Thought-Sacrifice as Higher Consciousness

[AshvinP]

I returned to the first post in the Conformal Cyclic Meditation thread and wanted to share my thoughts, but figured it may be best to start a new thread since some discussion is still ongoing there. It's really worth contemplating more deeply what was written at the very beginning of the first post on the thread.

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:

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.

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.

[Federica]

Thank you, Ashvin, for sharing your thoughts!

I am still in the middle of the reflection you are suggesting, and it’s becoming larger than expected. I don’t feel ready for an organic comment, but I still would like to jot down a preliminary thought. I think the discontinuity of consciousness involved in the appearance of distractions is inherent, and I doubt it’s possible to have our thoughts ‘aborted’ consciously, or within our control. Instead, we can know that this is going to happen, and accept the fact that we are navigating through these multiple cycles of reincarnating thoughts. I believe what we have to sacrifice is precisely the wish of detailed, segmented control, so that we become conscious of the nature of the time rhythm of the imaginative process. We relinquish the wish of full control on the entire life arch of the thought. The little piece I would add here is surrender. We let go of the attempt to master the time wave all throughout. We surrender to the fact that we can't be the conscious operators of the exact moment the thought is aborted, the moment we fall asleep, the moment we will die. We can't will the passage ourselves as sacrifice, what we sacrifice is the monitoring. I would see our contribution to the Cosmic economy in terms of surrenderring the monitoring. So that we can remain present as witnesses.

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Ashvin, for sharing your thoughts!

I am still in the middle of the reflection you are suggesting, and it’s becoming larger than expected. I don’t feel ready for an organic comment, but I still would like to jot down a preliminary thought. I think the discontinuity of consciousness involved in the appearance of distractions is inherent, and I doubt it’s possible to have our thoughts ‘aborted’ consciously, or within our control. Instead, we can know that this is going to happen, and accept the fact that we are navigating through these multiple cycles of reincarnating thoughts. I believe what we have to sacrifice is precisely the wish of detailed, segmented control, so that we become conscious of the nature of the time rhythm of the imaginative process. We relinquish the wish of full control on the entire life arch of the thought. The little piece I would add here is surrender. We let go of the attempt to master the time wave all throughout. We surrender to the fact that we can't be the conscious operators of the exact moment the thought is aborted, the moment we fall asleep, the moment we will die. We can't will the passage ourselves as sacrifice, what we sacrifice is the monitoring. I would see our contribution to the Cosmic economy in terms of surrenderring the monitoring. So that we can remain present as witnesses.

Hey Federica,

Thanks for the initial feedback. I think we are somewhat saying the same thing here. By sacrificing the thoughts, I certainly didn't mean we should try to take hold of every single thought and do something with it in any analytical way (although there is an element of precise steering of thoughts, discussed some more below). Rather the sacrifice is about the quality and direction of our thinking force, or the inner disposition of that force. In that sense, I agree there is a critical aspect of acceptance of our intellectual limitations and surrender of our egoistic thought-life, in full waking consciousness, to higher forces.

But I think we should examine this word "inherent" - typically this is used to mean something like, an absolute 'law of reality'. We can easily slip into abstract metaphysical thinking here. We need to remember everything is spoken from the first-person perspective - can we livingly experience more of our thoughts and feelings and perceptions originating from the sphere of our own will as we gradually integrate consciousness? Clearly layers of our thinking will remain conditioned outside the sphere of our will for much time to come, but this should not be held as any absolute law which prevents greater continuity and control, or makes us feel that it is not an aim worth pursuing. Let's revisit Cleric's example of drunkenness and anger from the other thread.

 

For example, sometimes we may feel our anger bubbling up and we feel as if we want to slap someone in the face. While drunk this may happen as certainly as a law of nature. We simply witness the burst of anger and the movement of our arm. When sober we have something like safety time, we feel the anger gaining momentum and the mental image of us slapping the person begins to take shape. But in our thinking also other images can be intuited side by side – we sense the consequences of our action. Then just like a railroad operator, we can switch tracks and channel anger in a different direction.

Becoming conscious of our internal states and rhythms, i.e. becoming more sober in our thought-life and soul-life, is also gaining inner control over them. By surrendering our thought-life to the Cosmic Will, i.e. the Will of our progressive states of becoming which are still potential ('future') and not yet manifest ('past'), we are graced with new degrees of thinking freedom; with new power and responsibility in our soul-life. "He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it." We have already received the capacity to expand our creative thought-freedom through the incarnation of the Christ impulse, but now it is a question of wilfully taking hold of that capacity. It is the Will of the Cosmos that we become ever-more creatively responsible for ourselves, for our communities, our species, and for genuine acts of creation which serve all kingdoms of the Earth. 

So it is a question of purifying our lower self through living knowledge of the forces which constellate our Being, thereby steering the capacity of our "I"-consciousness into higher planes. Then we are like the railroad operators who can see the tracks ahead of us and anticipate the spiritual switches which can be made in the face of all the discontinuities we must endure. We can steer our soul-life in directions which harmonize rather than fragment. By 'living' knowledge, we should be clear that this means a more intimate and precise knowledge of the anatomy of our soul life. Of course we are not dissecting it like we dissect a frog in grade school to learn of its anatomy - we are not using the same mode of analytical cognition, where 'I am here' and the 'frog is there' - but the principle of differentiating the inner structure is the same. It's only that we don't feel ourselves to be outside the inner structure of our own soul life.

For ex., consider this bit of spiritual science:

Another thing is that a man feels that all the good, right and true things that he thinks stream out from him. He feels as if they're growing into the future, that they're germ-forming for the future. But the wrong, bad, ugly things that he thinks and feels also grow out like this. He really feels them streaming out of him, and he knows that the bad thoughts streaming from him will later serve as food for the good ones. So they're also necessary. Then he begins to understand why so many bad, wrong and ugly thoughts and feelings assail him during meditation. When he knows that they're necessary forces and food for the future he'll also assess them correctly. He won't have to complain about them if he's strong enough to not let them flow into his willing and action. 

So that can be an example of precisely offering up our thoughts as sacrifices for the spiritual worlds, by becoming livingly conscious of how they will become food for good thoughts in the 'future'. This is quite literal - what is within us will later become outwardly manifest and seed the living environment for the Earthly kingdoms. Of course we can already see this happening with modern technology, but right now our thought-power is limited to the domain of rearranging parts of the mineral kingdom, i.e. what is already dead. Later our thinking will also become creative within the domain of life - we will be creating life out of our thinking force. So we can prepare for that future now through living knowledge of our thought-life and how it participates in the spiritual economy. Then we are also switching the thought-tracks so that the bad thoughts don't flow into our selfish deeds and instead serve the Whole. 

[Cleric K]

Thank you, Ashvin.

All this inspired me to do some more experimentation and seek for a smoother gradient to make these important ideas more accessible.

Instinctively we feel that consciousness could be uninterrupted. Potentially, the incarnational rhythms will become such that we won’t feel as a different person each life but more like an overarching spirit that continues its work in different circumstances, in the same way that our ordinary “I” continues its work each morning. It is possible to approach the intuition of these uninterrupted rhythms in our thinking.

It is very interesting to note that in quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function has been considered for a long time to be an instantaneous process. Finer experiments in recent years show that the collapse is in fact a gradual process.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2013.13899

Alexander Korotkov of the University of California, Riverside, adds that the measurements can be thought of as a kind of 'quantum steering' that helps to keep the system evolving along a quantum path, casting light on the intrinsically gradual nature of any measurement process. "In real life nothing happens instantaneously,” he says.

This also reminds of the way lightnings form:



Usually things happen too fast to discern. We see only a lightning bolt. But when seen in slow motion as above, it’s a two stage process where first the so called lightning leaders ‘feel’ the environment and once a path for the charge is found, the main plasma channel forms.

We strive for something similar in meditation. Think of an ice hockey match on TV. It’s very difficult to trace the puck. One moment the player hits the puck with the stick, the next moment we look on the other side to see whether a goal was scored. There’s an interruption from our perspective. So we strive for two things:
1/ We strive to slow down the whole process
2/ We strive for uninterrupted perception of the process

We should understand why we list two points. Slowing down is one part of the problem. But we can get distracted even in that case. For example, try looking at the lightning animation above as attentively as possible. The fact that we’re looking at a slow motion capture doesn’t in itself guarantee that our attention won’t jump somewhere else.

Now 2/ is relatively easier to grasp. We understand what it means to focus our perception on something as if we don’t want to skip a beat. We try to keep laser sharp focus in such a way that whatever happens, there should be no chance we can miss it. If our sight strays even for a split second, we may miss that which we were looking for. It is interesting to observe this focused perception when we contemplate the Sunrise and we try to catch the first ray. We don’t know with full precision when the first ray will appear so we look with all our attentiveness at the brightest spot of the horizon. If our gaze gets distracted even for a moment, when we return our gaze we may see that we have missed the moment – the first ray is already shining.

1/ is not that clear. At first this seems like science fiction, how can one slow down time? But things become much more clear when we remember that we’re observing our thinking, so it is thinking that we must slow down.

Let’s consider the verbal thought “I think these words”. When glanced over superficially, these are just like any other written words. Even if we verbalized them while reading, they still sound not that different from “Johnny went playing”. But things become much different when we in fact try to think these words in such a way that we fully experience their meaning.

This meaning is of a quite different kind compared to “Johnny went playing”. It is a realtime testimony of our intimate spiritual activity. Let’s look at the two parts of the sentence.

“These words” refers to the inner perception of our thinking voice. We indeed hear our voice in our mind. “I think” refers to the fact that our thinking process recognizes itself in the words. We don’t care about any metaphysical speculations about what an “I” is. In this direct experience, the word “I” is only a symbol for self-reference. It simply means that we intuitively feel to be one with the cause of the word perceptions.

For some, such an experience can be disturbing at first. In the sensory spectrum we have Eisoptrophobia (fear of seeing one’s own reflection in a mirror). Our inner words are like mirrors of our spiritual activity, so similar fear is possible. But gradually we can learn to not so much seek our image in the words but rather to know our degrees of freedom. Non-dualists are right in this that the image that we create for ourselves is quite illusionary. The true self-image comes not from what we think about our Earthly character but from clear experience of how and what we think, feel and do.

Now the two parts of the sentence have to become concentric, so to speak – the auditory perception of the words and the intuition that the words are being thought. In other words, this intuition should be present through the whole time while our words sound. This is most easily achievable when we try to slow down the whole process.

The thinking of modem man is largely habitual. We don’t at all try to feel creative in the sounds of our inner voice. We only skim over the meaning of what is being thought. For this reason, what was said so far may sound like nonsense to many. This is because instead of engaging in the experiment, one habitually continues to comment and analyze it. It is precisely this voice that continues to comment from the blind spot, that we need to engage. Slowing down thinking not only helps to approach the detailed perception of thinking that we strive for but also forces us to do something which we normally don’t do and thus can’t be executed as an already learned semi-automatic habit. We need to be present in the activity, like we need to be present when we learn to write for the first time.

In this experiment we begin to think in ‘slow-motion’ the words “I think these words” while trying to feel them as a fitting glove for our intuitive activity. Gradually the words should become much ‘larger’ than what normally fits in our temporal aperture. Instead of verbal pebbles that we contain in our mind, they become like scenes of a theatrical play that we move through. It is important to note that here thinking in ‘slow motion’ doesn’t mean that our cognition becomes sluggish and drowsy. Instead, we should feel how we’re creatively active in every curve of the sounds, in the way they morph into each other. Like the lightning above, we should feel that slowing down allows us to experience our voice in higher resolution, it’s like zooming into a highly detailed experience which in our normal thinking is barely noticed. Thus our activity should feel quite intense. Slowing down doesn’t mean to speak the words at greater intervals, like “I… think… these… words”. No, the sounds themselves have to be spoken in slow-motion, they have to be stretched in time. We shouldn’t try to encompass the whole sentence. As said, we should feel as somewhere along a theatrical play, fully engaged in the current act.

Then we continue to repeat the words more and more slowly. Finally we stretch them so much that they become like a very long single tone. For example, when we start with the “I” (aye), we basically hold ‘aaaaaaa’, without reaching ‘ye’. Then the sound should become softer and softer until we barely hear our thinking voice. It’s like softening our real voice until it becomes whispering and then even further until we only have the movement of our breath. So we have stretched our words to such an extent that we now live not in vibrating sound but only the smooth flow of our thinking-breath. Since this is now a laminar flow, we can basically say that we’re in a state of concentration. Concentration doesn’t mean freezing. Probably the best example is the waterfall. Its ‘concentrated’ image looks like a static column. Yet the water is constantly replenished. Similarly, when we stretch our words to such an extent, we remain with our laminar thinking-breath. Our thinking form is concentrated but we live in the intuition that we’re continually replenishing that form through time with our thinking-will. Thus our intuition that we’re thinking the words is still valid, except that the words’ vibrations have been stretched to laminar flow of thinking-breath. It’s very good if we succeed to feel this softening of the sound and attaining to that smooth and laminar thinking flow.

Now we come to the interesting part. This laminar flow will be interrupted at some point. Maybe it will be interrupted long before we succeed to slow down our words to such an extent. But that’s OK. Because we now make it our goal not to prevent any interruptions but to observe as closely as possible how the interruptions come about. Much like the quantum mechanics experiment above, we want to observe in slow motion the collapse. We do that by making our attention really intense. It’s like we want to split time into finer and finer slices such that we can sense how the process of distraction happens.

We’ll fail many times but that’s OK. We simply slow down again and renew our uninterrupted focus while waiting for the next disruption. We intensely try to increase the resolution of our attention, as if not to ‘skip a beat’.

What’s interesting in this exercise is that we entirely change our attitude. Normally we try to concentrate and when we get distracted this leads to frustration. But here we turn the game around. We actually want to see the true nature of distraction. We have nothing against being distracted but we want to see exactly how it happens. We want to see in slow motion how our laminar thinking-breath starts to vibrate again and begins to speak new words. We’re like a fisherman who wants to see in slow-motion the vibration of the tip of the fishing rod when the fish nibbles, so that he can pull back. He can’t afford to blink, he needs uninterrupted slow-motion focus. In our case our laminar spiritual activity is the rod and the bait. We’re intensely vigilant and wait to see in slow motion how an external (distracting) force agitates our flow and channels our thinking-breath into thinking something else.

When we practice in this way, something very peculiar happens. We find that we have to wait longer and longer for the nibbling. And when the agitation approaches, it is experienced as a nudge which doesn’t really break our concentration but very interestingly, in this nudge we feel like in a flash of intuition that we have seen a picture of what we might have thought about if that nudge was to take control of our thinking voice. This gradually leads into a very interesting state where it’s as if our whole environment becomes filled with such nudges. Yet they don’t succeed in breaking our laminar flow every time. Our thinking-breath continues to flow, yet our consciousness begins to fill with flashes of intuition, like pictures of all those things that we might otherwise think about in verbal sequences.

Of course, what was here described is only the technical side. To make that into proper meditation, we also need to prepare a fertile feeling and ideal context. But in any case, this provides another angle for the sacrifice. We had to sacrifice our inner verbalization in order to grasp the distractions nudging as flashes of intuition into our laminar spiritual activity. In time we find out that even though our thinking voice is laminar, and thus we can't think in the classical way by arranging words, we begin to sense that to some extent we can still meaningfully steer the panorama of flashes, much like the scientist speaks of 'quantum steering'.

[AshvinP]

Cleric, thanks for this stimulating exercise and illustration! I personally have found it very helpful so far to more closely align my real-time thinking activity with what I am perceiving in thought, and I will continue to work with it to attain an increasing laminar flow and closely observe the interruptions.

Usually things happen too fast to discern. We see only a lightning bolt. But when seen in slow motion as above, it’s a two stage process where first the so called lightning leaders ‘feel’ the environment and once a path for the charge is found, the main plasma channel forms.

We strive for something similar in meditation. Think of an ice hockey match on TV. It’s very difficult to trace the puck. One moment the player hits the puck with the stick, the next moment we look on the other side to see whether a goal was scored. There’s an interruption from our perspective. So we strive for two things:
1/ We strive to slow down the whole process
2/ We strive for uninterrupted perception of the process

We should understand why we list two points. Slowing down is one part of the problem. But we can get distracted even in that case. For example, try looking at the lightning animation above as attentively as possible. The fact that we’re looking at a slow motion capture doesn’t in itself guarantee that our attention won’t jump somewhere else.

Now 2/ is relatively easier to grasp. We understand what it means to focus our perception on something as if we don’t want to skip a beat. We try to keep laser sharp focus in such a way that whatever happens, there should be no chance we can miss it. If our sight strays even for a split second, we may miss that which we were looking for. It is interesting to observe this focused perception when we contemplate the Sunrise and we try to catch the first ray. We don’t know with full precision when the first ray will appear so we look with all our attentiveness at the brightest spot of the horizon. If our gaze gets distracted even for a moment, when we return our gaze we may see that we have missed the moment – the first ray is already shining.

This post reminded me of a scene from the BBC show, Sherlock, where he explains how he faked his own death and made sure Watson was there to witness the event. It was a very well orchestrated plan, with a whole series of events over many months, which culminates in the faked death (code word: LAZARUS ).





So he explains a critical part was that Watson should be hit by the bike and, as he recovers and moves towards the spot where Sherlock fell, the whole ground operation rotates clockwise so he can't perceive it, and the real Sherlock takes the place of the corpse which was thrown out the window. Then he is left with the only 'reasonable' conclusion - that Sherlock fell to his death, because he missing all the information which could allow him to conclude otherwise. This reminds me of how our attention also seems to be missing the spiritual flashes of Light right when we have the opportunity to perceive them. We 'randomly' get 'hit by a bike' and then our whole sensory rhythm is out of sync with the supra-sensory rhythm taking place. Religious tradition identifies this as the historical Fall, yet we can also say its ideal influence continues to propagate through the incarnational rhythms until it embeds itself deeply within the very core of our cognitive movements. The living spirit of the Cosmos has increasingly fallen into the dead, mechanical workings of nature from the lower out of sync perspective. We feel like our logic is forced to conclude the spirit doesn't exist, or only exists in some separate realm apart from the natural order. But who is orchestrating these well-timed distractions from above?

We are! They were born out of our subconscious intents and desires in the supra-sensory worlds. Our normal consciousness feels like there are chains of physical events which cause one another, but it completely misses the supra-sensory ideal glue which unites those chains. For ex., if a person falls into a lake and drowns, we would try to find the cause of this event in the physical circumstances preceding it, like the fact that he was pushed by someone, or he had a heart attack and fell in, or he was drunk and fell in, etc. Then we say confidently that was the "cause" of death. But the reality is that the overarching spirit intends/desires to go through the portal of death, i.e. its Karma has been fulfilled, and continue its work in different circumstances. It then 'attracts' a physical event, or series of events, which will serve to fulfill that purpose. Just like we may choose a varied array of word-forms to express our intuitive intents, the spirit can choose a wide array of physical events to fulfill its Karma. So perhaps we can understand our thought-distractions, which repeatedly cause us to miss the lightning flashes of spiritual insight, as well-orchestrated events which serve to fulfill various Karmic purposes of the overarching spirit.

At this point one could say, 'if these are our intentions in the higher worlds, then why don't we just follow them and not try and resist them through these exercises'? But such a perspective simply forgets what it is currently doing, which is just as much a part of its Karma as anything else. It has brought itself through a whole chain of life events to the point where it can be on this forum and participate in the exercises, thereby bringing its previously subconscious plans into the Light of consciousness and gradually bridge the discontinuities. Every thought-distraction contains the potential of overcoming its resistance for anyone here, reading these posts, and our spiritual activity will be more strengthened that it would be if there were never any distractions to overcome. What remains subconscious at this stage of our cognitive evolution will eventually work its way into the world in destructive, fragmenting ways. By making these soul-forces conscious, by baiting the thought-interruptions with our laminar spiritual activity to closely observe them, we also purify and tame them. Then we can live more directly in the intuitive meaningful potential before it collapses into crystallized thought-forms which drag us hither and thither; before it rotates out of our thinking vision and we are blindsided by the distractions. Then we are also given more complete information as we reason through the natural world order, and the latter is raised from the dead into a new life.

“Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light of this world. But if one walks in the night, he stumbles, because the light is not in him.” These things He said, and after that He said to them, “Our friend Lazarus sleeps, but I go that I may wake him up.”

[Federica]

But I think we should examine this word "inherent" - typically this is used to mean something like, an absolute 'law of reality'. We can easily slip into abstract metaphysical thinking here. We need to remember everything is spoken from the first-person perspective - can we livingly experience more of our thoughts and feelings and perceptions originating from the sphere of our own will as we gradually integrate consciousness?

We surely can, but it doesn't help me to look at these thoughts as "my" thoughts "originating from the sphere of my own will". Although there is plenty of work to be done to gain more will strength. This viewpoint is not a rebuttal of willful exertion, at all. We do have to exercise our will to better align our conscious experience with the thought landscape and its rhythms. In a sense, there's nothing else to do in this life, but does that make thoughts, feelings and perceptions originate from the sphere of our will? Right now I don't see it that way.


I used “inherent” intentionally, to signify that something is one with something else and inseparable from it. Here I meant that a distraction is a discontinuity of consciousness. When we are distracted, it inherently means that we couldn’t grasp the time wave of the thought. We got lost in the chain of integration. The thought escaped us. So when a thought I’m having is aborted that way, I don’t feel there’s much I can afford to sacrifice. It’s not like I had a choice and I chose to sacrifice the thought. It’s just that I couldn’t do otherwise.


"So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts" means to me that the thought I was pursuing was there before me, and the distracting one was there before me as well, as I awakened in it, after having fallen asleep to the initial thought, that I was trying to grasp. The thoughts are all there, they are portions of an existing landscape, and we move our consciousness along their time shape as intentionally and skilfully as we can. When it doesn’t work, it’s because we are smaller than them. We couldn’t reflect the thought in one piece, we had to let it go. Using the clutch metaphor, in a distraction, the springs get loaded univocally, instead of working at smoothing out the pulls in small adjustments that overall compensate one another, until at some point they snap, and throw us in the crack of a distraction. It could be a hard stop, a painful fall, or we could bounce on a different rail, and go on rolling somehow on a different train of thoughts. Either way we didn’t operate the switch consciously at all.

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.

Rather than considering myself a 'thought generator', with most of my production being rejected as imperfect by Cosmic intuition, it’s more intuitive for me to picture my activity as navigating an existing thought landscape. My activity consists of trying to follow the contours of some of these already existing patterns. These thinking patterns are laid out and interwoven, and I have the perfect metaphor here: the networks of pistes of a ski resort. I start descending along one piste, I am not creating the mountain while gliding. I am not even shaping it. At most, my passage slightly changes the face of the piste, as I leave a small but unique trace in the profile of the snow mass. For a while I am able to follow the piste trajectory, I am grasping the time wave of the thought, but then my strength diminishes and I get side-tracked or derailed into another piste, another train of thought I didn’t intend to follow, or I fall and experience a full and painful collapse. I got distracted, I fell in the crack of a discontinuity of consciousness. This is the same experience as when we fall in the snow with not the least idea what we did wrong, and how it happened. One second we are flowing smoothly, and the next one we are down and injured. At that point I can’t say: I have sacrificed the thought and offered it to the Cosmos. I simply couldn’t stick to it with my current skills. I lost adherence somehow, and I flipped. This is how it looks at my current level of experience. With regard to Cleric's lastly suggested exercise to slow down the process and catch the distraction, my experience is that I can slow down the thought a tiny bit but if I overuse this flexibility, the skin of the thought will to become so stretched out, so thin, that it's like calling for it to crack open. The cracks are the distractions, discontinuities, or falls. Like on a piste, especially if it's a difficult one, one can adjust speed a little bit, but it seems impossible to take it at a very low speed. Under a certain speed the descent loses meaning, nothing flows anymore, the speed is inherent to the experience of the thought. The speed is the fabric of the thought. If I dismember the fabric, I dismember the thought. That's how I see it.

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...

This is not very clear to me. First, it never crosses my mind to feel ashamed, or tragically frustrated, or resentful for having distractions, for being unable to grasp intuitions. I don't have such grit. I don't have to convince myself that trial and error is good. Then it seems obvious to me that thoughts can only be aborted outside of our control. and independent of our will. If we could exert our will in that moment, well our thoughts would not get aborted. When we sacrifice a perceptual thought content to create an imaginative one instead, we are sacrificing something indeed, but that’s the opposite of an abortion, it's a new birth, we are seeding our own future improvement. Conversely, when we fail to grasp the fluid form of the thought, we put a strain on the springs and end up falling in the cracks of distractions, there's no sacrifice. It's the higher worlds who are sacrificing their landscape to our exercises, but our only possession is our will to get up and try again. As you say, 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”.


So maybe we are just highlighting sides of a same coin. I simply wanted to say that at this point I see our contribution less in terms of creating and giving, and more in terms of imitating and grasping. One day, you say, our thinking will also become creative within the domain of life. Well, life is already being created out of thinking force. Our contribution is to explore how to come to associate our agency to that type of thinking, how to imitate it, how to follow its curvature, how to grasp it in an uninterrupted hold. In this sense I see our current role much more on the receiving side of a sacrifice, than on the giving one.

[AshvinP]

But I think we should examine this word "inherent" - typically this is used to mean something like, an absolute 'law of reality'. We can easily slip into abstract metaphysical thinking here. We need to remember everything is spoken from the first-person perspective - can we livingly experience more of our thoughts and feelings and perceptions originating from the sphere of our own will as we gradually integrate consciousness?

We surely can, but it doesn't help me to look at these thoughts as "my" thoughts "originating from the sphere of my own will". Although there is plenty of work to be done to gain more will strength. This viewpoint is not a rebuttal of willful exertion, at all. We do have to exercise our will to better align our conscious experience with the thought landscape and its rhythms. In a sense, there's nothing else to do in this life, but does that make thoughts, feelings and perceptions originate from the sphere of our will? Right now I don't see it that way.

Federica,

When you say 'better align our conscious experience with the thought landscape and its rhythms' through the will, that is what I mean by locating our inner-outer experiences within the sphere of our own will. As long as we feel there are phenomena arising and unfolding independent of our willful be-ing, we are still conditioned and unfree. There is still an 'outer' world existing in antipathy to our 'inner' world. Obviously the gradient of attaining spiritual freedom is a vast one, which will require gradual reascent through the delaminations-convolutions of our pure intuitive intents, but we should remember it is a ceaseless process of our becoming more than who we can currently imagine ourselves to be. 

I used “inherent” intentionally, to signify that something is one with something else and inseparable from it. Here I meant that a distraction is a discontinuity of consciousness. When we are distracted, it inherently means that we couldn’t grasp the time wave of the thought. We got lost in the chain of integration. The thought escaped us. So when a thought I’m having is aborted that way, I don’t feel there’s much I can afford to sacrifice. It’s not like I had a choice and I chose to sacrifice the thought. It’s just that I couldn’t do otherwise.
...
Rather than considering myself a 'thought generator', with most of my production being rejected as imperfect by Cosmic intuition, it’s more intuitive for me to picture my activity as navigating an existing thought landscape. My activity consists of trying to follow the contours of some of these already existing patterns. These thinking patterns are laid out and interwoven, and I have the perfect metaphor here: the networks of pistes of a ski resort. I start descending along one piste, I am not creating the mountain while gliding. I am not even shaping it. At most, my passage slightly changes the face of the piste, as I leave a small but unique trace in the profile of the snow mass. For a while I am able to follow the piste trajectory, I am grasping the time wave of the thought, but then my strength diminishes and I get side-tracked or derailed into another piste, another train of thought I didn’t intend to follow, or I fall and experience a full and painful collapse. I got distracted, I fell in the crack of a discontinuity of consciousness. This is the same experience as when we fall in the snow with not the least idea what we did wrong, and how it happened. One second we are flowing smoothly, and the next one we are down and injured. At that point I can’t say: I have sacrificed the thought and offered it to the Cosmos. I simply couldn’t stick to it with my current skills. I lost adherence somehow, and I flipped. This is how it looks at my current level of experience. With regard to Cleric's lastly suggested exercise to slow down the process and catch the distraction, my experience is that I can slow down the thought a tiny bit but if I overuse this flexibility, the skin of the thought will to become so stretched out, so thin, that it's like calling for it to crack open. The cracks are the distractions, discontinuities, or falls. Like on a piste, especially if it's a difficult one, one can adjust speed a little bit, but it seems impossible to take it at a very low speed. Under a certain speed the descent loses meaning, nothing flows anymore, the speed is inherent to the experience of the thought. The speed is the fabric of the thought. If I dismember the fabric, I dismember the thought. That's how I see it.

I think part of the issue here is that we tend to imagine our core identity staying the same as we do the work of consciously navigating the intuitive thought-landscape and following the time-waves. To your credit, you do mention this is how it feels with your "current skills" and how it looks to your "current level of experience". But then you seem to be extracting more metaphysical conclusions from that current experience. When you say, "I couldn't do this otherwise", this may be valid for your current perspective, but the goal of higher cognition is precisely to realize the degrees of freedom where we can do it otherwise. The exercises are done to help transform our current experiences into something greater than their sum, which is the same as re-cognizing ourselves as the Whole from which the parts precipitate. These are degrees of freedom we attain in everything we implicitly understand as "me" - our desires, feelings, thoughts, memories, personality, etc. Through the work, we are gradually sacrificing that 'identity' in the chrysalis woven from our spiritual activity. Sacrificing here doesn't mean forgetting or no longer making use of that identity - that would be retrogression to past stages of evolution - but integrating it with the wings of our higher Sun-nature. We are progressively remembering our truly creative Will-nature in the depths of our Be-ing. Our lower and higher natures are continuous and unified from the higher vantage, so it doesn't make much sense to say "I couldn't do this otherwise", only "I am not doing it otherwise right now". The reasons why we are not are to be found in our self-imposed limitations.

So, in your skiing metaphor, we are in fact understanding ourselves more and more as unified with the overarching Spirit who creates and shapes the mountain, impressing its thought, feeling, life, and physical forms into the snow mass. Through higher cognitive development, we understand our creative role in holistically shaping the pistes and their various twists and turns, thereby anticipating where we might get distracted and fall. We can speak of this process as either creating the pistes or discovery of the pistes - these are two poles in a unified relationship which the intellect tends to make artificially into dualities. I like Schelling's quote - "to know Nature is to create Nature." From the higher first-person cognitive perspectives, these two become increasingly one and the same. Now one can say, 'but I'm not at that higher cognitive level, so it's not that way for my first-person perspective'. But the reason we are posting these things and speaking of thought-sacrifice is precisely to find a point of contact between our current perspective and the higher one, which we can leverage into truly creative spiritual activity. Even taking the inner sacrificial disposition of, 'I am now closely and patiently observing all distractions and how they come about', even when it seems to be unsuccessful, is creating degrees of freedom or leeway through which our intuitive spirit can manifest. We are sacrificing our short-term expectation of 'success' for the gradual realization of that success over time. 

This is not very clear to me. First, it never crosses my mind to feel ashamed, or tragically frustrated, or resentful for having distractions, for being unable to grasp intuitions. I don't have such grit. I don't have to convince myself that trial and error is good. Then it seems obvious to me that thoughts can only be aborted outside of our control. and independent of our will. If we could exert our will in that moment, well our thoughts would not get aborted. When we sacrifice a perceptual thought content to create an imaginative one instead, we are sacrificing something indeed, but that’s the opposite of an abortion, it's a new birth, we are seeding our own future improvement. Conversely, when we fail to grasp the fluid form of the thought, we put a strain on the springs and end up falling in the cracks of distractions, there's no sacrifice. It's the higher worlds who are sacrificing their landscape to our exercises, but our only possession is our will to get up and try again. As you say, 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”.
So maybe we are just highlighting sides of a same coin. I simply wanted to say that at this point I see our contribution less in terms of creating and giving, and more in terms of imitating and grasping. One day, you say, our thinking will also become creative within the domain of life. Well, life is already being created out of thinking force. Our contribution is to explore how to come to associate our agency to that type of thinking, how to imitate it, how to follow its curvature, how to grasp it in an uninterrupted hold. In this sense I see our current role much more on the receiving side of a sacrifice, than on the giving one.

As I hope is clear above, I think you are expressing a polarization too far in the other direction. Indeed we can say we are seeking to imitate the higher worlds, the Beings who sacrificed their spiritual activity for the natural thought-landscape we can now work through. We imitate sacrifice by making our own sacrifices. We are already passive, consumptive beings of sensory impressions, feelings, and thoughts. We have been on the receiving end of higher sacrifices for many, many aeons now. Now we can make a sacrifice by becoming progressively more active and creative in those domains - in fact this is what was signified by our discovering the concept of 'sacrifice' in ancient culture. We dimly awakened to this potential within ourselves and now we can make it increasingly more lucid. The progressive evolutionary chain can only come to fruition if humanity attains a cognitive level at which it is creating the natural landscape for other beings through its sacrifice, as ours was created for us. The sacrifices made by higher beings - all that we perceive around us through our normal concepts - is in the process of decaying and dying away, like fading memories. There will not be anything left unless we ourselves pick up the torch and carry it further. Of course we shouldn't pretend we are that level when we aren't, but to speak of "our" current role in that way is presumptuous - there are always differentiated streams of evolution and it is no different within humanity itself. Some portions of humanity must fulfill the task of not only maintaining the receptive cognitive states already attained, but presently realizing the productive cognitive states yet to become manifest. And we can't assume some potions are not already in the process of fulfilling that task or that we here on the forum cannot actively contribute.

[Federica]

But I think we should examine this word "inherent" - typically this is used to mean something like, an absolute 'law of reality'. We can easily slip into abstract metaphysical thinking here. We need to remember everything is spoken from the first-person perspective - can we livingly experience more of our thoughts and feelings and perceptions originating from the sphere of our own will as we gradually integrate consciousness?

We surely can, but it doesn't help me to look at these thoughts as "my" thoughts "originating from the sphere of my own will". Although there is plenty of work to be done to gain more will strength. This viewpoint is not a rebuttal of willful exertion, at all. We do have to exercise our will to better align our conscious experience with the thought landscape and its rhythms. In a sense, there's nothing else to do in this life, but does that make thoughts, feelings and perceptions originate from the sphere of our will? Right now I don't see it that way.

Federica,

When you say 'better align our conscious experience with the thought landscape and its rhythms' through the will, that is what I mean by locating our inner-outer experiences within the sphere of our own will. As long as we feel there are phenomena arising and unfolding independent of our willful be-ing, we are still conditioned and unfree. There is still an 'outer' world existing in antipathy to our 'inner' world. Obviously the gradient of attaining spiritual freedom is a vast one, which will require gradual reascent through the delaminations-convolutions of our pure intuitive intents, but we should remember it is a ceaseless process of our becoming more than who we can currently imagine ourselves to be. 

I used “inherent” intentionally, to signify that something is one with something else and inseparable from it. Here I meant that a distraction is a discontinuity of consciousness. When we are distracted, it inherently means that we couldn’t grasp the time wave of the thought. We got lost in the chain of integration. The thought escaped us. So when a thought I’m having is aborted that way, I don’t feel there’s much I can afford to sacrifice. It’s not like I had a choice and I chose to sacrifice the thought. It’s just that I couldn’t do otherwise.
...
Rather than considering myself a 'thought generator', with most of my production being rejected as imperfect by Cosmic intuition, it’s more intuitive for me to picture my activity as navigating an existing thought landscape. My activity consists of trying to follow the contours of some of these already existing patterns. These thinking patterns are laid out and interwoven, and I have the perfect metaphor here: the networks of pistes of a ski resort. I start descending along one piste, I am not creating the mountain while gliding. I am not even shaping it. At most, my passage slightly changes the face of the piste, as I leave a small but unique trace in the profile of the snow mass. For a while I am able to follow the piste trajectory, I am grasping the time wave of the thought, but then my strength diminishes and I get side-tracked or derailed into another piste, another train of thought I didn’t intend to follow, or I fall and experience a full and painful collapse. I got distracted, I fell in the crack of a discontinuity of consciousness. This is the same experience as when we fall in the snow with not the least idea what we did wrong, and how it happened. One second we are flowing smoothly, and the next one we are down and injured. At that point I can’t say: I have sacrificed the thought and offered it to the Cosmos. I simply couldn’t stick to it with my current skills. I lost adherence somehow, and I flipped. This is how it looks at my current level of experience. With regard to Cleric's lastly suggested exercise to slow down the process and catch the distraction, my experience is that I can slow down the thought a tiny bit but if I overuse this flexibility, the skin of the thought will to become so stretched out, so thin, that it's like calling for it to crack open. The cracks are the distractions, discontinuities, or falls. Like on a piste, especially if it's a difficult one, one can adjust speed a little bit, but it seems impossible to take it at a very low speed. Under a certain speed the descent loses meaning, nothing flows anymore, the speed is inherent to the experience of the thought. The speed is the fabric of the thought. If I dismember the fabric, I dismember the thought. That's how I see it.

I think part of the issue here is that we tend to imagine our core identity staying the same as we do the work of consciously navigating the intuitive thought-landscape and following the time-waves. To your credit, you do mention this is how it feels with your "current skills" and how it looks to your "current level of experience". But then you seem to be extracting more metaphysical conclusions from that current experience. When you say, "I couldn't do this otherwise", this may be valid for your current perspective, but the goal of higher cognition is precisely to realize the degrees of freedom where we can do it otherwise. The exercises are done to help transform our current experiences into something greater than their sum, which is the same as re-cognizing ourselves as the Whole from which the parts precipitate. These are degrees of freedom we attain in everything we implicitly understand as "me" - our desires, feelings, thoughts, memories, personality, etc. Through the work, we are gradually sacrificing that 'identity' in the chrysalis woven from our spiritual activity. Sacrificing here doesn't mean forgetting or no longer making use of that identity - that would be retrogression to past stages of evolution - but integrating it with the wings of our higher Sun-nature. We are progressively remembering our truly creative Will-nature in the depths of our Be-ing. Our lower and higher natures are continuous and unified from the higher vantage, so it doesn't make much sense to say "I couldn't do this otherwise", only "I am not doing it otherwise right now". The reasons why we are not are to be found in our self-imposed limitations.

So, in your skiing metaphor, we are in fact understanding ourselves more and more as unified with the overarching Spirit who creates and shapes the mountain, impressing its thought, feeling, life, and physical forms into the snow mass. Through higher cognitive development, we understand our creative role in holistically shaping the pistes and their various twists and turns, thereby anticipating where we might get distracted and fall. We can speak of this process as either creating the pistes or discovery of the pistes - these are two poles in a unified relationship which the intellect tends to make artificially into dualities. I like Schelling's quote - "to know Nature is to create Nature." From the higher first-person cognitive perspectives, these two become increasingly one and the same. Now one can say, 'but I'm not at that higher cognitive level, so it's not that way for my first-person perspective'. But the reason we are posting these things and speaking of thought-sacrifice is precisely to find a point of contact between our current perspective and the higher one, which we can leverage into truly creative spiritual activity. Even taking the inner sacrificial disposition of, 'I am now closely and patiently observing all distractions and how they come about', even when it seems to be unsuccessful, is creating degrees of freedom or leeway through which our intuitive spirit can manifest. We are sacrificing our short-term expectation of 'success' for the gradual realization of that success over time. 

This is not very clear to me. First, it never crosses my mind to feel ashamed, or tragically frustrated, or resentful for having distractions, for being unable to grasp intuitions. I don't have such grit. I don't have to convince myself that trial and error is good. Then it seems obvious to me that thoughts can only be aborted outside of our control. and independent of our will. If we could exert our will in that moment, well our thoughts would not get aborted. When we sacrifice a perceptual thought content to create an imaginative one instead, we are sacrificing something indeed, but that’s the opposite of an abortion, it's a new birth, we are seeding our own future improvement. Conversely, when we fail to grasp the fluid form of the thought, we put a strain on the springs and end up falling in the cracks of distractions, there's no sacrifice. It's the higher worlds who are sacrificing their landscape to our exercises, but our only possession is our will to get up and try again. As you say, 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”.
So maybe we are just highlighting sides of a same coin. I simply wanted to say that at this point I see our contribution less in terms of creating and giving, and more in terms of imitating and grasping. One day, you say, our thinking will also become creative within the domain of life. Well, life is already being created out of thinking force. Our contribution is to explore how to come to associate our agency to that type of thinking, how to imitate it, how to follow its curvature, how to grasp it in an uninterrupted hold. In this sense I see our current role much more on the receiving side of a sacrifice, than on the giving one.

As I hope is clear above, I think you are expressing a polarization too far in the other direction. Indeed we can say we are seeking to imitate the higher worlds, the Beings who sacrificed their spiritual activity for the natural thought-landscape we can now work through. We imitate sacrifice by making our own sacrifices. We are already passive, consumptive beings of sensory impressions, feelings, and thoughts. We have been on the receiving end of higher sacrifices for many, many aeons now. Now we can make a sacrifice by becoming progressively more active and creative in those domains - in fact this is what was signified by our discovering the concept of 'sacrifice' in ancient culture. We dimly awakened to this potential within ourselves and now we can make it increasingly more lucid. The progressive evolutionary chain can only come to fruition if humanity attains a cognitive level at which it is creating the natural landscape for other beings through its sacrifice, as ours was created for us. The sacrifices made by higher beings - all that we perceive around us through our normal concepts - is in the process of decaying and dying away, like fading memories. There will not be anything left unless we ourselves pick up the torch and carry it further. Of course we shouldn't pretend we are that level when we aren't, but to speak of "our" current role in that way is presumptuous - there are always differentiated streams of evolution and it is no different within humanity itself. Some portions of humanity must fulfill the task of not only maintaining the receptive cognitive states already attained, but presently realizing the productive cognitive states yet to become manifest. And we can't assume some potions are not already in the process of fulfilling that task or that we here on the forum cannot actively contribute.

Ashvin,

When I say that “I see things” in a certain way, there is no assumption or suggestion that that way is the truth, and no intention to drag anyone down at the level of my current understanding.
This attitude that you judge presumptuous comes in reality from a growing realization of chance and opportunity, and from a feeling of gratitude. It comes from in between the words of the prayer recently suggested by Cleric. It says, Lord be with me, inspire my thoughts with the luminous ideas that can lead me, it doesn’t say, there will soon be nothing left around here, let me pick up the torch and create a world for other beings that need it. I know this is true, and you are fully justified to say that. I understand the urgency you are expressing, though I am clearly not at that level where I understand the process of reality as “me”, flowing in a unified way with my activity. But I certainly don't exclude that others can, right now, so please take my words as simply coming from a different mood, not as a negation of others' ability to live up to that task right now. I also feel urgency, but I am expressing it from along my trajectory, certainly at a different level of understanding/being/doing.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

When I say that “I see things” in a certain way, there is no assumption or suggestion that that way is the truth, and no intention to drag anyone down at the level of my current understanding.
This attitude that you judge presumptuous comes in reality from a growing realization of chance and opportunity, and from a feeling of gratitude. It comes from in between the words of the prayer recently suggested by Cleric. It says, Lord be with me, inspire my thoughts with the luminous ideas that can lead me, it doesn’t say, there will soon be nothing left around here, let me pick up the torch and create a world for other beings that need it. I know this is true, and you are fully justified to say that. I understand the urgency you are expressing, though I am clearly not at that level where I understand the process of reality as “me”, flowing in a unified way with my activity. But I certainly don't exclude that others can, right now, so please take my words as simply coming from a different mood, not as a negation of others' ability to live up to that task right now. I also feel urgency, but I am expressing it from along my trajectory, certainly at a different level of understanding/being/doing.

I wrote a response to this, but forgot to login before posting it, so it went away. I'll try again tomorrow.

In the meantime, to all who are reading: Merry Christmas!

[Federica]

Thank you, what a beautiful image! Merry Christmas, Ashvin, and everyone reading!