Thought-Sacrifice as Higher Consciousness

[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.

Hey Federica,

Merry Christmas again!

I just wanted to re-post what I wrote yesterday in response.

I know you don't intend to 'drag anyone down' to your current perspective, and I am confident that if you persist with prayer, meditation, and reading of Steiner, Klocek, or anyone similar who explores these ideas in depth, you will find the optimal orientation for your path over time. In the meantime, I am only interested in helping to clarify the underlying principles of this spiritual practice, and learn whatever I can in the process of dialoguing. These principles can be really important because, even if we don't resonate with a particular angle of approach or exercise, they will no doubt come to our aid in other approaches and exercises we pursue. For instance, let's revisit the following:

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 would say that calling for the cracks to open is completely natural for this exercise, so that we can observe intently what comes through those cracks (we are baiting them with our spiritual activity). That was my experience as well. It should start to feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, straining, etc. As Cleric mentioned, this aids us in deconditioning from automatic thinking habits, tied to our lower nature, which assert themselves when doing such exercises. The strain is not an indication that the thought-fabric itself has broken down, but rather that we are pushing against the boundaries of our normal sense-based cognition, which is exactly what we aim to do. There is really nothing 'inherent' to thought-experience apart from the mode of consciousness which is participating in it. So we are in a certain sense aiming to 'dismember' the thought-content to invert into a higher mode of cognition, which knows the thought-content from a higher vantage.

We shouldn't be focused on the meaning of the thought-content. In the normal sensory-conceptual spectrum, we miss our intuitive activity which collapses into that thought-content because we are too focused on its isolated meaning (the whole environment is also structured to reinforce this polarized state). When things start to lose their meaning for us, we stop paying attention to them and thereby miss the meaningful intuition embedded in the depths of world appearances. Instead, with the meditative exercise, we want to attain an intimate experience of how the inner voice is reflecting the intuitive activity which weaves in boundless potential of meaning. We are seeking to experience tightly how every 'jot and tittle' of the inner voice is shaped through that activity. When the cracks inevitably open and thought-distractions flood in (including feelings of anxiety, frustration, helplessness, etc.), we don't resist them but invite them with open arms. Not to get carried away on them but to observe them intently and see how they are interacting with our activity. These are great opportunities to observe the 'liminal spaces' of our thought-trains which we would normally never have. 

As we persist in this rhythmic alternation of willed thinking and intent observation, we can start to live more directly in the intuitive thinking potential before its wave function collapses into the thought-patterns which would have manifested if it had fallen into the cracks. We start to understand more deeply, through flashes of intuition, where such distracting patterns are coming from within the depths of our own being. Normally they just surface in our consciousness and we don't know what hit us - we don't have any cognitive leeway to anticipate their arrival. This is why they become 'inherent' to us, because they arrive independent of our cognitive anticipation and our will. It is really the same principle for all phenomena of the world we experience. What we normally call 'nature' is simply that portion of the phenomenal world processes which has not been brought within the sphere of our intimate spiritual activity. 

I am not expecting a response on this today, but would like to hear how the above reasoning sounds to you when you get a chance.

[Cleric K]

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

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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.

Federica, Ashvin did a great job above on addressing this. I’ll just throw out a few more details.

Indeed, the cracking of the thought-fabric is precisely the goal. All the wonders of the Cosmos are contained behind these cracks. We should, however, make sure we get this right.

Here we’re already speaking not only about Imagination but the onset of Inspiration. As such, it would be misleading if we simply expect to see something in the cracking thought-forms. Imagine that a person touches you. You feel the inner sensation of touch. It would be absurd if you expect that by further analyzing the texture of the sense of touch (looking into its cracks), you would find there the reality of the person. That reality you only find when you understand from quite another direction the kind of inner life of feelings and ideas that has led the person to touch you. We need the same mood if we are to understand the nature of Imagination and proceed to Inspiration. We can never find true reality in the imaginative colors and forms by dissecting them with the scalpel. They only become comprehensible when we understand the speech of the Spirit that shapes these forms (cymatics), just like ripples on a lake are only testimonies for the activity of the wind.

We’re entering the domain of thinking gestures. These are reflected in the imaginative mirror but they themselves are only forms and vibrations of intuition. By stating this, it immediately becomes a trap because we’re tempted to imagine intuition as some vibrating substance. Yet what ‘vibrates’ is the imperceptible but intuitively known meaning. This is the great challenge, because the spiritual world is known as the ‘shape’ of our intuition – not imaginatively perceptible shape but the shape of our "I". At any point we’re ‘shaped’ in the meaning that we currently think. (btw the fact that we renounce images and focus on the shape of intuition, doesn’t mean that the spiritual world is dark. It can be said that the Imaginative is already contained in it as potential)

With all this said, when the imaginative impressions of our thought-forms begin to crack, this is only the reflection of what happens with the intuition-shape of being. I intended to write something in the essays but maybe I’ll include a beta version of it here.



To the left we have ordinary cognition. We have thin conscious inner life (the dashed line) while most of our being is projected over the sensory perceptions, which makes it feel like we exist in the physical world. We have very little self-knowledge. Our temperament, character, sympathies, antipathies, ideologies, etc. all go in the subconscious black box we call “I”.

In the middle we have Imaginative cognition, where we increase the leeway between our spiritual perspective and the suit. Within this inner imaginative space we begin to understand much more of the forces that shape our character and the world. Now we are fully aware that the Cosmos is spiritual in nature, yet we still feel as an ensouled being with its own inner life in images (thus the name of that level of being – Spirit-Self). We understand that the Cosmos is weaved of spiritual (thinking-like) forces but we experience their indirect impressions in our soul, just like we experience the touch of the person.

Then we have Inspirative cognition, through which we become conscious of the spiritual world proper. This is not simply an even more refined imaginative soul space but we now live in the very vibration of intuition where the activity of spiritual beings interfere. This is symbolized with the untwisting of the knot (deconvolution). This is also the stage where indeed, we can no longer speak of an inner and outer world. This duality only comes by because of the (correct) intuition that in the imaginative substance we live in a personal impression of the Cosmos. In the spiritual world we still live within an unique perspective but we no longer have private inner life. For example, at that stage we can’t think “here I am, beholding the spiritual world, reasoning about it.” This habitually takes it that we have our private thinking life and the spiritual world is some other Cosmic thinking life. But this is not so. The spiritual world is the underlying intuitive fabric of our, otherwise considered to be private, thoughts.

This is really the greatest challenge for modern man. We live with the impression that our private life of thinking is the holy of holies, the only place that’s absolutely ours and every other being is outside that sphere. But this isn’t so even from a materialistic perspective. In that view, our thinking life is encoded in brain activity patterns which really belong to the world, they are ‘public’. The laws of physics don’t care about some sphere that our ego considers to be its own property. Cosmic waves interfere in our brain at any moment, brain activity radiates EM waves in space. From that perspective there’s nothing private about our brain, it’s part of the world’s quantum fields.

Materialism actually leads us into very valuable insights but we have to turn them around and find their spiritual counterpart. We find the public existence of being through Inspirative cognition. Instead of quantum fields (which we can only conceive as abstract images in our soul) we find the Cosmic speech, the waves of intuition that act as archetypal and elemental lines of force along which more convoluted forms of being coalesce.

We have illustrated this with analogies like the Cantor dust, aliasing and so on. Here’s one more way:



The quality is quite bad but it makes the point. In a metaphorical sense we can say that the shapes of our thinking are like these Moiré patterns. This doesn’t mean that they are illusions. The intuition that corresponds to them is unique in itself. The only illusion is the idea that these are monolithic thought-entities that are our own original creations and belong to our ego. This is what the cracking of the thought-forms invites us to understand.

Our thoughts – not their imaginative reflections but the imperceptible (but known) shape of vibrating intuition – are only stable patterns in a spiritual world of interfering intuition. This means that our private thoughts exist by virtue of the interference of intuitive activity of countless beings and conversely, our activity in these patterns is part of the interference of everything else.

There are many more things to be said but this should be enough to give a hint. When spiritual development goes gradually, we first accustom ourselves to the idea that our thoughts are not atomic phenomena but are more like Moiré patterns in the spiritual world weaved of the vibrating intuition of countless beings – both archetypal and elemental. It’s clear that in order to have consciousness in this realm we can no longer rely on the imaginative reflections of our thoughts. We can only have self-consciousness here if we can understand ourselves not as a soul with a private world that interacts with an outer world but as a coherent center whose activity reverberates through the whole world of resounding intuition. Thus we don’t have existence apart from that of the world. The fabric of our intuitive gestures is the fabric of the Cosmos, in which other beings are also active. That’s why we can only be conscious here if we have our center in something that transcends our personal life. This is where the Christ archetypal being comes into play.

We should understand that in the spiritual world, even though we speak of Cosmic Thoughts of beings, these thoughts are not thoughts about something. These thoughts are the lines of force that underlie the structure and dynamics of our imaginative dreamscape. For example, the archetypal plant is not a floating thought about a plant but is the very attractor, which in complicated interference leads to Moiré patterns that follow that archetypal idea. Similarly, the Christ being is not a mind that thinks about things but the ‘carrier wave’ which gives the temporal shape of the whole evolutionary journey of humanity. We can have clear consciousness in the Inspirative world only when we see evolution from such above-personal perspective. This is extremely simplified but we should at least try to understand that a thought in the spiritual world is not a mental picture of something but the actual underlying structure and temporal transformation of reality.

[Cleric K]

PS: Federica, hopefully this also gives another angle on the question of thought-sacrifice. I hope this makes it more understandable that we have to sacrifice the thought Moiré pattern in order to gain consciousness of the underlying interference of vibrating intuition. Yet, as said, this is connected with developing the inner trust that when we surrender our thought-forms, our being doesn't sink into a chaotic storm of Cosmic thinking but becomes concentric with the musical hierarchy of meaningful Cosmic life. In the spiritual world our life only makes real sense when seen from the Heliocentric perspective. We understand our human destiny only when we see the life of our Solar spiritual environment as our own.

[Federica]

Hey Federica,

Merry Christmas again!

I just wanted to re-post what I wrote yesterday in response.

I know you don't intend to 'drag anyone down' to your current perspective, and I am confident that if you persist with prayer, meditation, and reading of Steiner, Klocek, or anyone similar who explores these ideas in depth, you will find the optimal orientation for your path over time. In the meantime, I am only interested in helping to clarify the underlying principles of this spiritual practice, and learn whatever I can in the process of dialoguing. These principles can be really important because, even if we don't resonate with a particular angle of approach or exercise, they will no doubt come to our aid in other approaches and exercises we pursue. For instance, let's revisit the following:

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 would say that calling for the cracks to open is completely natural for this exercise, so that we can observe intently what comes through those cracks (we are baiting them with our spiritual activity). That was my experience as well. It should start to feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, straining, etc. As Cleric mentioned, this aids us in deconditioning from automatic thinking habits, tied to our lower nature, which assert themselves when doing such exercises. The strain is not an indication that the thought-fabric itself has broken down, but rather that we are pushing against the boundaries of our normal sense-based cognition, which is exactly what we aim to do. There is really nothing 'inherent' to thought-experience apart from the mode of consciousness which is participating in it. So we are in a certain sense aiming to 'dismember' the thought-content to invert into a higher mode of cognition, which knows the thought-content from a higher vantage.

We shouldn't be focused on the meaning of the thought-content. In the normal sensory-conceptual spectrum, we miss our intuitive activity which collapses into that thought-content because we are too focused on its isolated meaning (the whole environment is also structured to reinforce this polarized state). When things start to lose their meaning for us, we stop paying attention to them and thereby miss the meaningful intuition embedded in the depths of world appearances. Instead, with the meditative exercise, we want to attain an intimate experience of how the inner voice is reflecting the intuitive activity which weaves in boundless potential of meaning. We are seeking to experience tightly how every 'jot and tittle' of the inner voice is shaped through that activity. When the cracks inevitably open and thought-distractions flood in (including feelings of anxiety, frustration, helplessness, etc.), we don't resist them but invite them with open arms. Not to get carried away on them but to observe them intently and see how they are interacting with our activity. These are great opportunities to observe the 'liminal spaces' of our thought-trains which we would normally never have. 

As we persist in this rhythmic alternation of willed thinking and intent observation, we can start to live more directly in the intuitive thinking potential before its wave function collapses into the thought-patterns which would have manifested if it had fallen into the cracks. We start to understand more deeply, through flashes of intuition, where such distracting patterns are coming from within the depths of our own being. Normally they just surface in our consciousness and we don't know what hit us - we don't have any cognitive leeway to anticipate their arrival. This is why they become 'inherent' to us, because they arrive independent of our cognitive anticipation and our will. It is really the same principle for all phenomena of the world we experience. What we normally call 'nature' is simply that portion of the phenomenal world processes which has not been brought within the sphere of our intimate spiritual activity. 

I am not expecting a response on this today, but would like to hear how the above reasoning sounds to you when you get a chance.

Ashvin,

Thank you for this step by step illustration, I do follow, and it makes sense. But because it’s not an experience, I can only record it and use it as a guideline in my attempts.


If I think of drawing a triangle with the tip of my finger, for example, I can try to draw it slower. What I experience then is fatigue, and soon enough full stop in the drawing. I start moving the finger again, as slowly as possible, and then I come to a full stop again. It’s as if, by petrifying the gesture, I was trying not to lose the thought and not to fall in the cracks of distraction. In this sense I was saying that the thought loses its dynamic. Then, in a way, it becomes a concentration, not an imaginative action anymore. So after a few stops and restarts (very few) it’s not even a crack that I experience. I have become so tired that the experiment is finished. I do take note that the cracks are welcome, as we make ourselves ready to observe them with openness as they occur, but I also gather that it’s necessary to try to remain in the initial thought, otherwise we don't have any base to observe the crack from, otherwise we get carried away. We cannot observe the crack from within the crack. That would be the standard discontinuity of consciousness that we witness a posteriori.


I understand that, with time, this practice allows to see the distraction coming while still engaged in the thinking gesture, not coming as content but as a background opening on intuitions as potential, but I haven’t started having such experience, therefore I can only note that for now, and have it as a compass for what to expect going forward. The reasoning sounds clearly, I have only struggled somewhat with your last sentence. Not that it’s the first time you or Cleric describe that, but as you mentioned elsewhere, we easily forget, we even forget our own good ideas, and we slip back in thinking habits. However with some effort, I can see that the intuitions materialize as distractions in a particular form that is due to the shape of our soul. So when we succeed in catching the before and after, we can deduct that shape from the specific way the before has morphed into an after. And when that shape is indirectly identified in that way, the barrier between our I and its background of intuitions melts, and that barrier is the same that keeps us separate from the world process, as subjects. When we see through that filter, or barrier, we become seamlessly connected to nature from within our spiritual activity. I understand that. I don't’ have this experience, but your compass is precise and helpful enough to let me see that. Thank you.

[Federica]

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

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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.

Federica, Ashvin did a great job above on addressing this. I’ll just throw out a few more details.

Indeed, the cracking of the thought-fabric is precisely the goal. All the wonders of the Cosmos are contained behind these cracks. We should, however, make sure we get this right.

Here we’re already speaking not only about Imagination but the onset of Inspiration. As such, it would be misleading if we simply expect to see something in the cracking thought-forms. Imagine that a person touches you. You feel the inner sensation of touch. It would be absurd if you expect that by further analyzing the texture of the sense of touch (looking into its cracks), you would find there the reality of the person. That reality you only find when you understand from quite another direction the kind of inner life of feelings and ideas that has led the person to touch you. We need the same mood if we are to understand the nature of Imagination and proceed to Inspiration. We can never find true reality in the imaginative colors and forms by dissecting them with the scalpel. They only become comprehensible when we understand the speech of the Spirit that shapes these forms (cymatics), just like ripples on a lake are only testimonies for the activity of the wind.

We’re entering the domain of thinking gestures. These are reflected in the imaginative mirror but they themselves are only forms and vibrations of intuition. By stating this, it immediately becomes a trap because we’re tempted to imagine intuition as some vibrating substance. Yet what ‘vibrates’ is the imperceptible but intuitively known meaning. This is the great challenge, because the spiritual world is known as the ‘shape’ of our intuition – not imaginatively perceptible shape but the shape of our "I". At any point we’re ‘shaped’ in the meaning that we currently think. (btw the fact that we renounce images and focus on the shape of intuition, doesn’t mean that the spiritual world is dark. It can be said that the Imaginative is already contained in it as potential)

With all this said, when the imaginative impressions of our thought-forms begin to crack, this is only the reflection of what happens with the intuition-shape of being. I intended to write something in the essays but maybe I’ll include a beta version of it here.



To the left we have ordinary cognition. We have thin conscious inner life (the dashed line) while most of our being is projected over the sensory perceptions, which makes it feel like we exist in the physical world. We have very little self-knowledge. Our temperament, character, sympathies, antipathies, ideologies, etc. all go in the subconscious black box we call “I”.

In the middle we have Imaginative cognition, where we increase the leeway between our spiritual perspective and the suit. Within this inner imaginative space we begin to understand much more of the forces that shape our character and the world. Now we are fully aware that the Cosmos is spiritual in nature, yet we still feel as an ensouled being with its own inner life in images (thus the name of that level of being – Spirit-Self). We understand that the Cosmos is weaved of spiritual (thinking-like) forces but we experience their indirect impressions in our soul, just like we experience the touch of the person.

Then we have Inspirative cognition, through which we become conscious of the spiritual world proper. This is not simply an even more refined imaginative soul space but we now live in the very vibration of intuition where the activity of spiritual beings interfere. This is symbolized with the untwisting of the knot (deconvolution). This is also the stage where indeed, we can no longer speak of an inner and outer world. This duality only comes by because of the (correct) intuition that in the imaginative substance we live in a personal impression of the Cosmos. In the spiritual world we still live within an unique perspective but we no longer have private inner life. For example, at that stage we can’t think “here I am, beholding the spiritual world, reasoning about it.” This habitually takes it that we have our private thinking life and the spiritual world is some other Cosmic thinking life. But this is not so. The spiritual world is the underlying intuitive fabric of our, otherwise considered to be private, thoughts.

This is really the greatest challenge for modern man. We live with the impression that our private life of thinking is the holy of holies, the only place that’s absolutely ours and every other being is outside that sphere. But this isn’t so even from a materialistic perspective. In that view, our thinking life is encoded in brain activity patterns which really belong to the world, they are ‘public’. The laws of physics don’t care about some sphere that our ego considers to be its own property. Cosmic waves interfere in our brain at any moment, brain activity radiates EM waves in space. From that perspective there’s nothing private about our brain, it’s part of the world’s quantum fields.

Materialism actually leads us into very valuable insights but we have to turn them around and find their spiritual counterpart. We find the public existence of being through Inspirative cognition. Instead of quantum fields (which we can only conceive as abstract images in our soul) we find the Cosmic speech, the waves of intuition that act as archetypal and elemental lines of force along which more convoluted forms of being coalesce.

We have illustrated this with analogies like the Cantor dust, aliasing and so on. Here’s one more way:



The quality is quite bad but it makes the point. In a metaphorical sense we can say that the shapes of our thinking are like these Moiré patterns. This doesn’t mean that they are illusions. The intuition that corresponds to them is unique in itself. The only illusion is the idea that these are monolithic thought-entities that are our own original creations and belong to our ego. This is what the cracking of the thought-forms invites us to understand.

Our thoughts – not their imaginative reflections but the imperceptible (but known) shape of vibrating intuition – are only stable patterns in a spiritual world of interfering intuition. This means that our private thoughts exist by virtue of the interference of intuitive activity of countless beings and conversely, our activity in these patterns is part of the interference of everything else.

There are many more things to be said but this should be enough to give a hint. When spiritual development goes gradually, we first accustom ourselves to the idea that our thoughts are not atomic phenomena but are more like Moiré patterns in the spiritual world weaved of the vibrating intuition of countless beings – both archetypal and elemental. It’s clear that in order to have consciousness in this realm we can no longer rely on the imaginative reflections of our thoughts. We can only have self-consciousness here if we can understand ourselves not as a soul with a private world that interacts with an outer world but as a coherent center whose activity reverberates through the whole world of resounding intuition. Thus we don’t have existence apart from that of the world. The fabric of our intuitive gestures is the fabric of the Cosmos, in which other beings are also active. That’s why we can only be conscious here if we have our center in something that transcends our personal life. This is where the Christ archetypal being comes into play.

We should understand that in the spiritual world, even though we speak of Cosmic Thoughts of beings, these thoughts are not thoughts about something. These thoughts are the lines of force that underlie the structure and dynamics of our imaginative dreamscape. For example, the archetypal plant is not a floating thought about a plant but is the very attractor, which in complicated interference leads to Moiré patterns that follow that archetypal idea. Similarly, the Christ being is not a mind that thinks about things but the ‘carrier wave’ which gives the temporal shape of the whole evolutionary journey of humanity. We can have clear consciousness in the Inspirative world only when we see evolution from such above-personal perspective. This is extremely simplified but we should at least try to understand that a thought in the spiritual world is not a mental picture of something but the actual underlying structure and temporal transformation of reality.

Thank you Cleric!

I realize spiritual development proceeds by attunement, by shaping the I through certain gestures, and your insights definitely help me feel - hopefully also become - more familiar with the gestures, and more hands-on with the work ahead. I know it looks like I am going backwards these days, and maybe I am in some respects, but what I am sure about is that my egoic sense is changing in a way that doesn’t go back. Thanks to these always new angles you present, I’ve been able to loosen the cornerstones of the ego to some extent. I know that for sure, by reading my own older comments. I remember how I was feeling about certain insights. It's tiny but perceptible progression.


Also I should say that your drawings are a major help to anchor intuition, they create an extra degree of freedom that boosts the efforts to be done. In retrospect, I notice how much of the ideal substance I have gathered from your posts and essays is solidly resting on these sketches and images, be them the time consciousness spectrums, the hysteresis process, the vantage point, Deep M@L, or more recently the visual rendering of aliasing, and many more. These visualizations are more dense and more stable than words. They are like crystals of intuition, now immediately and forever accessible. If this forum for some reason was to disappear today, I would lose many thoughts, but I would not lose these visuals, and the intuitions they convey. I am sure I am not alone in this impression. Thank you for the gift of these sketches!


Regarding today's insights on distractions, thought-nature and thought-sacrifice, I see that you are pointing to some of the same intuitions as for example in this older post about concentration. The cracks were already there, though they were much more transparent to me then. Today I better grasp that the trace impressed by spiritual activity is relevant for that which can be traced back from it, not for what it is in itself. So our look has to span further beyond the ‘data’ level. Both aperture and focal lenght have to change. I also feel I understand the “great challenge” you speak of. It can be seen in two ways. Either as dissolving the egoic anchor through concentric recognition of the I (voiding the thoughts-pay-no-toll illusion) or as assuming meaning, not as incorporation of content but as “I am meaning”, or “meaning lives on as intention”. I know these are two sides of the same coin. There’s nothing else than meaning, and meaning only can be lived. “Lived” doesn’t mean “embodied” as we are tempted to think, we don't want to fall back to a proprietary approach, meaning is not another suit we are poured into. I guess living the meaning happens when we join its resonating intention.

This means that our private thoughts exist by virtue of the interference of intuitive activity of countless beings and conversely, our activity in these patterns is part of the interference of everything else.

Yes, this sounds familiar to me, which is why I can approach the "great challenge". I am lucky I have always had the essence of this intuition with me. I feel I was born with it. Hence I don’t have visceral resistance to it, I can accustom myself to the collective nature of spiritual activity, and I ‘only’ have to unpack this intuition. From this, I can try to sense that the spiritual world is not made of floating thought-contents, carried around by floating mind-units, we don’t want to default back to a vision of the spiritual as a floating replica of the perceptual world. It’s rather an organized structure of vibrating potential. I get that.


The one thing that I am not able to intuit at the moment is this:

In the spiritual world we still live within an unique perspective but we no longer have private inner life.

What makes that unique perspective ‘mine’, when I have lost the illusion of ‘private inner life’? Where lies the contour of uniqueness that allows the I to hold an individual perspective, when we don't have existence apart from that of the world? When the fabric of our intuition is the Cosmic fabric? In other words, what does the orange line symbolize in the third sketch?

[Federica]

PS: Federica, hopefully this also gives another angle on the question of thought-sacrifice. I hope this makes it more understandable that we have to sacrifice the thought Moiré pattern in order to gain consciousness of the underlying interference of vibrating intuition. Yet, as said, this is connected with developing the inner trust that when we surrender our thought-forms, our being doesn't sink into a chaotic storm of Cosmic thinking but becomes concentric with the musical hierarchy of meaningful Cosmic life. In the spiritual world our life only makes real sense when seen from the Heliocentric perspective. We understand our human destiny only when we see the life of our Solar spiritual environment as our own.

Yes. It's more understandable. I have wrapped my head around that since the beginning of the Conformal cyclic meditation thread. I don't have at my disposal the building material yet to construct the inner trust in the net of meaningful Cosmic life. When I read "Solar spiritual environment", or "complex hierarchy" I struggle to get the meaning. But I have the intention to understand human destiny in that compound, when it dissolves its boundaries in the recognition of its spiritual environment. In a sense, I feel the approach could be reversed. Instead of developing trust to be able to sacrifice perceptual and imaginative content, one could first surrender the thought-images - which to me basically means to intently explore the cracks, and to let go of looking - in order to connect with the growing trust. But I also feel this is premature for me. I am not yet acquainted with imaginative cognition, apart from few attempts, so before I can meaningfully sacrifice it, I should develop it and use it to expand self awareness in that space first.

[Cleric K]

Thank you, Federica, for your encouraging words! In exchanges like those we have on this forum I can already feel the joy of the, hopefully not too distant, future when more and more people will find true reality concealed in the fabric of our intellectual mask and then sketches as the ones we use here will be as clear as the alphabet is for modern man. The sketches will simply evolve into a higher order language that expresses the livingly experienced spiritual structure of ourselves and the world.

The one thing that I am not able to intuit at the moment is this:

In the spiritual world we still live within an unique perspective but we no longer have private inner life.

What makes that unique perspective ‘mine’, when I have lost the illusion of ‘private inner life’? Where lies the contour of uniqueness that allows the I to hold an individual perspective, when we don't have existence apart from that of the world? When the fabric of our intuition is the Cosmic fabric? In other words, what does the orange line symbolize in the third sketch?

Alas, here it becomes quite difficult to symbolize things, precisely because we’re dealing with forms of meaning. The Imaginative world, to some extent, still lends itself to expression in images but this becomes increasingly difficult in the spiritual world. It’s like trying to describe the Penrose Triangle to someone over the phone. By the time we grasp one corner of what we try to describe, the other slips away.



Imagine that you are a mathematician and you work in a team with other colleagues on a complicated problem. Now imagine that you’re so engrossed in this problem that you forget the surrounding world, you forget your bodily needs, your perceptions, your Earthly desires. Now the meaning of the mathematical ideas is your whole world. They are not simply ideas in your mind but the ideas are the structure of that world and your own being. To solve the problem is to find a specific configuration of your own ideal form. However, just when you think that you have found the solution form, you see certain imperfections and through them a whole wider ideal world confronts you and now your form has to solve for these new ideal dimensions too.

Now imagine that this inner space is not at all simple and uniform but complicated language-like hierarchy. You feel yourself to be a unity in this world not because you have a body but because your being is like an idea that grows and evolves. Your idea-being is not your own property but is itself part of the world. Imagine that as a mathematician you fully identify with your work. Theories are being developed, they grow, they reach dead ends, essential extract is produced from which new ideal growth begins. You have to imagine that you're not an ego that thinks this theory and takes pride in it (probably expecting a Nobel prize) but the theory is what you are. Developing the theory is to expand your own being, to discover its degrees of freedom, how it stands within its ideal mathematical constraints and how it can transform them.

You transform through these ideal states and understand that your colleagues are also present in this structure. They also work on the same problem. The problem is the Cosmic Puzzle. It’s not simply that we’re ‘here’ and think about the puzzle ‘there’ on the laboratory table but our own being is part of the structure of the puzzle, thus thinking about the problem is in itself movement of its parts. When the colleagues think, this is movement of the parts too. So it’s not just a mental task, it’s rather as if we have to dance together, except that every movement is also meaningful, just like the movements of the larynx are expressions of meaning. Like in a choir that we don't see, we can't say one colleague is here, another is there – we live in the meaningful interference of voices – this is the structure of reality. They sound from every point in space, so to speak. The 'theory' that we feel ourselves to be, would never exist as such, if those other voices were not sounding. They give us our ideal structure and we sound back into theirs. We're like communicating vessels, we have to dance together in order to develop our theory.

In this sense, our whole being is experienced as this 'theory' that grows and which tries to encompass, to become the solution of the Cosmic Puzzle. This is why we speak of a unique perspective within this infinite ideal world. The way our solution-being develops is only one of infinitely many possible.

The ideal movements of that reality feel coherent, in the same way the speech and gestures of a reasonable person feel coherent – we feel behind them a living being that understands its existence and seeks to unfold it creatively. This is what we feel from all sides in the ideal world. Everything results from creative and meaningful activity. That’s why in esoteric traditions the spiritual world is most often compared to speech. That’s why we speak of the Word, the Logos. This doesn’t mean that everything is only of sound-like character. Not in the least. It is a full-spectrum world which contains the ideal potential for color, sound, aroma and things which we can’t even conceive in our ordinary consciousness. Yet the reason initiates speak of Cosmic speech is because this most clearly conveys the fact that every phenomenon is an expression of meaningful spiritual activity, just like our human speech is.

We don’t have private life in the sense that the evolving idea that we are, doesn't have personal pains and pleasures. We have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to lie about, nothing that we desire for ourselves only – in short, anything that can live in a darkened soul enclosure. The mood in this ideal world is one of energetic creative work, where this Cosmic dance, this solving of the Cosmic puzzle – which is our own spiritual fabric – is our greatest joy, greatest scientific challenge, the greatest source of inspiration, the greatest artistic creation, the greatest benefactor for all existence.

[AshvinP]

Hey Federica,

Merry Christmas again!

I just wanted to re-post what I wrote yesterday in response.

I know you don't intend to 'drag anyone down' to your current perspective, and I am confident that if you persist with prayer, meditation, and reading of Steiner, Klocek, or anyone similar who explores these ideas in depth, you will find the optimal orientation for your path over time. In the meantime, I am only interested in helping to clarify the underlying principles of this spiritual practice, and learn whatever I can in the process of dialoguing. These principles can be really important because, even if we don't resonate with a particular angle of approach or exercise, they will no doubt come to our aid in other approaches and exercises we pursue. For instance, let's revisit the following:

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 would say that calling for the cracks to open is completely natural for this exercise, so that we can observe intently what comes through those cracks (we are baiting them with our spiritual activity). That was my experience as well. It should start to feel unfamiliar, uncomfortable, straining, etc. As Cleric mentioned, this aids us in deconditioning from automatic thinking habits, tied to our lower nature, which assert themselves when doing such exercises. The strain is not an indication that the thought-fabric itself has broken down, but rather that we are pushing against the boundaries of our normal sense-based cognition, which is exactly what we aim to do. There is really nothing 'inherent' to thought-experience apart from the mode of consciousness which is participating in it. So we are in a certain sense aiming to 'dismember' the thought-content to invert into a higher mode of cognition, which knows the thought-content from a higher vantage.

We shouldn't be focused on the meaning of the thought-content. In the normal sensory-conceptual spectrum, we miss our intuitive activity which collapses into that thought-content because we are too focused on its isolated meaning (the whole environment is also structured to reinforce this polarized state). When things start to lose their meaning for us, we stop paying attention to them and thereby miss the meaningful intuition embedded in the depths of world appearances. Instead, with the meditative exercise, we want to attain an intimate experience of how the inner voice is reflecting the intuitive activity which weaves in boundless potential of meaning. We are seeking to experience tightly how every 'jot and tittle' of the inner voice is shaped through that activity. When the cracks inevitably open and thought-distractions flood in (including feelings of anxiety, frustration, helplessness, etc.), we don't resist them but invite them with open arms. Not to get carried away on them but to observe them intently and see how they are interacting with our activity. These are great opportunities to observe the 'liminal spaces' of our thought-trains which we would normally never have. 

As we persist in this rhythmic alternation of willed thinking and intent observation, we can start to live more directly in the intuitive thinking potential before its wave function collapses into the thought-patterns which would have manifested if it had fallen into the cracks. We start to understand more deeply, through flashes of intuition, where such distracting patterns are coming from within the depths of our own being. Normally they just surface in our consciousness and we don't know what hit us - we don't have any cognitive leeway to anticipate their arrival. This is why they become 'inherent' to us, because they arrive independent of our cognitive anticipation and our will. It is really the same principle for all phenomena of the world we experience. What we normally call 'nature' is simply that portion of the phenomenal world processes which has not been brought within the sphere of our intimate spiritual activity. 

I am not expecting a response on this today, but would like to hear how the above reasoning sounds to you when you get a chance.

Ashvin,

Thank you for this step by step illustration, I do follow, and it makes sense. But because it’s not an experience, I can only record it and use it as a guideline in my attempts.


If I think of drawing a triangle with the tip of my finger, for example, I can try to draw it slower. What I experience then is fatigue, and soon enough full stop in the drawing. I start moving the finger again, as slowly as possible, and then I come to a full stop again. It’s as if, by petrifying the gesture, I was trying not to lose the thought and not to fall in the cracks of distraction. In this sense I was saying that the thought loses its dynamic. Then, in a way, it becomes a concentration, not an imaginative action anymore. So after a few stops and restarts (very few) it’s not even a crack that I experience. I have become so tired that the experiment is finished. I do take note that the cracks are welcome, as we make ourselves ready to observe them with openness as they occur, but I also gather that it’s necessary to try to remain in the initial thought, otherwise we don't have any base to observe the crack from, otherwise we get carried away. We cannot observe the crack from within the crack. That would be the standard discontinuity of consciousness that we witness a posteriori.


I understand that, with time, this practice allows to see the distraction coming while still engaged in the thinking gesture, not coming as content but as a background opening on intuitions as potential, but I haven’t started having such experience, therefore I can only note that for now, and have it as a compass for what to expect going forward. The reasoning sounds clearly, I have only struggled somewhat with your last sentence. Not that it’s the first time you or Cleric describe that, but as you mentioned elsewhere, we easily forget, we even forget our own good ideas, and we slip back in thinking habits. However with some effort, I can see that the intuitions materialize as distractions in a particular form that is due to the shape of our soul. So when we succeed in catching the before and after, we can deduct that shape from the specific way the before has morphed into an after. And when that shape is indirectly identified in that way, the barrier between our I and its background of intuitions melts, and that barrier is the same that keeps us separate from the world process, as subjects. When we see through that filter, or barrier, we become seamlessly connected to nature from within our spiritual activity. I understand that. I don't’ have this experience, but your compass is precise and helpful enough to let me see that. Thank you.

Federica,

I would just point out here that we don't need to draw a sharp line between what we are discerning through our logical reasoning and what we have 'experienced'. Since the very structure of reality is thought-processes, and we are thinking be-ings, our intuitive shape is actually molding itself to the contours of reality in our logical reasoning through these concepts, creating-discovering its degrees of freedom. Even our perception of the world is changing subtly, which is most evident in the meaning we glean from speech-writing which we may have seen many times before but could not understand or only dimly understood. Eventually this will also manifest for our inner perception. Of course the language we use here will implicitly suggest a subject/object divide until our new habits of living thinking have taken a more firm root within us, in which case we more seamlessly get 'beneath' the language-forms to their intuitive meaning. So basically we can take everything Cleric wrote in his last post and realize it applies to what we are doing now in the thinking-gestures we make to follow the posts and make holistic sense of them. Inspired cognition is becoming much more livingly conscious of those thinking-gestures we are always performing to make sense of the world. We awaken to ourselves as the metamorphosing thinking-gestures.

re: triangle drawing - I am not sure this exercise would work with drawing a triangle image. When we stretch out the thought-sounds of 'I think the words', we are still actively engaging the thinking-will with the 'aaaa', morphing into 'eeeeyeee', etc. It's similar to the vowel exercise in that sense. But when we slow down the drawing of the triangle image to the point of stopping, then we are basically locking our concentration in a point, as you say. There is still value to that concentration, but we are losing the dynamic texture of the morphing thought-forms in response to our intuitive thinking-gestures. In a sense, we don't prolong the exercise long enough to have the imaginative content to sacrifice at the altar of Inspiration.

[Cleric K]

re: triangle drawing - I am not sure this exercise would work with drawing a triangle image. When we stretch out the thought-sounds of 'I think the words', we are still actively engaging the thinking-will with the 'aaaa', morphing into 'eeeeyeee', etc. It's similar to the vowel exercise in that sense. But when we slow down the drawing of the triangle image to the point of stopping, then we are basically locking our concentration in a point, as you say. There is still value to that concentration, but we are losing the dynamic texture of the morphing thought-forms in response to our intuitive thinking-gestures. In a sense, we don't prolong the exercise long enough to have the imaginative content to sacrifice at the altar of Inspiration.

Ashvin, here we shouldn’t underestimate the value of the fixed concentration. Actually, I see the slowing down of the “I think these words” as transition into concentration. Federica rightly noted that. Here concentration shouldn’t be confused for lack of dynamics. As I said before, probably the best image for this is that of the waterfall.

When we concentrate on the triangle it seems as we’re leading ourselves in stagnation (that’s why when the nature of this is not grasped correctly, it’s seen as monotonous and boring). The slowing down exercise had in mind that even that which is slowed down to a standstill is still being continually replenished through time. In this sense, we can meditate just as successfully with an unmoving triangle or any other symbol but gradually we have to become more sensitive to the fact that this thought-image is not really static through time. If we put a TV movie on pause the image freezes. Yet the pixels of the screen continue to emit new light. The image is the same but the light is ever new. It is similar with concentration. The triangle thought-image seems frozen but it is only a standing wave within our temporal becoming. It is precisely because we put our intellectual habits to rest, that we free our spirit to gain consciousness in the temporal flow. We begin to sense subtle lawfulness within this flow.

It’s important to realize that our spiritual activity feels differently on different levels. When we morph the shape of the triangle we use one kind of activity. Imagine you’re playing with the Moiré patterns from the book. When we move the semi-transparent grid against the page, we see moving patterns. If we do that instinctively and we forget about our hands we can conceive that with our will we’re moving directly the pattern.

When we put the triangle to rest, within the temporal flow of imagination (of which the triangle is a standing wave/waterfall shape/Moiré pattern) we find more subtle forms of spiritual activity with which we move, so to speak, the grids. As an example, imagine that we’re meditating on the static triangle. Gradually we begin to be vividly aware that we’re actively sustaining the temporal flow of imagination that keeps the triangle in place. The longer we sustain this concentration, the richer the flow becomes. It becomes a very tempting source for distractions, we can easily break our concentration and begin thinking about the temporal texture. Yet if we resist, the texture becomes even more rich. Remember – through all this time we’re sustaining the form of the triangle. The richness comes not from morphing its shape but from the flow that sustains it.

It may seem paradoxical but even though our intellectual self seems to have frozen in concentration, this is what makes it possible to become more conscious of the highly dynamic temporal flow that sustains the form of concentration. The critical thing is that our activity within this flow is already of a more subtle character. In comparison, if from that state we decide to morph the shape of the triangle, this activity seems quite crude. It’s like we lose sight of the subtle movements of the grids and instead instinctively push the Moiré pattern itself. For this reason, we shouldn’t be too eager to be creative at this subtler level, we first have to get used to its dynamics.

When we sustain this meditation, the richness of the imaginative flow’s texture grows and expands. The kinds of intuition that we gain within this flow are most varied but as an example, consider that we simply become more conscious of ourselves and recognize that the fact that we’re currently concentrated on a static triangle, is really something within the context of our overall spiritual interests. We didn’t just wake up doing this exercise. In our daily life at some point we decided we should meditate and chose this particular form of concentration. Normally, we have an interest, we don’t create an interest as we create a thought. At the subtler level, we find the interest as something real, as the attractor that pulls certain activities and pushes away others. In normal cognition an interest is just the name we give to a certain feeling of sympathy but in the subtler flow we find it as an active force in our soul life. It is clear that this force operates on a different level compared to our normal thinking or the forces we employ to morph a triangle. We can imagine that our pre-incarnate being is more capable of modeling these soul forces (as far as karma permits) in order to ensure certain experiences within the sensory spectrum but from our ordinary intellectual perspective, these interests are much more as the subconscious curvature of our soul life, which makes us prefer one thing over another.

The whole point is that we have to distinguish the ‘coarseness’ of spiritual activity at different levels. For this reason, concentrating on thought-image (waterfall) is the most direct way in which we can become conscious of the temporal flow of imagination that sustains it. If we don’t take this abstractly, we can say that in order to grasp the thickness along the fourth dimension of time, we have to concentrate the 3D thought-image and feel how the time-flow sustains it. It is perfectly true that we gain intuition of this time-extended spiritual activity when we morph the triangle but this can only lead so far. To grasp even subtler temporal forces we have to concentrate the 3D form in order to become much more sensitive to the flow of time. While we’re morphing the triangle we’re being too ‘loud’ and miss the more subtle texture of the temporal flow, where our higher order soul and spiritual nature is to be found.

[AshvinP]

re: triangle drawing - I am not sure this exercise would work with drawing a triangle image. When we stretch out the thought-sounds of 'I think the words', we are still actively engaging the thinking-will with the 'aaaa', morphing into 'eeeeyeee', etc. It's similar to the vowel exercise in that sense. But when we slow down the drawing of the triangle image to the point of stopping, then we are basically locking our concentration in a point, as you say. There is still value to that concentration, but we are losing the dynamic texture of the morphing thought-forms in response to our intuitive thinking-gestures. In a sense, we don't prolong the exercise long enough to have the imaginative content to sacrifice at the altar of Inspiration.

Ashvin, here we shouldn’t underestimate the value of the fixed concentration. Actually, I see the slowing down of the “I think these words” as transition into concentration. Federica rightly noted that. Here concentration shouldn’t be confused for lack of dynamics. As I said before, probably the best image for this is that of the waterfall.

When we concentrate on the triangle it seems as we’re leading ourselves in stagnation (that’s why when the nature of this is not grasped correctly, it’s seen as monotonous and boring). The slowing down exercise had in mind that even that which is slowed down to a standstill is still being continually replenished through time. In this sense, we can meditate just as successfully with an unmoving triangle or any other symbol but gradually we have to become more sensitive to the fact that this thought-image is not really static through time. If we put a TV movie on pause the image freezes. Yet the pixels of the screen continue to emit new light. The image is the same but the light is ever new. It is similar with concentration. The triangle thought-image seems frozen but it is only a standing wave within our temporal becoming. It is precisely because we put our intellectual habits to rest, that we free our spirit to gain consciousness in the temporal flow. We begin to sense subtle lawfulness within this flow.

It’s important to realize that our spiritual activity feels differently on different levels. When we morph the shape of the triangle we use one kind of activity. Imagine you’re playing with the Moiré patterns from the book. When we move the semi-transparent grid against the page, we see moving patterns. If we do that instinctively and we forget about our hands we can conceive that with our will we’re moving directly the pattern.

When we put the triangle to rest, within the temporal flow of imagination (of which the triangle is a standing wave/waterfall shape/Moiré pattern) we find more subtle forms of spiritual activity with which we move, so to speak, the grids. As an example, imagine that we’re meditating on the static triangle. Gradually we begin to be vividly aware that we’re actively sustaining the temporal flow of imagination that keeps the triangle in place. The longer we sustain this concentration, the richer the flow becomes. It becomes a very tempting source for distractions, we can easily break our concentration and begin thinking about the temporal texture. Yet if we resist, the texture becomes even more rich. Remember – through all this time we’re sustaining the form of the triangle. The richness comes not from morphing its shape but from the flow that sustains it.

It may seem paradoxical but even though our intellectual self seems to have frozen in concentration, this is what makes it possible to become more conscious of the highly dynamic temporal flow that sustains the form of concentration. The critical thing is that our activity within this flow is already of a more subtle character. In comparison, if from that state we decide to morph the shape of the triangle, this activity seems quite crude. It’s like we lose sight of the subtle movements of the grids and instead instinctively push the Moiré pattern itself. For this reason, we shouldn’t be too eager to be creative at this subtler level, we first have to get used to its dynamics.

When we sustain this meditation, the richness of the imaginative flow’s texture grows and expands. The kinds of intuition that we gain within this flow are of most varied but as an example, consider that we simply become more conscious of ourselves and recognize that the fact that we’re currently concentrated on a static triangle, is really something within the context of our overall spiritual interests. We didn’t just wake up doing this exercise. In our daily life at some point we decided we should meditate and chose this particular form of concentration. Normally, we have an interest, we don’t create an interest as we create a thought. At the subtler level, we find the interest as something real, as the attractor that pulls certain activities and pushes away others. In normal cognition an interest is just the name we give to a certain feeling of sympathy but in the subtler flow we find it as an active force in our soul life. It is clear that this force operates on a different level compared to our normal thinking or the forces we employ to morph a triangle. We can imagine that our pre-incarnate being is more capable of modeling these soul forces (as far as karma permits) in order to ensure certain experiences within the sensory spectrum but from our ordinary intellectual perspective, these interests are much more as the subconscious curvature of our soul life, which makes us prefer one thing over another.

The whole point is that we have to distinguish the ‘coarseness’ of spiritual activity at different levels. For this reason, concentrating on thought-image (waterfall) is the most direct way in which we can become conscious of the temporal flow of imagination that sustains it. If we don’t take this abstractly, we can say that in order to grasp the thickness along the fourth dimension of time, we have to concentrate the 3D thought-image and feel how the time-flow sustains it. It is perfectly true that we gain intuition of this time-extended spiritual activity when we morph the triangle but this can only lead so far. To grasp even subtler temporal forces we have to concentrate the 3D form in order to become much more sensitive to the flow of time. While we’re morphing the triangle we’re being too ‘loud’ and miss the more subtle texture of the temporal flow, where our higher order soul and spiritual nature is to be found.

Cleric,

Thanks for this clarification! This really gives me new way to conceptually approach the meditations. It is also very powerful to image the deeper soul traits like temperament, character, interests, etc. as attractor forces through which the more subtle forms of spiritual activity flow, and which condition our thinking-will flow they are made more conscious and pliable to our activity.

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?