Cell Intelligence in Physiological & Morphological Spaces

[Cleric K]

Here's an interesting example of the way science is forced by the facts to consider the vertical structuring of reality. It's amazing how even prominent scientists today still live in 18th century conceptions of organisms as flat amalgamation of cells, no different than bouncing billiard balls, that somehow self-organize. When we look at the concrete facts this simply doesn't make any sense. The facts are right in our face.

It's really interesting to see how in the lecture above they have used such concepts as hierarchy of configuration spaces where the higher orders bend the space of possibilities for the lower orders and of course the lower orders work back into the higher. This is nothing but reaching the idea of the formative forces of the Cosmos yet entirely through intellectual reasoning about sensory facts.

Of course, as exciting as it is, it is also very alarming to see how one-sided this approach is. It is practically still cemented in planar intellect, a horizontal slice within the vertical hierarchy, that simply tries to spread its patterns into all levels. It's still far from the understanding that these levels are only abstract conceptualizations of real inner spiritual activity that has to be integrated within the human being. Without such understanding, quite infernal goals will utilize this possibility to manipulate the formative forces of Nature.

Hopefully, this will also stimulate at least some souls to recognize that true healing and even regeneration of organs, is not to be reached by manipulating ion channels of the cells (indirectly diverting the formative forces) but by the development of the whole human being of body, soul and spirit. By consciousness growing into the deeper strata of soul life, we also find the major causes for diseases. Pathological configurations in soul space, bend (disrupt) the configuration of formative space and that's how our life and mineral body malfunction (of course there are also external causes of disease). Trying to alleviate these disruptions through manipulation of the formative forces will indeed lead to results that are unthinkable through classic allopathic medicine or mechanical surgery. Yet on a broader scale it's like trying to patch up a sinking ship. We patch one hole but the water pressure bursts through a new one. This can only be rectified when man understands his musical relations with the Cosmos. Our relations to both the archetypal and elemental levels have to be musically attuned through our spiritual activity to the Cosmic symphony.

[AshvinP]

Here's an interesting example of the way science is forced by the facts to consider the vertical structuring of reality. It's amazing how even prominent scientists today still live in 18th century conceptions of organisms as flat amalgamation of cells, no different than bouncing billiard balls, that somehow self-organize. When we look at the concrete facts this simply doesn't make any sense. The facts are right in our face.

It's really interesting to see how in the lecture above they have used such concepts as hierarchy of configuration spaces where the higher orders bend the space of possibilities for the lower orders and of course the lower orders work back into the higher. This is nothing but reaching the idea of the formative forces of the Cosmos yet entirely through intellectual reasoning about sensory facts.

Of course, as exciting as it is, it is also very alarming to see how one-sided this approach is. It is practically still cemented in planar intellect, a horizontal slice within the vertical hierarchy, that simply tries to spread its patterns into all levels. It's still far from the understanding that these levels are only abstract conceptualizations of real inner spiritual activity that has to be integrated within the human being. Without such understanding, quite infernal goals will utilize this possibility to manipulate the formative forces of Nature.

Hopefully, this will also stimulate at least some souls to recognize that true healing and even regeneration of organs, is not to be reached by manipulating ion channels of the cells (indirectly diverting the formative forces) but by the development of the whole human being of body, soul and spirit. By consciousness growing into the deeper strata of soul life, we also find the major causes for diseases. Pathological configurations in soul space, bend (disrupt) the configuration of formative space and that's how our life and mineral body malfunction (of course there are also external causes of disease). Trying to alleviate these disruptions through manipulation of the formative forces will indeed lead to results that are unthinkable through classic allopathic medicine or mechanical surgery. Yet on a broader scale it's like trying to patch up a sinking ship. We patch one hole but the water pressure bursts through a new one. This can only be rectified when man understands his musical relations with the Cosmos. Our relations to both the archetypal and elemental levels have to be musically attuned through our spiritual activity to the Cosmic symphony.

Thanks for sharing this, Cleric.

I have become more sensitive lately to how so much of 'cutting-edge' intellectual discussion on YT, etc. involves people discussing and debating questions which have already been answered to a significant extent. For ex., there is this interview of Jordan Peterson with Temple Grandin where at the beginning they discuss more imaginative modes of thinking, i.e. thinking in pictures and inferential-analogical reasoning, in relation to normal intellectual cognition, i.e. inner verbalization and deductive-discursive reasoning.





We can sense how it is simply assumed they are at the very forefront of understanding these cognitive modes through abstract conceptualization, even for TG. It isn't at all suspected that the depth structure can be known from the inner perspective, so naturally, if someone were to point towards such a possibility, it would come off as fantastic, presumptive, arrogant, demeaning, etc., even though it's only the logical continuation of exactly what they are investigating. Of course this is the mind-container perspective you have highlighted extensively. It is firmly rooted in thinking of the past but feels itself to be pioneering the present and the future. To sacrifice that perspective would mean to also sacrifice making YT videos for a while and simply pursue contemplation, outwardly and inwardly, in silence and with humility and patience. It would mean forsaking the invigorating feeling of being on the 'cutting edge' of these intellectual discussions at all times, and the materialistic perks which accompany that feeling.

The unwillingness to make such a sacrifice goes to show how much the whole human being, with our development of feeling and will, of the Cosmic aesthetic and moral qualities, is lacking in the pursuit of mere scientific head-knowledge (and, to be fair, JP is probably one of the closest public intellectuals to understanding the need for more holistic development). The more that these deeper layers of our spiritual activity are compartmentalized into 'private' matters of religion (or ignored altogether), the harder it becomes for people to see the value in making the necessary sacrifices for the realization of normally unmanifest, unsuspected Cosmic Ideas. Such a lack doesn't only cause the inquirers to come up short in their understanding, but eventually to invert that understanding into the materialistic infernal goals you mention. It's such a fine line between exciting promise and looming disaster. Or as Milton put it, “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”

[Cleric K]

The thing is, Newton was a gifted individual and only those who proceed to university maths/physics will ever understand his work. Sure, the rest of humanity has benefited from his efforts, e.g. the satellites that give us our GPS. But the masses have no idea about the details or even the fundamentals of gravitational theory or calculus.

As I said, SS would appear to be for the select few, the harbingers whoever they are, at least in this age. Perhaps we can view things a bit like standard evolutionary where a small number of individuals receive a beneficial mutation which one day might become fixed in the population. Similarly, those in our current time who make spiritual progress can confer blessings upon the larger human race.

(I began writing this reply – which turned into almost an essay – before new year but had very limited time to finish it. Now I see that Ashvin has already addressed the main points but I’ll nevertheless supplement it with yet another angle. I’m replying in this thread because I think it fits the topic better.)

Anthony, your example with Newton is right – that in today’s science and technology someone has to do the heavy lifting, while others only reap the benefits. But it will be very misleading if we imagine that spiritual science has to develop similar tools and appliances that others will simply add to their households (metaphorically speaking). There’s an important distinction here and to make it clearer we’ll have to make a wide detour.

In our age, even the simplest modern man lives in Newton-like consciousness. Even without studying physics, one lives in instinctive intuition of a physical world where inanimate objects move about. So the ghost, which was still there for the ancients, has been driven out of the machine, so to speak. For man of today this ghost has been driven out of the appearances of the Cosmos and is to be found only in his own inner life, where however, it is not sense perceptible. It is shadowy and elusive to the extent that it’s customary to call it an illusion, while the universal machine that presses into the senses is felt to be self-evident reality. To know the ghost we have to make it perceptible and this we can start doing in thinking. Our thinking-forms are the means through which we begin to know the imperceptible ghost, its degrees of freedom and spaces of possibilities.

What is current science doing? It takes the ghost and tries to reintroduce it into the world. Yet it does so in a peculiar way – it takes the ghost of our thinking and tries to fill the world with it, it tries to animate the inanimate with intellectual thoughts. Of course, we say that all this happens only in the brain, it’s just a mental model spread over the sensory picture of the world but it’s still effectively doing exactly that – we’re trying to understand the world by mimicking its inanimate appearances through the intellectual (mostly mathematical) movements of our ghost.

For a long time already it has been clear that thinking in the channels of Newtonian mechanics doesn’t mimic Nature’s appearances perfectly. Even General Relativity has its problems. But still, these thinking frameworks have allowed for GPS satellites and home appliances. Yet as you say, very few need to actually understand the details. Most of us simply reap the benefits.

To understand how spiritual evolution differs in this, we have to first grasp very well the following distinction. Average Joe operates in the same conscious space as the scientist. The difference is that the former thinks about an iPhone, a sports car, a spaceship while the latter fills these perceptions with much more thoughts. When the average person looks at the phone they can think of communication, games, apps and so on. When the engineer looks at it, he sees there his whole professional life, the mathematics of physics, electronics, the circuits, the CPU, the memory, the software, OS, drivers and so on. Yet the cognitive space has similar ‘geometry’ in both cases, it’s just that the scientist fills it much more thoroughly with thoughts. Now consider what was explained in the lecture:



If the whole lecture hasn’t been seen I recommend at least looking at these two chapters: 55:48 to 59:00

As I wrote in the first post, it is very interesting to contemplate how scientists gradually have to recognize this ‘verticality’ of reality. Our mainstream understanding of biology is still based on 17th century thinking. Things are as flattened as they were for Descartes (as far as the mode of cognition is concerned). Today this is one of the greatest impediments for gaining deeper insight into reality.

What the above image depicts, can be found in different forms here and there in scientific works but it’s still very rare. The general idea is that the laws of reality do not exist only at the particle level but every scale-level introduces something unique which is not reducible to another level. For our goals it’s very important that we understand very well what this implies.

An example where things exist only on a single level is cellular automata like Conway’s game of life (CGOL). This is a very simple system consisting of a rectangular grid of cells (pixels) that can be on or off (alive or dead). Then a single frame of the system is transformed into the next by following these simple rules, applied for each cell:



Here’s a typical unfoldment when the rules are run over random initial conditions (noise of alive and dead pixels).



Usually things evolve in a chaotic manner until they finally settle into a quasi-stable pattern. Yet through careful preparation of the initial conditions it is possible to achieve practically any level of algorithmically describable behavior. For example, here’s a working computer:



CGOL is a Turing-complete system. This means that its rules are general enough that it can simulate the behavior of any conceivable computational system. Anything that can be described with an algorithm can be implemented in CGOL.

Here we come to an important point. One would say that the computer above is an emergent system. But we should be crystal clear that as far as the CGOL system is concerned, it is completely irrelevant whether the pixels are arranged in the shape of a computer or as random noise. The rules are completely the same. We can run the rules on our own device (like here – use the pencil tool to draw your own shapes and then use the ‘play’ button to see them transform) or we can use paper and pencil and run the rules ourselves by hand. We don’t need to understand that the pixels are arranged in a particular way, we don’t need to understand how the simulated CGOL computer works. We can be completely myopic and go through the cells one by one, apply the rules and produce the next frame. The CGOL computer will run just fine.

This is the mainstream way in which biological life is seen today – as emerging from purely physical interactions. The laws of physics are considered to be exactly the same in the biological cell and the stone. Nature is completely myopic, it doesn’t ‘know’ that its particle-pixels are arranged in the shape of an organism. It simply runs the rules that transform them from frame to frame. Consider the following unicellular life forms:



In reductionism it is all the same whether the particles are arranged in the shape of these organisms or they are simply a homogeneous soup of chemicals. Life doesn’t exist as some ‘thing’ from the reductionistic perspective. It’s just a name that we, conscious beings, give to certain patterns of pixels.

The question why we should experience such holistic patterns as consciousness is hard enough but it should be clear that even the simplest unicellular life is only assumed to be nothing but the dynamics of the physical pixels. There’s currently no scientific experiment which can tell if the laws of physics are enough. All our physical science and its remarkable mathematical precision, is entirely a science of what is dead. We can’t study the behavior of an electron unless we devise specific experiments where this electron is isolated in a very controlled system. The same holds for our study of the molecular dynamics in the biological cell. Our microscopes can’t see at the scale where molecules react. We can only study the chemical reactions of molecules that have been extracted from the living cell. Thus most of the fine details about molecular biology are conceptually patched together from our understanding of the separate steps of the chemical reactions. For example, videos such as the following are presently impossible to film directly. They represent our understanding of the separate chemical reactions and how they would fit together through time.



Watching animations like these leaves one wondering how could it be that molecules which are supposed to wiggle in their statistical Brownian dynamics, exhibit such orchestrated behavior. And indeed, the idea that the laws of physics, as we know them when studying isolated particles in highly controlled (constrained) experiments, are enough to explain the complicated dynamics of biological chemistry, is entirely an assumption. Presently, our computers are not powerful enough to fully simulate a simple macromolecule (such as folding of a protein), let alone a whole cell. But hopefully, if such simulations become possible and we load the blocks of biology, and begin to simulate their transformations frame by frame, it will be seen that we can only simulate a dying cell. The molecules will wiggle in their Brownian motions and soon everything falls apart into chaos.

We should make no mistake and believe that this will convince scientists that there’s something wrong in the reductionist approach. A motivated painter would never say that something is impossible to draw. He’ll simply go on to refine the techniques, the brushes, the paints and so on. Such is the case in science. Failure won’t demotivate scientists. Most of them will continue to refine the CGOL rules of physics, patching them in the most varied ways in order to replicate the appearances of living cells. Very few will consider that there might be something insufficient in the mode of cognition they exercise.

Needless to say, patching the rules in this way will produce a more and more bizarre system that makes less and less intuitive sense. Interestingly, we already see signs of this with the advent of machine learning. The latter is just a fancy name for optimization of a mathematical function. The training process adjusts the parameters of the function until it produces results that we desire (think of the function as a box with thousands of potentiometers which need to be adjusted in order to produce the desired output when presented with specific input). Such approaches already give plausible results in areas like protein folding and gravitational systems. It’s clear that in this we no longer seek the ‘laws of physics’ but we simply devise a ‘painting’ algorithm that when run, replicates certain dynamics. There will be more and more scientists who will readily admit that this is all we can ever do. The search for the laws of Nature will be seen as a kind of superstition, a confused form of idealism that has come to believe that human mathematical thinking has something to do with the foundations of reality, instead of being only intellectual mimicking of appearances. Note that all this proceeds solely because the intellect desires to have a flat system of rules, where everything can be seen as patterns of pixels, just like the computer inside CGOL (here ‘flat’ doesn’t mean 2D. We can have n-dimensional cellular automata if we like. It is flat in the sense that we have a clear two-tier system of elements and the rules of their transformations – nouns and verbs).

Now if all this is understood, it will be clear what people like Michael Levin (ML) explore – that there are levels of lawfulness in Nature. The higher levels bend the space of possibilities for the lower levels. If we measure the behavior of the particles in a dead cell we would find statistical randomness, just like we find in Brownian motion. If we could measure the behavior of molecules in a living cell it would be discovered that each molecule moves according to slightly modified statistics. This is the higher order lawfulness which bends the configuration space of the lower. And of course, the lower works back on the higher.

Let’s try to get a good feel for what all this means. Think of what today’s science consists of. It practically all comes down to the Principle of Least Action.



Whether it is classical mechanics or quantum mechanics, or general relativity, the question is always to find the correct path through configuration space, which minimizes a certain quantity called the action (for more information this video may be useful). In general relativity this path is called the geodesic – light takes the shortest path in curved spacetime (more technically, the path that minimizes the proper time).



Now what is configuration space? I won’t go into technical details but let’s approach this in the context of our needs. As a crude analogy consider the typical organization structure:



Here we can say that each level operates in a different configuration space, which represents the corresponding goals and the means of attaining them. The CEO operates with global goals. He says “I want to double the profits over the next year.” From his point of view he’s following a geodesic through corporate goal space. He’s at point A with profits X and wants to move towards point B where the profits are 2X. The geodesic is the shortest path between A and B in that goal space. This bends the configuration space of the middle level management. Now they have certain constraints within which they operate. They also have their own geodesics, their mid-level goals. These in turn bend the configuration space of the low level management.

In the configuration space of the CEO, reality looks like traversing a space of high level goals. These are the elements of reality at that level – merging of companies, new branches, new product lines and so on. This is the landscape through which the CEO’s geodesic streams. It’s a level where the details of the mid and low level management are abstracted. This doesn’t mean that this level is an absolute master control over the lower. If the CEO sets unrealistic goals, the lower level will face certain impossibilities and will respectively bend his own morphic space where his geodesic will deviate from the intended goal.

At the same time, the CEO’s space itself is being bent by higher order spaces. For example, national and global economics, politics, legislation. The CEO’s space is influenced by both the lower and higher, and at the same time he works upon the lower (by issuing orders) or even the higher (for example by lobbying).

It is natural that man of today feels certain antipathy towards such hierarchical structures because they are indeed not exactly natural. They mimic nature in a mechanical way but they are not exactly how Nature does it. Thus we should keep in mind that the corporate hierarchy is only an analogy. To get a feel for the natural spaces consider another example. You reach and take a cup of tea from the table. From your perspective your frames of existence transform through a clear configuration space and you’re following a smooth geodesic in it. You move from state A where your hand is retracted, towards state B where you have grabbed the cup. Things are quite different for your physical organism however. An astounding complexity is involved in the movement of your arm. Consider this animation:



We can see that what from our intellectual perspective is a smooth path through the configuration space of our bodily conscious states, actually bends the configuration space of our tissues and cells in a very complicated manner, which are within the context of our thinking intent.

Or consider what we do when we try to tell a story or explain some knowledge. At some level we experience the intuition of the whole story. This intuition has a certain unique identity, a fingerprint. We can tell apart our intuition of the story of our going to Paris from that of going to New York. This intuition bends the space of our pictorial imagination. We can go through the perceptual frames of the story as in a movie. Of all the possible things that we can imagine, we’re moving through images that fit the curvature of the intuition of the whole story. Then these images can bend our linguistic space. From all the words that we may use, only those remain which fit the stream of images. Our everyday consciousness is so habitual that we’re rarely aware of this gradient. Instead we instinctively spit out the words of the story, without paying attention to the spaces of memory-intuition and images.

Please note that there’s a great difference here with Bernardo’s idea that the body is what consciousness looks like from the outside. Here we don’t pretend that our hand is what the willing of its movement looks like. It’s rather that the physical spaces have quite independent existence, yet through our willing activity we partake in their curvature.

Hopefully these examples already hint at what people like ML investigate. It is the realization that a single level of rules (like CGOL or fundamental physics) cannot account for the higher order dynamics. Instead, there’s a musical orchestration between levels which operate at different levels of abstraction, so to speak. The key thing to understand is that at each level of abstraction there’s simplicity. The transformations at each level simply try to follow the shortest path in morphic space. When we want to take the cup of tea we don’t have to be aware of the incredible complexity of the lower levels – we simply will our transformation directly toward the future state B where we hold the cup.

Now one can say that we’re stating obvious things. We have known for centuries that our conscious life operates at a higher level of abstraction. So what’s new? That we question the floating assumption that this level has to be reduced to some other level(s). It is indeed an assumption. Nothing in our given experience forces us to make this assumption. In fact, the moment we make such an assumption we immediately create an irresolvable hard problem. So why then we’re so obsessed with reductionism? The deep reasons for this would take us too far but let’s just point out that it’s almost like we’re magnetically repelled from taking our human-level intellectual activity as something real, that can’t be reduced to other levels. Please understand this rightly – this is not to say that our intellectual morphic space is something complete in itself that can be understood in isolation. No level exists as something in itself. Every level exists only in relation to all other levels. Yet each level represents a unique intuitive space which is pivoted along geodesics and which correspondingly bends other spaces.

We need to take a moment and appreciate how deeply embedded this impulse for reductionism really is in our scientific and philosophical habits. To grasp this we need to understand that reductionism doesn’t necessarily imply only small things, like pixel-particles. ML only hints at this. His concrete biological studies don’t allow him to speculate about it but as he follows the integration of configuration spaces, after moving from the space of cells and organs he says “...and who knows what other spaces there are, linguistic and maybe many others”. If we follow the logical thread we come to the conclusion that our human-scale linguistic space is itself being bent by higher order spaces (like the CEO’s space being bent by national and global economics). Following the thread to the end naturally leads us to what mystical traditions have always known – that everything resides within an all-encompassing configuration space. One could say for example, that at a much higher level there’s the smooth geodesic of the rhythmic outbreath and inbreath of Brahma. The curvature of this space bends the whole hierarchy of more specific spaces. The thing however, is that when this is taken intellectually it becomes another form of reductionism, except that it reduces not to many things but to one thing. We say “Only the highest unitary configuration space is real, our human-level intuitive space is an illusion.”

We need to really understand what’s at stake here. It’s about the refusal that there’s such a thing as causality at the human-level of integration. We’re in the middle and there are two extremes. One extreme says “All the causes lie at the lowest level. These are where the CGOL rules manifest. It would be foolish to say that the parts of the simulated CGOL computer have any causal function. We say ‘signals travel from here to there, they are processed in the CPU, then they activate the display unit’ but this is all only a manner of speaking. In reality there’s no signal, there’s no display unit, there’s no activation. All there is are the simple CGOL rules applied to each pixel from frame to frame. In the same sense it would be foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal role in the flow of reality. These are simply levels of abstraction, they are only patterns of the fundamental transformation of pixels, which don’t know or care about their higher order shapes.” The other extreme says “The only cause lies in the highest level. It’s foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal reality. It’s all simply a shadow of the one real cause at the level of unity. Thus we attain to reality when we stop pretending that we’re doing something at our human scale and instead seek mystical union with the highest unity.”

Understanding these two extremes and the middle point holds one of the greatest secrets of our present stage of evolution. We need to appreciate how we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. We can’t get out of bed without this. We continually transform our states of being through these intuitive configuration spaces at our human level of abstraction. Yet at the moment we begin to philosophize about this activity, we’re immediately thrown into one of the two extremes. This has already been thoroughly examined in the Central Topic and the hysteresis process. At the moment we begin philosophizing, we completely denounce any creative responsibility. We immediately reduce our human-scale geodesic flow to be nothing but a pattern of either the lowest or the highest level. We do that because we’re unaware of our thinking process. We immediately forget that we’re engaged in philosophizing. We’re unaware that we’re treading the intuitive space of philosophical meaning and what we philosophize about is only an objectified memory image of our past human-scale states.

This is something that we must understand with crystal clarity. Unless we recognize how we steer our thinking, feeling and willing configuration spaces all the time, yet we completely push them away as soon as we start philosophizing (being completely blind about the fact that we’re still pivoting through thinking space of philosophical intuition), we simply have no chance to grasp the fact that causality exists on all levels and is experienced in unique forms of intuition.

My experience in this forum and in general, shows that without exception, those who are firmly enmeshed into either materialistic or mystical reductionism, are certain to show great antipathy towards any deeper spiritual understanding. And this is only natural, since spiritual investigation begins with the recognition that each level is a unique space of intuitive spiritual activity and we only understand reality when we can grasp how these levels work into each other in a musical gradient. We can’t make even the first step into reality if we’re unwilling to experience our thinking as steering through, say, linguistic space, that can’t be reduced to some other space. This is not to say that our thinking is absolutely free – this is simply not the case – our flow is heavily constrained by both higher and lower spaces, yet there’s something in the bending of our own thinking space which can never be attributed to anything else. The palette of our vocabulary, our ideas and so on are a much wider field than what we experience at any given moment as a single thought. Thus our thoughts are certainly dependent on that invisible landscape. That’s why we use the term ‘steering’ or ‘space bending’. Nevertheless, in the steering activity we’re one and the same with the first-person causal activity of the Cosmos. We are the first-person experience of what a causal law of nature is. We reach a point where if we’re to seek another cause of our living steering spiritual activity, we need to put that same spiritual activity in the blind spot in order to philosophize with it about some other imagined abstract causes.

Let’s try to summarize all this by borrowing ML’s images:



Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.

Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.

In our intellect we’re like the CEO. We don’t have immediate experience of the ground floor workers (our biological cells) yet steering through mental images in intuitive space can extend into the lower spaces as willing. Conversely, the workings of the lower spaces impress as perceptions and feelings which can be grasped intuitively as a flow of images at the level of our intellectual topology.

When we consider the higher order spaces, we need a kind of inverted form of spiritual activity. Humanity has been preparing for this kind of activity through the practice of prayer. Through prayer we radiate our thinking intents into higher order spaces and we also try to perceive their curvature through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in order to know how we can musically harmonize our human-level flow with the higher order flow.

Notice that although we speak of ‘spaces’ these implicitly contain also time. For example, when we reach for the tea cup, our intuition spans the temporal transformation along the geodesic. We live in the intuitive knowing of where our hand is going because we ourselves steer the transformation through that space. Similarly, higher order spaces’ geodesics can encompass even greater temporal spans. In the lecture, ML depicts that with the enlargement of the light cones and the fact that higher order minds have goals that span much greater timespans.

Now when we think in the lines of ML, we imagine that at each level of space there’s some unique lawfulness which can’t be reduced to any other space. The shortest path between two states in one space is not the same as that in others. In one space two states lie on a smooth geodesic but in lower spaces, the way they are being bent looks like higher intelligence is active in their ordering. The molecules in the cell seem to be orchestrated by higher intelligence, even though in life space there’s simply following of the shortest path between two states.

Notice that we always steer through thinking space (even though quite instinctively most of the time) and experience mental images representing other spaces. This happens when we think of physics, biology, psychology and so on. Yet the lawfulness of these spaces remains abstract to us. We imagine that biological space bends the flow of physical molecules but this bending activity is only an abstract mental picture for us, no different than the way we picture electricity and magnetism.

Things however, become interesting when we consider thinking space itself. Then the steering through that space turns upon itself. This is the only place where we have the chance to find the space-bending activity in a completely different way – as the experience of our first-person causal will. In other words, unlike the abstract mental pictures of the supposed causal activity in other spaces, now our mental images tightly reflect our livingly experienced steering activity. This we can experience, for example, with the “I think these words” or the vowels exercises.

This is really the beginning of meditation in the modern sense. It starts with the experience of space-bending of thinking space itself. Through concentration on that activity we reach the point of feeling ourselves to be smoothly steering through a geodesic in that space. From here we can gradually follow how other spaces bend thinking space and how in turn our intuitive spiritual activity can harmonize the musical nesting of all spaces, as far as we can bend them. This is no longer a matter of abstract arrangement of mental images but of actual expansion of consciousness and new forms of steering.

* * *

Now we’re more or less in a position to return to the original inquiry. In our age we wouldn’t say that we’re less human if we don’t understand how GPS satellites work. There are many things that can make us a worthy human being, without having to enter into the technicalities of science and engineering. In fact, many people consider precisely scientists to be cold intellectuals that miss something of their essential humanity.

It’s enough that some human beings have entered into these technicalities, such that others can reap the benefits. This however is not the case with spiritual knowledge. In evolutionary terms we can’t become human in the full sense of the word unless we understand things such as those we’re investigating here. This doesn’t mean that we have to use technical terms such as configuration spaces, geodesics and so on. These are nothing but symbolic expressions borrowed from our modern scientific vocabulary. Yet in one way or another, at one time or another, everyone will come to understand the essence of these things.

Here ‘understanding’ doesn’t mean to simply fill our head with some concepts and recite them at sermons. These concepts have to be found as concrete intuitions of the full spectrum of reality. The abstract concepts are only a scaffold. To come to reality we have to find what they are triangulating. The picture of nested morphic spaces that bend each other will remain just an abstract image unless we try to move to reality. Few ways were already presented. If we can recognize in a fully introspective way the relation of our general intuition of a story, its pictorial experience and its linguistic verbalization, we already have something concrete from our inner life, for which the concepts are symbolic expressions.

Evolutionary spiritual development consists of such an expansion of consciousness, where we come to know the inner side of the morphic spaces and the way they work into each other. In one way or another we have to come to consciousness of our soul space, where our sympathies and antipathies bend our linguistic space. We have to become more conscious of our bodily space, where we begin to recognize how our inner life of thoughts and feelings distorts the morphic space of our organs and tissues. These will be found to be within the context of even higher order spaces, where our incarnational transformations are seen as following a smooth rhythmic geodesic, which in turn are embedded into the evolutionary space of the whole of humanity, which also follows a rhythmic geodesic there and so on.

The role of spiritual science today is that it tries to spread awareness of these morphic spaces and how our spiritual activity fits in them. It is indeed true that there’re always some souls who approach things earlier than others. But this holds true for anything. Today only those who have developed a certain inner strength of individuality can enter into these depths of reality. There are many souls who lack such strength. They will always feel a need for the support of a group consciousness, which gives them form. Such people would say “I’ll consider these things only when I see those around me taking a step”. Of course, all the others say the exact same thing, so they are all stuck, everyone expects others to make the first step. This doesn’t mean that they won’t transform. It’s simply that such transformation is always more painful because it is forced by the transforming environment, while the beings struggle to remain as they are. We find our fully conscious stance within these transformations when we recognize that our personal soul life is embedded within the higher and lower morphic spaces. Then we don’t pretend that we’ll always remain the same but we try to musically attune to the flows, such that our consciousness expands and we can steer through our human-scale space with the greatest freedom. Ignorance is not freedom. A dog on a leash which doesn’t recognize its constraints (and thus believes it is free), can’t override them either.

Those on a forum like this, already feel themselves to be at least a little unfitting in the general group consciousness. Some see this only as a kind of spare time hobby, others feel that something much deeper is at stake. In no way should this cause any pride in us like in saying “Look at me, I’m no part of the herd.” Such an attitude has catastrophic consequences. It can only be balanced by the understanding that any degree of freedom we win for ourselves immediately becomes a responsibility. Thus anyone who approaches these new evolutionary currents has to understand how great of a responsibility we bear in order to lead these currents into the general life.

Of course, there will also be those who say “Well, it’s true that I’m currently constrained but I’ll be free after death. My morphic space is completely independent of the Cosmos, so I’ll take it with me and do whatever I want on the other side. There’s no need to learn anything about the nested constraints here on Earth. These are just temporary conditions. It’s curious to see how they work but this is completely optional. As long as I focus on my own independence, I’ll be free after death and all these optional constraints will be left behind.” Well, this attitude has been gone through so many times. In the end it remains a Cosmic bet. One simply holds on to the belief that the nested morphic spaces have significance only in the Earthly state even though they have no idea what the other state would be like. Thus – the dualism between ‘this’ and the ‘other’ world. If one insists on taking such a gamble, instead of exploring the full spectrum of reality that is available to us here and now (and which any serious monism/non-dualism should consider to be the spectrum of reality), then trying to logically show what the odds are, will barely be considered.

With all this said, it should be clear that spiritual knowledge is something living. It’s like finding new limbs that we didn’t know existed. It’s about finding new ways in which consciousness can flow, new degrees of freedom that musically attune the nested morphic spaces into a holistic symphony. This is a science of living. It simply makes no sense that some spiritual scientists will take the trouble to develop tools and appliances which others will simply use to make their eating and drinking more pleasurable. Our days of ‘end-user experience’ of life are running out. Today we’re called upon to enter into the living organism of existence, to see what we and the Cosmos are ‘made of’. This necessarily changes our whole experience of what we are as spiritual beings, what reality is and how we’re placed in the living Cosmos.

* * *

The transformation of our thinking activity from intellectual arrangement of mental images about reality, into living steering along the geodesics of intuitive space, is at the heart of PoF. Even though it’s well more than a century since this essential step in the cognitive evolution of humanity has been outlined, it is bewildering to contemplate how far removed from it are the leading thinkers of our age. It seems like the polarization into materialistic and mystical reductionism, instead of being reconciled, grows even stronger. People still have this strong antipathy towards finding the creative causal activity within thinking, from whence the musical integration of the morphic spaces begins. There’s still this strong addiction to projecting the cause of thinking to something else, belonging to some other level of reality. In other words, thinking still wants to polarize itself into blind spot activity, which builds a mental model of itself and imagines that the ‘true’ causes of thinking lie somewhere out there, where the model points at.

Both kinds of reductionism are dead ends in evolution. So is apathy towards our spiritual activity. Ideas such as those presented by ML can be taken as a kind of compromise between completely flat intellectual modeling and the living experience of steering and integration of intuitive spaces. For those who are incapable of thinking without the help of an abstract model, this can be taken as a transitional stage. The only way to overcome the reductionistic flattening of cognition into one of the two extremes is by looking for the unique causal activity at each level.

What makes this approach suitable for transition? The fact that if followed logically, such ideas inevitably lead us to consider the pivoting of our thinking, feeling and willing spaces as something real which can’t be reduced to other levels. This logically faces us with the question “what do those causes feel like in the case of thinking space?” Here we arrive at a real test for our own ideas. If we’re true to our ideas we would have to find in thinking space something which is irreducible to other spaces. If we’re not true to our ideas, we’ll twist, we’ll move our thinking in the blind spot by secretly imagining that we stand outside reality and go on speculating about thinking space as something separate, having nothing to do with our actual real-time philosophical activity.

For this reason, the intellectual models which try to envision some form of scale-dependent lawfulness of spacetime, are the only direction that has the potential to rescue the intellect from the two extremes of reductionism. Such models are indeed rare but can be seen here and there. ML’s is one of the more well formed. There have been several attempts to introduce scale-relativity in physics. One example is Fractal Space-Time And Microphysics: Towards A Theory Of Scale Relativity. Another more general investigation is A Fractal Topology of Time: Implications for Consciousness and Cosmology. 

Even though these models are still very abstract, when the intellect moves through these ideas it gradually becomes conscious of dynamics unlike anything that can be experienced through flattened reductionism. Such models are the only way through which the intellect (linguistic space) can encounter its own causal nature as something that has to be taken as an irreducible law of nature. Without such scale-relativity of causation, the intellect always projects its cause into the materialistic or the mystical extremes.

This doesn’t mean that such models will by themselves transform thinking into living steering of intuitive space. But they can at least lead us to the very edge where the intellect twists and turns upon itself. Such twisting and turning can be contemplated in works like Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid or I Am a Strange Loop, yet there the intellect still hopelessly projects its cause into the CGOL level of materialistic reductionism and the strange loop is nothing but a pixel pattern, just like the simulated computer in CGOL. But still, for those deeply enmeshed in abstract thinking, only such scale-relative ideas are capable of ‘tricking’ the intellect to approach the point where it can unite with its own spiritual reality. This union is at the core of PoF. Only from this point true science can begin, which investigates and harmonizes from the inner perspective, the musical interaction of causal intuitive spaces at different scales.

The fact that we have called this kind of intellectual modeling ‘transitional’ doesn’t mean that it is a smooth and easy transition. As said, it’s much more of a compromise. We have to invest a lot of energy for moving our intellect through these models and in the end, they are only a quite imperfect scaffold that will have to be dismantled. It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.

This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires. As said before, as exciting as ML’s ideas are, they hold a great danger for humanity. In proper evolution we would start from the central thinking space and expand into the inner reality of lower and higher morphic spaces. This, as explained, leads to the attunement of our soul life which results in a deeper and balanced life of thinking, feeling and willing, centered not only around our individuality but concentric and harmonized with the higher order spaces. This in turn leads to attunement of life space and then the conditions for many of the most deadly diseases of our age are rendered nonexistent. Out spirit has the potential of becoming a formative and regenerative force for the bodily spaces. If such self-knowledge is denied to the soul, human passions continue to work from the subconscious regions of the psyche. Then the intellect extends its mechanical tentacles into other morphic spaces, trying to manipulate their curvature indirectly. Things like regeneration of organs and body modeling will indeed become possible, through such indirect manipulation of the corresponding formative spaces. All this however, will happen not as a result of spiritual development that musically integrates the physical, life, soul, thinking and higher order spaces, but as means for satisfaction of certain unconscious egoistic tendencies that bend our thinking space from the dark spiritual background of our existence. Needless to say, when this happens, the devastation that will become possible will be in magnitudes greater than what we can cause to ourselves today with allopathic drugs and surgery – not only in bodily sense but for the structure of the soul itself.

Hopefully, these tendencies will be counterbalanced by enough souls who will recognize that true freedom and everything that humanity has cherished as the highest values of Truth, Love and Wisdom, is to be achieved not by following blind passions but by expanding consciousness into the nested morphic spaces, where we become fully conscious participants in the artful unfolding of the Cosmos.

To summarize:
1. Abstract models of scale-relative causal laws of reality are the only way the scientific intellect can be pointed away from the two reductionistic extremes.
2. If the logic of these ideas is followed to the ultimate conclusions, the thinking that thinks these ideas will have to recognize its own causal space-bending nature as something directly experienceable and not only abstractly modeled through arrangements of mental images. Now the living space-bending (steering) of intuitive space is recognized as the actual first-person experience of the Process of reality. This is at the heart of PoF. Thus abstract scale-relative models have some potential to lead the intellect to the threshold of spiritual reality.
3. Once our inner experience of existence is transformed into steering/bending through nested intuitive spaces, true science begins. Now evolution becomes a process in which we take fully conscious participation by exploring the curvature of higher order spaces and harmonizing it with the lower.

[Anthony66]

The thing is, Newton was a gifted individual and only those who proceed to university maths/physics will ever understand his work. Sure, the rest of humanity has benefited from his efforts, e.g. the satellites that give us our GPS. But the masses have no idea about the details or even the fundamentals of gravitational theory or calculus.

As I said, SS would appear to be for the select few, the harbingers whoever they are, at least in this age. Perhaps we can view things a bit like standard evolutionary where a small number of individuals receive a beneficial mutation which one day might become fixed in the population. Similarly, those in our current time who make spiritual progress can confer blessings upon the larger human race.

(I began writing this reply – which turned into almost an essay – before new year but had very limited time to finish it. Now I see that Ashvin has already addressed the main points but I’ll nevertheless supplement it with yet another angle. I’m replying in this thread because I think it fits the topic better.)

Anthony, your example with Newton is right – that in today’s science and technology someone has to do the heavy lifting, while others only reap the benefits. But it will be very misleading if we imagine that spiritual science has to develop similar tools and appliances that others will simply add to their households (metaphorically speaking). There’s an important distinction here and to make it clearer we’ll have to make a wide detour.

In our age, even the simplest modern man lives in Newton-like consciousness. Even without studying physics, one lives in instinctive intuition of a physical world where inanimate objects move about. So the ghost, which was still there for the ancients, has been driven out of the machine, so to speak. For man of today this ghost has been driven out of the appearances of the Cosmos and is to be found only in his own inner life, where however, it is not sense perceptible. It is shadowy and elusive to the extent that it’s customary to call it an illusion, while the universal machine that presses into the senses is felt to be self-evident reality. To know the ghost we have to make it perceptible and this we can start doing in thinking. Our thinking-forms are the means through which we begin to know the imperceptible ghost, its degrees of freedom and spaces of possibilities.

What is current science doing? It takes the ghost and tries to reintroduce it into the world. Yet it does so in a peculiar way – it takes the ghost of our thinking and tries to fill the world with it, it tries to animate the inanimate with intellectual thoughts. Of course, we say that all this happens only in the brain, it’s just a mental model spread over the sensory picture of the world but it’s still effectively doing exactly that – we’re trying to understand the world by mimicking its inanimate appearances through the intellectual (mostly mathematical) movements of our ghost.

For a long time already it has been clear that thinking in the channels of Newtonian mechanics doesn’t mimic Nature’s appearances perfectly. Even General Relativity has its problems. But still, these thinking frameworks have allowed for GPS satellites and home appliances. Yet as you say, very few need to actually understand the details. Most of us simply reap the benefits.

To understand how spiritual evolution differs in this, we have to first grasp very well the following distinction. Average Joe operates in the same conscious space as the scientist. The difference is that the former thinks about an iPhone, a sports car, a spaceship while the latter fills these perceptions with much more thoughts. When the average person looks at the phone they can think of communication, games, apps and so on. When the engineer looks at it, he sees there his whole professional life, the mathematics of physics, electronics, the circuits, the CPU, the memory, the software, OS, drivers and so on. Yet the cognitive space has similar ‘geometry’ in both cases, it’s just that the scientist fills it much more thoroughly with thoughts. Now consider what was explained in the lecture:



If the whole lecture hasn’t been seen I recommend at least looking at these two chapters: 55:48 to 59:00

As I wrote in the first post, it is very interesting to contemplate how scientists gradually have to recognize this ‘verticality’ of reality. Our mainstream understanding of biology is still based on 17th century thinking. Things are as flattened as they were for Descartes (as far as the mode of cognition is concerned). Today this is one of the greatest impediments for gaining deeper insight into reality.

What the above image depicts, can be found in different forms here and there in scientific works but it’s still very rare. The general idea is that the laws of reality do not exist only at the particle level but every scale-level introduces something unique which is not reducible to another level. For our goals it’s very important that we understand very well what this implies.

An example where things exist only on a single level is cellular automata like Conway’s game of life (CGOL). This is a very simple system consisting of a rectangular grid of cells (pixels) that can be on or off (alive or dead). Then a single frame of the system is transformed into the next by following these simple rules, applied for each cell:



Here’s a typical unfoldment when the rules are run over random initial conditions (noise of alive and dead pixels).



Usually things evolve in a chaotic manner until they finally settle into a quasi-stable pattern. Yet through careful preparation of the initial conditions it is possible to achieve practically any level of algorithmically describable behavior. For example, here’s a working computer:



CGOL is a Turing-complete system. This means that its rules are general enough that it can simulate the behavior of any conceivable computational system. Anything that can be described with an algorithm can be implemented in CGOL.

Here we come to an important point. One would say that the computer above is an emergent system. But we should be crystal clear that as far as the CGOL system is concerned, it is completely irrelevant whether the pixels are arranged in the shape of a computer or as random noise. The rules are completely the same. We can run the rules on our own device (like here – use the pencil tool to draw your own shapes and then use the ‘play’ button to see them transform) or we can use paper and pencil and run the rules ourselves by hand. We don’t need to understand that the pixels are arranged in a particular way, we don’t need to understand how the simulated CGOL computer works. We can be completely myopic and go through the cells one by one, apply the rules and produce the next frame. The CGOL computer will run just fine.

This is the mainstream way in which biological life is seen today – as emerging from purely physical interactions. The laws of physics are considered to be exactly the same in the biological cell and the stone. Nature is completely myopic, it doesn’t ‘know’ that its particle-pixels are arranged in the shape of an organism. It simply runs the rules that transform them from frame to frame. Consider the following unicellular life forms:



In reductionism it is all the same whether the particles are arranged in the shape of these organisms or they are simply a homogeneous soup of chemicals. Life doesn’t exist as some ‘thing’ from the reductionistic perspective. It’s just a name that we, conscious beings, give to certain patterns of pixels.

The question why we should experience such holistic patterns as consciousness is hard enough but it should be clear that even the simplest unicellular life is only assumed to be nothing but the dynamics of the physical pixels. There’s currently no scientific experiment which can tell if the laws of physics are enough. All our physical science and its remarkable mathematical precision, is entirely a science of what is dead. We can’t study the behavior of an electron unless we devise specific experiments where this electron is isolated in a very controlled system. The same holds for our study of the molecular dynamics in the biological cell. Our microscopes can’t see at the scale where molecules react. We can only study the chemical reactions of molecules that have been extracted from the living cell. Thus most of the fine details about molecular biology are conceptually patched together from our understanding of the separate steps of the chemical reactions. For example, videos such as the following are presently impossible to film directly. They represent our understanding of the separate chemical reactions and how they would fit together through time.



Watching animations like these leaves one wondering how could it be that molecules which are supposed to wiggle in their statistical Brownian dynamics, exhibit such orchestrated behavior. And indeed, the idea that the laws of physics, as we know them when studying isolated particles in highly controlled (constrained) experiments, are enough to explain the complicated dynamics of biological chemistry, is entirely an assumption. Presently, our computers are not powerful enough to fully simulate a simple macromolecule (such as folding of a protein), let alone a whole cell. But hopefully, if such simulations become possible and we load the blocks of biology, and begin to simulate their transformations frame by frame, it will be seen that we can only simulate a dying cell. The molecules will wiggle in their Brownian motions and soon everything falls apart into chaos.

We should make no mistake and believe that this will convince scientists that there’s something wrong in the reductionist approach. A motivated painter would never say that something is impossible to draw. He’ll simply go on to refine the techniques, the brushes, the paints and so on. Such is the case in science. Failure won’t demotivate scientists. Most of them will continue to refine the CGOL rules of physics, patching them in the most varied ways in order to replicate the appearances of living cells. Very few will consider that there might be something insufficient in the mode of cognition they exercise.

Needless to say, patching the rules in this way will produce a more and more bizarre system that makes less and less intuitive sense. Interestingly, we already see signs of this with the advent of machine learning. The latter is just a fancy name for optimization of a mathematical function. The training process adjusts the parameters of the function until it produces results that we desire (think of the function as a box with thousands of potentiometers which need to be adjusted in order to produce the desired output when presented with specific input). Such approaches already give plausible results in areas like protein folding and gravitational systems. It’s clear that in this we no longer seek the ‘laws of physics’ but we simply devise a ‘painting’ algorithm that when run, replicates certain dynamics. There will be more and more scientists who will readily admit that this is all we can ever do. The search for the laws of Nature will be seen as a kind of superstition, a confused form of idealism that has come to believe that human mathematical thinking has something to do with the foundations of reality, instead of being only intellectual mimicking of appearances. Note that all this proceeds solely because the intellect desires to have a flat system of rules, where everything can be seen as patterns of pixels, just like the computer inside CGOL (here ‘flat’ doesn’t mean 2D. We can have n-dimensional cellular automata if we like. It is flat in the sense that we have a clear two-tier system of elements and the rules of their transformations – nouns and verbs).

Now if all this is understood, it will be clear what people like Michael Levin (ML) explore – that there are levels of lawfulness in Nature. The higher levels bend the space of possibilities for the lower levels. If we measure the behavior of the particles in a dead cell we would find statistical randomness, just like we find in Brownian motion. If we could measure the behavior of molecules in a living cell it would be discovered that each molecule moves according to slightly modified statistics. This is the higher order lawfulness which bends the configuration space of the lower. And of course, the lower works back on the higher.

Let’s try to get a good feel for what all this means. Think of what today’s science consists of. It practically all comes down to the Principle of Least Action.



Whether it is classical mechanics or quantum mechanics, or general relativity, the question is always to find the correct path through configuration space, which minimizes a certain quantity called the action (for more information this video may be useful). In general relativity this path is called the geodesic – light takes the shortest path in curved spacetime (more technically, the path that minimizes the proper time).



Now what is configuration space? I won’t go into technical details but let’s approach this in the context of our needs. As a crude analogy consider the typical organization structure:



Here we can say that each level operates in a different configuration space, which represents the corresponding goals and the means of attaining them. The CEO operates with global goals. He says “I want to double the profits over the next year.” From his point of view he’s following a geodesic through corporate goal space. He’s at point A with profits X and wants to move towards point B where the profits are 2X. The geodesic is the shortest path between A and B in that goal space. This bends the configuration space of the middle level management. Now they have certain constraints within which they operate. They also have their own geodesics, their mid-level goals. These in turn bend the configuration space of the low level management.

In the configuration space of the CEO, reality looks like traversing a space of high level goals. These are the elements of reality at that level – merging of companies, new branches, new product lines and so on. This is the landscape through which the CEO’s geodesic streams. It’s a level where the details of the mid and low level management are abstracted. This doesn’t mean that this level is an absolute master control over the lower. If the CEO sets unrealistic goals, the lower level will face certain impossibilities and will respectively bend his own morphic space where his geodesic will deviate from the intended goal.

At the same time, the CEO’s space itself is being bent by higher order spaces. For example, national and global economics, politics, legislation. The CEO’s space is influenced by both the lower and higher, and at the same time he works upon the lower (by issuing orders) or even the higher (for example by lobbying).

It is natural that man of today feels certain antipathy towards such hierarchical structures because they are indeed not exactly natural. They mimic nature in a mechanical way but they are not exactly how Nature does it. Thus we should keep in mind that the corporate hierarchy is only an analogy. To get a feel for the natural spaces consider another example. You reach and take a cup of tea from the table. From your perspective your frames of existence transform through a clear configuration space and you’re following a smooth geodesic in it. You move from state A where your hand is retracted, towards state B where you have grabbed the cup. Things are quite different for your physical organism however. An astounding complexity is involved in the movement of your arm. Consider this animation:



We can see that what from our intellectual perspective is a smooth path through the configuration space of our bodily conscious states, actually bends the configuration space of our tissues and cells in a very complicated manner, which are within the context of our thinking intent.

Or consider what we do when we try to tell a story or explain some knowledge. At some level we experience the intuition of the whole story. This intuition has a certain unique identity, a fingerprint. We can tell apart our intuition of the story of our going to Paris from that of going to New York. This intuition bends the space of our pictorial imagination. We can go through the perceptual frames of the story as in a movie. Of all the possible things that we can imagine, we’re moving through images that fit the curvature of the intuition of the whole story. Then these images can bend our linguistic space. From all the words that we may use, only those remain which fit the stream of images. Our everyday consciousness is so habitual that we’re rarely aware of this gradient. Instead we instinctively spit out the words of the story, without paying attention to the spaces of memory-intuition and images.

Please note that there’s a great difference here with Bernardo’s idea that the body is what consciousness looks like from the outside. Here we don’t pretend that our hand is what the willing of its movement looks like. It’s rather that the physical spaces have quite independent existence, yet through our willing activity we partake in their curvature.

Hopefully these examples already hint at what people like ML investigate. It is the realization that a single level of rules (like CGOL or fundamental physics) cannot account for the higher order dynamics. Instead, there’s a musical orchestration between levels which operate at different levels of abstraction, so to speak. The key thing to understand is that at each level of abstraction there’s simplicity. The transformations at each level simply try to follow the shortest path in morphic space. When we want to take the cup of tea we don’t have to be aware of the incredible complexity of the lower levels – we simply will our transformation directly toward the future state B where we hold the cup.

Now one can say that we’re stating obvious things. We have known for centuries that our conscious life operates at a higher level of abstraction. So what’s new? That we question the floating assumption that this level has to be reduced to some other level(s). It is indeed an assumption. Nothing in our given experience forces us to make this assumption. In fact, the moment we make such an assumption we immediately create an irresolvable hard problem. So why then we’re so obsessed with reductionism? The deep reasons for this would take us too far but let’s just point out that it’s almost like we’re magnetically repelled from taking our human-level intellectual activity as something real, that can’t be reduced to other levels. Please understand this rightly – this is not to say that our intellectual morphic space is something complete in itself that can be understood in isolation. No level exists as something in itself. Every level exists only in relation to all other levels. Yet each level represents a unique intuitive space which is pivoted along geodesics and which correspondingly bends other spaces.

We need to take a moment and appreciate how deeply embedded this impulse for reductionism really is in our scientific and philosophical habits. To grasp this we need to understand that reductionism doesn’t necessarily imply only small things, like pixel-particles. ML only hints at this. His concrete biological studies don’t allow him to speculate about it but as he follows the integration of configuration spaces, after moving from the space of cells and organs he says “...and who knows what other spaces there are, linguistic and maybe many others”. If we follow the logical thread we come to the conclusion that our human-scale linguistic space is itself being bent by higher order spaces (like the CEO’s space being bent by national and global economics). Following the thread to the end naturally leads us to what mystical traditions have always known – that everything resides within an all-encompassing configuration space. One could say for example, that at a much higher level there’s the smooth geodesic of the rhythmic outbreath and inbreath of Brahma. The curvature of this space bends the whole hierarchy of more specific spaces. The thing however, is that when this is taken intellectually it becomes another form of reductionism, except that it reduces not to many things but to one thing. We say “Only the highest unitary configuration space is real, our human-level intuitive space is an illusion.”

We need to really understand what’s at stake here. It’s about the refusal that there’s such a thing as causality at the human-level of integration. We’re in the middle and there are two extremes. One extreme says “All the causes lie at the lowest level. These are where the CGOL rules manifest. It would be foolish to say that the parts of the simulated CGOL computer have any causal function. We say ‘signals travel from here to there, they are processed in the CPU, then they activate the display unit’ but this is all only a manner of speaking. In reality there’s no signal, there’s no display unit, there’s no activation. All there is are the simple CGOL rules applied to each pixel from frame to frame. In the same sense it would be foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal role in the flow of reality. These are simply levels of abstraction, they are only patterns of the fundamental transformation of pixels, which don’t know or care about their higher order shapes.” The other extreme says “The only cause lies in the highest level. It’s foolish to imagine that our thinking and will have any causal reality. It’s all simply a shadow of the one real cause at the level of unity. Thus we attain to reality when we stop pretending that we’re doing something at our human scale and instead seek mystical union with the highest unity.”

Understanding these two extremes and the middle point holds one of the greatest secrets of our present stage of evolution. We need to appreciate how we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. We can’t get out of bed without this. We continually transform our states of being through these intuitive configuration spaces at our human level of abstraction. Yet at the moment we begin to philosophize about this activity, we’re immediately thrown into one of the two extremes. This has already been thoroughly examined in the Central Topic and the hysteresis process. At the moment we begin philosophizing, we completely denounce any creative responsibility. We immediately reduce our human-scale geodesic flow to be nothing but a pattern of either the lowest or the highest level. We do that because we’re unaware of our thinking process. We immediately forget that we’re engaged in philosophizing. We’re unaware that we’re treading the intuitive space of philosophical meaning and what we philosophize about is only an objectified memory image of our past human-scale states.

This is something that we must understand with crystal clarity. Unless we recognize how we steer our thinking, feeling and willing configuration spaces all the time, yet we completely push them away as soon as we start philosophizing (being completely blind about the fact that we’re still pivoting through thinking space of philosophical intuition), we simply have no chance to grasp the fact that causality exists on all levels and is experienced in unique forms of intuition.

My experience in this forum and in general, shows that without exception, those who are firmly enmeshed into either materialistic or mystical reductionism, are certain to show great antipathy towards any deeper spiritual understanding. And this is only natural, since spiritual investigation begins with the recognition that each level is a unique space of intuitive spiritual activity and we only understand reality when we can grasp how these levels work into each other in a musical gradient. We can’t make even the first step into reality if we’re unwilling to experience our thinking as steering through, say, linguistic space, that can’t be reduced to some other space. This is not to say that our thinking is absolutely free – this is simply not the case – our flow is heavily constrained by both higher and lower spaces, yet there’s something in the bending of our own thinking space which can never be attributed to anything else. The palette of our vocabulary, our ideas and so on are a much wider field than what we experience at any given moment as a single thought. Thus our thoughts are certainly dependent on that invisible landscape. That’s why we use the term ‘steering’ or ‘space bending’. Nevertheless, in the steering activity we’re one and the same with the first-person causal activity of the Cosmos. We are the first-person experience of what a causal law of nature is. We reach a point where if we’re to seek another cause of our living steering spiritual activity, we need to put that same spiritual activity in the blind spot in order to philosophize with it about some other imagined abstract causes.

Let’s try to summarize all this by borrowing ML’s images:



Imagine this as clearly as possible. As a thinking being we’re steering in thinking intuitive space. When we think about matter and biology we project our thinking in that direction. Please note – in our intellectual life we don’t experience the full nature of the lower and higher spaces. They only act as constraints to our human-scale flow. Our consciousness spans through all spaces but we are clearly self-conscious only in the steering of thinking space. Other spaces mysteriously impress into our thinking space as various conscious phenomena.

Even though for clarity the spaces are depicted as something separate, we should imagine that they are all one within the others – every space is being bent by all others and it bends all others. So when we say that we’re self-conscious in thinking space this doesn’t mean that other spaces are separated from our consciousness through some membranes. It’s only that our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics.

In our intellect we’re like the CEO. We don’t have immediate experience of the ground floor workers (our biological cells) yet steering through mental images in intuitive space can extend into the lower spaces as willing. Conversely, the workings of the lower spaces impress as perceptions and feelings which can be grasped intuitively as a flow of images at the level of our intellectual topology.

When we consider the higher order spaces, we need a kind of inverted form of spiritual activity. Humanity has been preparing for this kind of activity through the practice of prayer. Through prayer we radiate our thinking intents into higher order spaces and we also try to perceive their curvature through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition, in order to know how we can musically harmonize our human-level flow with the higher order flow.

Notice that although we speak of ‘spaces’ these implicitly contain also time. For example, when we reach for the tea cup, our intuition spans the temporal transformation along the geodesic. We live in the intuitive knowing of where our hand is going because we ourselves steer the transformation through that space. Similarly, higher order spaces’ geodesics can encompass even greater temporal spans. In the lecture, ML depicts that with the enlargement of the light cones and the fact that higher order minds have goals that span much greater timespans.

Now when we think in the lines of ML, we imagine that at each level of space there’s some unique lawfulness which can’t be reduced to any other space. The shortest path between two states in one space is not the same as that in others. In one space two states lie on a smooth geodesic but in lower spaces, the way they are being bent looks like higher intelligence is active in their ordering. The molecules in the cell seem to be orchestrated by higher intelligence, even though in life space there’s simply following of the shortest path between two states.

Notice that we always steer through thinking space (even though quite instinctively most of the time) and experience mental images representing other spaces. This happens when we think of physics, biology, psychology and so on. Yet the lawfulness of these spaces remains abstract to us. We imagine that biological space bends the flow of physical molecules but this bending activity is only an abstract mental picture for us, no different than the way we picture electricity and magnetism.

Things however, become interesting when we consider thinking space itself. Then the steering through that space turns upon itself. This is the only place where we have the chance to find the space-bending activity in a completely different way – as the experience of our first-person causal will. In other words, unlike the abstract mental pictures of the supposed causal activity in other spaces, now our mental images tightly reflect our livingly experienced steering activity. This we can experience, for example, with the “I think these words” or the vowels exercises.

This is really the beginning of meditation in the modern sense. It starts with the experience of space-bending of thinking space itself. Through concentration on that activity we reach the point of feeling ourselves to be smoothly steering through a geodesic in that space. From here we can gradually follow how other spaces bend thinking space and how in turn our intuitive spiritual activity can harmonize the musical nesting of all spaces, as far as we can bend them. This is no longer a matter of abstract arrangement of mental images but of actual expansion of consciousness and new forms of steering.

* * *

Now we’re more or less in a position to return to the original inquiry. In our age we wouldn’t say that we’re less human if we don’t understand how GPS satellites work. There are many things that can make us a worthy human being, without having to enter into the technicalities of science and engineering. In fact, many people consider precisely scientists to be cold intellectuals that miss something of their essential humanity.

It’s enough that some human beings have entered into these technicalities, such that others can reap the benefits. This however is not the case with spiritual knowledge. In evolutionary terms we can’t become human in the full sense of the word unless we understand things such as those we’re investigating here. This doesn’t mean that we have to use technical terms such as configuration spaces, geodesics and so on. These are nothing but symbolic expressions borrowed from our modern scientific vocabulary. Yet in one way or another, at one time or another, everyone will come to understand the essence of these things.

Here ‘understanding’ doesn’t mean to simply fill our head with some concepts and recite them at sermons. These concepts have to be found as concrete intuitions of the full spectrum of reality. The abstract concepts are only a scaffold. To come to reality we have to find what they are triangulating. The picture of nested morphic spaces that bend each other will remain just an abstract image unless we try to move to reality. Few ways were already presented. If we can recognize in a fully introspective way the relation of our general intuition of a story, its pictorial experience and its linguistic verbalization, we already have something concrete from our inner life, for which the concepts are symbolic expressions.

Evolutionary spiritual development consists of such an expansion of consciousness, where we come to know the inner side of the morphic spaces and the way they work into each other. In one way or another we have to come to consciousness of our soul space, where our sympathies and antipathies bend our linguistic space. We have to become more conscious of our bodily space, where we begin to recognize how our inner life of thoughts and feelings distorts the morphic space of our organs and tissues. These will be found to be within the context of even higher order spaces, where our incarnational transformations are seen as following a smooth rhythmic geodesic, which in turn are embedded into the evolutionary space of the whole of humanity, which also follows a rhythmic geodesic there and so on.

The role of spiritual science today is that it tries to spread awareness of these morphic spaces and how our spiritual activity fits in them. It is indeed true that there’re always some souls who approach things earlier than others. But this holds true for anything. Today only those who have developed a certain inner strength of individuality can enter into these depths of reality. There are many souls who lack such strength. They will always feel a need for the support of a group consciousness, which gives them form. Such people would say “I’ll consider these things only when I see those around me taking a step”. Of course, all the others say the exact same thing, so they are all stuck, everyone expects others to make the first step. This doesn’t mean that they won’t transform. It’s simply that such transformation is always more painful because it is forced by the transforming environment, while the beings struggle to remain as they are. We find our fully conscious stance within these transformations when we recognize that our personal soul life is embedded within the higher and lower morphic spaces. Then we don’t pretend that we’ll always remain the same but we try to musically attune to the flows, such that our consciousness expands and we can steer through our human-scale space with the greatest freedom. Ignorance is not freedom. A dog on a leash which doesn’t recognize its constraints (and thus believes it is free), can’t override them either.

Those on a forum like this, already feel themselves to be at least a little unfitting in the general group consciousness. Some see this only as a kind of spare time hobby, others feel that something much deeper is at stake. In no way should this cause any pride in us like in saying “Look at me, I’m no part of the herd.” Such an attitude has catastrophic consequences. It can only be balanced by the understanding that any degree of freedom we win for ourselves immediately becomes a responsibility. Thus anyone who approaches these new evolutionary currents has to understand how great of a responsibility we bear in order to lead these currents into the general life.

Of course, there will also be those who say “Well, it’s true that I’m currently constrained but I’ll be free after death. My morphic space is completely independent of the Cosmos, so I’ll take it with me and do whatever I want on the other side. There’s no need to learn anything about the nested constraints here on Earth. These are just temporary conditions. It’s curious to see how they work but this is completely optional. As long as I focus on my own independence, I’ll be free after death and all these optional constraints will be left behind.” Well, this attitude has been gone through so many times. In the end it remains a Cosmic bet. One simply holds on to the belief that the nested morphic spaces have significance only in the Earthly state even though they have no idea what the other state would be like. Thus – the dualism between ‘this’ and the ‘other’ world. If one insists on taking such a gamble, instead of exploring the full spectrum of reality that is available to us here and now (and which any serious monism/non-dualism should consider to be the spectrum of reality), then trying to logically show what the odds are, will barely be considered.

With all this said, it should be clear that spiritual knowledge is something living. It’s like finding new limbs that we didn’t know existed. It’s about finding new ways in which consciousness can flow, new degrees of freedom that musically attune the nested morphic spaces into a holistic symphony. This is a science of living. It simply makes no sense that some spiritual scientists will take the trouble to develop tools and appliances which others will simply use to make their eating and drinking more pleasurable. Our days of ‘end-user experience’ of life are running out. Today we’re called upon to enter into the living organism of existence, to see what we and the Cosmos are ‘made of’. This necessarily changes our whole experience of what we are as spiritual beings, what reality is and how we’re placed in the living Cosmos.

* * *

The transformation of our thinking activity from intellectual arrangement of mental images about reality, into living steering along the geodesics of intuitive space, is at the heart of PoF. Even though it’s well more than a century since this essential step in the cognitive evolution of humanity has been outlined, it is bewildering to contemplate how far removed from it are the leading thinkers of our age. It seems like the polarization into materialistic and mystical reductionism, instead of being reconciled, grows even stronger. People still have this strong antipathy towards finding the creative causal activity within thinking, from whence the musical integration of the morphic spaces begins. There’s still this strong addiction to projecting the cause of thinking to something else, belonging to some other level of reality. In other words, thinking still wants to polarize itself into blind spot activity, which builds a mental model of itself and imagines that the ‘true’ causes of thinking lie somewhere out there, where the model points at.

Both kinds of reductionism are dead ends in evolution. So is apathy towards our spiritual activity. Ideas such as those presented by ML can be taken as a kind of compromise between completely flat intellectual modeling and the living experience of steering and integration of intuitive spaces. For those who are incapable of thinking without the help of an abstract model, this can be taken as a transitional stage. The only way to overcome the reductionistic flattening of cognition into one of the two extremes is by looking for the unique causal activity at each level.

What makes this approach suitable for transition? The fact that if followed logically, such ideas inevitably lead us to consider the pivoting of our thinking, feeling and willing spaces as something real which can’t be reduced to other levels. This logically faces us with the question “what do those causes feel like in the case of thinking space?” Here we arrive at a real test for our own ideas. If we’re true to our ideas we would have to find in thinking space something which is irreducible to other spaces. If we’re not true to our ideas, we’ll twist, we’ll move our thinking in the blind spot by secretly imagining that we stand outside reality and go on speculating about thinking space as something separate, having nothing to do with our actual real-time philosophical activity.

For this reason, the intellectual models which try to envision some form of scale-dependent lawfulness of spacetime, are the only direction that has the potential to rescue the intellect from the two extremes of reductionism. Such models are indeed rare but can be seen here and there. ML’s is one of the more well formed. There have been several attempts to introduce scale-relativity in physics. One example is Fractal Space-Time And Microphysics: Towards A Theory Of Scale Relativity. Another more general investigation is A Fractal Topology of Time: Implications for Consciousness and Cosmology. 

Even though these models are still very abstract, when the intellect moves through these ideas it gradually becomes conscious of dynamics unlike anything that can be experienced through flattened reductionism. Such models are the only way through which the intellect (linguistic space) can encounter its own causal nature as something that has to be taken as an irreducible law of nature. Without such scale-relativity of causation, the intellect always projects its cause into the materialistic or the mystical extremes.

This doesn’t mean that such models will by themselves transform thinking into living steering of intuitive space. But they can at least lead us to the very edge where the intellect twists and turns upon itself. Such twisting and turning can be contemplated in works like Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid or I Am a Strange Loop, yet there the intellect still hopelessly projects its cause into the CGOL level of materialistic reductionism and the strange loop is nothing but a pixel pattern, just like the simulated computer in CGOL. But still, for those deeply enmeshed in abstract thinking, only such scale-relative ideas are capable of ‘tricking’ the intellect to approach the point where it can unite with its own spiritual reality. This union is at the core of PoF. Only from this point true science can begin, which investigates and harmonizes from the inner perspective, the musical interaction of causal intuitive spaces at different scales.

The fact that we have called this kind of intellectual modeling ‘transitional’ doesn’t mean that it is a smooth and easy transition. As said, it’s much more of a compromise. We have to invest a lot of energy for moving our intellect through these models and in the end, they are only a quite imperfect scaffold that will have to be dismantled. It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.

This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires. As said before, as exciting as ML’s ideas are, they hold a great danger for humanity. In proper evolution we would start from the central thinking space and expand into the inner reality of lower and higher morphic spaces. This, as explained, leads to the attunement of our soul life which results in a deeper and balanced life of thinking, feeling and willing, centered not only around our individuality but concentric and harmonized with the higher order spaces. This in turn leads to attunement of life space and then the conditions for many of the most deadly diseases of our age are rendered nonexistent. Out spirit has the potential of becoming a formative and regenerative force for the bodily spaces. If such self-knowledge is denied to the soul, human passions continue to work from the subconscious regions of the psyche. Then the intellect extends its mechanical tentacles into other morphic spaces, trying to manipulate their curvature indirectly. Things like regeneration of organs and body modeling will indeed become possible, through such indirect manipulation of the corresponding formative spaces. All this however, will happen not as a result of spiritual development that musically integrates the physical, life, soul, thinking and higher order spaces, but as means for satisfaction of certain unconscious egoistic tendencies that bend our thinking space from the dark spiritual background of our existence. Needless to say, when this happens, the devastation that will become possible will be in magnitudes greater than what we can cause to ourselves today with allopathic drugs and surgery – not only in bodily sense but for the structure of the soul itself.

Hopefully, these tendencies will be counterbalanced by enough souls who will recognize that true freedom and everything that humanity has cherished as the highest values of Truth, Love and Wisdom, is to be achieved not by following blind passions but by expanding consciousness into the nested morphic spaces, where we become fully conscious participants in the artful unfolding of the Cosmos.

To summarize:
1. Abstract models of scale-relative causal laws of reality are the only way the scientific intellect can be pointed away from the two reductionistic extremes.
2. If the logic of these ideas is followed to the ultimate conclusions, the thinking that thinks these ideas will have to recognize its own causal space-bending nature as something directly experienceable and not only abstractly modeled through arrangements of mental images. Now the living space-bending (steering) of intuitive space is recognized as the actual first-person experience of the Process of reality. This is at the heart of PoF. Thus abstract scale-relative models have some potential to lead the intellect to the threshold of spiritual reality.
3. Once our inner experience of existence is transformed into steering/bending through nested intuitive spaces, true science begins. Now evolution becomes a process in which we take fully conscious participation by exploring the curvature of higher order spaces and harmonizing it with the lower.

I'm not sure how at over 7400 words, your response is “almost” an essay But thanks so much for putting in such effort into this – it was very helpful and speaks my sort of language with the maths/physics themes. I’m also very happy you picked up on the themes of the ML video which I had been thinking how to draw some extra insights out of you.

For what is probably a first, I was pretty much able to follow all that was written by you on the first read - maybe even to some of the intuitions pointed to by the symbols. It has definitely added to my grasp of things.

I’m not sure whether you really addressed the attainability to the broader humanity in our current age of SS and the “living space-bending of intuitive space”. Perhaps this issue doesn’t really matter. It is something that crops up with me from time to time as I broach these topics with people and observe their blank stares. No doubt this is a function of my novice pontifications.

There is a question of telos with all of this. From the standpoint of my current thinking activity, I can marvel at how my arm raises when I will it to while having a planar understanding of all the biochemical reactions I command with my every volition. I can likewise be dimly aware of the forces that shape me from above. Perhaps then, I should be satisfied with my human-scale geodesics, my little cosmic niche as a middle manager as it were. Why should I seek vertical integration, this spiritual understanding, this becoming a cosmic micro manager of sorts wanting to know what is going on above and below? It reminds me of Australia’s former prime minister, Scott Morrison, who after his election defeat, was discovered to have secretly sworn himself in to a number of ministerial roles. Apparently he couldn’t trust his own cabinet to do their appointed business.

I know the above is a very loose analogy but why not let the molecular stuff do their molecular stuff and the higher beings do their higher being without wanting to put our nose into the affairs, demanding why they constrain our human geodesic thus? Who has set this agenda? Can we opt out as most in our generation do? Can I start a cosmic separation of hierarchical levels party?

[Federica]

(...)

Cleric, once again, thank you for the wealth of insights, offered in the most effortless and fluid manner! Because of my very limited scientific background, I have been wondering if the character of this post/essay would be an obstacle for me. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been so, and I want to encourage everyone to read - don’t get sidetracked by the title!
It’s not been too difficult to follow the extensive link traced from one extreme to the other of the existing methods of knowledge, spanning across everything we usually discuss here, that revolves around the primacy of thinking. To me this wide angle is very useful. That the pursuits of science are driving science at the brink of growing out of its own reductive methods, is not only intriguing but also useful to imagine a continuous stream of intuitive space. Similarly for the idea that science shares the reductionist obsession with the opposite extreme of non-dualism, which does nothing else than reducing agency to the supreme Oneness-Awareness, away from the illusion of separate self.
In fact, what human inquiry of any kind could explore wider than that, or elsewhere? Everything is delineated and encompassed here, including the mid-level salvation in the balancing of the extremes. Only the deeper and finer folds and layers are left to explore. The new element in this illustration (at the best of my understanding) compared to previous posts, is the even more unifying trait. The converging potential of all reductionist forces at play is more finely revealed. Surely this whole trajectory will be all the more insightful, maybe decisive, to Anthony and other scientific-minded persons, which makes me wish the ones interested in the referred research on the interconnected levels of causality could read this, and I would like to ask: what are the considerations to have in mind with regards to the possibility of posts being actively shared beyond the borders of this forum?

For my part, I intend to read this post again multiple times in the coming days and weeks. For now, I would like to add a parallel endeavor I was reminded of while reading, which allows to follow the line of reasoning expressed here from a more philosophical, all consistent perspective, that maybe sounds more familiar to some. As it’s been noted before, slightly different ways to express similar ideas help, so I’ll report this other way, from Max Leyf’s Redemption of thinking.
What are described in the post as the reductionist extremes - current science and current non-dualism, both eager to normalize by one-sided criteria the human knower, living in the middle of the causality depth structure - are described by Max Leyf as the one-sided attempts to pursue either truth (through objectivity, in current science) or meaning (through subjectivity, in post-modernist reaction to the meaning crisis). In both cases this is achieved at the expense of the other element: science sacrifices meaning (its very existence) on the altar of truth/objective knowledge, while postmodernism sacrifices truth (its very existence) on the altar of subjective/personally significant meaning. Naturally, in that book like in this essay, the solution is to be discovered by each of us in the middle point of these extremes.

(...) the work of J. W. von Goethe, Owen Barfield, and Rudolf Steiner offers a way of reconciling this division by remedying both the “post-truth” phenomenon and “the meaning crisis” at once without relinquishing the fundamental tenets of either the postmodern or the scientific approaches to knowledge. Goethe’s way of knowledge, as perfected by Steiner, manages to integrate these two methodological poles without sacrificing the objectivity of the former or the subjectivity of the latter.

This conjunction of the elements of truth and meaning, achieved in the book by proving that “mind, thinking, and consciousness are not afterthoughts but rather constitutive principles of being/reality” appears as another way to express the post’s challenge to recognize that there’s specific causality at the human, mid-level of reality’s depth structure. This causality is denied, or reduced, either to ground-level, mindlessly played-out laws of nature/rules of transformation - by science - or to abidance by supreme awareness - by mysticism/non dualism. Thinking is nothing else than the manifestation of this causality. We experience causality at the mid-point of the depth structure of reality, but we still have to realize it. Because reality is what truth and meaning are both made of, when we realize that we only exist as expressions of our level-specific causality, we preserve both. Conversely, when we reduce causality to one or the other extreme, we inevitably corrupt one or the other element of reality.

So in the fact that “we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time” hides in plain sight “one of the greatest secrets of our present stage of evolution” - in Max Leyf's words: “the basic paradox of self-knowledge that is the crux of philosophy and the human condition itself”. What’s bewildering is that we have been pointed to this secret many times before. Still, it proves difficult to take hold of it, and recognize “how we steer our thinking, feeling and willing configuration spaces all the time”. Certainly, the reason is that this secret is not a piece of information to align with matching thoughts as the missing piece. The secret is only the key to operating an experience. It's the material and plans to build a bridge. From which point, everything can still go completely wrong. We could hold the key in a display case as a special piece, to put on display at selected occasions. We could lead the bridge project to stall by unskillful coordination... The secret is only the beginning of the journey. It tells us that there’s a journey ahead, where it starts, and what’s the plan. But to actually walk the talk is up to each individual's actions. Looking at the fresh and detailed action plans in this post, I have once again felt the need to go back to PoF, trying to match the maps. Here are my annotations:

In thinking, we have that element given us which welds our separate individuality [human-scale geodesic] into one whole with the cosmos [the geodesic of higher order intuitive space]. In so far as we sense and feel, and also perceive, we are single beings; in so far as we think, we are the all-one being that pervades everything [we participate in causality at the human level of integration]. This is the deeper meaning of our two-sided nature: We see coming into being in us a force complete and absolute in itself, a force which is universal but which we learn to know [our thinking space provides us with a unique intuitive topology of the total interference of spaces through which we can traverse conscious states along smooth geodesics], not as it issues from the center of the world [the full nature of the lower and higher spaces], but rather at a point in the periphery [our human mid-level]. Were we to know it at its source [first-person causal activity of the Cosmos], we should understand the whole riddle of the universe the moment we became conscious. But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits [lawfulness of transformation of our states from frame to frame] we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us from the universal world existence [higher order spaces].
The fact that the thinking, in us, reaches out beyond our separate existence and relates itself to the universal world existence, gives rise to the fundamental desire for knowledge in us. Beings without thinking do not have this desire. When they are faced with other things, no questions arise for them. These other things remain external to such beings. But in thinking beings the concept rises up when they confront the external thing. It is that part of the thing which we receive not from outside but from within [we’re steering in thinking intuitive space]. To match up, to unite the two elements, inner [meaning] and outer [truth], is the task of knowledge.
The percept [object, truth] is thus not something finished and self-contained, but one side of the total reality. The other side is the concept [subject, meaning]. The act of knowing is the synthesis of percept and concept. Only percept and concept together constitute the whole thing [reality/being].

[Cleric K]

Thank you for your feedback, Anthony!

There is a question of telos with all of this. From the standpoint of my current thinking activity, I can marvel at how my arm raises when I will it to while having a planar understanding of all the biochemical reactions I command with my every volition. I can likewise be dimly aware of the forces that shape me from above. Perhaps then, I should be satisfied with my human-scale geodesics, my little cosmic niche as a middle manager as it were. Why should I seek vertical integration, this spiritual understanding, this becoming a cosmic micro manager of sorts wanting to know what is going on above and below? It reminds me of Australia’s former prime minister, Scott Morrison, who after his election defeat, was discovered to have secretly sworn himself in to a number of ministerial roles. Apparently he couldn’t trust his own cabinet to do their appointed business.

I know the above is a very loose analogy but why not let the molecular stuff do their molecular stuff and the higher beings do their higher being without wanting to put our nose into the affairs, demanding why they constrain our human geodesic thus? Who has set this agenda? Can we opt out as most in our generation do? Can I start a cosmic separation of hierarchical levels party?

Aren't we already doing precisely that? We look down towards the elemental spaces and say "You just make sure you keep me alive, get it?" We look up towards the Cosmic expanses and say "You just keep those orbits in place and that spiral of time rollin', a'ight? The rest leave it to me."

Yet that innocent 'me' is the rabbit hole hiding a whole world out of sight. For some, that me is a benign homo sapiens, going to work, providing for the family. For another it is the voice command that leads one nation into war with another.

If it is not yet the time to put our nose into the affairs of the spaces that from behind the scenes bend the geodesics of our human expression (that we colloquially call 'me'), then what is it time for?

[Cleric K]

...

Thank you Federica!
Hearing the thoughts being produced from within your own soul is always invaluable feedback to me. I'm biased here because I've always had this thrill about science, computers and technology, so I guess such metaphors clothed in scientific terms won't have the same weight for everybody. But nevertheless, maybe it's my bias, but I think that even without knowing it, science has produced a very rich vocabulary that can be used as almost literal metaphors for our actual spiritual experiences. It's just that we have to overcome the tendency to dissect the mental images and expect that we can build reality out of their arrangements.

And I think that from our limited experience here in the forum, we can already sense how such ways of expressing have the potential to become a common language. Whether we call it steering along a geodesic through intuitive space or riding on a golf car through a gallery of mental images, we can feel that we're all speaking of the same concrete experiences. Even though we don't know each other in person, sharing in that intuitive experience makes us feel the reality of each other's being much more livingly than what some people experience even if they share the same room.

[AshvinP]

...

Thank you, Cleric! The recent string of detailed illustrative posts you have shared here have been like a series of mini-revolutions in my own concretization of spiritual scientific ideas-experience. I have no doubt that they will continue to bear fruit in my consciousness for many months and years to come.

Or consider what we do when we try to tell a story or explain some knowledge. At some level we experience the intuition of the whole story. This intuition has a certain unique identity, a fingerprint. We can tell apart our intuition of the story of our going to Paris from that of going to New York. This intuition bends the space of our pictorial imagination. We can go through the perceptual frames of the story as in a movie. Of all the possible things that we can imagine, we’re moving through images that fit the curvature of the intuition of the whole story. Then these images can bend our linguistic space. From all the words that we may use, only those remain which fit the stream of images. Our everyday consciousness is so habitual that we’re rarely aware of this gradient. Instead we instinctively spit out the words of the story, without paying attention to the spaces of memory-intuition and images.
...
Here ‘understanding’ doesn’t mean to simply fill our head with some concepts and recite them at sermons. These concepts have to be found as concrete intuitions of the full spectrum of reality. The abstract concepts are only a scaffold. To come to reality we have to find what they are triangulating. The picture of nested morphic spaces that bend each other will remain just an abstract image unless we try to move to reality. Few ways were already presented. If we can recognize in a fully introspective way the relation of our general intuition of a story, its pictorial experience and its linguistic verbalization, we already have something concrete from our inner life, for which the concepts are symbolic expressions.

It occurred to me that one way to test if these things have remained abstract 'sermons' - whether we are still compartmentalizing the scaffolds into neat theories which we contemplate here and there - rather than concrete intuitions of reality's full spectrum, is to see if our thinking 'bends' enough to discern the archetypal principles across many varied domains of experience from the personal to the collective poles. As an example, we can take what is being discussed with Anthony on the other thread. How can we principally understand why proactive individual awakening to intuitive spiritual activity also translates into a broader awakening at the higher nested scales of community, nation, 'race', gender, species? Of course, simply describing the principle in broad outlines is not the equivalent of gaining concrete first-person intuition, but it's only a way for us to test out to what extent this intuition may be manifesting. 

One of many approaches is to experience our individual intellectual life in our current incarnation as corresponding with a linguistic verbalization which has condensed from the general intuition of the human evolutionary story. Although the story is much more expansive, for our purposes it begins with the Fall from soul-spirit consciousness into physical sensory consciousness. The general intuition of the story is that we embraced certain egoistic desires which allowed for us to attain an inner soul-life capable of freely willed thought, feeling, and action, through which the individuated soul can voluntarily expand back into a soul-spirit consciousness capable of genuine moral (redemptive) action. We hold this intuition as holistic pre-verbal, pre-imagistic, timeless meaning (not as the words I just used to describe it). When we constrain this general intuition to images, we begin to experience the story as a temporal flow of acts (perceptual frames). 

In the first act of the story our consciousness split into dual modes - through our higher rhythms we participate from the soul-spirit consciousness between incarnations and during sleep, and through our lower rhythms we participate with physical consciousness during incarnation while awake. Just as with any story, there is no hard delineation of events within an act or between the first and second acts. For a time there was a concrete waking incarnational memory of past incarnations, prenatal experience, and spiritual experience during sleep - what SS refers to as 'atavistic clairvoyance'. From this twilight of spiritual consciousness we get all the world mythologies and religions. In the second act, the atavistic clairvoyance gets dimmed out almost completely by the light of intellectual cognition, yet the latter is not developed enough for the self-reflective capacity of modern philosophy, science, etc. Humanity existed in a no man's land, a dark night of the soul, as the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. It is here where the Solar Hero descends into manifestation and brings the impulse for purified self-consciousness i.e. spiritual freedom which reunites the individual's inner life with Cosmic rhythms.

We are still transitioning from the second into the third act. The key here is to inwardly experience how the above condensation from general intuition to images to words is archetypally present across all domains of experience. Our individual intellectual life during our current incarnation is like the prosaic words we use to articulate this whole intuitive evolutionary story and its perceptual frames to ourselves. All that we have done in standard philosophy and science so far, as individuals and collectives, are varied means of that articulation from slightly different angles, to get a dim conceptual hold of the story. Now, for true philosophy and science to develop in the third act, we need the inverted spiritual activity which grows from the constrained linguistic configuration space into the higher order spaces of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive potential meaning . Our Ego-consciousness spans the entire superimposed spectrum of configuration spaces, mediating (steering) between the higher and lower spaces. With our current physical consciousness, we only become aware of what has already become manifest rather than what could potentially become manifest (or we only dimly perceive the latter in vague thoughts). 

Instead of continuing to passively succumb to the fallen force of gravity which condenses the spaces of potential meaning into fragmented manifest forms, we actively work with the force of levity which 'evaporates' the fragmented forms into subtler states of potential unmanifest meaning. These subtler states are the same ones through which our collective spiritual consciousness descended in the first act of the Fall. It is important that we discern how our entire identity as physical-intellectual perspectives, wrapped up in personal memories, temperaments, habits, interests, emotions, intellectual thoughts, etc., correspond with the condensed linguistic forms of the general intuition of who we are as "I"-beings. When we sacrifice our identification with this condensed form through the inverted spiritual activity, we are gaining intuition of what paths of development could become manifest, as individuals and collectives, which were previously unsuspected because they were (literally) unimaginable. We can then have greater anticipation for how our steering through the intuitive thinking space will condense into cultural and natural forms of our experience. 

Through the inner awakening to our intuitive spiritual activity, we are not simply accumulating new facts of knowledge which we add onto our current intellectual identity, but consciously expanding that identity across the nested configuration spaces which span from the personal to the collective. To become more conscious in the higher spaces is to gain more control over how they bend the lower spaces. As Cleric mentioned, the practical implications of this greater consciousness and freedom-control are endless. The individual implications are pretty clear and relate to better health, more vital energy, less existential anxiety, less swings into depressed states, greater holistic knowledge of the world around us, more creative impulses, greater feeling of communion with the living spiritual atmosphere, more healthy control over and therefore acceptance of one's destiny, and many more similar ones. 

"Now when He got into a boat, His disciples followed Him. And suddenly a great tempest arose on the sea, so that the boat was covered with the waves. But He was asleep. Then His disciples came to Him and awoke Him, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!”

But He said to them, “Why are you fearful, O you of little faith?” Then He arose and rebuked the winds and the sea, and there was a great calm."

As Cleric said, with greater conscious control over the intuitive steering comes greater responsibility for how we steer it. Through the inner work we also manifest universal feelings and ideals which increase our active interest in the soul-life around us. At the collective pole, quite literally all psycho-physical diseases can be better understood, more effectively treated, and eventually eliminated through the individual awakenings. Technologies can be developed which serve the Earth organism as a whole and are only hampered now by short-sightedness and greed. Catastrophic wars can be averted. Every individual will be known-seen as a living image of the Whole, to be treated with utmost respect and dignity. This won't be an abstract sermon of 'equity, equality, diversity', but objective and verifiable living knowledge of how every individual soul-spirit forms a necessary link in the Whole chain of spiritual evolution. 

"Without me God cannot make a single worm; if I do not preserve it with Him, it must straightway fall to pieces...
I know that without me God cannot live for an instant; if I come to nothing then He must needs give up the ghost." (Angelus Silesius)

[Anthony66]

If it is not yet the time to put our nose into the affairs of the spaces that from behind the scenes bend the geodesics of our human expression (that we colloquially call 'me'), then what is it time for?

Perhaps it's time to be more diligent in our middle-manager duties. Perhaps it's time to revere the CEO. I don't know.

Certainly the picture that is being painted is one that will lead to increased understanding and intuition of the workings of the Cosmos. As Ashvin says, there are some benefits along the way:

The individual implications are pretty clear and relate to better health, more vital energy, less existential anxiety, less swings into depressed states, greater holistic knowledge of the world around us, more creative impulses, greater feeling of communion with the living spiritual atmosphere, more healthy control over and therefore acceptance of one's destiny, and many more similar ones. That is certainly an interesting pursuit.

But where do we actually derive our marching orders from? Who or what determines the telos and where is the strategic plan to be found?

[AshvinP]

If it is not yet the time to put our nose into the affairs of the spaces that from behind the scenes bend the geodesics of our human expression (that we colloquially call 'me'), then what is it time for?

Perhaps it's time to be more diligent in our middle-manager duties. Perhaps it's time to revere the CEO. I don't know.

Certainly the picture that is being painted is one that will lead to increased understanding and intuition of the workings of the Cosmos. As Ashvin says, there are some benefits along the way:

The individual implications are pretty clear and relate to better health, more vital energy, less existential anxiety, less swings into depressed states, greater holistic knowledge of the world around us, more creative impulses, greater feeling of communion with the living spiritual atmosphere, more healthy control over and therefore acceptance of one's destiny, and many more similar ones. That is certainly an interesting pursuit.

But where do we actually derive our marching orders from? Who or what determines the telos and where is the strategic plan to be found?

Anthony,

I'm sure Cleric will weigh in with his more insightful thoughts, but in the meantime I wanted to share a response. First and foremost, we need to be ready and willing to put in the time and effort for answers to these questions. I am sure you felt your previous question about Newtonian science was pretty simple and straightforward, but as we can see, Cleric sacrificed his own time and effort to take a significant 'detour', all as a means of adequately answering that one question. And I am sure he would say the question still hasn't really been answered - rather the opportunity has been provided for you to continue the work of answering your own question from within. The same applies to these latest questions, which I would say were largely also addressed in the response to the first question.

In no way should this cause any pride in us like in saying “Look at me, I’m no part of the herd.” Such an attitude has catastrophic consequences. It can only be balanced by the understanding that any degree of freedom we win for ourselves immediately becomes a responsibility. Thus anyone who approaches these new evolutionary currents has to understand how great of a responsibility we bear in order to lead these currents into the general life.

The above is critical for anyone on the path of intuitive spiritual activity to contemplate deeply. When we navigate our human-scale geodesics within the thinking space in a living way, as concrete intuitions of reality's full spectrum, we discern that it's the ultimate human responsibility to bring the balance between mystical and materialistic reductionism, within our own souls and, therefore, within our group-souls and the collective human soul. Why? Because no other soul can do this balancing task for us or for our species. Our further evolution to becoming true humans depends entirely on that responsibility being taken up. Cleric made this a central theme of answering the question of why spiritual science cannot be understood and treated as any other science or field of knowledge we are familiar with. We could understand the entire post as an illumination of why there is no possibility of someone understanding and living spiritual science while also treating it as an 'end-user experience'. 

First we had to discern the reasons why we are able to approach secular science in that way, which is rooted in its myopic study of phenomena which are dead, rather than living. It's not necessarily a moral judgment on secular scientists - they can only investigate what is dead because the source of life in the world - our living thinking - remains in their blind spot. Therefore they cannot even imagine any living mode of cognition which participates in the redemption of the philosophies and sciences, of human culture in general and of the natural kingdoms themselves. The lower nature of personalized interests, passions, theories, emotions, opinions, etc. continually reasserts itself in every inquiry. The sensory-conceptual plane of thinking experience is Maya through and through. Every physical impression, event, technology, institution, etc. appears to us as something isolated which we permeate with concepts, just like the molecules and cells the scientist models with computer algorithms. The algorithm is a reflection of our current mode of physical cognition. Without higher cognitive development, we are constantly jumping from one Maya experience to another, in observation and in thought, and deriving our conclusions based on those.  

Something needs to be said here with respect to philosophical and scientific principles. With ordinary reasoning, we have no chance of penetrating beyond the normal sensory-conceptual Maya without our principles. This is a major theme of PoF - how our thinking begins to dimly perceive archetypal ideations through the World Content when it logically reasons from fragmented percepts-concepts to principles. We are still perceiving these principles outwardly with ordinary cognition rather than in their living inner nature (which is always tied up with the activity of spiritual beings), yet we are nevertheless projecting our thinking into the higher order configuration spaces. The only reason Levin's models can potentially steer the scientific intellect towards its own inner reality is because it reaches foundational principles.

Principles, laws and facts: the structure of the universe is summarized in these three words. Facts exist in incalculable number, and they are governed by a lesser number of laws. These laws are themselves governed by a few principles, which are really but one: God himself. The world of facts is the world of multiplicity, of dispersion, while the divine world is the world of unity. Here you have a key of great simplicity which can give you the solution to all problems.If people complain of feeling as if they live in darkness and chaos, it is quite simply because they have no knowledge of these three worlds, of their structure or how they function. As long as they remain focused on the physical world, on facts and events, they will never manage to see clearly and master their situation. In order to have a clear vision of things, and even to act correctly, they must rise by way of thought to the region of principles where the spirit and light of God reign.

So the key principle here is that of balancing the higher and lower configuration spaces, i.e. redeeming the latter through the inflow of the former, with our increasingly conscious steering of thinking through the rhythmic geodesics. We need to find the concrete intuitions of what this means in our first-person experience of physics (dynamics of sense perception), biology (formative life forces), psychology (soul life), and spirituality (higher thinking life where we awaken to ourselves as creative agencies). All of these configuration spaces are rooted in intelligent and intentional forces, but our human-scale spiritual space is the only one where the intentional agency and the products of that agency coincide (thinking activity and thought-forms). That is because the Ego incarnated on the physical plane within the individual human soul through the events 2,000 years ago. For every other lower configuration space, the Ego-force responsible for the appearances is to be found in the corresponding higher space (1st-7th, 2nd-6th, 3rd-5th). Our 4th thinking space is like the gateway between the the appearances and the realities. To bridge them is the task of the true human.

We can look at this balancing responsibility through the more Anthroposophical lens as well. What follows is nothing other than a different way of characterizing what Cleric explored in great detail through the modern scientific intellectual scaffolding, and which we are summarizing again now. The Luciferic beings correspond with the extreme of mystical reductionism and the Ahrimanic with the extreme of materialistic reductionism. 

Now we may characterize these two kinds of beings from a more profound point of view. Let us observe the Luciferic beings and see what interests they have in cosmic existence. We shall find that their chief interest is to make the world, and above all the human world, desert the spiritual beings whom man must regard as his true creators. The Luciferic beings wish nothing more than to make the world desert the divine beings. Do not misunderstand me: it is not the prime intention of the Luciferic beings to appropriate the world to themselves. From various things I have said about them you can gather that this is not their chief intention; their chief aim is to make the human being forsake his own divine creator-beings, to liberate the world from these beings.

The Ahrimanic beings have a different aim. They have the decided intention to make the kingdom of man and the rest of the earth, subject to their sphere of power, to make mankind dependent upon them, to get control over human beings. While it always has been—and is now—the endeavor of the Luciferic beings to make human beings desert what they can feel as the Divine in themselves, the Ahrimanic beings have the tendency gradually to include mankind and everything connected with it in their sphere of power.

Thus, within our cosmos, into which we human beings are interwoven, there exists a battle between the Luciferic beings, constantly striving for freedom, universal freedom, and the Ahrimanic beings, constantly striving for everlasting power and might. This battle permeates everything in which we live. Please hold this fact in mind as the second idea, important to our further considerations. The world in which we live is permeated by Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings, and there exists this tremendous contrast between the liberating tendency of the Luciferic beings and the power tendency of the Ahrimanic beings.

If you consider this whole matter you will have to say to yourselves: I am only able to understand the world if I conceive of it in connection with the number three, the triad. For we have on the one hand the Luciferic, and on the other the Ahrimanic element, and in the middle the human being who, as the third element, in the state of equilibrium between the two, must feel his divine essence. We shall only arrive at an understanding of the world if we base it on this triad and become clear about the fact that human life is the scale-beam. Here the fulcrum; on the one side the scale pan with the Luciferic element, pulling upward; on the other side the scale pan with the Ahrimanic element, pulling downward. To keep the scales in perfect balance signifies the essential being of man. Those who were initiated into such secrets of the spiritual evolution of mankind have always emphasized the fact that it is only possible to understand cosmic existence into which man is placed if it is conceived of in the sense of the triad; that it cannot be understood if it is considered on the basis of any other number. Thus we may say, employing our own terminology: we have to deal with three main factors in cosmic existence, namely: the Luciferic element, representing the one scale of the balance, the Ahrimanic element, representing the other scale of the balance, and the state of equilibrium which represents the Christ Impulse.

Now you may well imagine that it is entirely in the interest of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers to conceal this secret of the triad. For the proper comprehension of this secret enables mankind to bring about the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers; that means, on the one hand, to use the Luciferic tendency toward freedom for the achievement of a wholesome cosmic aim, and on the other hand, to strive to achieve the same with the Ahrimanic element. The human being's normal spiritual condition consists in relating himself in the proper way to this trinity, this triune structure of the world.

It should already be clear from the above that we cannot properly conceive this higher spiritual dynamic in terms of our Maya concepts of 'good' and 'evil'. We can't write off the Luciferic or Ahrimanic developments as silly superstitions like the materialists do, or demonic forces to be shunned and avoided, like the fundamentalists do. In fact, there can be no free spiritual evolution without utilizing their forces for wholesome Cosmic aims within our human-scale geodesic. By self-consciously steering our thinking by virtue of the Christ impulse, we are taking on the responsibility of redeeming the Luciferic-Ahrimanic powers which hold sway over Earth. This is a uniquely human responsibility as stewards and shepherds of the Earth kingdoms - no one else can be expected do it for us. Now if we truly and honestly feel, within our Heart of hearts, after careful examination, that this is not a high ideal worth pursuing, then nothing written on this forum needs to be taken seriously. It is only our own individual high ideal, freely chosen, which can put us on a path towards steering our intuitive thinking activity as a sacred duty and mission of Earthly redemption. Otherwise we will always feel like we have been given 'marching orders' from elsewhere.

But let's be clear - part of that careful soul-examination is to discern whether we are already following marching orders as we ignorantly freefall through the morphic spaces. As said, there are intelligent intents permeating the entire superimposed structure, bending the spaces in which our willing, feeling, and thinking steers. We need to discern whether there is any principle reason why we are justified to think that we are somehow more free when we remain in ignorance of the Cosmic forces, and that we are not following anyone else's marching orders when we let our thinking be steered from without. Does this make any sense? Again, if our high ideal (or lack of it) is to remain enslaved, then remaining ignorant is a perfectly valid option. But we need to be very honest with ourselves if that's what we really value, or rather if we value Truth, Love, and Wisdom, if we value Freedom. If it's the latter, then we may discern that many of our current intellectual tendencies are simply serving to obscure our true Heart's desire.