Anthony, Ashvin already covered the essentials.Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sun Jan 08, 2023 7:15 amPerhaps 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: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?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.
Let’s consider once more the fact that we should really try to observe what kind of answers we expect when the questions are asked. These things are just as valid for ordinary things as they are for spiritual. The only reason they may seem different is because most of the things we ordinarily ask about already fit in well known slots of intuition. For example, an adult watching the news very rarely hears something that demands new concepts and new ways of thinking.
Imagine the question: “Where’s Einstein’s curvature of spacetime to be found?” You are familiar with scientific thinking, so imagine that a layman asks you this question. I guess you immediately feel that you’ll have to disappoint the person. You’ll have to begin saying something like “well, you can’t really point at something and say ‘that’s the curvature’. You’ll have to spend some time thinking about these things in order to gain certain intuition about them.”
It’s similar about space too. We don’t have some concrete perception for ‘space’, in the same way we can focus on color or smell. To see where space is to be found, we need to develop certain intuitive orientation within perceptions. Our sense of space is this intuitive grasp of certain lawfulness through which perceptions transform.
We can use the exact same approach when we ask “where’s the telos?” It’s not about pointing at some perception and saying “there it is” but about developing certain intuitive orientation – in this instance not about space but about time.
Imagine that we take symbolic snapshots of our states of be-ing:
Each state symbolizes the full spectrum of inner experience (not only sensory perceptions but also feelings, thoughts, will). When we think, our state transforms. The states are drawn along a dimension but from our perspective we’re always at the center – the state transforms around us, so to speak.
If we think verbally, as the states metamorphose, at any point in time we hear a different verbal word. When we think “I need to take the garbage out”, we’re clearly experiencing sequences of words through time. Yet these words would be just a sequence of random noise if there wasn’t the overarching intuition that is actually being linearized in language. Very little attention is paid to these things today. Even worse than this is that the thoughts themselves usually stream in quite uncontrollable torrents. We jump from thought to thought quite erratically.
It’s important to realize that when we think about the above image this doesn’t yet equate with a real experience of the ‘thickness’ of time. In fact, current scientific views will outright say that such an experience is impossible. Our brain simply feeds our conscious frames one by one. In that sense, the whole image above is only an abstraction. We should take the whole image and imagine that it is experienced as one of the blue circles. That is, the whole image is just a thought in our current state of being.
How can that image turn into a symbol for something real? By trying to gain clearer consciousness of our temporal flow. This immediately tells us that we need to transform something in the way we conduct our spiritual activity. Just doing more and more thinking about these things, still leaves us in the sequential and quite jittery changes of states.
In my experience, the easiest way to approach the real experience (if we're not yet ready for meditative concentration) is by experimenting with smoothing out and slowing down the movement of our spiritual activity.
There are many ways we can do that. For example, we can simply move our gaze smoothly and slowly among our surroundings, with all our thinking attention being fully invested in the movement itself. We’ll find that our gaze has the tendency to snap to objects, which breaks the smooth flow. We can alleviate this by defocusing our eyes and avoiding focusing on the object themselves but only on the movement.
Then we can do that also in our imagination. We can move our ray of attention in ∞ figure around our eyes (like a pair of glasses). Once again the goal is to do this slowly and smoothly, without interruptions, without ‘lifting the pen’, so to speak.
As a whole, it is by cultivating this feeling of flow that our temporal intuition begins to expand. Another interesting experience is to move our hands as if we conduct an orchestra. The movements have to be gentle, as if we try to cause the least disturbance of the air or we want to impress only smooth harmonious waves in it. When we do exercises with our will however (as it is with hand movements), we have to be more vigilant that our thinking focus must be completely coinciding with our will. Our movements are normally so habitual that we do one thing but think of something else.
All such exercises are only preparations, of course. These smooth streamlines of our spiritual activity through time are nevertheless still shaped in some ways. In other words, there’s telos. The simplest thing to notice is the fact that our whole exercise is performed within the overarching intuition of the exercise itself. For example, the idea of moving our focus in ∞ shape is the overarching intuition that guides the actual streamline through time.
To gain even deeper intuition of the telos of our flow of metamorphosis, we have to seek sensitivity for our inner life of sympathies, antipathies, desires. For example, the desire to have a glass of wine is part of that telos, isn’t it? It curves the way our states of being metamorphose towards a certain direction.
I’m not using the wine example as some kind of personal criticism. I’m not saying that if one forces himself to stop alcohol, they’ll do any better. Transforming such habits can only happen in a healthy way when we develop love for something far more valuable.
In this sense, I’m only mentioning the wine example as something that can speak to you in a more concrete manner. Our inner life is weaved of such forces that externally steer the streamline of our becoming (depicted as ‘lateral’ forces in the image). Through concentration of our spiritual activity we can resist these forces and as a result we become conscious of them and corresponding new degrees of freedom. This is at the basis of one of the exercises in HTKHW, where we have to deny to ourselves some small desire. For example, next time I feel like having a glass of wine and see myself reaching for the bottle, I can say “I’ll skip this time.” The goal here is not to deprive ourselves and be miserable but to find the experience of us differentiating from the desire. In this way it becomes an objective force in our soul life, that we are ordinarily completely merged with and flow along. By differentiating we come to know another ‘me’ which has the inner strength to steer the streamline in novel ways. Please note that when the desire is known in this way, it is not simply some abstract idea, as it could be in Freudian psychology. We indeed feel how this force tries to curve our streamline in a certain direction. Even though the force is not something that we can see as some perception in space, we nevertheless have clear intuition of it, much like in this classic illusion where there are no edges of the white triangle, but we nevertheless ‘see’ it.
Through experiences like these, we begin to discover how our whole inner life is criss-crossed by such forces that continually give shape to our streamline (even though most of the time it is not even a streamline but hectic jumping from state to state). If this is grasped it should be clear that the spiritual telos can only be known realistically in such a way. Everything else remains as the blue circles within our frames of existence. This doesn’t mean that we can’t understand many things at that level. But you seem to be at a point where you are leading an inner battle.
It’s important to recognize a very specific blocker at this stage. On one hand we understand that no matter how detailed, a blue circle (that is, an abstract model of reality) will always remain just that – a mental image in our spatial consciousness. On some level we know that true understanding demands certain inner transformations. Yet the intellect demands hard proof that such efforts won’t be in vain. For example, (once again, nothing personal here) we can say “How can I be really certain that by cutting wine I won’t simply be missing one of the few small pleasures I have in life? What if all this is just a hoax and I give up wine for nothing?”
Alas, there’s no simple resolution to this stage because in itself it is a self-reinforcing cycle. It’s about what we really value in the spiritual experience we call life. If we simply want to have a pleasant end-user experience in this life, then certain subconscious forces are already in place and they bend our streamlines in a specific way that ensures we won’t end up anywhere near to the essentials. On the other hand, if we deeply yearn to grow into the Cosmic mystery, then secret forces begin to bend the streamlines such that we converge in that direction. Then we’ll also find the inner strength to overcome certain tendencies. We simply have to loosen our sense of immutability. We have to identify less with our present desires. As a child, it would be heartbreaking if we’re told that one day we’ll have to give up our toys. Yet as we grow up our interests naturally transform. Then we see that we have already extracted all the lessons from our toys and continue on a different level. It’s quite the same with other adult habits. If we don’t transform some of them, death will certainly take them away anyway. So if we’re open to the fact that no matter how old we are and how much life experience we have gained, we’re still on a continuous journey of self-transformation, then we’ll even be happy about the fact that some of the desires which currently guide our telos from behind the scenes, will become objectively known forces that we can navigate through with new degrees of freedom.
Desires, sympathies and antipathies are only the most immediate layer of the telos, yet we can’t skip it. Beyond this quite personal telos we begin to know lateral forces that have much more archetypal character. At this stage we very clearly begin to see how our personal spiritual journey resembles the story of the Old and New Testament. We seek the Promised Land, we go through the Wilderness (where many of the seeking souls wander presently) and so on. All these correspond to stages of soul transformation. Deeper than that we have the even more general archetypal forces of all life, or the Cosmic rhythms and so on. But I repeat that all this will remain just an abstract blue circle unless we try to seek its reality first in the most immediate sphere of our personal life. And conversely – if we find some of that reality in the way our personal streamline curves, then we’ll have much clearer intuition how this scales up in the Macrocosm.