ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Cleric K]

Nonetheless, the further explanations of the intuition of 'intrinsic interconnectedness' are helpful. Thank you for the Fourier function! The intuition is clear. Stupid question: As per the YT video, if my target drawing is a circle, only one arrow is required. Yet, if I erase all bars in the upper graph (straight line) that's what I get in the lower, just one arrow?
(I know this is off topic, but maybe my confusion hangs to a very simple point that's quick to tell?)

It's not a stupid question at all. Actually the answer is not at all obvious since I simplified things a lot. In order to get a single bar in the frequency spectrum you would have to have a sine wave in the upper graph. Check out again the demo, I've modified it to display a wave by default.

The leftmost bar of the spectrum corresponds to zero frequency which corresponds to the constant average value of the bars. That's why you get only the single leftmost bar when you have straight line in the upper graph.

So you are completely right. If you want to draw a circle you only need a single arrow. In the 1D case we don't have circles but waves. Actually, the circle is made of two waves - sine and cosine.



One controls the X axis, the other - Y.

So the version of Fourier with waves is a simplified version of the more general circle case. The waves are what you get by looking at the rotating arrow from the side and seeing as rising and falling.

Every conceivable waveform can be represented as sum of waves, just like any 2D curve can be made from sum of rotating arrows. Here's a nice way of visualizing it.



The image in the front is the summation (interference) of all waves (corresponding to the upper image in the demo). The image along the depth is the spectrum (the lower image in the demo). The spectrum shows how much of each wave we want to add to the final interference. You can see that if you want your final sum to be a simple wave, then you simply have to use the wave with the corresponding frequency from the spectrum. Its bar will be non-zero, while everything else will be zero (this is the situation of the current version of the demo).

[Federica]

I see, it's so well explained, thank you, once again!
Now I also understand what is meant by 1D, which was the other question I had, that I didn't dare to ask above
And I get a slightly better intuition of how the waves have to interfere in order to result in a certain shape, or at least wave.

[Federica]

Federica,

I thought of another angle to approach from. Besides sleep and death, there is another phenomenon which is more accessible to our modern scientific understanding - the inner world of our physical body (which actually consists of the etheric-astral-ego depth structure as well). The outer world stands in a similar relation to this inner world as how our waking life stands in relation to sleep-death. It is a 'liminal space' in which our ordinary cognition has no knowledge or only dreamy knowledge of what is taking place. First we can notice that the inner world unfolds more directly to even our ordinary cognition as temporal processes, unlike the outer spatial world with its mostly fixed objects where we barely notice any evolution. 





Secular science falls prey to the aliasing effect - it simply assumes that what goes into the body from external nature, and what goes out of the body in the form of excretions, retains that fundamental character as it undergoes all the liminal processes within the body. What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil. Any one of these spaces - inner bodily world, sleep, death - if investigated carefully with living thinking, reveals very similar processes. It reveals the intentional activity of spiritual forces, in which we ourselves participate, which transmutes sense-perceptions, experiences, external substances, etc. into WFT forces which restore the vitality, health, life, spiritual content, of the former. Secular science speaks of this vaguely and abstractly with respect to sleeping-dreaming. Yet the archetypal spiritual reality of these liminal processes reveal much more profound truths. 

In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in — let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.

Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.

If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys — or transforms — what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the substances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.

Actually this restoration occurs every duration of our waking experience as well, and the qualia of that experience - colors, smells, tastes, sounds, textures - are forces at the threshold of the spiritual world continually impinging on our physical consciousness but dying out rapidly when we remain with ordinary waking cognition (unlike in our dreams where we open up to and flow along with them in an instinctive manner). It is the same principle as the thought-distractions - we are constantly dying in our inattentive selfish thoughts, returning to the spiritual world, and then reincarnating in 'fresh' thought by its good grace. In this sense, the redemptive principle is always at work within the liminal spaces of experience. 

Within color (as within the form of those entities that we behold) lies the hope that matter will again become light—the light that it is in the depths; moreover, there lies the hope that matter will reawaken as the light of ideas, as the warmth of life within the human soul. This is the Earth's secret. It is the secret of the light's rebirth insofar as it rises up as the fabric of thought, within thought, by ceasing to die out into the specter of space, or into the specter of time. We can reascend from the specter to the light.

Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 49). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

One clear aspect of what takes place in these liminal spaces is what Cleric has described as the 'last in, first out' principle of computer processing (that only being a dim mechanized cultural shadow of actual living processes). Throughout all of spiritual scientific research, we find descriptions of how we run through our experiences in reverse during sleep and after death. For ex., the reverse 'life-review' that we experience as an imagistic panaroma in the etheric body after casting off the physical body. A similar review happens every time we sleep.  Instead of experiencing only the outer physiognomy of those experiences in dim perceptions-concepts clothed in abstract space and linear time, we experience from the perspective of the inner spiritual forces which holistically impressed them. So these are really the same experiences viewed from opposite poles of consciousness, although that rhythmic alternating process introduces new shades of meaning to the experiences. Consider the following. 

Still another question arises here, moreover a very important one. — What happens when we have a very short sleep — for example an afternoon nap? Or indeed when we have a brief forty winks during a lecture, but really do go to sleep; the whole thing may last only two or three minutes, perhaps only a minute or half a minute. What happens then? If the sleep were real, we were in the spiritual world during that half minute.

The truth is, my dear friends, that for this short nap even during a lecture, the same holds good as for the all-night sleep of a lie-a-bed — I mean, of course, a human lie-a-bed! As a matter of fact, whenever a man falls asleep, even for a brief moment, the whole sleep is a unity and the astral body is an unconscious prophet; it surveys the whole sleep up to the point of waking ... in perspective, of course. What is remote may lack clarity, as when a short-sighted person looks down an avenue and does not see the trees at the farther end of it. In the same way the astral body may be short-sighted, figuratively speaking, in the subconscious. Its perception does not reach the point where the individual earth-lives begin. But broadly speaking, the fact is that even during the briefest sleep we rush with tremendous, lightning-like rapidity through all our earthly lives. This is a matter of extraordinary significance. Naturally it is all very hazy; but if somebody falls asleep during a lecture, then the lecturer or those who share his power of observation have it in front of them. Think of it: the whole of earth-evolution, together with what the sleeper has experienced in previous earthly lives! When somebody falls asleep during a lecture everything lacks clarity because it happens with such terrific rapidity; one thing merges quickly into another, but it is there, nevertheless. From this you will understand that karma is perpetually present, inscribed as it were in the World-Chronicle. And every time a man falls asleep he has opportunity to approach his karma. This is one of the great secrets of existence.

Every short nap we take, we have the opportunity of approaching our entire Karma and thereby setting on the process of redeeming it. In other words, every duration of our experienced world-state is only what it is because the holistic forces of our entire spiritual evolution continually inflow our consciousness and thereby constitute it. These fundamental principles of our spiritual existence shouldn't be treated as only partially applicable, which is practically how the secular culture treats them - when it comes to dead things of the perceptible world, the principles are upheld dogmatically, but when it comes to living things, to ideal things, to moral things, the liminal forces from which the principles actually flow forth, they are discarded or modified or selectively paid attention to as we please. The redemptive principle which works through the liminal spaces of experience is not only limited to certain phenomena and not others - to natural phenomena and not cultural phenomena, or to some cultural phenomena and not others. They are universally applicable, which is why we have such an archetypally and lawfully structured spiritual evolution which reflects dimly, at our current stage, into our natural and cultural laws.

It is very true that discerning these principles is only the very beginning of our work and they will remain things we are seizing only with the pliers of the intellect until we also persistently engage our inverted spiritual activity during meditation, so that we make more conscious this ceaseless inflowing of Cosmic impulses from the liminal spaces. The meditative state is a willful trusting of our thinking force to the Wise spiritual guidance of humankind. Nevertheless, that spiritual guidance needs something to work with and these holistic principles we are discerning through our conceptual reasoning provide it with the foundation on which our Imaginative life can be erected, or the purified sheaths in which the Spirit can find a proper vessel for its intuitive becoming. Trust me, I know the feeling of 'man, I am hopelessly stuck surveying these things from only the outer side, as abstract schemas', but I also know the consistent defying of such habitually expected limitations when remaining prayerfully persistent and trusting in pursuit of attunement with the Wise guidance. Just in the process of writing this one post, I have had the opportunity to revisit key texts from the archive and the forum and deepen my living understanding. There are always new depths of meaning to redeem from the forms of the world through our devoted spiritual activity. 

Thank you, Ashvin!

It's taking me a little while to 'digest' this idea, because in the series: reincarnation in a thought / in a waking day / in a lifetime / in the body inner world, the body really seems to be the odd one out. It's not a time rhythm itself, it has rhythms.
It’s hard to grasp that the same relation found between waking state, or lifetime, and sleep state, or death, can be found between outer and inner physical world. At first it sounded like adding apples and oranges. But if I remember that the more we develop spiritually, the more we become unlocalized (please don’t interpret this as mystical rejection of the sense world!) then I can see that everything within the threshold of the skin (inner world of the body) can also be thought of as one mode of consciousness, a way in which consciousness expresses itself, namely “laws of nature + life”.

From the viewpoint of our waking state, we can realize that we are sitting and willing in a body that we practically understand nothing of. I took note that the whole depth structure is present, or echoed, in the inner body itself. However I believe the 'special feature' of this body perspective you are presenting - the element the unconsciousness of inner bodily processes consists of - is life, correct? If so, the inner-outer relation you are presenting should hold true for animals and plants alike (how an isolated little plant on a window sill keeps on transforming a few inputs in new limbs, and abundance of cascading flowers, season after season, seems just as mysterious to me). In other words, it's the secret of life at large we need to progressively grasp, of which the human body is only one example.

What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil.

I am taking note of this question as a valuable meditative exercise. What comes to mind at the moment is that, as we inquire about the transformative power of life, we are referring to cycles/modes of consciousness. It’s about becoming conscious of the various states, which actually only means becoming conscious across states, embracing various modes of reality/consciousness within the scope of our individuated willed activity.

In standard waking state versus sleep, our soul and spiritual essence tend to get out of focus. Then, in sleep, we are drawn to lose focus on our physical and life bodies. We oscillate across this spectrum as we traverse the day-night cycle. In the alive-state versus dead-state rhythm, the separating pull is sharper. In the dead-state we lack the localized physical-etheric mode completely. Specularly, in our worldly life cycle, we are perhaps pulled apart from the spiritual world more abruptly than we are from the regenerative sleep cycle during our waking day. (It’s painful because as I am making an effort to really get a grasp of all these rhythms, a clear idea of ‘nesting’ has flashed, but hasn't lasted. I couldn’t hold it clearly enough to write it down). Anyway, what I was trying to say is, if I keep the rough idea of spiritual delocalization alive in the back of my mind, I could place this 'inner world of the body/outer sense world' cycle at place number 3 maybe, after 1/death-life cycle, and 2/sleep-waking cycle, and before 4/reincarnation rhythm in thoughts.

Potentially, all cycles can be fully encompassed in consciousness, however, in 4/ thinking descends all the way down to physical, it becomes thought percepts/perceptions, in which we reincarnate and can become conscious of; in 3/ we can aim to reincarnating in the secrets of our etheric body and life in general, bringing them within the scope of awareness; in 2/ the soul identity can be brought into better focus, while physical and etheric bodies are paused, and throughout the whole cycle; and in 1/ all physical-etheric (and soul?) layers are dropped, as the true self is reintegrated, and we can work at expanding that higher consciousness to our reincarnation on Earth. These my clumsy attempts to imagine some logic around the idea of inner world of body. I’m not sure if there’s anything worth salvaging from that. I feel I should read Theosophy in order to get additional help with structuring these thoughts!

So what is really taking place within the body? ...Life-etheric secrets? Something fundamentally mysterious must be operating there, on top of laws of nature, otherwise we would be able to shape the inner body within the framework of that natural lawfulness, as we shape objects in the outer physical world. What I'm unable to bring into proper focus is the hierarchy, the relations between levels, bodies, modes, within the depth structure of reality-consciousness. But I appreciate the illustration of holisticness you draw in the last part, it's still inspiring, and thanks for the words of encouragement!
Redemption as expansion of consciousness, principles as overarching reading modes valid across spectrums… I realize that all these facets of ‘holisticness’ need to remain constantly present to cognition as foundational evidence, while cognition expands to new domains. They can't work as mere concepts stored in some mind-repository, that I would constantly forget to consult when needed. Instead of endlessly pulling the blanket to one side, leaving the other sides uncovered, it’s necessary to weave the blanket bigger, and thicker, so that it can holistically cover more and more of the depth spectrum of reality, and also accommodate with equally sharp focus all the finer waves interfering in its thickness.

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Ashvin!

It's taking me a little while to 'digest' this idea, because in the series: reincarnation in a thought / in a waking day / in a lifetime / in the body inner world, the body really seems to be the odd one out. It's not a time rhythm itself, it has rhythms.
It’s hard to grasp that the same relation found between waking state, or lifetime, and sleep state, or death, can be found between outer and inner physical world. At first it sounded like adding apples and oranges. But if I remember that the more we develop spiritually, the more we become unlocalized (please don’t interpret this as mystical rejection of the sense world!) then I can see that everything within the threshold of the skin (inner world of the body) can also be thought of as one mode of consciousness, a way in which consciousness expresses itself, namely “laws of nature + life”.

From the viewpoint of our waking state, we can realize that we are sitting and willing in a body that we practically understand nothing of. I took note that the whole depth structure is present, or echoed, in the inner body itself. However I believe the 'special feature' of this body perspective you are presenting - the element the unconsciousness of inner bodily processes consists of - is life, correct? If so, the inner-outer relation you are presenting should hold true for animals and plants alike (how an isolated little plant on a window sill keeps on transforming a few inputs in new limbs, and abundance of cascading flowers, season after season, seems just as mysterious to me). In other words, it's the secret of life at large we need to progressively grasp, of which the human body is only one example.

What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil.

I am taking note of this question as a valuable meditative exercise. What comes to mind at the moment is that, as we inquire about the transformative power of life, we are referring to cycles/modes of consciousness. It’s about becoming conscious of the various states, which actually only means becoming conscious across states, embracing various modes of reality/consciousness within the scope of our individuated willed activity.

In standard waking state versus sleep, our soul and spiritual essence tend to get out of focus. Then, in sleep, we are drawn to lose focus on our physical and life bodies. We oscillate across this spectrum as we traverse the day-night cycle. In the alive-state versus dead-state rhythm, the separating pull is sharper. In the dead-state we lack the localized physical-etheric mode completely. Specularly, in our worldly life cycle, we are perhaps pulled apart from the spiritual world more abruptly than we are from the regenerative sleep cycle during our waking day. (It’s painful because as I am making an effort to really get a grasp of all these rhythms, a clear idea of ‘nesting’ has flashed, but hasn't lasted. I couldn’t hold it clearly enough to write it down). Anyway, what I was trying to say is, if I keep the rough idea of spiritual delocalization alive in the back of my mind, I could place this 'inner world of the body/outer sense world' cycle at place number 3 maybe, after 1/death-life cycle, and 2/sleep-waking cycle, and before 4/reincarnation rhythm in thoughts.

Potentially, all cycles can be fully encompassed in consciousness, however, in 4/ thinking descends all the way down to physical, it becomes thought percepts/perceptions, in which we reincarnate and can become conscious of; in 3/ we can aim to reincarnating in the secrets of our etheric body and life in general, bringing them within the scope of awareness; in 2/ the soul identity can be brought into better focus, while physical and etheric bodies are paused, and throughout the whole cycle; and in 1/ all physical-etheric (and soul?) layers are dropped, as the true self is reintegrated, and we can work at expanding that higher consciousness to our reincarnation on Earth. These my clumsy attempts to imagine some logic around the idea of inner world of body. I’m not sure if there’s anything worth salvaging from that. I feel I should read Theosophy in order to get additional help with structuring these thoughts!

So what is really taking place within the body? ...Life-etheric secrets? Something fundamentally mysterious must be operating there, on top of laws of nature, otherwise we would be able to shape the inner body within the framework of that natural lawfulness, as we shape objects in the outer physical world. What I'm unable to bring into proper focus is the hierarchy, the relations between levels, bodies, modes, within the depth structure of reality-consciousness. But I appreciate the illustration of holisticness you draw in the last part, it's still inspiring, and thanks for the words of encouragement!
Redemption as expansion of consciousness, principles as overarching reading modes valid across spectrums… I realize that all these facets of ‘holisticness’ need to remain constantly present to cognition as foundational evidence, while cognition expands to new domains. They can't work as mere concepts stored in some mind-repository, that I would constantly forget to consult when needed. Instead of endlessly pulling the blanket to one side, leaving the other sides uncovered, it’s necessary to weave the blanket bigger, and thicker, so that it can holistically cover more and more of the depth spectrum of reality, and also accommodate with equally sharp focus all the finer waves interfering in its thickness.

Federica,

Right, and our physical cognition of inner temporal rhythms is simply an analogy (decohered form) to the supra-sensory rhythms we experience during the sleep-death journeys. With our thinking consciousness attenuated to the physical plane, which we call 'waking life', we experience those same rhythms we were journeying through within the liminal spaces, which currently remain 'dark' to the physical consciousness, in their outer-decohered forms. It's really interesting when we begin to understand analogies in this way - then we discern (dimly at first) why any analogies from the physical to the spiritual are actually intelligible to us. The physical forms, whether they are objects, processes, events, institutions, technology, etc., evoke a mental resonance with the WFT forces we have experienced, are experiencing, will experience through our higher Self consciousness (past-present-future are not so strictly delineated with that higher consciousness). The resonance evoked really resides in the inner meaning of the relation which is discerned by our thinking - in this case, the meaning of cycles of 'darkness' to our ordinary knowledge, which we know has some durational character and revitalizes our conscious existence in some way, which would otherwise be completely swamped by outer sensory-conceptual existence. 

It is certainly true that the life forces of the plant and animal kingdoms remain a mystery for secular science because it doesn't penetrate the liminal spaces where the origin of these forces is to be found. Yet it is also a key principle to discern that, what we see outspread around us in the kingdoms of Nature, and in the great Macrocosm in general, has all concentrated within the individual human organism as a microcosm. That is another way to define when a being has reached its "human" stage. So all the rhythms you speak of are nested within our inner processes, and the first lawful aim of our inverted spiritual activity is generally becoming more conscious of them in the life body. In that sense, whatever is worked upon within the human organism towards living Self-knowledge and its moral perfection is also acting redemptively on all the kingdoms nested within our consciousness. It will no doubt take some time and effort to livingly discern the holistic logic underlying the following, but it really follows from a principled philosophical and scientific understanding of our rhythmic involving-evolving consciousness through the ages of the Earth.

Let us focus upon the consideration of our ether body. Our ether body is, as it were, held together by the elasticity of the physical body. The ether body is held together through the elastic force of the physical body as long as we are here between birth and death. Now, just represent in an imaginative way, if you can, an experiment which naturally cannot be done, but just imagine that it could be done, that you could remove the physical body on the one hand from the ether body and on the other hand remove the astral body and the ego from the ether body. Then, because the elasticity of the physical body is no longer there, you would discover that this ether body would spring out, separate out into many different divisions showing that the ether body is a manifoldness constituted out of many single factors and is only held together through the elasticity of the physical body.

Now we ask the question: How would these portions which spring out of us appear when we are able to separate the physical body away from the ether body? Indeed, even though it may appear strange to the clever people of our present age, nevertheless the following fact is true. These parts of the ether body would assume forms which would approximately resemble the outspread animal kingdom; that means that all the possible forms of the animal kingdom would appear. It would really be true that a certain part of your ether body, the head, for example, would take on a form similar to a bird, a certain part of the ether body which is in the vicinity of the larynx would take on a very beautiful angelic animal form; and so on. Thus we carry the whole animal kingdom inside us in our ether body. This is absolutely true. Our ether body is the outspread animal kingdom which is held together through the elasticity of our physical body.
...
When a certain impulse wants to be active in us, obviously it must come up in the astral body. If you consider these things in an orderly fashion, they do not contradict each other. Thus when you speak of the presence of drives and instincts in the human being, you must naturally ascribe them to the astral body. However, the form similarity which we have just spoken about in the animal kingdom is at the basis of the situation. And again, when we consider our astral body, if we are able to separate it out imaginatively as I just indicated in the separation of the ether body, then this astral body would fall apart, because it is only held together through the elasticity of the physical and the ether bodies. If you remove that elasticity, the astral body would fall apart and then it would represent something very similar to the whole outspread plant kingdom. Through the fact that we have an astral body, the different forms of the plant kingdom really exist in us as it is spread out in the world in its manifoldness. If you study the whole plant kingdom in the way in which one form is placed beside another, then you have an externally separated picture of that which has been drawn together in the human astral body. This knowledge also belongs to what has been called the Lost Word, because a consciousness of these things was present in the primal wisdom.

We should keep in mind that all we perceive in space, including our own bodily organism, is the nested and superimposed time-rhythms. Spatial cognition gives us the capacity to perceive them simultaneously. So, in the sense of Cleric's recent posts, the bodily state of our organism at any given time is only what it is because the forces at work within the rhythms of death-rebirth, sleep-wake, the hysteresis of thought-perception, have evolved in a certain holistic relation. If we were to adjust one little aspect of our breathing rhythm, for ex., all those forces would then stand in a different relation to one another. So perhaps it would have been more appropriate for me to compare the inner bodily liminal space to an image of all the other nested rhythms we speak of. In esoteric science, investigating the microcosm of the human body with higher consciousness really brings us to all the Macrocosmic forces as well. Imagination awakens us within the etheric, Inspiration within the astral, and Intuition within the Ego-"I" force itself. 

In terms of the redemptive principle, modern spiritual training allows us to attract the WFT forces of the liminal spaces, which we are normally asleep to, more into waking consciousness, or conversely to expand the strength of our waking consciousness into the liminal spaces, and thereby 'speed up' the evolutionary perfection of our whole organism, which would normally unfold over much longer rhythmic cycles if left to its own accord. For ex., in the first stage of the liminal space after death we journey through what is known as 'Kamaloka', where we purify the lower astral nature of its sensuous desires, confronting that nature as objective forces from the inner experiential perspective of how they have impressed themselves into the world and other people around us. Steiner gives us the evening reverse memory-review exercise as a means of attenuating our consciousness more to this stage of the post-death liminal space. Of course it won't be experienced with nearly the same intensity, but it serves as a concrete preparation which can actually minimize the time spent in Kamaloka before ascending to higher planes. That time of purification is not only for our own localized benefit, but that of the entire Earthly organism. What we consciously work on with our moral forces between death-rebirth, in concert with the higher hierarchies, is what makes all redemptive evolution of the Earthly kingdoms possible. 

Keep in mind these are only very crude and broad outlines of the principles which will aid us when we delve into the details of spiritual scientific research. Without the former (which are much more effectively presented through Cleric's illustrations), and the complementary exercises for strengthening thhe force of our will-thinking, the latter will seem like a tangled mess of abstract concepts for an unnecessarily long period of time, if not indefinitely. But eventually we do need to journey into that detailed research to flesh out our holistic intuition. This way we are not only reading the content as abstract details which were developed independently of us, but as more conscious reflections of the Wisdom we already possess within the depths of our being, simply being articulated in various symbolic forms.

[Federica]

Federica,

Right, and our physical cognition of inner temporal rhythms is simply an analogy (decohered form) to the supra-sensory rhythms we experience during the sleep-death journeys. With our thinking consciousness attenuated to the physical plane, which we call 'waking life', we experience those same rhythms we were journeying through within the liminal spaces, which currently remain 'dark' to the physical consciousness, in their outer-decohered forms. It's really interesting when we begin to understand analogies in this way - then we discern (dimly at first) why any analogies from the physical to the spiritual are actually intelligible to us. The physical forms, whether they are objects, processes, events, institutions, technology, etc., evoke a mental resonance with the WFT forces we have experienced, are experiencing, will experience through our higher Self consciousness (past-present-future are not so strictly delineated with that higher consciousness). The resonance evoked really resides in the inner meaning of the relation which is discerned by our thinking - in this case, the meaning of cycles of 'darkness' to our ordinary knowledge, which we know has some durational character and revitalizes our conscious existence in some way, which would otherwise be completely swamped by outer sensory-conceptual existence. 

It is certainly true that the life forces of the plant and animal kingdoms remain a mystery for secular science because it doesn't penetrate the liminal spaces where the origin of these forces is to be found. Yet it is also a key principle to discern that, what we see outspread around us in the kingdoms of Nature, and in the great Macrocosm in general, has all concentrated within the individual human organism as a microcosm. That is another way to define when a being has reached its "human" stage. So all the rhythms you speak of are nested within our inner processes, and the first lawful aim of our inverted spiritual activity is generally becoming more conscious of them in the life body. In that sense, whatever is worked upon within the human organism towards living Self-knowledge and its moral perfection is also acting redemptively on all the kingdoms nested within our consciousness. It will no doubt take some time and effort to livingly discern the holistic logic underlying the following, but it really follows from a principled philosophical and scientific understanding of our rhythmic involving-evolving consciousness through the ages of the Earth.

Let us focus upon the consideration of our ether body. Our ether body is, as it were, held together by the elasticity of the physical body. The ether body is held together through the elastic force of the physical body as long as we are here between birth and death. Now, just represent in an imaginative way, if you can, an experiment which naturally cannot be done, but just imagine that it could be done, that you could remove the physical body on the one hand from the ether body and on the other hand remove the astral body and the ego from the ether body. Then, because the elasticity of the physical body is no longer there, you would discover that this ether body would spring out, separate out into many different divisions showing that the ether body is a manifoldness constituted out of many single factors and is only held together through the elasticity of the physical body.

Now we ask the question: How would these portions which spring out of us appear when we are able to separate the physical body away from the ether body? Indeed, even though it may appear strange to the clever people of our present age, nevertheless the following fact is true. These parts of the ether body would assume forms which would approximately resemble the outspread animal kingdom; that means that all the possible forms of the animal kingdom would appear. It would really be true that a certain part of your ether body, the head, for example, would take on a form similar to a bird, a certain part of the ether body which is in the vicinity of the larynx would take on a very beautiful angelic animal form; and so on. Thus we carry the whole animal kingdom inside us in our ether body. This is absolutely true. Our ether body is the outspread animal kingdom which is held together through the elasticity of our physical body.
...
When a certain impulse wants to be active in us, obviously it must come up in the astral body. If you consider these things in an orderly fashion, they do not contradict each other. Thus when you speak of the presence of drives and instincts in the human being, you must naturally ascribe them to the astral body. However, the form similarity which we have just spoken about in the animal kingdom is at the basis of the situation. And again, when we consider our astral body, if we are able to separate it out imaginatively as I just indicated in the separation of the ether body, then this astral body would fall apart, because it is only held together through the elasticity of the physical and the ether bodies. If you remove that elasticity, the astral body would fall apart and then it would represent something very similar to the whole outspread plant kingdom. Through the fact that we have an astral body, the different forms of the plant kingdom really exist in us as it is spread out in the world in its manifoldness. If you study the whole plant kingdom in the way in which one form is placed beside another, then you have an externally separated picture of that which has been drawn together in the human astral body. This knowledge also belongs to what has been called the Lost Word, because a consciousness of these things was present in the primal wisdom.

We should keep in mind that all we perceive in space, including our own bodily organism, is the nested and superimposed time-rhythms. Spatial cognition gives us the capacity to perceive them simultaneously. So, in the sense of Cleric's recent posts, the bodily state of our organism at any given time is only what it is because the forces at work within the rhythms of death-rebirth, sleep-wake, the hysteresis of thought-perception, have evolved in a certain holistic relation. If we were to adjust one little aspect of our breathing rhythm, for ex., all those forces would then stand in a different relation to one another. So perhaps it would have been more appropriate for me to compare the inner bodily liminal space to an image of all the other nested rhythms we speak of. In esoteric science, investigating the microcosm of the human body with higher consciousness really brings us to all the Macrocosmic forces as well. Imagination awakens us within the etheric, Inspiration within the astral, and Intuition within the Ego-"I" force itself. 

In terms of the redemptive principle, modern spiritual training allows us to attract the WFT forces of the liminal spaces, which we are normally asleep to, more into waking consciousness, or conversely to expand the strength of our waking consciousness into the liminal spaces, and thereby 'speed up' the evolutionary perfection of our whole organism, which would normally unfold over much longer rhythmic cycles if left to its own accord. For ex., in the first stage of the liminal space after death we journey through what is known as 'Kamaloka', where we purify the lower astral nature of its sensuous desires, confronting that nature as objective forces from the inner experiential perspective of how they have impressed themselves into the world and other people around us. Steiner gives us the evening reverse memory-review exercise as a means of attenuating our consciousness more to this stage of the post-death liminal space. Of course it won't be experienced with nearly the same intensity, but it serves as a concrete preparation which can actually minimize the time spent in Kamaloka before ascending to higher planes. That time of purification is not only for our own localized benefit, but that of the entire Earthly organism. What we consciously work on with our moral forces between death-rebirth, in concert with the higher hierarchies, is what makes all redemptive evolution of the Earthly kingdoms possible. 

Keep in mind these are only very crude and broad outlines of the principles which will aid us when we delve into the details of spiritual scientific research. Without the former (which are much more effectively presented through Cleric's illustrations), and the complementary exercises for strengthening thhe force of our will-thinking, the latter will seem like a tangled mess of abstract concepts for an unnecessarily long period of time, if not indefinitely. But eventually we do need to journey into that detailed research to flesh out our holistic intuition. This way we are not only reading the content as abstract details which were developed independently of us, but as more conscious reflections of the Wisdom we already possess within the depths of our being, simply being articulated in various symbolic forms.

Thanks once again, Ashvin.
If you don’t already, you should know that what you’ve been sharing in your last couple of posts in this thread fits/shapes very well the line of my reflections and so it’s particularly helpful. I hope everyone else reading can get the same value, especially Anthony, and Mike. Indeed, I don’t understand the meaning of “elasticity” of the physical body, as referred to in the quote, and how it fits in the microcosmic reflection (analogy) it is. What I can do for now is to pinpoint that for myself, so that I can remember it highlights one of the various directions towards which I have to weave new portions of ‘the blanket’.


One question. I don’t see how to go from this: “all we perceive in space, including our own bodily organism, is the nested and superimposed time-rhythms” to this: “it would have been more appropriate for me to compare the inner bodily liminal space to an image of all the other nested rhythms”. Could you please reformulate?

Keep in mind these are only very crude and broad outlines of the principles which will aid us when we delve into the details of spiritual scientific research. Without the former (which are much more effectively presented through Cleric's illustrations), and the complementary exercises for strengthening the force of our will-thinking, the latter will seem like a tangled mess of abstract concepts for an unnecessarily long period of time, if not indefinitely.

Yes, I understand this is the right sequence to follow, in order to progress and realize things. I will admit I have experienced some level of disbelief, when loosely hearing/reading about certain complex hierarchies of being, their very precise characteristics, etc. Not that I'm actively exploring those lectures, but when I have come across anything along these lines, it has felt very fantastical, or whimsical. But I also realize why it is so. I haven’t attuned my understanding enough. I don’t have a wide enough 'helicopter view' at the moment.

[AshvinP]

Thanks once again, Ashvin.
If you don’t already, you should know that what you’ve been sharing in your last couple of posts in this thread fits/shapes very well the line of my reflections and so it’s particularly helpful. I hope everyone else reading can get the same value, especially Anthony, and Mike. Indeed, I don’t understand the meaning of “elasticity” of the physical body, as referred to in the quote, and how it fits in the microcosmic reflection (analogy) it is. What I can do for now is to pinpoint that for myself, so that I can remember it highlights one of the various directions towards which I have to weave new portions of ‘the blanket’.


One question. I don’t see how to go from this: “all we perceive in space, including our own bodily organism, is the nested and superimposed time-rhythms” to this: “it would have been more appropriate for me to compare the inner bodily liminal space to an image of all the other nested rhythms”. Could you please reformulate?

Keep in mind these are only very crude and broad outlines of the principles which will aid us when we delve into the details of spiritual scientific research. Without the former (which are much more effectively presented through Cleric's illustrations), and the complementary exercises for strengthening the force of our will-thinking, the latter will seem like a tangled mess of abstract concepts for an unnecessarily long period of time, if not indefinitely.

Yes, I understand this is the right sequence to follow, in order to progress and realize things. I will admit I have experienced some level of disbelief, when loosely hearing/reading about certain complex hierarchies of being, their very precise characteristics, etc. Not that I'm actively exploring those lectures, but when I have come across anything along these lines, it has felt very fantastical, or whimsical. But I also realize why it is so. I haven’t attuned my understanding enough. I don’t have a wide enough 'helicopter view' at the moment.

I'm glad it has been helpful, Federica.

I am unclear on the 'elasticity of the physical body' as well. Usually that word is more associated with the higher bodies which conform themselves to the less pliable physical form. I generally do the same thing in such situations - just make a mental question mark and move on. The seeming discrepancies always resolve themselves in one way or another. Sometimes there are translation errors as well, but I don't think that's the case here.

I think the key point is that our physical body encases the more subtle bodies and modulates our ego-activity through the physical senses, thereby giving us a feeling of being a unified entity in a spatial location. However we are actually much more distributed across the elemental spectrum with our bodily organism, situated more in temporal rhythms, woven out of many varied beings. This becomes experiential knowledge when our ego-activity is able to know itself through the astral senses as well. What we see outspread in the kingdoms of Nature are our own 'past' stages of evolution which exist simultaneously with our present and are always working into that 'lightness of now' from the 'dark' subconscious in the form of life processes, instincts, drives, passions, conditioned thoughts-memories, etc. The 'future' also works into the now as supra-sensory, archetypal forces i.e. our ideas-ideals. We redeem the 'past' by bringing more of the 'future' forces into our cognitive aperture, the lightness of now. 

Notice how there are no free-floating abstractions with this understanding. Everything we call lower drives, instincts, etc. refers to spiritual beings, as well as what we call justice, humility, gratitude, faith, etc. These are beings with intentional agency through which our current sense of "I" is woven, and likewise their sense of "I" is woven from the interference of all beings. We became an "I", at the individual and collective scale,  when we were awakened to ourselves, very dimly at first, as a marriage of the elementary and archetypal forces which stand in polar relation. That is when we can start allowing the higher ideas-ideals inflow our lower soul-life and thereby begin the process of purification-perfection. The main difference is that the archetypal beings are experientially awakened to this interference and therefore do not confuse themselves for self-enclosed entities as we normally do. We can continue the perfection process and evolve into the archetypal beings if we become more livingly conscious of how this symphonic orchestration of beings is always making our current experience possible. 

One question. I don’t see how to go from this: “all we perceive in space, including our own bodily organism, is the nested and superimposed time-rhythms” to this: “it would have been more appropriate for me to compare the inner bodily liminal space to an image of all the other nested rhythms”. Could you please reformulate?

We can ask here, what is an image? Basically it is the outer physiognomy of the TFW forces which unfold through the nested temporal rhythms. If we come across a person with a smile on their face, we say that is the outer physiognomy of their inner feeling-life. We can't imagine a free-floating smile detached from any inner experiential activity - then it wouldn't be a 'smile' or have any meaning to us. So when we perceive the smile, we are also perceiving the inner activity itself. The same applies to all sensory images and processes located in space. We can say our spatial percepts are the outer physiognomy of inner concepts, our concepts the physiognomy of imaginations, imaginations of inspirations, inspirations of intuitions. Likewise, this relation holds for the physical to the etheric, etheric to astral, astral to Ego. These are the SS labels for the nested, superimposed rhythms which structure our current experience through our body-soul-spirit organism and which we objectify in space with our normal waking consciousness (there are even higher rhythms which are not really accessible to higher cognition at our current stage of evolution). 

I will admit I have experienced some level of disbelief, when loosely hearing/reading about certain complex hierarchies of being, their very precise characteristics, etc.

That's a very understable reaction. It helps to keep in mind that we exist with the higher hierarchies (and the lower life waves which are perceptible to us) as members of an evolving Cosmic organism. Every cell, tissue, organ, system of the organism has its function, its task to complete, its relation to the other parts of the organism, etc. None of them can exist as isolated entities - they can only be what they are at any given moment in relation to all other aspects of the organism. Even what we know as the various nested rhythmic periods of evolution - planetary incarnations, rounds, globes, epochs, cultural epochs - are the manifested activity of the higher hierarchies and the tasks they were given to fulfill. Everything phenomenal, including Time itself, is the manifestation of archetypal WFT activity which we have dimly awakened to in our "human" stage. Consider the following excerpt from his lectures on the Genesis account of the 'days' of creation.

There is a passage in the Genesis account which has been a veritable stumbling-block to all the commentators, because for centuries they have completely ignored what occult investigation has had to say about the real meaning of the words with which our Bible opens. If you are at all familiar with modern Biblical criticism, you will know what difficulty this point has caused the commentators. There is a sentence in Genesis which is rendered And God divided the light from the darkness, and it is then made to appear that light and darkness alternated. I shall come back again to a closer examination of the words. For the time being I will make use of a translation into modern speech — it is not correct, and I am only using it provisionally. At a certain point it says: And the evening and the morning were the first day. And further: And God called the light Day. This is a real stumbling-block for the world of letters! What then is a “day” of creation? The naive intellect regards a day as lasting twenty-four hours, as something which alternates between light and darkness, as does our day, during which we wake and sleep. Now of course you all know how much scorn has been heaped upon this naive idea of the creation of the world in seven such days. You perhaps also know how much labour — how much fruitless labour-has been applied to the task of identifying the seven days of creation with longer or shorter periods — geological epochs and so on — so as to make a “day” of creation signify some longer period of time.
...
What then is the meaning of the word yom, which is usually translated as “day”? Only those can form a judgment about this who are able to transport themselves in feeling, in attitude of soul, into ancient methods of naming things. The process of nomenclature in ancient times needed quite a different kind of feeling from what we have today. To avoid too great a shock, let us take it step by step. Let me first draw your attention to a doctrine held by the Gnostics. They spoke of spiritual powers who played a part in our existence, who entered successively into the development of our existence, and these powers, these Beings, they called Aeons. By these Aeons they do not mean periods of time, but Beings. They mean that a first Aeon acts, and, having executed the work of which he is capable, is succeeded by a second Aeon, and after the second has exhausted his capacities, a third takes over, and so on. When the Gnostics spoke of Aeons, they meant Beings guiding development in succession, one taking over from another. It was only very much later that the purely abstract concept of time was associated with the word “Aeon.” Aeon is a Being, a living entity. And just as “Aeon” expresses “living entity,” so too does the Hebrew word yom. It has nothing to do with a merely abstract designation of time, but conveys the quality of being. Yom is a Being. And when one is dealing with seven such yamim following one another, one is dealing with seven consecutive Beings or groups of Beings.

[AshvinP]

I have to say, the potential of Sora to demolish the incentive for the pursuit of sense-free thinking is quite alarming, especially once it goes beyond minute-long videos.

We’re teaching AI to understand and simulate the physical world in motion, with the goal of training models that help people solve problems that require real-world interaction.

Introducing Sora, our text-to-video model. Sora can generate videos up to a minute long while maintaining visual quality and adherence to the user’s prompt.

Here is a helpful video that explains the technology, although maybe Cleric could weigh in with more technical insight about what's possible and not possible.





Through the natural course of spiritual evolution, the ever-flattening, repetitive, and passively absorbed sensory spectrum would stimulate people to look within for the curvature of imaginative ideas and experiences in which the soul could be spiritually active. Yet now we are devising technology to not only extend our visual stimulation through videos and games developed by others, such as VR, but to make ourselves feel active in the process as well. The guy in the video above points to various potential uses of this technology that would allow for endless stimulation in this respect. This will only make it that much harder for people to feel something is off with the normal misaligned course of sensory life and that an inward course-correction is needed.

On the other hand... the potential for using it to come up with helpful video metaphors for our spiritual existence seems equally great. I already have a few ideas!

Thoughts?

(and yes I am aware what happens when we add a "t" )

[Federica]

Thoughts?

This technology seems to me closely connected to a quantum understanding of reality, that is, a finer DoF field for the intellect to move into, compared to deterministic, collapsed thinking patterns. As Cleric said, this is the current direction of scientific progression:

Gradually we’ll learn to think about reality not in terms of what it is and what it is made of, but in terms of what it could be. In other words, reality is not a fixed arena where elements can exist and various permutations but any existential state will be seen only as an instance filtered of the infinite potential of what existence could be.

Now, Sora seems to me like the Ahrimanic armed phalanx, so to speak, of a twofold evolving intellect - the intellect in the process of refining its self-characterization. On the one hand, this refinement lends itself to the possibility of spiritualization, closer to the point of turning the ray of inquiry within (in the way described by Cleric in the Symphony of Minds thread). At the same time, the refinement is sabotaged and literally smashed back into collapse on the sensory spectrum, through a technology such as this one. When Sora, for example, is able to picture out infinite eventlines that could result in a given end-picture (as described in the video you shared) we are robbed of the inner experience of "sensing how our inner life continually morphs through superimposed images" as, for example, in the illustration below:

It can be of great value when we think intellectually, if we try to feel what soul subconscious images we are really describing. If we try to do this we’ll see that our intellect and logical thinking as a whole are not some stratum of existence that stays in isolation from everything else. For example, we may think: “I'm getting late for the plane and this cab driver is not helping! Maybe if I tell him to take the shortcut through 6th avenue?” Such inner narrations go on most of the time. But if we try to examine our inner life, we can convince ourselves that they are only encodings of soul imagery. For example, when we realize that we’re late, we live in the image of approaching the airport and seeing how the plane flies away. Then we live in the image of going through another road which we intuitively feel will take less time. Then we live in the image of speaking to the driver and maybe how he gets angry because he doesn’t like to be told how to do his job.

It is really amazing but through our meditative efforts these experiences become completely real. We begin to sense how our inner life continually morphs through such superimposed images and we instinctively steer through them according to our intuitive orientation. All our intellectual thinking is simply the semi-automatic encoding process which collapses these images into liner sequences of thoughts. Our soul, in the most literal sense, continuously dreams these images. If the support of our physical body was to be suddenly taken away, then any of these images could turn into a dream line.

In this sense, Sora is comparable to an armed raid that threatens to hijack man's chances on the brink of recognizing that "the intellect is only an octave of spiritual activity". At this crucial moment in time, when the upper frontier of the octave is being approached, Sora is hijacking the possibility of trespassing that frontier. Sor-Ah-riman are telling us: “You poor little man, you thought you would finally gain a chance to play with these fields of potential, mathematically, and now even pictorially. Hell no.” So they snatch the voluminous toy from our thinking hands and smash it flat on the sensory floor again, under our captivated eyes.

[Federica]

On the other hand... the potential for using it to come up with helpful video metaphors for our spiritual existence seems equally great. I already have a few ideas!

Thoughts?

Ashvin,

With the caveat that I don’t know what concrete application you are thinking about, I am doubtful about the helpfulness, and even the safety, of possible video metaphors in Sora.

In general I always thought that animations could be a great way to convey ideas - spiritual scientific ideas in particular. But Sora is different. Here the animation is exponentially more immersive and deceivingly self-actualized. I actually believe, these would not be true metaphors, but more like the annihilation of a metaphor. A metaphor is a linguistic-symbolic stimulus for active, pictorial thinking to orient the probing of the existential constraints. But in this sort of metaphoric self-inputted video interferences, passive thinking is highly encouraged, while the illusion is given that one is actively working, in first-person, free from the deterministic flow. It’s highly deceptive, and the deception is powerful, because it leverages the area of experience where we are most vulnerable to deception and already heavily attracted to - the sensory spectrum. If we unconsciously buy into the ready-made conclusing that feedback from constraints, as we probe the fields of potential, is sensory, then the full-body and full-soul pictorial capacities would be atrophyzed even more.

By contrast, traditional image or video metaphors are different, like for example, the Truman show, as a metaphor for our modern condition of consciousness, or the imaged metaphors regularly used in the posts and essays on this forum. Those are still linguistic in a sense. We are presented with symbols of encoded meaning. Then we have to actively decipher them. The metaphor is an invitation that we have to seize by executing related gestures in first-person (and even in these harmless metaphors a warning against modeling approach is beneficial, as you and Cleric often say).

But Sora seems a very different type of tool. We feel active, we feel that we are operating our own experiential flows from wthin, but if we are not already strong in our phenomenological habits, the feeble pictorial capacities could suffer full amputation. As I have recently read somewhere, any technology can be seen as correlated with amputation of a corresponding human capacity. With this text-to-video technology, unless we consider that people are already amputated in their pictorial abilities - probably an extreme judgment - the risk of using it pedagogically for spiritual development is that the ones who would need pedagogical aid the most, are precisely the ones who would be the most exposed to deception, while those who could manage to consciously resist it, actually don’t need an entry-level aid such as provided by this tool (as far as I can imagine).

[AshvinP]

On the other hand... the potential for using it to come up with helpful video metaphors for our spiritual existence seems equally great. I already have a few ideas!

Thoughts?

Ashvin,

With the caveat that I don’t know what concrete application you are thinking about, I am doubtful about the helpfulness, and even the safety, of possible video metaphors in Sora.

In general I always thought that animations could be a great way to convey ideas - spiritual scientific ideas in particular. But Sora is different. Here the animation is exponentially more immersive and deceivingly self-actualized. I actually believe, these would not be true metaphors, but more like the annihilation of a metaphor. A metaphor is a linguistic-symbolic stimulus for active, pictorial thinking to orient the probing of the existential constraints. But in this sort of metaphoric self-inputted video interferences, passive thinking is highly encouraged, while the illusion is given that one is actively working, in first-person, free from the deterministic flow. It’s highly deceptive, and the deception is powerful, because it leverages the area of experience where we are most vulnerable to deception and already heavily attracted to - the sensory spectrum. If we unconsciously buy into the ready-made conclusing that feedback from constraints, as we probe the fields of potential, is sensory, then the full-body and full-soul pictorial capacities would be atrophyzed even more.

By contrast, traditional image or video metaphors are different, like for example, the Truman show, as a metaphor for our modern condition of consciousness, or the imaged metaphors regularly used in the posts and essays on this forum. Those are still linguistic in a sense. We are presented with symbols of encoded meaning. Then we have to actively decipher them. The metaphor is an invitation that we have to seize by executing related gestures in first-person (and even in these harmless metaphors a warning against modeling approach is beneficial, as you and Cleric often say).

But Sora seems a very different type of tool. We feel active, we feel that we are operating our own experiential flows from wthin, but if we are not already strong in our phenomenological habits, the feeble pictorial capacities could suffer full amputation. As I have recently read somewhere, any technology can be seen as correlated with amputation of a corresponding human capacity. With this text-to-video technology, unless we consider that people are already amputated in their pictorial abilities - probably an extreme judgment - the risk of using it pedagogically for spiritual development is that the ones who would need pedagogical aid the most, are precisely the ones who would be the most exposed to deception, while those who could manage to consciously resist it, actually don’t need an entry-level aid such as provided by this tool (as far as I can imagine).

These are good points, Federica. I think you are correct that the videos could act as potent hooks for the intellect to remain passive and fail to seek the inner depth to which the sensory metaphor is pointing. In that sense, they would need to be used sparingly, for limited purposes, and with copious accompanying reasoning of its intended inner symbolism.

At this point, I think it could only be useful for giving concrete examples of certain first-person spiritual activity. For ex., we could compare some situations. Cleric's latest essay gives the following metaphor:

Now the World states (the circular lattices) represent our moment-by-moment perspectival experience of existence. These frames contain our thoughts about the model of reality (the movie strip frames) just like a line of dialog in the movie spans over several frames. This, however, leads to a recursive paradox because if we remember the blind spot, everything that we tried to overcome, applies to our present situation too. The picture above is still only a mental image in our mind (we may draw a thought-bubble around it). So, it seems that we can make mental models for our experience of existence, but these always remain mere thoughts about some theoretical existence. If we try to overcome the blind spot and capture in the model our real-time thinking process which thinks the model, we feel like a dog chasing its tail. Our thinking is like a hand that tries to draw a picture of ‘itself drawing a picture of ‘itself drawing a picture of itself ‘…’ ’ ’, and so on in an infinite recursion.

Could this be supplemented by a simple video illustrating this recursive principle? I don't know, it is probably a bit redundant in this case and the static image of recursive drawing or the image of "dog chasing its tail" is more helpful. As you say, these invite us to become more active with our inner gestures and discern the reality the metaphor is pointing to, whereas the videos would be more of a passive distraction that hooks the intellect.

Actually, as I think through other potential applications, they all have similar shortcomings that probably outweigh the benefits. So it seems you are right and I was overestimating the metaphorical utility

The only thing I can think of where it could be useful is if the metaphor involved a sequence of events and the vivid visual transformation between the events was important to emphasize for some reason. For ex. a metaphor about how normal horizontal thinking is like moving through a convoluted maze while vertical thinking allows one to gain a higher vantage point that encompasses the maze in its archetypal patterns.