Thanks for opening the thread, Ashvin. Although the phenomenological background is familiar, this rendition clearly has novelty to it. It has inspired me with some reflections on cognition. I thought I would write a short commentary at first, but the commentary has somehow grown out of control, and now it looks like a kind of slow phenomenology
A good consolidation exercise for me, certainly boring for those who are familiar with the topic. I’m still posting it, in case even only one person might find it useful.
Max Leyf wrote:
The above describes the process of cognition, which ordinarily only becomes conscious in the product of knowledge and not in the process.
COGNITIVE PRODUCT VERSUS COGNITIVE PROCESS
This notion that the
product of cognition - we usually call it knowledge - is only the output of a whole
process of cognizing-grasping-knowing reality, is key, I believe, and very helpful. It allows us to really ponder that we set in motion a specific cognitive process - that we commonly ignore - in order to understand what is, and the only cognitive element we are conscious of is the output of that process: thoughts, as commonly intended. Every formed thought we become aware of, exists as output - or byproduct - of unconsciously operated cognitive operations. It’s a process that secretes thought-output, which then switches on our conscious attention. So we awaken in the perception of the thought-output (we perceive our thoughts) only after they have reached down to the world of senses, and not as they unfold within the cognitive process. This is despite the fact that we ourselves have full responsibility for the unfolding.
So the first point that becomes extra-clear reading the essay is that human cognition is the unaware designer and operator of a sort of ‘secret industrial facility’ that continually precipitates thoughts down into the level where they become sensible to us.
This process of cognition we unconsciously operate, we call
thinking. That’s different from the common use of the word “thinking”, generally referred to the act of taking stock of sequences of thoughts appearing to our consciousness, within or without the framework of some guiding intention. Here the standard meaning is extended. First, the word needs to cover not only the sequence of thought-outputs, but also, and especially, the usually unconscious process of thinking which secretes them. Second, this human unconscious unfolding that we are calling thinking is a sub-activity of a larger-than-human thinking activity, in which human thinking is encompassed. In other words, Thinking is a cosmic activity, process, unfolding, or becoming, of which human thinking is only one particular rendition. Thinking is systemic cosmic activity. In its human version in particular, as it's unconsciously performed, it releases a byproduct of perceptible thoughts. In this track of precipitated material, thoughts are both perceptible and congealed, inert, static. Actually, it’s only because they have solidified that they're perceptible/perceived. And it’s only because they are perceived that they have to be congealed. They are not anymore dynamic unfolding, but inert byproducts of that unfolding, congealed in time. As perceptible, they can’t evolve anymore, we can only take them or leave them. It’s as if perception had forced us to ‘take a picture’ and single it out of the dynamic flow of thinking. As an analogy, we could surely put lots of time-stamped pictures in sequence and make a film, with an appearance of dynamic unfolding, but the film will never be the real thing, only a patched-together reflection of the real experience. In this sense, thoughts are byproducts, time-rigid pictures fallen out of a dynamic thinking flow.
Still, there’s nothing wrong in itself with this functioning of our ‘cognitive facility’. Our incarnate human nature requires it: we have to make the thought-pictures fall, if we want to perceive them as we usually do in the physical world. There’s no other way around, because perception (in this case, perception of our thoughts) is fragmentation. Perception only can happen if we (unconsciously) sacrifice the dynamics of our thinking activity to perceive/cognize thoughts, and generate
knowledge. So the building blocks of “human knowledge” as commonly intended are exactly that, perceived/congealed thoughts. We can find unlimited amounts of them everywhere in the perceptual world, as we take a book out of the shelf and start reading, as we hear a presenter holding a lecture, or turn inside and search for our latest thoughts, etcetera. I think it’s helpful to see the thoughts, a little provocatively, as the
waste product of thinking, similar to the waste generated by an industrial operation. The waste products are not the reason for the existence of the facility, they are not at the core of the transformational process operated in the plant. Rather, they are expressed, precipitated out of it, as a sub-optimum, but inevitable productive phase. Here it's not meant that human thoughts are a plague. Only that it may be useful to provisionally push our reasoning in the direction of the metaphor, imagining for a moment standard knowledge (expressed thought-pictures) as waste product of human thinking activity - an inevitable result of what we do, in our human form, with the cosmic, universal activity of Thinking. As a consequence, this 'inevitable result' should be treated carefully. First, we shouldn’t confuse it for the end product, or destination, of our cognitive activity, supposed to
completely fulfill our quest for truth. Second, we should look for ways to redeem it, and reintegrate it in the process it precipitated from, just as we look for ways to recycle industrial waste back into the productive/creative cycle, so as to regain it.
To summarize, Thinking is neither in our brain, nor in our own consciousness. Rather, our consciousness and brain are some of the ways/places where the universal, cosmic thinking force, or activity, finds expression. Thinking is larger than man. Thoughts are smaller. Thoughts are what commonly happens to Thinking, when it takes the ways of human cognition, flowing in the form of the human consciousness, soul, and brain. Thinking is not one of the various human activities. Rather, we humans are one of the various expressions of it. Thinking (spirit) is the creating (dynamic) principle of the universe (cosmos) in which we are included, and to which we contribute. It’s the constitutive principle of reality - reality as it is, not as we normally know it, in its perceptual, time-rigid manifestations. This is hard to make sense of, and maybe the following image can help. Thinking is like
the glue of reality as it is, a glue that gives the Cosmos unity without congealing - sort of an elastic glue that mobilizes within the limits of certain laws - maybe similar to what energy is in the physical plane.
This being said, it’s only by exploring how our contribution to the cosmic creative process of reality plays out in us humans, that we can grow in the
realization (not knowledge) of the true, expansive nature of Thinking. Exploring our contribution phenomenologically, we come to the key realization that we are so perception-oriented that we get stuck in all the singular instances of the perceptual flow. We can move from one thought to the next, indeed, but jerkily. We jump from one thought-printout to the next, lacking the awareness of how they are elastically glued together, lacking the awareness of the unity granted by the medium. And we get so intoxicated by the dominance and density of perception, that we don’t even see how we are dragged down in fragmentation, moving in fits and starts, forced to sacrifice the direct realization of the fluid, unitary, creative, true nature of reality. We get instantly intoxicated by the physical world and its time-bound perceptions, and we assume that’s reality. In truth, by getting sucked into perceptions - including the perception of our thoughts - and unless we aim and manage to regain/recycle our thought-pictures into our thinking process, and then into Thinking at large, we exclude the possibility of cognizing reality as it truly is.
IN HIGHER COGNITION, KNOWING = DOING = BEING
The next key point is, as we slowly realize how our typical way of cognizing reality goes - as we put effort in grasping this phenomenology, making the unconscious conscious - we are not just thinking in the common sense. We are also
making something happen. We are thinking, and also
acting. This is another difficult junction. As long as we manipulate thoughts the standard way - without realizing that they’re what thinking leaves behind as byproduct of its unfolding - we are stuck in the physical plane, and our thoughts only exist as replicas of whatever they try to grasp. They are not the thing itself, they are the representation of the thing. That’s how we make them. We make them in such a way that we can look at them as time-stamped representations, to describe objects in a given moment, or to model the production of something new. Commonly, we assemble our thoughts as manuals for how to read and modify the physical plane.
However, when we outgrow our perceptual existence to ascend and flow into the creative, thinking/spiritual process of reality - when we move our core directly into the force from which the physical plane manifests/becomes perceptible to us, there is no way to do so only as an “understanding” or a “cognition”, because it’s an act of flowing with our entire being, moving our core into the creative process of reality itself. Hence,
we write off the duality between the thing to be known, and cognition that knows it. So the reintegration of percepts and concepts is the beginning of the ascension into reality’s generating engine itself. We start to merge the planes, physical and ideal. Grasping/understanding and acting/happening/creating start to overlap, until they will eventually coincide. In other words, we are quitting the space of replicas. More and more, “understanding” will equal something immediate and spaceless, rather than “wrapping our minds around something”, pasting our rigid thoughts on phenomena the best we can, in order to copy their form, in order to build a replicating model to stock our library. Instead, the two planes - the perceptual and the beyond-perceptual - are realized as one. They must come to unity, as we restore the unity of idea and perception. Inside the unitary creative engine itself, under-standing and cognizing won’t mean anything familiar anymore. We could find out that, at the spiritual level, cognition is indissociable from activity/creation, not as two things bound together, but as one thing that can’t be torn apart in two. Higher cognition must be activity/creation. Not creation of material stuff, but ideation of meaning at the level of the unitary plane of what is, where knowing equals doing, equals being.
Side note: In line with the above, I wonder if the word “cognition” - perfect to describe the human process of knowing, and its product-knowledge - is appropriate to “higher cognition”. Because when we say “cognition”, we instantly imagine
otherness, and to embrace that otherness across some mental
space, coming from the side, from underneath, or from whatever other place. So we are stuck in a thought of “grasping”. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t seem the most helpful to describe expansion in the activities of the spiritual realm, when we “
restore the fullness of reality”. I would maybe prefer “thinking”, “spiritual activity”, or “spiritualizing” (I know I formerly said I disliked the verb “spiritualize”, I have changed my mind). To me, “cognition” in “higher cognition” sounds like a temporary placeholder. We start the navigation on the raft of cognition, but we already prepare to switch gears further on.
CREATIVE ENGINE OF REALITY
The path begins when we start realizing the unconscious process of human thinking with the intention of navigating it backwards. Our human cognition can be extended to encompass that process, if we put the effort and activate our will in that direction. In the end, we will come to infuse ourselves with the organizing cosmic principle of Thinking substance of reality, that holds it together as one, and lawfully mobilizes it at the same time.
Reality is both held together and dynamized
through Thinking (Thinking realizes it)
by Thinking (Thinking makes it) and
as Thinking (Thinking is it). So to realize something of this thinking nature (spiritual nature) simultaneously means
getting it, willing it, and being it. There can’t be any sense in which we “understand” it while remaining separate from it, while not becoming it. We have to flow with all our thinking being into it, because ideational activity is the only activity. The closer we come to this spiritual knowing-willing-being, the more we are not just apprehending, taking hold of thoughts. Molding thought-replicas and seizing stuff is the nature of perception, not thinking. The nature of
Thinking is lawful-willful creation. Attaining the creative engine, we are realizing the process of reality. “To realize” is actually a good word, meaning getting it and making it real, thus being it, directly as living thinking. These are not separate activities, they’re one thing that we try to express with our available perceptual vocabulary that can either grasp, or do, or be. But when we become
integral to the engine, there is no either or, it’s all one. Thinking is the creative principle of the cosmos, so when we really see it, it’s because we are doing it (willing it) hence we are it. It is creation, and this is the
meaning of living thinking. There is no reflecting objects from the side, from a distance, from a subjective perspective, forming thought sequences. When we undo the sacrifice of reality on the altar of perception, we redeem the human perspective in which we keep understanding, willing, and being forcefully segmented with the forceps of perception, and we are sucked back into the unity of it all.
SPACE AS INTELLECTUALIZED TIME
Through phenomenology, we have seen that human cognition unconsciously breaks the seal of reality, tears apart its oneness, robs its percepts, and runs away with them, to dwell and rest in the Earthly lands of perception. Then we spend the rest of our efforts asking “Who am I”, trying to bridge that self-created gap and satisfy our thirst for the spiritual.
Most generally, it manifests as a
thirst for knowledge, an impulse to embrace the truth of reality again. But our first attempts are weak. In standard cognition, we attempt to know reality by throwing at perceptions the embracing grasp of perceptual thoughts. We hope to revive-explain our sensory perceptions or the world - the
corpse of reality, that we kill by sucking its time-blood out of it - by patching them together with the
corpse of thinking (precipitated thought-output). But perceptions, in order to be detoxified or redeemed, would need to be re-acted back into the flow they come from, rather than matched and patched with other perceptions. In our naive attempt to know the fullness of reality, we endlessly try to
grasp perception with perception. But how can we go anywhere beyond perception in this way?
Another way to say it: Our true self lives in the pure reality of undivided ideas and concepts. But as incarnated beings, we surrender to a human impulse to “make ours”, to divide, and to possess, no matter how minuscule our catch might be, and even if it means to cut us off of unity and fall in duality. The urge to take hold of time-rigid thought-pictures one at a time, is stronger. So to pursue perception, we have to break the time coherence of the ideational flow of reality, and we extract static fragments from it. To make them fully ours, we have to
think them apart from the time flow, and park them “elsewhere”. Hence we conceive space and use it as a
reservoir to accommodate our perceptual possessions. This is how we have fallen into an all-perceptual domain expressed in space, where we harbor the perceptual fall-outs we precipitate out of the time flow. The other way to say it is that
space is intellectualized time.
In short, in space, our existence abides by perceptions as the dominant mode of experience. What is sacrificed in the process is the time-structure that sustains the ideational unity as endlessly creative unfolding. In other words, space is an endless
interruption of the creative time-flow. The interruption is of intellectual nature: the intellect wants to possess time-rigid fragments of reality as knowledge, so it snaps them off of the creative flow of what is, and parks them in parallel reservoirs that stand in the way of the creative time flow.
The only way out is to
reverse-engineer our standard process of cognition. We can’t patch dead ends back together. We have to walk backwards and through the process of standard cognition, and
consciously re-act it. We need to creatively (willingly) learn-unlearn the process, then do-undo the break, the sacrifice of full reality. We have to die to the one-sided senses, and be born again in the flow of cosmic living thinking. The way back home is not a loop, it’s an inversion. We need to inflow the broken ends with the energy of space-free, time-continuous thinking.
NUCLEAR PLANT METAPHOR
Another way to see it: can we undo a thought? Obviously not. Once the byproduct has fallen out of the creative engine, precipitated into the realm of perceptions, it’s too late. The thought is manifested and we can’t take it back. We can only
redeem it. So undoing the sacrifice of reality can only mean
entering the generating engine from which our standard cognition diverges, and see that, while the split is integral to our incarnate nature and will continue to happen, we can learn to continuously reverse it as it happens. We can willingly aim to progressively merge the two sides, asymptotically ascending to the creative thinking force itself.
Hence we come to realize that
the telos our cognition is so eager to attain is neither its human thought-output, nor the human cognitive process that drives us from unity to fragmentation (although those are phases that need to be traversed on our way back). The telos of cognition is above and beyond our human idea of knowledge and knowing. And
our thirst for knowledge is truly a thirst for re-acting our spiritual unity with the cosmos, through reintegration of our true self. This could be the real, future-oriented meaning of knowledge, knowing, cognition.
Back to the industrial plant metaphor, we could imagine a nuclear plant where we hit
U, cosmic Unity, with
N, the neuron of our thirst for knowledge. As we break
U, we fall out of unity and are dragged into the world of senses, where
P, the products of fission we obtain, are perceptions,
perceptual fragments: precipitated sense percepts and thought-pictures. The reaction is somewhat self-sustained, as we continue to use our thought-pictures as fuel for further interaction with percepts. We aim to extract knowledge from the process of chain reaction, and to some extent the creative energy (
T, thinking) encapsulated in U, reflects and warms us up along the way, but the perceptual fragments (P) repel each other as they fall, and we can’t really patch them back together, we can’t make them react into T energy again. Eventually the process exhausts itself, and we are left with waste, thought-products that require careful handling.
Now, a huge evolutionary advance would happen if we could find a way to regain the waste products back into the production cycle. As soon as thoughts are precipitated we have to redeem them by infusing the process in reverse with the light of consciousness. Even better, if we could asymptotically shrink the production cycle more and more (close the hysteresis) to the point that the waste almost doesn’t need to be expelled and reintegrated, but is retained and reworked from within the process.
If the innovation (evolution) were to be refined to perfection, no fissive-cognitive process would be necessary anymore as we would know how to attain the nuclear energy (thinking) potential directly in U (cosmic unity) without any need for it to manifest as thinking fission, through the densifying process of human cognition. We would know-act-be pure thinking potential without any need to engage in any reaction, to release any waste. Thinking energy would not need to be broken down and fall into thought-pictures and their brain reflections, and we probably would have no need to reincarnate again.
In a way, the evolutionary direction aims to reverse the thought-output of cognition back into its process of thinking, and the latter back into its living, ever creating source. In other words, the result of cognition (knowledge) will have to be undone, or redeemed, into its function, so that its object can finally become one with its subject.
This is much more concisely expressed by Aristotle: “
Cosmic thinking is thinking of thinking” which means, it only can be pure creation, being. We ourselves can and should aspire to that ideal, by redeeming the loops of manifestation, shortening any spacetime distance (knowledge, as
product of thinking) from the Source, consciously moving our whole being closer and closer to the ever creating, living activity of Spirit. The more we approach the divine source of creation that thinks itself, that creates itself, that is, the more the meanings of knowing, acting, and being merge with each other in Thinking, the perpetual, self-regenerating fountain that gives substance to the whole Cosmos.