A Phenomenology of Cognition (Max Leyf)

[Stranger]

Excellent essay, Federica, you summarized the essential points of SS eloquently, but let me comment a bit and ask some questions. From my own experience, when we advance to higher cognition, this is where we can fully and consciously experience Thinking in all its aspects of "getting it, willing it, and being it". However, with the sense perceptions and perceptions of the thoughts as the by products of lower cognition compulsively appearing in our consciousness, we do not have the direct conscious access into the "guts" of this creative process (at least, speaking for myself, I don't, do you?). I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them. The conclusion of your essay is that we should be able to "enter the generating engine" and bring and integrate it to our consciousness. This sounds very encouraging, but is there any evidence that it is actually practically possible, at least in our human form? What makes you think that it is practically possible and not just our wishful thinking? This question relates to the question I asked here.

Let's put it under a test. If anyone here would practically be able to penetrate into the guts of Thinking where the perceptions and thoughts precipitate from, then they would be able to creatively and willfully participate in this process, which means they could change the outcome of it. Practically it would mean that we could change the flow of sense perceptions in a particular creative way according to our will, for example, walk through the wall or fly out from the window. Is there any practical evidence that it is possible? Are there any Anthroposophy practitioners who could make this happen? Let's make another test: has anyone tried to penetrate into the guts of the lower-cognitive thought-creation process and actually get it under a full conscious control of lower-level thinking where we can "get all the thoughts, will them and be them", so that there are no more already precipitated thoughts popping out into our consciousness generated without conscious and creative involvement in the thinking process of their generation?

So basically, on the higher level of cognition we can creatively participate in and experience the thinking process in its full cycle. Then we extrapolate this process to the Cosmic scale and make a proposition that we likewise should be able to integrate into the layers of creative Cosmic Thinking where the sense perceptions and thoughts are generated. This is a reasonable assumption to make, but is there any experiential evidence to support it?

[Stranger]

So, adding to the above questions, I was reading this post where Cleric said:

If aspects of the world process can be experienced as mental pixels, why shouldn't it be possible that, for example, the electric currents that energize the pixels and which are undoubtedly also part of the objective world process, could themselves be experienced as unique subjective qualia?

Through proper transformation of our spiritual conduct it is possible that the currents that energize the pixels, can also become part of the subjective experience (which leads also to novel DoFs of spiritual activity). They key here is that this expansion of consciousness is not the inflation of a personal bubble where pixels reverberate but the experience of the actual objective world process of the electric currents.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue that it is not possible, I am actually honestly hope that it is possible. It definitely may be possible, there are no reasons why it may not. But that does not necessarily mean that it should be possible, unless we want to engage in wishful thinking. We need some experiential evidences in order to arrive from "may" to "should".

I get the method and the process: by developing the higher cognition we intend to integrate into the layers of Cosmic Thinking where these processes occur and make these processes subjectively experienced. My question is again: are there any experiential evidences to support this hope? We can definitely develop our higher cognition, and we should by all means, there is no question about that. But does that give us the actual access to those objective processes that precipitate our perceptions and thoughts, and if anyone claims that it does, what are the evidences to support such claim?

[Cleric K]

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to argue that it is not possible, I am actually honestly hope that it is possible. It definitely may be possible, there are no reasons why it may not. But that does not necessarily mean that it should be possible, unless we want to engage in wishful thinking. We need some experiential evidences in order to arrive from "may" to "should".

I get the method and the process: by developing the higher cognition we intend to integrate into the layers of Cosmic Thinking where these processes occur and make these processes subjectively experienced. My question is again: are there any experiential evidences to support this hope? We can definitely develop our higher cognition, and we should by all means, there is no question about that. But does that give us the actual access to those objective processes that precipitate our perceptions and thoughts, and if anyone claims that it does, what are the evidences to support such claim?

There’s no evidence to support this because such experience is nowhere to be found. There’s a misunderstanding here of what ‘higher cognition’ is. In the way you try to conceive it, it is synonymous to moving towards the periphery of reality such that we can encompass the engine of reality (which also drives our cognition) as something laid down as contents within consciousness.

This is similar to the way the materialist expects to understand his own consciousness – he imagines that his brain can be scanned and a model of it laid down in front of him. It’s obvious that the real mind that contemplates the model is still distinct from the model itself. If one would state otherwise it will be an obvious error. Yet we commit the exact same error when we imagine that we can move towards the 'nondual' periphery of pure consciousness and contemplate the engine of reality (where also the guts of the thinking self are expected to be found) laid down as some spiritual phenomena in front of us.

Federica did a great job to depict how we have to learn to flow with the World process, since we are that process. Higher cognition doesn’t consist in stepping outside this flow and comfortably observing it from the side but in developing intuitive orientation (which has depth along the orders of reality) within the perceptual totality of the flow (not only sensory perceptions).

You say:

I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them.

Isn’t it conceivable that maybe the reason you can’t progress in that direction is simply because you’re going in the quite opposite direction? And the bold text really confirms this. It seems you reach a level of contemplation of thoughts, you see them coming and going but that panorama doesn’t seem to grow any further. Pictorially speaking, it’s like in the contemplation of the thoughts you see a small aperture of the industrial process, a small window to the assembly line on which you see a sequence of thoughts coming and going over the conveyor belt. Yet you don’t see where they come from and where they go. Thus you expect that in meditation that aperture should be widened and you should be able to contemplate more of the industrial machinery.

All of this however, completely assumes that your spiritual being stands as a lateral observer of the industrial process, being very careful not to identify with the thought-parcels running on the assembly line.

After all these talks on this forum, isn’t it clear that this ‘mode’ of contemplation is the actual issue? The guts of the industrial process are not something that we de-identify from and contemplate from the side, as we would examine an engine. In fact we have to feel fully responsible for a thought-parcel, to feel creatively involved with it. We understand something of the guts not by detaching from them but by being them, by exploring their dynamics and constraints from within.

It’s as if we believe that we can gain true insight into our arm by quietly contemplating it and being careful not to identify with it. That’s fine, we surely don’t have to identify with the arm but we can only know it in the true sense if we experience the will that can move it and all the accompanying sensations. The inner experience of the degrees of freedom of that will and the creative possibilities, tell us things which we can never know if we only contemplate the arm.

It’s similar with thinking. The spiritual guts are not to be found as some objective images in our consciousness but as the living exploration of our thinking and imaginative flow – their degrees of freedom, how that flow is shaped by our ideas, preferences, sympathies and antipathies and even higher order aspects of reality. We can't see how thoughts are produced but we have to become the process that wilfully produces them (while being constrained in certain ways). Of course, then we can express that living be-ing-the-process into images but we don't confuse these images for the real spiritual process, which we know in a more intimate way by knowing our intuitive movements through it.

So when you say that you have adapted some of the exercises and made them more integral, it basically means “Getting hold on and concentrating thinking activity is way too limiting for my taste. I’ll go straight to the essentials and expand to grasp the true nature of thoughts. I already know what thoughts are so I don’t need to spend more time playing with them. It’s time to step back and see them as part of the big picture.”

And this contains the whole reason why thinking remains as nebulous as ever. Because one has to go through thinking, to explore the creative constraints that make us think in one or another way. Thus the guts are to be found through deepening of self-knowledge. Isn’t it obvious why this goes nowhere when we imagine that we already know (or have sacrificed) all there is to know about ourselves? It’s imagined that if we don’t feel there to be any self, then we have overcome it and we’re in position to contemplate how the lower self works. But this is such an elementary mistake. The animal also doesn’t feel to have any self, does this mean that it lives in an enlightened state?

The whole problem arises when we try to understand thinking as something that is no longer ‘me’. In other words, we imagine that in the ‘nondual’ mode we have overcome the lower self that lives in thinking and we expect to see that lower self laid down as this:



Then we wonder why we see a piston or two moving but not the whole engine. It’s as simple as it could be – because we’re still the living engine.
This is the simple fact, Eugene. And the more we try to explicate it, the more it appears more complicated than it really is. It has always been about this one and the same thing in our conversations – that you try to move to the 'nondual' periphery, where you’re free from the lower self and expect to see it as an engine laid down. This however, never works out because in reality the Cosmic engine can’t be split against itself. We have to learn to be the engine. And as shocking as this will sound, we have to learn to be even the lower self. This means that we have to be able to feel fully identified with the intellectual thinking process. Our whole Divine essence should flow through it as our most intimate expression. Identified not with the thought products but with the living activity that animates them. If we think that we have outgrown such silly activities and that we now explore more integrated methods where the lower self has detached from our essential being and is to be found as an engine spread out below us, then we shouldn’t wonder why we can’t make any progress. The simple fact is that the vast majority of this engine is still in our depths, behind our blind spot. We simply blind ourselves for this fact when we imagine that we have overcome it. Then, refusing to even conceive of such a possibility, we have no other choice but blame our inability to see the full engine on external factors – genetics, global warming, the Demiurge, the communists and so on.

[AshvinP]

Noted. Yes, I'm aware that, for now, my elaborations must be at best oversimplified and uncalibrated, because of the known reasons. Here I believe I understand the thing "akin to waste" in higher cognition is phenomenologically identical to intellectual thought-pictures, only our 'distance' from the picture is negligible, or absent (we are it) therefore we are not at imminent risk of idolizing it?

Federica,

I am in no position to make detailed representations on the phenomenological experience of higher cognition, as I am only at the very first stages of developing it myself. I really use Steiner and Cleric's detailed illustrations to help my intuitive orientation towards those higher modes, especially Inspiration and Intuition, while of course pursuing them inwardly as well. For Imagination, it's safe to say that the 'waste' is not identical to intellectual thought-pictures. For one, the latter is a spatial picturing of fixed objects which transform 'frame by frame' (the congealed perceptions you speak of), while the former is much more a temporal unfolding of processes, a dynamic flux, which can be grasped holistically if we learn how to read the imagistic script. Anyway, these things will unveil themselves to us as we reverentially pursue the inner dynamics of our intuitive becoming, coupled with our outward reasoning through spiritual science.

What I write is much more about the basic principles. The perception-thinking hysteresis we find in our ordinary cognition reflects an essential polar relation throughout the entire gradient, which only becomes the hysteresis as we know it when it is 'stepped down' through the convolutions. At the much higher scales, we could say it's more akin to a sacrifice-redemption hysteresis, where Will and Ideation is of a much more deeply moral character than we are used to feeling about our own activity. We have pointed to Genesis 2 before - 'and the Elohim looked upon all that they had made, and saw that it was very good.' Or as Steiner discusses it in PoF:

There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the simultaneous contemplation of it. This is recognized even in Genesis (1, 31). Here God creates the world in the first six days, and only when it is there is any contemplation of it possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.

I realize you are well aware of this essential dynamic of our thinking experience, but I am only highlighting that it exists along the entire gradient of the nested "I" perspectives. But the huge difference being that, in our current intellectual convolution of waking consciousness, we are always at risk of splitting the hysteresis and idolizing one pole or the other.

[Stranger]

Isn’t it conceivable that maybe the reason you can’t progress in that direction is simply because you’re going in the quite opposite direction? And the bold text really confirms this. It seems you reach a level of contemplation of thoughts, you see them coming and going but that panorama doesn’t seem to grow any further. Pictorially speaking, it’s like in the contemplation of the thoughts you see a small aperture of the industrial process, a small window to the assembly line on which you see a sequence of thoughts coming and going over the conveyor belt. Yet you don’t see where they come from and where they go. Thus you expect that in meditation that aperture should be widened and you should be able to contemplate more of the industrial machinery.

All of this however, completely assumes that your spiritual being stands as a lateral observer of the industrial process, being very careful not to identify with the thought-parcels running on the assembly line.

After all these talks on this forum, isn’t it clear that this ‘mode’ of contemplation is the actual issue? The guts of the industrial process are not something that we de-identify from and contemplate from the side, as we would examine an engine. In fact we have to feel fully responsible for a thought-parcel, to feel creatively involved with it. We understand something of the guts not by detaching from them but by being them, by exploring their dynamics and constraints from within.

You again misinterpreted my words. By "not identified" I meant not to be in a mode where I see my "separate self" identified with my self-centered thoughts. The nondual state is "I am everything" where all phenomena are mindfully experienced as inseparable from the fullness of Self, in other words, the Self is "being" all phenomena, see this post. But in this mode all phenomena need to be experienced mindfully. So, all you above criticism is irrelevant.

In the parallel thread Ashvin wrote:

All of this would be revealed to you (...) if you took even the first steps to gradually differentiate your cognitive force from the passion-fueled intellectual templates you are currently merged with.

Theat's exactly what I meant, and you did not criticize Ashvin because you knew what he meant there, but you misinterpreted my words even though I meant exactly the same.

Cleric, it is impossible to have a productive dialog if you keep misinterpreting my words.

But all the above is a different discussion. My question was not about identifying or mis-identifying, but about evidences that such expansion of consciousness into the machinery is practically possible.

[Cleric K]

You again misinterpreted my words. By "not identified" I meant not to be in a mode where I see my "separate self" identified with my self-centered thoughts. The nondual state is "I am everything" where all phenomena are mindfully experienced as inseparable from the fullness of Self, in other words, the Self is "being" all phenomena, see this post. But in this mode all phenomena need to be experienced mindfully.

In the parallel thread Ashvin wrote:

All of this would be revealed to you (...) if you took even the first steps to gradually differentiate your cognitive force from the passion-fueled intellectual templates you are currently merged with.

Theat's exactly what I meant, and you did not criticize Ashvin because you knew what he meant there, but you misinterpreted my words even though I meant exactly the same.

Cleric, it is impossible to have a productive dialog if you keep misinterpreting my words.

But all the above is a different discussion. My question was not about identifying or mis-identifying, but about evidences that such expansion of consciousness into the machinery is practically possible.

Ashvin means something altogether different with 'differentiating'. It's differentiation of the spiritual activity. For comparison, if we have some kind of tremor of the arm or we are simply fidgeting a lot, we might take this simply as what we are, as how reality works. We differentiate when we try to will certain movements and we find how the tremor/fidgeting actually opposes our will. It's the same with thinking. To differentiate from the channels and ducts of our ordinary cognitive life, we have to be active, to instill certain meaningful rhythm or concentrate. Then we begin to recognize various forces that have been hitherto merged with the background of our being and we simply assumed that this is how reality works. When we begin to recognize these forces we can speak of them, we can put them into images. But the key is that we can speak of them because we were active and explored new degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity, not because we stared in our soul then saw the machinery and thought "Aha, so that's how my cognition works".

Just consider an exercise like "I think these words", where you have to fully incarnate in the thinking-pronunciation of the thoughts and feel how your meaningful activity shapes the sounds like artforms. I believe that you'll agree that this is not something you're interested in. You would see this as too dual, missing the all encompassing nature of the nondual state where we are everything. In concentrative exercises as these we restrict ourselves and miss the whole Cosmic periphery that is still us. Is it correct to say that this is how you feel about the exercises that involve intense work with thought forms?

[Stranger]

Just consider an exercise like "I think these words", where you have to fully incarnate in the thinking-pronunciation of the thoughts and feel how your meaningful activity shapes the sounds like artforms. I believe that you'll agree that this is not something you're interested in.

This is something that I exactly described in this post as "I am everything" stage of nondual realization.
Cleric, I'm giving up on you, you choose to keep twisting and misinterpreting my words even though I wrote pages trying to describe the nondual state. I'm quoting it here. I may be not precise in my statements so you can always find ways to misinterpret them, but this below is always what I mean:

3. The third stage is the final integration which happens with realization that the World is as real as the Self and not different from the Self (“I am everything”, “The World is Brahman”). In this state there is no longer a distinction or separation between permanent and impermanent, real and unreal, everything is simultaneously Oneness and multiplicity, permanent and impermanent, One and many, inseparable but diverse. Or more precisely, these old dualistic concepts simply no longer apply, they turn out to be abstractions no longer relevant to Reality. That does not mean that this state is non-explicable, it just means that it is directly and experientially known with new meanings. It is the same Thinking that knows Itself intimately and directly in all its forms beyond the outdated dualistic concepts.

[Federica]

Excellent essay, Federica, you summarized the essential points of SS eloquently, but let me comment a bit and ask some questions. From my own experience, when we advance to higher cognition, this is where we can fully and consciously experience Thinking in all its aspects of "getting it, willing it, and being it". However, with the sense perceptions and perceptions of the thoughts as the by products of lower cognition compulsively appearing in our consciousness, we do not have the direct conscious access into the "guts" of this creative process (at least, speaking for myself, I don't, do you?). I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them. The conclusion of your essay is that we should be able to "enter the generating engine" and bring and integrate it to our consciousness. This sounds very encouraging, but is there any evidence that it is actually practically possible, at least in our human form? What makes you think that it is practically possible and not just our wishful thinking? This question relates to the question I asked here.

Let's put it under a test. If anyone here would practically be able to penetrate into the guts of Thinking where the perceptions and thoughts precipitate from, then they would be able to creatively and willfully participate in this process, which means they could change the outcome of it. Practically it would mean that we could change the flow of sense perceptions in a particular creative way according to our will, for example, walk through the wall or fly out from the window. Is there any practical evidence that it is possible? Are there any Anthroposophy practitioners who could make this happen? Let's make another test: has anyone tried to penetrate into the guts of the lower-cognitive thought-creation process and actually get it under a full conscious control of lower-level thinking where we can "get all the thoughts, will them and be them", so that there are no more already precipitated thoughts popping out into our consciousness generated without conscious and creative involvement in the thinking process of their generation?

So basically, on the higher level of cognition we can creatively participate in and experience the thinking process in its full cycle. Then we extrapolate this process to the Cosmic scale and make a proposition that we likewise should be able to integrate into the layers of creative Cosmic Thinking where the sense perceptions and thoughts are generated. This is a reasonable assumption to make, but is there any experiential evidence to support it?

(I haven't yet read what Cleric and Ashvin have written in reply in the meantime, so if there's any contradiction, it's not meant as such from my side)


Thank you for your interest in exploring these questions, Eugene! I believe that putting things to the test really is the way to go. It’s another way to say “living thinking”, provided that it’s done with an open mind, like you are doing, and so I’m glad to walk this way with you.


A preliminary thing that comes to mind while I’m reading you:

From my own experience, when we advance to higher cognition, this is where we can fully and consciously experience Thinking in all its aspects of "getting it, willing it, and being it". However, with the sense perceptions and perceptions of the thoughts as the byproducts of lower cognition compulsively appearing in our consciousness, we do not have the direct conscious access into the "guts" of this creative process (at least, speaking for myself, I don't, do you?).

I have an impression here that in your expression, the byproducts - rather than waste awaiting to be recycled and gone through in reverse, as we aim to restore (restore is a great word!) the fullness of reality - the byproducts come across as enemies, launching unforeseeable attacks, standing in the way of the meditative goal as fully estranged stuff. If this is approximately the feeling, I suspect it is unhelpful, and that a better feeling would be a feeling of hope, and an intention to make peace with our admittedly ugly and sometimes compulsive thought-pictures. We are looking for the method to recycle them within the same exact process that has generated them, not “somewhere else”, as far away as possible, from our core mission. Here you could say “Ok, but we are discussing thinking, not feeling, this is a marginal consideration”. To which I would respond:

It is not easy, at first, to believe that feelings (...) have anything to do with cognition. This is due to the fact that we are inclined to set cognition aside as a faculty by itself — one that stands in no relation to what otherwise occurs in the soul. In so thinking we do not bear in mind that it is the soul which exercises the faculty of cognition; and feelings are for the soul what food is for the body. If we give the body stones in place of bread, its activity will cease. It is the same with the soul.

What I’m trying to say is, I believe we should aim at a feeling of stepping into the inquiry as a whole, all-round individual, which we are eager re-inflow in all its parts with the awareness to come, rather than as a warrior on the alert, ready to behead the inner enemies as soon as they pop out (also because it looks like those fighting skills could later come in handy, we should spare them). Another example: although a certain amount of skepticism is good, if the inquiry is approached with the main intention of proving it wrong, and with a feeling of antipathy, it’s very likely that the subtleties of the reasoning will remain hidden, and the effort will be wasted. Not because spiritual science cannot lead to stone-sure conclusions, but because we need the momentum that feeling can provide, in order to put in the effort. Because the effort is required before the stone-sure conclusions can appear. It’s like when you take a mountain hike. You imagine and you know, and you trust that the view will be stunning, once you will reach the top. It will be worth it 100%. Still, until you’re there, you’ll have to walk your way ahead through difficult terrain, low clouds, and short visibility.


[Here I was looking for a passage I remember from Knowledge of the higher worlds, but I am not finding it. I hope you will eventually read the whole book!]

we do not have the direct conscious access into the "guts" of this creative process (at least, speaking for myself, I don't, do you?). I tried for years in my meditative practice and still could not penetrate into these guts of Thinking layers where these sense perceptions and thoughts are being produced. The best I could do is to become not identified with them but just to maintain mindful awareness of them. The conclusion of your essay is that we should be able to "enter the generating engine" and bring and integrate it to our consciousness. This sounds very encouraging, but is there any evidence that it is actually practically possible, at least in our human form? What makes you think that it is practically possible and not just our wishful thinking?

Speaking for myself, I am clearly very, very far away from reaching the top, from gaining the stunning overview. Nonetheless, the changes in my thinking habits - and habits in general - that I am witnessing; a certain, observable reorientation happening in my whole inner constitution (which includes feelings, plus has outer reverberations); and the few specific thinking insights I have received, are stone-sure confirmations that, while I am a complete beginner along the path, I am also not wishfully fumbling in the dark. The path that others have been fleshing out for us - through the history of Mysteries, then Steiner, and all the way down to this forum - is real. With patience and good will, it can be walked. While today I cannot demonstrate from personal experience that it leads to the top, I can tell you I have now left the starting point behind me, and so far, what I am encountering in the field matches the map I have been handed. And the sight is changing, indeed. The path goes up, which is both challenging, and exciting - if you are a hiker, you know exactly the feeling, just a little while after you get started. Surely there is straying, and there is hesitating. What is not there - from personal experience - is wishful thinking. Wishful thinking generally leaves us with a taste of uncertainty and, actually, free fall. On the living thinking path, we find solid ground under our feet, precise and extensive indications, and, if we are lucky like we are, the unheard-of chance of practically real-time feedback!

we should be able to "enter the generating engine" and bring and integrate it to our consciousness

We should be able to enter it, yes. It is expressed as an act (entering) but we should feel the entering also as a discovering gesture of thinking nature, and ultimately, as being. I wouldn’t say that we should integrate the engine “to” our consciousness. It might not be the spirit of what you put in words here, but again, let me share a feeling: the integration will happen within our own identity. Ok, we are discovering the nature of this identity at the same time, but we shouldn’t let the mind form an image of “moving” elements from an outside to an inside, where the secret of the "gut of thinking" is brought to our consciousness. Neither should we let it form an image of the opposite: that our consciousness expands, until it encompasses, and becomes one with the engine.
I would say that a better supporting imagery would be that of inversion, or turning inside-out. We will turn ourselves inside out, and we get ready to keep everything with us on our journey. Not as is - we will transform ourselves, and redeem our weaknesses - but nothing is going to happen “elsewhere”. It’s due to happen right at the center of our being, with all the strings remaining attached, so to say. What will be shifting is the awareness of the compass that centers us appropriately within the engine. I personally found Cleric's picture of Deep Mind@large, useful as imaginative support here. The evil and compulsory parts appear to us as such because we haven’t yet penetrated the depth of our being with the appropriate compass. We will have to work hard, not to behead them, but to redeem them, so that they can come to operate in harmony with, and not against, the wholeness of being, as our being finds its unique overlapping-intersecting place within the engine, as rightful participant in the complexity of the engine’s lawful structure.

If anyone here would practically be able to penetrate into the guts of Thinking where the perceptions and thoughts precipitate from, then they would be able to creatively and willfully participate in this process, which means they could change the outcome of it. Practically it would mean that we could change the flow of sense perceptions in a particular creative way according to our will, for example, walk through the wall or fly out from the window.

This could only be imaginable if we overlook the lawfulness of being, and the supreme interconnectedness that rules within the engine (saying “within” is actually misleading, because it lets us imagine that there is an outside). I tried to convey this idea with the metaphor of energy, and more specifically, by likening divine Thinking to an elastic glue. We are not all alone in the engine. We share it with a huge variety of beings on all sorts of levels. Some as powerful as to encompass the trajectory of our whole reincarnating self in one thinking wave, or the trajectory of our family, and some on a much more modest level of pervasiveness of consciousness. So if you imagine a complex physical system in which every “piece” is connected to every other piece through a kind of dynamic glue, which possesses certain specific physical properties, you will get the intuition - as an analogy - of how it’s impossible to touch one element without messing up, pushing, pulling, and twisting all the other elements, and some in ways that would require super complex predictive algorithms to foresee.


A metaphor Cleric recently used is the following, where he illustrated that we do stir the world-state intentionally (as a whole - don’t think physical vs. thinking - there is only one engine, to the extent that we become aware of it) and we will continue to stir it. We will expand the way we stir it, as we consciously develop our living thinking. However this will always necessarily abide by the inherent lawfulness of the engine, across planes. Similarly to how the physical plane has sure lawfulness. Actually the lawfulness that rules the flow of becoming on the physical plane is a reflection of spiritual lawfulness. So no, we won’t walk across walls, neither physically, not in thinking, and luckily so. Here in Cleric’s words:

Let’s say that a cup falls down and shatters. Then I think “I wish that didn’t happen. If the world is of spiritual essence why can’t I simply imagine the pieces coming back together and the cup jumping intact on my desk?” But in the literal sense we do exactly that! We imagine the cup coming together. This is what we do with our spiritual activity and this is what we get! We indeed steer the World state in a direction where we imagine the cup coming together. And all of this is really part of the World state, our brain fires differently in that direction – firing that is in harmony with the holistic direction in which we move.

When we imagine the cup coming together we steer through states where we experience such imaginative content and it is holistically in tune with corresponding parts of the sensory spectrum. We shouldn’t conceive that our imagination ‘sends waves’ that cause the brain to fire in some way or vice versa. The World-state evolves as something whole. The question is in what ways we can feel creatively responsible for the evolution of the state.

Further illustrated as follows:

Maybe that example has been little misleading. I hope that it hasn't been gathered that in the future our life will consists into molding the physical laws in any way we like, such as as reversing the shattering of a cup.
The example was meant only to counteract a common misconception in idealism (and a main reason why materialists instinctively reject it). Namely that reality is similar to our human-stage imagination (a dream or whatever) that we simply, for some strange reasons, can't reimagine differently. The goal was only to hint that the changes in the full spectrum of the World-state require corresponding forms of spiritual activity.
Even T, F, W can't be fully separated. It wouldn't be correct to say that thinking is only mental, while willing is the mental descending into the sensory. This is clearly not the case, since thinking already descends into the sensory as brain activity and probably in other ways which bend the configuration spaces of our bodily organism. What we call will is the form of activity that specifically engages the limb or speech system, through which we can metamorphose more of the World-state.

Let's make another test: has anyone tried to penetrate into the guts of the lower-cognitive thought-creation process and actually get it under a full conscious control of lower-level thinking where we can "get all the thoughts, will them and be them", so that there are no more already precipitated thoughts popping out into our consciousness generated without conscious and creative involvement in the thinking process of their generation?

I am certainly not the best person here to give insights about that, let alone answering this question. I will only say that, according to my limited experience, it is necessary and fully possible to discipline the flow of our thoughts. However, to the extent that we are incarnate in earthly form, and immersed in a sensory spectrum that needs to be constantly apprehended, and will continue to, I don’t think it is necessary, or even desirable to disengage ourselves completely from the human perceptual mode of cognition and its workings. That would equal a complete refusal of the physical world, while the aim of our incarnate state is to turn it inside out, not to turn our back to it. We have to redeem it from within, not as a way of moving to a next stage while on Earth, but as a way to become conscious of the depth that is already present, even in the most trivial of our sensations. These will naturally and positively remain a part of our everyday life.

Thanks to his insight into the supersensible world, the initiate gains a better knowledge and appreciation of the true value of visible nature than was possible before his higher training; and this may be counted among his most important experiences. Anyone not possessing this insight and perhaps therefore imagining the supersensible regions to be infinitely more valuable, is likely to underestimate the physical world. Yet the possessor of this insight knows that without experience in visible reality he would be totally powerless in that other invisible reality. Before he can live in the latter he must have the requisite faculties and instruments which can only be acquired in the visible world.

Side note: what I wrote is certainly not an essay, Eugene If I ever write one in the future (which I doubt) I would approach it quite differently. Here I jotted down and patched together a few reflections, with insufficient logical sequence, and relying completely on the phenomenology expressed in Max Leyf’s essay, and in PoF in the background.

[Stranger]

Speaking for myself, I am clearly very, very far away from reaching the top, from gaining the stunning overview. Nonetheless, the changes in my thinking habits - and habits in general - that I am witnessing; a certain, observable reorientation happening in my whole inner constitution (which includes feelings, plus has outer reverberations); and the few specific thinking insights I have received, are stone-sure confirmations that, while I am a complete beginner along the path, I am also not wishfully fumbling in the dark. The path that others have been fleshed out for us, through the history of Mysteries, then Steiner, and all the way down to this forum - is real. With patience and good will, it can be walked. While today I cannot demonstrate from personal experience that it leads to the top, I can tell you I have now left the starting point behind me, and so far, what I am encountering in the field matched the map I have been handed. And the sight is changing, indeed. The path goes up, which is both challenging, and exciting - if you are a hiker, you know exactly the feeling, just a little while after you get started. Surely there is straying, and there is hesitating. What is not there - from personal experience - is wishful thinking. Wishful thinking generally leaves us with a taste of uncertainty and, actually, free fall. On the living thinking path, we find solid ground under our feet, precise and extensive indications, and, if we are lucky like we are, the unheard-of chance of practically real-time feedback!

Thanks for your thoughtful answer, Federica, you addressed my questions. I get what you are saying, you have faith in the path, and that's the only way you can accomplish it.

If anyone here would practically be able to penetrate into the guts of Thinking where the perceptions and thoughts precipitate from, then they would be able to creatively and willfully participate in this process, which means they could change the outcome of it. Practically it would mean that we could change the flow of sense perceptions in a particular creative way according to our will, for example, walk through the wall or fly out from the window.

This could only be imaginable if we overlook the lawfulness of being, and the supreme interconnectedness that rules within the engine (saying “within” is actually misleading, because it lets us imagine that there is an outside). I tried to convey this idea with the metaphor of energy, and more specifically, by likening divine Thinking to an elastic glue. We are not all alone in the engine. We share it with a huge variety of beings on all sorts of levels. Some as powerful as to encompass the trajectory of our whole reincarnating self in one thinking wave, or the trajectory of our family, and some on a much more modest level of pervasiveness of consciousness. So if you imagine a complex physical system in which every “piece” is connected to every other piece through a kind of dynamic glue, which possesses certain specific physical properties, you will get the intuition - as an analogy - of how it’s impossible to touch one element without messing up, pushing, pulling, and twisting all the other elements, and some in ways that would require super complex predictive algorithms to foresee.

Right, I admit that was an overstatement on my part, of course these are collectively/cosmically created structures, we may be able to consciously participate in them but we cannot "bend" them as we would wish according to our individual preferences. Still the question remains: was there anyone who was able to consciously inwardly experience that machinery of the creation of sensory experiences?

Let's make another test: has anyone tried to penetrate into the guts of the lower-cognitive thought-creation process and actually get it under a full conscious control of lower-level thinking where we can "get all the thoughts, will them and be them", so that there are no more already precipitated thoughts popping out into our consciousness generated without conscious and creative involvement in the thinking process of their generation?

I am certainly not the best person here to give insights about that, let alone answering this question. I will only say that, according to my limited experience, it is necessary and fully possible to discipline the flow of our thoughts. However, to the extent that we are incarnate in earthly form, and immersed in a sensory spectrum that needs to be constantly apprehended, and will continue to, I don’t think it is necessary, or even desirable to disengage ourselves completely from the human perceptual mode of cognition and its workings. That would equal a complete refusal of the physical world, while the aim of our incarnate state is to turn it inside out, not to turn our back to it. We have to redeem it from within, not as a way of moving to a next stage while on Earth, but as a way to become conscious of the depth that is already present, even in the most trivial of our sensations. These will naturally and positively remain a part of our everyday life.

Right, I didn't mean refusal or struggle with the precipitated thoughts, I meant exactly being able to become conscious of the machinery of their generation, and as we become conscious, also being able to willfully participate in this generation process and bending it according to the curvatures of higher-order meanings. In other words, we redeem the unconscious and mechanistic lower-order cognitive processes by making it conscious, "becoming" it and willfully redeeming it by shaping it according to higher-order meanings. So, I was asking if anyone here was actually able to fully accomplish it as an actual internal experience?

[Cleric K]

Just consider an exercise like "I think these words", where you have to fully incarnate in the thinking-pronunciation of the thoughts and feel how your meaningful activity shapes the sounds like artforms. I believe that you'll agree that this is not something you're interested in.

This is something that I exactly described in this post as "I am everything" stage of nondual realization.
Cleric, I'm giving up on you, you choose to keep twisting and misinterpreting my words even though I wrote pages trying to describe the nondual state. I'm quoting it here. I may be not precise in my statements so you can always find ways to misinterpret them, but this below is always what I mean:

3. The third stage is the final integration which happens with realization that the World is as real as the Self and not different from the Self (“I am everything”, “The World is Brahman”). In this state there is no longer a distinction or separation between permanent and impermanent, real and unreal, everything is simultaneously Oneness and multiplicity, permanent and impermanent, One and many, inseparable but diverse. Or more precisely, these old dualistic concepts simply no longer apply, they turn out to be abstractions no longer relevant to Reality. That does not mean that this state is non-explicable, it just means that it is directly and experientially known with new meanings. It is the same Thinking that knows Itself intimately and directly in all its forms beyond the outdated dualistic concepts.

Eugene, I'm not twisting anything, I asked you a concrete question about the exercise. As Ashvin noted on the other thread, you don't seem to comment on the exercises, except that you have adapted them to be more integral. I'm just trying to pinpoint something important.

I understand very well what you mean with #3 but I especially wanted to contrast this with the methods of meditation that take hold of our thinking activity, instead of directly expanding to overcome all distinctions between real and unreal, one and multiplicity and so on.

I can compare this with the following. Let's say reality is like a living Cosmic Book. The nondual logic dictates that we are that Book, there's no separation between us and the Book. When we take this understanding in its fullness, we have #3. Yet we spend time and time in meditation, contemplating and marveling at this Book as a whole and it doesn't becomes any more clearer. We can contrast this with taking some words from it where we find meaning and beginning to work from there, expanding meaning along the way, learning to read. Please note that this doesn't contradict #3. It only sets on a path make #3 meaningful reality - that is, to include in the experience of the Book the missing meaning of the text.

With this I'm not trying misrepresent what you have described, I'm just asking the same thing Ashvin asked you in the other thread: doesn't it seem possible to you that you may be neglecting an exercise like "I think these words" because it seems to you too fragmentary, too specialized and completely submerged in duality? Would you agree that you conceive that the more integrated method is to meditate straight on #3, trying to feel one with the Book, even though this doesn't seem to get you any closer to grasping its meaning (that's left for after death)?

I am certainly not the best person here to give insights about that, let alone answering this question. I will only say that, according to my limited experience, it is necessary and fully possible to discipline the flow of our thoughts. However, to the extent that we are incarnate in earthly form, and immersed in a sensory spectrum that needs to be constantly apprehended, and will continue to, I don’t think it is necessary, or even desirable to disengage ourselves completely from the human perceptual mode of cognition and its workings. That would equal a complete refusal of the physical world, while the aim of our incarnate state is to turn it inside out, not to turn our back to it. We have to redeem it from within, not as a way of moving to a next stage while on Earth, but as a way to become conscious of the depth that is already present, even in the most trivial of our sensations. These will naturally and positively remain a part of our everyday life.

Federica touches upon something of great significance above, which alone confirms that even though the experiences may not have gone at great length yet (and as in any path of development, including purely physical or intellectual, this is perfectly normal, how could we expect it to be otherwise?), she has grasped something completely essential with the words 'turning inside out'. This is how it really feels when we find our proper stance within the flow of reality. I've used this image before:



Our flow of becoming can be likened to the center of the torus where Time flows through us and becomes the space of spiritual phenomena (not speaking of physical space). The undeveloped man lives with whatever flows through him and becomes his actions, feelings, thoughts. When we set on the path of development we being to grasp the lawfulness of the flow, we gain some leeway through which we can steer in novel ways our becoming as it funnels from above, before it has mineralized into the past.

Our living experience of thinking allows us to experience this funneling of Time in the most direct way. From there we can slowly reorganize our being such that our consciousness expands along the depth, we understand more clearly how Time flows (within which our thoughts are embedded) and we can even find novel ways to steer that flow (the compulsive thought and feeling patterns spoken of in the other thread can be thought of as the curvature of the flow which makes some thoughts, feelings and actions more likely than other - isn't this what a character or temperament effectively are?).

Would it be correct to say that you're much rather interested in #3, which would correspond not to investigating this funnel of temporal becoming but rather directly expanding towards the oneness with the whole Torus - simultaneous past and future, oneness and multiplicity and so on? I repeat that the investigation of the flow through the center doesn't negate #3 - on the contrary - it realizes it.

Please understand this - I'm not trying to twist your words, it's simply that we're at the core of the issue but to get to the end you have to recognize this inner conflict between (1) focusing primarily on the oneness with the Book, even though it remains inexplicable and (2) starting from the humble thinking voice that begins to turn the Book inside-out, where as Ashvin said, our own life becomes the living evidence of the Book's flow of story.