A Phenomenology of Cognition (Max Leyf)

[AshvinP]

Presented in full below without commentary.

***

αὑτὸν ἄρα νοεῖ, εἴπερ ἐστὶ τὸ κράτιστον, καὶ ἔστιν ἡ νόησις νοήσεως νόησις.

“Therefore it must be of itself that the divine thought thinks (since it is the most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”

—Aristotle, Metaphysics, XII, 9, 1074, b74.

THE human being—as an “I”—first, in a pre-conscious activity of destruction, strips reality of its coherence. This is not something he does so much as something he is. To wit, the human being is situated in the world in such a manner that he bifurcates and disintegrates its structure in the manner indicated above as a condition for his perception and cognition of it. Hence, the activity of his consciousness consists in an initial reduction of being to pure chaos and nothingness—to non-being.

We learn that we have slept not by sleeping, but through inference—by the fact of waking. Similarly, we know that we disintegrated the true being of the object of our perception by the fact of its manifestation to our consciousness.

The initial annihilation of being proceeds by the extraction of (a) the concept from the wholeness of reality. This leaves (b) a field of percepts to which (a) the concept was lending coherence, organization, and intelligibility. The latter (b) instantaneously disintegrates into dust, like matter without life. The Book of Genesis depicts the function of the concept as soul:

“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul…you return to the ground–because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” (2:7, 3:10)

Sense-perception effaces from a being everything that is not sensory, including its form, life, soul, reality, and essence. When I sit across from another person, I see how she looks with my eyes, hear how she speaks with my ears, and so on. But I only know who she is by a higher form of cognition. Hence, knowing consists in restoring the elements which I first effaced as a condition for my sensory-perception.

In this way, the sequence of sense-perception can be grasped: from the provisional duality of concept and percept, the human being effects their reunion, in the bower of his consciousness, out of his own free creativity. Put another way, following an unconscious process of disintegration, the spiritual activity of the I seeks to resurrect the fallout from this event to unity and to life.

The above describes the process of cognition, which ordinarily only becomes conscious in the product of knowledge and not in the process. And yet, in a recognition of the architectonics of this process lies the possibility for consciousness to awaken at a prior, more energetic stage. In this way, consciousness would be kindled in thinking itself and not only in thoughts. The I would awaken to an integral participation in the evolution of Creation.

In this light, every being would be known afresh—not as mind to object, but as cause to effect, as the sun to its light, or as speaker to speech.

It follows from the above that there can be no “problem of knowledge” in the classical epistemological sense of Descartes and Kant any more than the meaning of the words I write is withheld from me. Certainly the words of others are opaque to my understanding in this way, to begin with, but only until I undertake this same process of death and resurrection described above in respect to them, at which point the speaker and I are one in spirit and I share in the meaning of what was expressed.

The archetype of knowledge is creatio ex nihilo. Hence it is an imitatio Christi in identitatem Logos—“an imitation of Christ in his identity as the Logos”—for as it is written, “in the beginning was the Logos…All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (John 1:1, 3) As Christ rose from the dust on the third day, so knowledge is the final moment following death and entombment.

The new Creation shimmers before the backdrop of non-being. It is perennially fresh because it has never existed before, like the virginal birth of Venus, who floats on the foam of chaos, born on the scallop-shell of consciousness to arrive on the shore of knowledge.

The order of being (ordo essendi) seems to end where the order of knowing (ordo cogniscendi) seems to commence. But of course, the order of knowing carries forward the order of being since knowing is also part of Creation and not something external or ulterior to it. Hence the human being contributes to being by knowing and thereby lends his voice to the chorus of Creation.

[Federica]

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.

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.

[AshvinP]

That is a splendid summary and elaboration, Federica, thank you! I really enjoyed the nuclear power plant metaphor - I think it can be a really helpful one to use for people who are just approaching this topic.

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.

Here I would just make one caveat - that thoughts only have to be solidified to be perceptible at our current mode of cognition, which only makes use of the physical senses. Perception, in a broader sense, could be thought of as all that which reflects our formless activity back to us so that we may awaken in self-consciousness. When we manage to develop our inner senses through spiritual training, we can indeed perceive our thoughts in their more fluid-imaginative forms before precipitating into their congealed forms reflected by the physical senses. So what you said should be understood to apply only to our current mode of intellectual cognition. I am aware that this is most likely how you meant it, rather than a broad metaphysical statement on cognition-perception in general. In other words, you are using "perception" to mean exclusively the static forms of the intellect.

The big difference between lower and higher modes of cognition is not so much in the perception of thought, either as outer forms or inner movements, as in the experienced relation between the thinker and the thought-perceptions. We no longer feel ourselves to be standing 'here' and viewing our thoughts in perceptions over 'there', practically severing the link between thinking activity and its outer physiognomy (which always exists even if we are not conscious of it), but rather we feel to be living within the dynamic perceptions. We can even sense this with ordinary cognition if we pay close attention to our state of being when we focus on the perception of a color, for ex. In that brief moment before we swing in the hysteresis to reflect on what is being observed, we can sense our whole being becomes the quality of 'blue'. 

Cleric also gave the imaginative mathematical example which is more lasting. The perception of the triangle-form, when we carefully couple it with the movements of our imaginative ray, is not felt to be something entirely congealed and separated from us, but intimately linked to our current thinking state of being. 

Let’s try to approach this through a mathematical example. We see a triangular form. It impresses as perception and evokes certain intuition – that of ‘triangle’. Then we can turn away from the perceptions and summon a memory image of the triangle. Now we’re doing elementary geometry, our geometric intuition is being expressed into a thought-image of our own making. Here we already have something analogous to Imaginative cognition. The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless. It consists of timeless relations. They have temporal character only insofar as we need to serialize these relations in thoughts. For example, when we think of the natural numbers, they are not subject to time. We need time to count through them but their relations are something timeless. Two is always between one and three – this is an eternal relation. This has nothing to do with Platonism. There’s no need to fantasize mathematical intuition as some exotic metaphysical realm. It is a simple fact of experience – when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts. Because of this frozen nature of mathematical intuition, when we’re thinking math we’re always alone. It is as if we walk through a frosty kingdom and any movement that we sense can only be our own, reflected in the ice crystals. The difference with Imagination in the wider sense is that in the latter we no longer feel alone. The reflections in our imaginative pictures are not only of our own movement but also of a kingdom teeming with life. It is as if we’re expressing in images intuitive life that continually changes underneath us on its own accord.

So I would just caution that we should avoid taking the 'waste product' metaphor too rigidly or negatively. The precipitated thought-perceptions do serve a critical purpose in our thinking stream of intuitive becoming, namely that of progressive spiritual awakening, but it is within the sphere of intellectual cognition that there is the greatest risk for the idolatry that you are pointing to with the metaphor. The risk is practically non-existent for imaginative cognition developed through proper spiritual training of the inner senses. But I think you also touched on this point - "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." Even in the highest spheres of spiritual activity, there is something akin to 'waste' which is impressed through that activity and recycled back into it, but only in the decohered form of the modern intellect is it so habitually likely to be severed from the activity and idolized. 

[AshvinP]

Here I would just make one caveat - that thoughts only have to be solidified to be perceptible at our current mode of cognition, which only makes use of the physical senses.

Just one more note on my 'caveat' - I realize it could have also been inserted for what Max wrote. I suppose that your post just gave me more opportunity to notice that it might be helpful to remark on. Max and yourself are doing a phenomenology here, so I think it makes sense to speak of perception as it relates to normal intellectual cognition, which is where the average person is starting from and the only thing such a person knows. And I am aware that you guys aren't confusing intellectual cognition-perception for the only possible mode. So, if anything, my comment is generally intended for anyone else who is following along and wondering whether 'perception' in its broader sense must necessarily "efface from a being... its form, life, soul, reality, and essence." That is not the case for higher modes of cognition-perception.

[Cleric K]

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

That's a great work, Federica! Unless people think that Federica, Ashvin and me are the same person, I think that it is of great value to see how everyone can approach these essential intuitions from a unique angle. This is what we really need. It's not about agreeing on the 'right' dogmatic words once and for all but learning to swim through these states from which the words flow as expressions.

Thank you! I hope this is only the beginning of a flow of inspiration!

[Federica]

I really enjoyed the nuclear power plant metaphor - I think it can be a really helpful one to use for people who are just approaching this topic.

Glad you liked it, Ashvin Indeed, as the metaphor came to mind, I found myself reflecting on viable ways to provide a rough idea of what living cognition is, in response to more or less casual questions one might get.
I should also say that, just before posting it, I searched the forum to check for any possibly similar metaphors, and I found a nuclear reference in one of your latest essays! So mine was only an additional take on an already expressed idea.

Here I would just make one caveat - that thoughts only have to be solidified to be perceptible at our current mode of cognition, which only makes use of the physical senses. Perception, in a broader sense, could be thought of as all that which reflects our formless activity back to us so that we may awaken in self-consciousness. When we manage to develop our inner senses through spiritual training, we can indeed perceive our thoughts in their more fluid-imaginative forms before precipitating into their congealed forms reflected by the physical senses. So what you said should be understood to apply only to our current mode of intellectual cognition. I am aware that this is most likely how you meant it, rather than a broad metaphysical statement on cognition-perception in general. In other words, you are using "perception" to mean exclusively the static forms of the intellect.

Thanks for the heads-up. Yes, I confirm I meant sensory perception in the physical world, if not for anything else, for the reason that I never thought about perception as a word to describe the experience of becoming self-conscious of thoughts beyond the sensory world. Probably, I would have thought about that, if I'd had some significant experience of higher cognition.

Even in the highest spheres of spiritual activity, there is something akin to 'waste' which is impressed through that activity and recycled back into it, but only in the decohered form of the modern intellect is it so habitually likely to be severed from the activity and idolized. 

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]

Here I would just make one caveat - that thoughts only have to be solidified to be perceptible at our current mode of cognition, which only makes use of the physical senses.

Just one more note on my 'caveat' - I realize it could have also been inserted for what Max wrote. I suppose that your post just gave me more opportunity to notice that it might be helpful to remark on. Max and yourself are doing a phenomenology here, so I think it makes sense to speak of perception as it relates to normal intellectual cognition, which is where the average person is starting from and the only thing such a person knows. And I am aware that you guys aren't confusing intellectual cognition-perception for the only possible mode. So, if anything, my comment is generally intended for anyone else who is following along and wondering whether 'perception' in its broader sense must necessarily "efface from a being... its form, life, soul, reality, and essence." That is not the case for higher modes of cognition-perception.

"Max and yourself are doing a phenomenology here"
Well... I'm afraid it would be more accurate to say that I was not really sure what I was doing here
But I'll try to live up to the credit. Once again, thank you, Ashvin. Yours is clearly a helpful remark for me to keep in mind.

[Federica]

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

That's a great work, Federica! Unless people think that Federica, Ashvin and me are the same person, I think that it is of great value to see how everyone can approach these essential intuitions from a unique angle. This is what we really need. It's not about agreeing on the 'right' dogmatic words once and for all but learning to swim through these states from which the words flow as expressions.

Thank you! I hope this is only the beginning of a flow of inspiration!

Thank you for the encouragement, Cleric!
(keeping in mind there've been ups and downs, and ups and downs are certainly ahead, too)

[Güney27]

Federica
Thank you for your valuable comment.
You summed it up really well and showed that our thoughts are more than words. Our word-thoughts are the skin of a shedding snake or the visible surface of the ocean. You have a talent for making things easy to understand. Thinking back to months of trying to understand Cleric's posts, I realize I couldn't understand them because I was trying to squeeze these things into a chain of mental representations. But somehow over time and asking (yes, I even wished in my prayers that I understand what is being said.)
I started reading scaligero and Georg kuehlewind (Georg kuehlewind is a German-Hungarian anthroposophist who was a friend of scaligero, and writes something similar in German as scaligero writes. Unfortunately, he was not valued in anthroposphic circles during his lifetime and was more an outsider) which I can only understand because of the contributions from this forum. I'm really very grateful that I came across this forum and I'm sure that without this forum I would never have dealt with these esoteric topics so much. I've read kastrup and looked into one of his critics (jeffrey Williams, who I spoke to over zoom over a year ago) and his statements. I was always looking for a philosophy that allowed God, angels, infinity, etc., but I went on this search in the hope of finding a theory with evidence, but it turned out very differently than I had hoped for at the time. Luckily too!
I studied Nietzsche and other German philosophers, but realized that it did me a lot of harm. This forum helped me to heal. Thanks to Cleric, Ashvin and Federica for this wisdom wrapped in comments

[Federica]

Federica
Thank you for your valuable comment.
You summed it up really well and showed that our thoughts are more than words. Our word-thoughts are the skin of a shedding snake or the visible surface of the ocean. You have a talent for making things easy to understand. Thinking back to months of trying to understand Cleric's posts, I realize I couldn't understand them because I was trying to squeeze these things into a chain of mental representations. But somehow over time and asking (yes, I even wished in my prayers that I understand what is being said.)
I started reading scaligero and Georg kuehlewind (Georg kuehlewind is a German-Hungarian anthroposophist who was a friend of scaligero, and writes something similar in German as scaligero writes. Unfortunately, he was not valued in anthroposphic circles during his lifetime and was more an outsider) which I can only understand because of the contributions from this forum. I'm really very grateful that I came across this forum and I'm sure that without this forum I would never have dealt with these esoteric topics so much. I've read kastrup and looked into one of his critics (jeffrey Williams, who I spoke to over zoom over a year ago) and his statements. I was always looking for a philosophy that allowed God, angels, infinity, etc., but I went on this search in the hope of finding a theory with evidence, but it turned out very differently than I had hoped for at the time. Luckily too!
I studied Nietzsche and other German philosophers, but realized that it did me a lot of harm. This forum helped me to heal. Thanks to Cleric, Ashvin and Federica for this wisdom wrapped in comments

Thank you, Güney, for your kind words, I'm happy you found it useful
I understand what you mean, that at the beginning it was difficult to make sense of the posts - for me it was the same.
But we realized the chance of coming across this forum, and it helped us persist. Gratitude is big for me as well, and not a single day goes by without feeling it.
Reading your thoughts about your philosophical journey, my impression is that your participation here really looks like a logical anchor point, after your previous explorations. I am glad you are here and look forward to the upcoming dialogs!

PS. I really liked the way you have described your philosophical quest with clear voice - well written!