A Phenomenology of Cognition (Max Leyf)

[Stranger]

Eugene,

I will try my best to find a different way to put it, compared to my previous posts in this thread. This might come slower than instantly, as I don't yet know how to go about it, plus I have some work left to do today, but one thing I want to highlight already now, because I think it could be a major hindrance to a fruitful discussion, is this. You are touched by the truth of the one reality, and so are those who are on a path of living thinking. Regardless of how the realization is formed, it is shared, as such. What is not shared is how to deal with the question of our human relation to Oneness, what Oneness means for us, individually and collectively.

The hindrance is the following. You speak of an integral approach, in which you aim to combine the non-dual and the living thinking paths. This is a problematic approach. The living thinking path is not a cognitive add-on, just as the non-dual approach isn't. You must enable yourself to loosen the tight grip on the non-dual way of reasoning, provisionally. A clean slate is necessary, for the sake of true understanding, which is clear if we remember that we are not wrapping our heads around something, we aim to enter the nucleus of Being instead, and can't do it while we keep holding on something else at the same time. If you are not ready to give yourself the complete freedom to start afresh, for the sake of the experiment, your nondual understanding will act as a hidden repellent. It will derail anything that doesn't follow the same clog sequence, or maybe transcends the clog stage altogether. If you don't want to, OK but then the question is, what motivates you to the exploration and effort you are doing now? Because one thing is sure, treating the living thinking path as an add-on, a nice-to-have, or a complement to current 'toolbox', is never, ever, ever going to work in any way.

Smorgasbord approaches would equal psychosis here, and are destined to fail 100%, because living thinking is not a thing, a practice, a framework, a methodology, or a worldview. It's us. Either we are it and know it, or we don't come to know it, hence we are not it, and are set to abandon ourselves to unknown flows of eternal cosmic soup.

OK, good, we are now looking at the practical side of it. My first comment is that I'm not treating the living thinking path as an add-on, a nice-to-have, or a complement to current 'toolbox', but treating it as an essential, indispensable and inseparable part of the integral path. My second one is, as I said to Cleric, that the nondual realization is a great catalyzer for the living thinking path because it works in consort with the living thinking practice to sacrifice the incoherent activity of the mind and to fully align the spiritual activity with the Oneness and creative potential of Being-Awareness-Thinking. And the third one is that, as a matter of experiential fact, all these aspects of Consciousness - its Beingness, Awareness, and Thinking, are inseparable by nature. Therefore, we can only align our individuated spiritual activity with Reality if we experientially embrace all of these aspects simultaneously (as a living experience). If we only focus on one aspect and neglect/dismiss the others, we are still in a state of incoherence with the fulness and unity of Reality.

The integration of nondual and living thinking is not an artificial construct of combining the views and practices of these two paths in a mish-mush, but an inseparable and harmonious fusion of them. Just like there is no contradiction between the Being, Awareness and Thinking aspects of Reality, but a harmonious unity of them, likewise, the practical path to realization of this harmony is a harmonious path of nondual-living-thinking where nondual and living-thinking can no longer be separated or taken separately (like you cannot do nondual practice on even days and living-thinking one on odd days).

[Cleric K]

100% agree that "this turning inside-out of the potential through the thinking ego is indispensable for our development and that of humanity as a whole" and we should do it by all means while we live in the human form. What happens after death and weather we return back to human form to continue with the evolutionary flow of humanity, or decide to move on to living in other forms is entirely different question and should be left for the discretion of each individual soul.

Well, I don't know what to say In that case I don't know why the accusations to Anthroposophical dogma that tries to push its methods of evolutionary turning-inside.

[Stranger]

100% agree that "this turning inside-out of the potential through the thinking ego is indispensable for our development and that of humanity as a whole" and we should do it by all means while we live in the human form. What happens after death and weather we return back to human form to continue with the evolutionary flow of humanity, or decide to move on to living in other forms is entirely different question and should be left for the discretion of each individual soul.

Well, I don't know what to say In that case I don't know why the accusations to Anthroposophical dogma that tries to push its methods of evolutionary turning-inside.

I was actually showing that Steiner himself pointed to the embracing of oneness in this thread, so obviously I was not "accusing" Anthroposophy. I was just pointing to your resistance for embracing the nondual view/practice/living-experience, but at this point, if we do not have any more disagreements, then there are no more "accusations" on my part. And to repeat again, I fully agree with your criticism of some nondual teachers and practices that reject the active living-thinking, and like you, I believe that they are doing it wrong. So, I understand that your resistance came from resisting these wrong nondual practices, but my effort here was to show that there is a "right" nondual path that does not contradict, but quite the opposite, goes in harmony with the living-thinking path and integrates with it naturally.

[AshvinP]

100% agree that "this turning inside-out of the potential through the thinking ego is indispensable for our development and that of humanity as a whole" and we should do it by all means while we live in the human form. What happens after death and weather we return back to human form to continue with the evolutionary flow of humanity, or decide to move on to living in other forms is entirely different question and should be left for the discretion of each individual soul.

Well, I don't know what to say In that case I don't know why the accusations to Anthroposophical dogma that tries to push its methods of evolutionary turning-inside.

I was actually showing that Steiner himself pointed to the embracing of oneness in this thread, so obviously I was not "accusing" Anthroposophy. I was just pointing to your resistance for embracing the nondual view/practice/living-experience, but at this point, if we do not have any more disagreements, then there are no more "accusations" on my part. And to repeat again, I fully agree with your criticism of some nondual teachers and practices that reject the active living-thinking, and like you, I believe that they are doing it wrong. So, I understand that your resistance came from resisting these wrong nondual practices, but my effort here was to show that there is a "right" nondual path that does not contradict, but quite the opposite, goes in harmony with the living-thinking path and integrates with it naturally.

In that comment, you quoted a passage from the last chapter on Intuition. I wonder what you also make of this passage from the same book, The Stages of Higher Knowledge, in the first chapter on Imagination.

Of course, the “divine self” is contained in every man. It is in every created being. In stone, plant, and animal, the “divine self” is also contained and active. But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with the manifestations of this “divine self.” Just as one can mutter over and over again that this world contains the “divine self” veiled within it and know nothing thereby of the physical world, so does he who seeks the “divine kingdom of spirits” only in blurred and indeterminate generalities know nothing of higher worlds. One should open the eyes and behold the revelation of deity in the things of the physical world, in the stone, in the plant, and not merely dream away all these as only “appearances” with the true form of God somehow “concealed” behind them. No, God reveals Himself in His creations and whoever would know God must learn to know the true essence of these creations. Therefore one must also learn to behold what really goes on and is living in the higher worlds, if one would know the “divine.” The consciousness that the “God-man” dwells within one can at most provide a beginning. But this beginning experienced in the right way, rises to an actual lift into the higher worlds. But this is possible only for one in whom the spiritual “senses” have been developed. Any other view arrives only at the standpoint, “I will stay as I am and attain only what is possible for me to attain in this way.” But the aim of the occultist is to become a different human being, in order to behold and experience other things than the customary ones.

It is precisely for this purpose that passage through imaginative knowledge is necessary. It has already been said that this stage of Imagination need not be conceived of as a school class that must be gone through. It is to be understood that, particularly in present-day life, there are persons who bring with them pre-conditions enabling the occult teacher to call forth in them inspired and intuitive knowledge simultaneously, or nearly so, with the imaginative. But it is not at all to be understood that any person could be spared passage through the imaginative stage.

[Stranger]

Of course, the “divine self” is contained in every man. It is in every created being. In stone, plant, and animal, the “divine self” is also contained and active. But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with the manifestations of this “divine self.” Just as one can mutter over and over again that this world contains the “divine self” veiled within it and know nothing thereby of the physical world, so does he who seeks the “divine kingdom of spirits” only in blurred and indeterminate generalities know nothing of higher worlds. One should open the eyes and behold the revelation of deity in the things of the physical world, in the stone, in the plant, and not merely dream away all these as only “appearances” with the true form of God somehow “concealed” behind them. No, God reveals Himself in His creations and whoever would know God must learn to know the true essence of these creations. Therefore one must also learn to behold what really goes on and is living in the higher worlds, if one would know the “divine.” The consciousness that the “God-man” dwells within one can at most provide a beginning. But this beginning experienced in the right way, rises to an actual lift into the higher worlds. But this is possible only for one in whom the spiritual “senses” have been developed. Any other view arrives only at the standpoint, “I will stay as I am and attain only what is possible for me to attain in this way.” But the aim of the occultist is to become a different human being, in order to behold and experience other things than the customary ones.

It is precisely for this purpose that passage through imaginative knowledge is necessary. It has already been said that this stage of Imagination need not be conceived of as a school class that must be gone through. It is to be understood that, particularly in present-day life, there are persons who bring with them pre-conditions enabling the occult teacher to call forth in them inspired and intuitive knowledge simultaneously, or nearly so, with the imaginative. But it is not at all to be understood that any person could be spared passage through the imaginative stage.

This is a great quote and I 100% agree with it. I stated many times before that the nondual realization is only a beginning of a new path where all creative capacities and aspects of thinking can be fully unleashed (which are imaginative, intuitive and others). My only comment, or rather elaboration to Steiners words, is that it would be more precise to say:

But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with both the timeless self-knowing of the "divine self" as wells as manifestations of this “divine self.”

In other words, the Divine Self knows itself experientially both as it is existentially/timelessly, and through its temporal manifestations that are never separate from the Self.

[AshvinP]

Of course, the “divine self” is contained in every man. It is in every created being. In stone, plant, and animal, the “divine self” is also contained and active. But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with the manifestations of this “divine self.” Just as one can mutter over and over again that this world contains the “divine self” veiled within it and know nothing thereby of the physical world, so does he who seeks the “divine kingdom of spirits” only in blurred and indeterminate generalities know nothing of higher worlds. One should open the eyes and behold the revelation of deity in the things of the physical world, in the stone, in the plant, and not merely dream away all these as only “appearances” with the true form of God somehow “concealed” behind them. No, God reveals Himself in His creations and whoever would know God must learn to know the true essence of these creations. Therefore one must also learn to behold what really goes on and is living in the higher worlds, if one would know the “divine.” The consciousness that the “God-man” dwells within one can at most provide a beginning. But this beginning experienced in the right way, rises to an actual lift into the higher worlds. But this is possible only for one in whom the spiritual “senses” have been developed. Any other view arrives only at the standpoint, “I will stay as I am and attain only what is possible for me to attain in this way.” But the aim of the occultist is to become a different human being, in order to behold and experience other things than the customary ones.

It is precisely for this purpose that passage through imaginative knowledge is necessary. It has already been said that this stage of Imagination need not be conceived of as a school class that must be gone through. It is to be understood that, particularly in present-day life, there are persons who bring with them pre-conditions enabling the occult teacher to call forth in them inspired and intuitive knowledge simultaneously, or nearly so, with the imaginative. But it is not at all to be understood that any person could be spared passage through the imaginative stage.

This is a great quote and I 100% agree with it. I stated many times before that the nondual realization is only a beginning of a new path where all creative capacities and aspects of thinking can be fully unleashed (which are imaginative, intuitive and others). My only comment, or rather elaboration to Steiners words, is that it would be more precise to say:

But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with both the timeless self-knowing of the "divine self" as wells as manifestations of this “divine self.”

In other words, the Divine Self knows itself experientially both as it is existentially/timelessly, and through its temporal manifestations that are never separate from the Self.

Alright, so let's then revisit the imaginative exercises which you agree are indispensable, for ex. the vowel and 'I think the word' exercises. When Cleric asked about it, you responded:

When I think or utter "these words", there is a flow of beautiful phenomena of meanings, intents, thoughts and sounds interconnected with each other and with the rest of Reality through a fabric of structured relations, all of them inseparable from the Oneness of All, from its Awareness and Beingness, and there is no "me"-observer who is observing this flow.

I may be mistaken, but to me this sounds like you went straight to a more 'adapted version', i.e. one that is aligned with your usual nondual meditative practices. Cleric asked about this as well, but I'm not sure what the answer was. Did you feel like remaining intimately connected with the thinking-gestures producing the sounds-meanings, because it maintains a somewhat separate "me producing sounds" orientation, was an unhelpful dualistic method which therefore needed to be changed? Did you stick with it for a little bit before deciding nothing revolutionary for your spiritual experience could possibly come from it, and then adapted it?

From my admittedly novice perspective, someone with extensive meditative practice such as yourself would have a great advantage - you may be in a complete serenity of soul almost as soon as you sit down and close your eyes. You can keep unwanted feelings and thoughts from rushing into the inner volume during the exercise. So if you were to follow the exercise faithfully, with openness and patience and without expectation of what "should" be happening, I would think some unsuspected leeway in your current cognitive mask would manifest rather quickly. Maybe not the first few times you do it, but it also wouldn't take months or years. I don't mean you will start beholding spiritual phenomena which somehow represent your cognitive-perceptual processes, but rather you will concretely sense the intuitive activity flowing in and making the conceptual life more fluid, more pliable. Perhaps the deeper meaning of something you read on this forum, like from Cleric or one of his illustrations, will light up in relation to your inner soul activity.

[Stranger]

I may be mistaken, but to me this sounds like you went straight to a more 'adapted version', i.e. one that is aligned with your usual nondual meditative practices. Cleric asked about this as well, but I'm not sure what the answer was. Did you feel like remaining intimately connected with the thinking-gestures producing the sounds-meanings, because it maintains a somewhat separate "me producing sounds" orientation, was an unhelpful dualistic method which therefore needed to be changed?

There is no "me producing sounds", there is only an intimate flow of conscious willing gestures producing sound-meanings.

Did you stick with it for a little bit before deciding nothing revolutionary for your spiritual experience could possibly come from it, and then adapted it?

Yes, that is what I regularly do in meditation actually, but I usually operate with intuitive meanings without words and their sounds. Sometimes I meditate with musical meanings and in this case the gestures take forms of sounds while still bearing the intuitive meanings with them. But this "I think these words" meditation with verbal gestures is also good, it is quite useful.

From my admittedly novice perspective, someone with extensive meditative practice such as yourself would have a great advantage - you may be in a complete serenity of soul almost as soon as you sit down and close your eyes. You can keep unwanted feelings and thoughts from rushing into the inner volume during the exercise. So if you were to follow the exercise faithfully, with openness and patience and without expectation of what "should" be happening, I would think some unsuspected leeway in your current cognitive mask would manifest rather quickly. Maybe not the first few times you do it, but it also wouldn't take months or years. I don't mean you will start beholding spiritual phenomena which somehow represent your cognitive-perceptual processes, but rather you will concretely sense the intuitive activity flowing in and making the conceptual life more fluid, more pliable. Perhaps the deeper meaning of something you read on this forum, like from Cleric or one of his illustrations, will light up in relation to your inner soul activity.

That's right, as I said, I have been doing this regularly actually. I quit "dark" meditation with suppressed conscious activity (shamatha method) and just passive observation meditation of the "soup" of the flow of spontaneously rising mental phenomena (zazen method) a while time ago because I learnt everything I needed form it, and now I'm always meditating actively with willing gestures, imaginations and intuitive meanings while maintaining full awareness of the wholeness of the flow of consciousness and its "suchness", "clarity-awareness", willing and thinking aspects. It's like a fully-open flow of cognitive, visual and audial spiritual activity without any feel of "me in the center of it" doing it and experiencing it.

Another way of meditating that I often do is when I apply this state to my creative process. For example, I meditate in the above way while willingly "gesturing" a piece of music that I will later play on guitar so that I can imagine what kind of musical shape, sounds and intuitive musical meanings may flow from this piece. Or, before drawing, I willingly imaginatively create and meditate on the image of my future drawing and its intuitive visual meanings. So, these are all active willing-creative meditations with non-verbal intuitive meanings and their imaginative visual and audial forms. Also, I sometimes meditate with intuitive philosophical meanings (also non-verbally).

The challenge is to maintain such state continuously during the daily activities, that's where I most often fail and slip back to habitual automatic mental thinking-doing or daydreaming mode without full awareness

PS: when I say "I willingly imaginatively create" and so on, this is just how English language works, there is actually no sense of "me willingly creating", so more precisely it should be said something like "images of drawings are willingly created by gestures of spiritual activity", but it is just would be awkward to write like this.

[AshvinP]

I may be mistaken, but to me this sounds like you went straight to a more 'adapted version', i.e. one that is aligned with your usual nondual meditative practices. Cleric asked about this as well, but I'm not sure what the answer was. Did you feel like remaining intimately connected with the thinking-gestures producing the sounds-meanings, because it maintains a somewhat separate "me producing sounds" orientation, was an unhelpful dualistic method which therefore needed to be changed?

There is no "me producing sounds", there is only an intimate flow of conscious willing gestures producing sound-meanings.

Did you stick with it for a little bit before deciding nothing revolutionary for your spiritual experience could possibly come from it, and then adapted it?

Yes, that is what I regularly do in meditation actually, but I usually operate with intuitive meanings without words and their sounds. Sometimes I meditate with musical meanings and in this case the gestures take forms of sounds while still bearing the intuitive meanings with them. But this "I think these words" meditation with verbal gestures is also good, it is quite useful.

Ok so what do you find useful in such an exercise? What is the meaningful feedback you get from the tightly coupled willing gestures and thought-perceptions, either for the adapting the method of your spiritual practice further and/or your overall conceptual understanding of how this intimate spiritual activity structures the normal waking experience? I know we have established already that you hit walls with respect to the latter, but I am wondering what usefulness you find in these exercises.

PS: when I say "I willingly imaginatively create" and so on, this is just how English language works, there is actually no sense of "me willingly creating", so more precisely it should be said something like "images of drawings are willingly created by gestures of spiritual activity", but it is just would be awkward to write like this.

Just a reminder that Cleric addressed that here, and you seemed to agree. Do you sense a 'me' or 'I' in the way that Cleric described it?

[Stranger]

Ok so what do you find useful in such an exercise? What is the meaningful feedback you get from the tightly coupled willing gestures and thought-perceptions, either for the adapting the method of your spiritual practice further and/or your overall conceptual understanding of how this intimate spiritual activity structures the normal waking experience? I know we have established already that you hit walls with respect to the latter, but I am wondering what usefulness you find in these exercises.

Well, many useful outcomes:
- It trains the mind to help to maintain full awareness of the wholeness of spiritual activity without falling into a mindless daydreaming mode
- It reveals how spiritual activity actually functions and shapes the walking experience. In the "automatic" mode of the walking experience we usually do not notice this activity and focus on its byproducts only.
- The wall I hit is when dealing with the percepts. I can intuitively sense the meanings behind the percepts, but (as I said before) I do not experience the full process of spiritual activity creating the percepts from the meanings the same way I experience the spiritual activity in the "I am saying these words" exercise. But as you said, we should not expect to have a full access to that layer of Thinking.

Just a reminder that Cleric addressed that here, and you seemed to agree. Do you sense a 'me' or 'I' in the way that Cleric described it?

It's a presence of this limitless fullness of actively conscious being-awaring-willing-thinking-imagining. We can call it with any name, such as "I", "nondual core", "Self", but it just has nothing to do with the old "me-doer-experiencer in the center of this activity" that I used to have a while ago. It is more like "being-willing-thinking-awaring without center or edge". Also, when I meditate with open eyes, there is no sense of any border between "inside of me" and "outside of me", there is no sense of the outer or inner world, itis all continuous "wholeness of consciousness".

Please don't call a psychiatric ambulance, I'm OK

[AshvinP]

Well, it's a presence of this limitless fullness of actively conscious being-awaring-willing-thinking-imagining. We can call it with any name, such as "I", "nondual core", "Self", but it just has nothing to do with the old "me-doer-experiencer in the center of this activity" that I used to have a while ago. It is more like "being-willing-thinking-awaring without center or edge". Also, when I meditate with open eyes, there is no sense of any border between "inside of me" and "outside of me", there is no sense of the outer or inner world, itis all continuous "wholeness of consciousness".

It really sounds as if you are objectifying your subjectivity in a spiritual panorama. I can't be sure from only what you have written here. This hypothesis has the advantage of explaining perfectly why the wall is being hit. The fact is that when our current subjectivity is thrown into the perceptual spectrum, either material or spiritual, we lose all ability to gain consciousness of how that subjectivity is constantly shaping the spectrum. In PoF terms, we have forgotten there is still present thinking structuring what we experience as 'limitless fullness', existing behind our current perspective and flowing through the fractal time-layers of our cognitive becoming. The materialist can stare at perceptions all day and never reach the relational structuring taking place between their thinking and the perceptions because that present activity is forgotten. In this case he remains with a bunch of fragmented perceptions which he can only unite with abstract mechanical laws, externalized from his own real-time thinking. The mystics/spiritualists simply take it a level or two deeper inwards before the forgetting occurs. They polarize to a wholeness of perceptions, where everything is perfectly related and unified, but this can only be grasped in meaning with the current subjective perspective which has been dissociated from and thrown into the unified panorama.

But this is all stuff Cleric has illustrated probably a dozen or more times on the forum already, so I'm not sure what good it will do to continue pointing to it in this way. At this point, I don't know if you still feel it is impossible for anyone to build the gradient further while on Earth, or simply that you have been unable to build it further because there is something off in your approach? If the latter, then what are acceptable explanations for what is 'off', if not the ones we have been offering here?