The Nature of the sensory world or do we really *know* the ultimate ground of reality?

[Federica]

Let Cleric correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Cleric by "streams" here meant the same thing that I meant. He mentioned "streams of becoming". Essentially, in idealism the reality is "made" of conscious experiences occurring in Consciousness that creates and experiences them. All phenomena we talk about - thoughts, intuitions, ideas, feelings, percepts, imaginations, willing gestures - are conscious experiences, or we call them "conscious phenomena". There is nothing else that we need to assume to ever exist - this is the claim the phenomenological idealism. So, the term "phenomenological idealism" may sound abstract, but it is actually very concrete statement of refusing to believe in a reality of anything other than the phenomena of our conscious experience that we all have right now in our direct first-person experience. Therefore, what we as "souls" are is the streams of phenomena. I used the word "conglomerates" to designate the fact that in our individuated fields of experience we have these phenomena flowing in a "bunch", or a "set" of phenomena occurring simultaneously all related to each other through the lawful structures that govern them. This is the same as the "stream of becoming" where the stream of phenomena form a living spiritual activity that is "becoming" as one of Many individuated expressions of One Consciousness. We tend to use different terminology and every time we need to calibrate our terms to make sure they bear the same meanings.

I think we should be clear that the individuated stream of becoming is like a cross-section of the entire depth structure of spiritual activity, from the most Universal to the most Differentiated. Cleric used the illustration of the Cantor dust fractal:

By the way, Eugene, it occurred to me that this Cantor dust post was written in response to you, but you never replied. It basically fleshes out and neatly outlines the entire recent discussion which has unfolded here and what you just agreed to in the last post. I wonder if you have any thoughts on it now, in light of the recent discussion?

Ashvin, that occurred to me as well, I have tried to refer Eugene to the same post:

Beyond my basic attempt, this and much more has already been presented in luminous terms, explicitly to your attention, in words that you might have missed completely:

So, Eugene, you didn’t comment on my previous post about aliasing, so I don’t know what you think of these things.

(...)
And so, to refocus even more on the initial question:

what in your view is the relation between images in memory/imagination and immediate sensory perception? What's the difference between looking at an apple with your eyes and summoning the image of an apple later in your meditations?

I guess Eugene is not replying on this part because he's waiting, as he said to Anthony, for Cleric to illustrate "how the imagination-intuition of higher-order beings precipitates into percepts within our field of conscious phenomena".


Which in a sense is understandable:

There are so many things to be said here but at this time I just wanted to point this important distinction between immediate perceptions and memory/imagined images

There are many more things than can be said but I just wanted to point out this particular thing. I don’t think we have gone in the depth of these questions here on the forum before.

And now having seen Cleric's reply to Anthony, I suspect this is Cleric's way to put pressure on himself to find new ways to approach the matter without necessarily refer to aliasing and its visuals (Cantor fractal, Moire patterns) that could be less instrumetal to smooth spiraling towards shared understanding.

[AshvinP]

I think we should be clear that the individuated stream of becoming is like a cross-section of the entire depth structure of spiritual activity, from the most Universal to the most Differentiated. Cleric used the illustration of the Cantor dust fractal:

By the way, Eugene, it occurred to me that this Cantor dust post was written in response to you, but you never replied. It basically fleshes out and neatly outlines the entire recent discussion which has unfolded here and what you just agreed to in the last post. I wonder if you have any thoughts on it now, in light of the recent discussion?

Ashvin, that occurred to me as well, I have tried to refer Eugene to the same post:

Beyond my basic attempt, this and much more has already been presented in luminous terms, explicitly to your attention, in words that you might have missed completely:

So, Eugene, you didn’t comment on my previous post about aliasing, so I don’t know what you think of these things.

(...)
And so, to refocus even more on the initial question:

what in your view is the relation between images in memory/imagination and immediate sensory perception? What's the difference between looking at an apple with your eyes and summoning the image of an apple later in your meditations?

I guess Eugene is not replying on this part because he's waiting, as he said to Anthony, for Cleric to illustrate "how the imagination-intuition of higher-order beings precipitates into percepts within our field of conscious phenomena".


Which in a sense is understandable:

There are so many things to be said here but at this time I just wanted to point this important distinction between immediate perceptions and memory/imagined images

There are many more things than can be said but I just wanted to point out this particular thing. I don’t think we have gone in the depth of these questions here on the forum before.

And now having seen Cleric's reply to Anthony, I suspect this is Cleric's way to put pressure on himself to find new ways to approach the matter without necessarily refer to aliasing and its visuals (Cantor fractal, Moire patterns) that could be less instrumetal to smooth spiraling towards shared understanding.

Right, and the question of percepts precipitating into our conscious aperture, or rather our aperture increasingly resonating with percepts which fit the holistic intuition of our stream of becoming, is certainly one that requires more in depth phenomenology, from a few different angles. I am eager to explore that more as well.

I felt the Cantor dust post really got to the heart of this One-Many discussion and provided a great way to conceive how the diminished individuated perspectives of the Absolute are unique intuitive streams of becoming in their own right, which can only be understood as an interference of all other streams. It is only from our current convoluted thinking perspective that this interference is not conceived-experienced and therefore we conceive-experience ourselves as 'soul-atoms' with either no connection to any Absolute state (material reductionism) or direct experiential access to the Absolute state (mystical reductionism). In either case, we generally hold our inner experiences on Earth as 'private' and wonder how concepts-percepts somehow make it into our private sphere and awaken our consciousness from higher-order perspectives or from some other ontological substrate. Needless to say, we will never find any satisfactory resolution to such a question because it presupposes a flawed duality/discontinuity between the Earthly perspective and that of the higher Self.

With regards to the mystical reductionist perspective, I really appreciated the simple coffee house analogy:

Not long ago I mentioned the coffee house analogy, where we can make sense only of the conversation on our table, while everything else sounds like noise. If the whole coffee house sings together, we grasp it holistically. In this sense our awakening to self-consciousness begins in a small ‘coffee table’ in the middle where we make intuitive sense of our perceptions (the happenings on our table).
...
Let’s return to the coffee house. We can imagine the different tables as partitions of our spiritual being. We move from table to table in time but our ordinary life doesn’t lead to a point where we can grasp them as a whole. So Eastern meditation employed in our contemporary context is like saying: “The conversations on my table are interesting and useful but I must not forget the holistic intuitive context.” So we go on and expand our consciousness and try to be all-inclusive. But what do we hear? The noise of the coffee house. It doesn’t make any sense to us. Yet driven by deep intuition we say “Within this noise I’m one with everything. I am the same as the top line of the fractal.” And it is true that our essential being is present in every point of the noise but it is not true that we are now equivalent to the solid top line. We are an aliased line which nevertheless is felt as a holistically integrated intuition of self (the dashed purple line).

Then the post goes on to a great illustration of how modern initiation-meditation differs from that approach and finds the true image of the Divine Self in the humble, self-conscious thought-seed around which our spiritual organism can grow and into which the Divine Self can incarnate. Then we begin to experience the intuitive background of our stream, including the Earthly sensory world, as clearly intelligble Music and Speech, rather than unified and sweetly sounding noise.

[Stranger]

By the way, Eugene, it occurred to me that this Cantor dust post was written in response to you, but you never replied. It basically fleshes out and neatly outlines the entire recent discussion which has unfolded here and what you just agreed to in the last post. I wonder if you have any thoughts on it now, in light of the recent discussion?

Sorry, I dropped in November and missed that post, so I'll comment here. This is a great post, I enjoyed reading it. Cleric again is beating a strawman of "reductionist mysticism", and we all agreed already that is it not the right spiritual approach. I would like to rehabilitate the bad label of "mystics" and point that there are both "reductionist" and "nonreductionist" mystics, and, as I explained before, the "reductionist" state was supposed to be only a temporary stage of nondual practice, but some people confuse it with the "ultimate liberation" and so become "reductionist mystics". Anyway, we should move on and leave the poor "reductionist mystics" behind, they already got enough criticism on this forum.

If we grasp this fact properly we’ll already know that intuition of self can only expand through the growth of our thinking organism. This thinking later transforms and reaches higher orders of intuition in Imagination and so on.

Correct. When mystics (reductionist of non-reductionist) say that the knowing of Self is "beyond thoughts" they only mean discursive thoughts. Self-knowledge of the Self happens through thinking, but It is only on the higher intuitive level of thinking where the Self becomes aware of itself.

I humbly rest myself in your Cosmic embrace, in your Intuitive Being. I can only open myself in prayer to you. But your Spirit I’ll only see reflected in the growing organism of my thinking being. Only in this way your Intuitive Being inflows in me like clear speech, just as I understand my own thoughts as clear speech.

Modern meditation demands as a precondition, clear understanding of all this. Then we know that we’re in the middle. Meditation should always begin with prayer – even if wordless. We turn with all our soul towards the infinite intuitive background and humbly desire to be one with it, just like the mystic does. Then we leave our periphery in complete trust to the Cosmic forces. Now we live in an aura of loving surrender to powers that can’t fit our ‘cabin’. At the same time we direct towards that which is up to us, and which no one else can do for us. We focus all our spiritual energy in the thought-seed around which our cognitive organism grows with much patience. ... More and more of Divine thinking becomes also our own thinking.

That is 100% true and I also talked about it in this thread. I'm reposting the brief outline of the spiritual practice that includes prayer as an essential part:

The spiritual path consists of basically three parts that need to be accomplished in our current human life: sacrificial, faith-prayer and fulfilling the Divine Will:

- The sacrificial part. The only thing blocking the way of uniting with the Divine is our "separate self". It leaves no gap for the Divine to fill our soul with its Holy Spirit. Our work is to deny and sacrifice the "separate self", and empty and clear the space in the soul so that the Holy Spirit can fill it and bring all the knowledge we need to know. But this is easy to say but very hard to do, it requires consistent work of dis-identification from the "separate self", metamorphing the psyche (metanoia) to turn it away from the self-centered egoic behavioral and cognitive patterns, of mindfulness in catching, not enacting and sacrificing the desires, thoughts and activities of the egoic self, and so on.

- The faith and prayer part. Open to the Divine and pray that it will reveal itself and fill and abide in the cleared space of our soul with its Divine presence. The Holy Spirit will fill the soul and bring it automatically into the state of Oneness, because the Holy spirit is indivisible, there is only one Holy Spirit in the entire Cosmos.

- Once the Divine enters the soul and abides in it, it will act according to its Will of Love and Compassion towards all living beings in the Cosmos through our individual spiritual activity.

There is a great Orthodox Christian prayer that I always use in my practice, I actually start my day with it right when I wake up.:

O Heavenly King,
the Comforter,
the Spirit of Truth,
Who art everywhere
and fillest all things,
Treasury of Blessings
and Giver of Life,
come and abide in us,
and cleanse us
from every impurity
and save our souls,
O Good One.

Doesn’t it make sense that if the Self is to gain true intuition of its reality (the higher lines), and not only the intuition of Cosmic noise, we should find ways to integrate the organism that can reflect these intuitions?

Yes, absolutely. So the point is that to accomplish such integration, the Self needs to know itself as a Conscious Being and realize that the whole Cosmos is inseparable from the Self and thereby see Itself as the source from which all structures grow while being inseparable from the Self, and at the same time gain the true intuition of the "higher lines" that higher-level knowledge of the whole structure of the Cosmos.

So, using the analogy of a tree, here is an outline of these approaches:
- Dualistic spiritual seekers, as well as secular scientists, only look at the leaves and branches around the perspective of their close proximity perceiving them fragmentary apart from each other and trying to comprehend their structures while neglecting the trunk that unites the branches and leaves into one inseparable structure.
- Nondual reductionists find the solid trunk within its close perspective and say: "Oh, the tree is actually only the solid trunk, not the leaves, so I don't care about the leaves, they come and go and are just making noise, I will stick with the real tree - the solid trunk"
- The "integrative living-thinking-mystics" embrace both the trunk-roots as the unifying foundation of the tree and the branches-leaves as the structure of the tree and work on enhancing the radius of their perspective of knowing the whole tree. They know that essentially the tree is of the same nature everywhere, and this knowledge allows them to know the tree as a unified structure and not as a fragmented set of separate leaves and branches, but they also embrace and do not neglect the leaves and branches as the structure essential to the tree and inseparable from it.

[Anthony66]

With that said, I'm a little disappointed that this thread seems to have gone undeveloped. The question of how the imagination-intuition of higher-order beings precipitate into percepts within our field of conscious phenomena is something I'd love to gain a greater insight of. You started to address this here with the distinction between immediate perceptions, memory images, and imaginative images. The diverse character of these makes sense.

Where I struggle is bridging the divide between the various metaphors that have been employed here - carrier waves, Moiré patterns, fractals etc. - and the standard models of say visual perception as per ChatGPT:

Light travels as electromagnetic radiation and enters the eye through the cornea, a transparent outer covering. The cornea bends the light and focuses it onto the lens, which further refracts the light and adjusts its focus. The lens then projects the light onto the retina, a thin layer of light-sensitive cells located at the back of the eye. The retina contains two types of photoreceptor cells: rods and cones. Rods are more sensitive to low levels of light and are responsible for our vision in dim light conditions. Cones are responsible for color vision and work best in brighter light conditions. When light hits the photoreceptor cells, it triggers a series of chemical and electrical events that generate nerve impulses. These impulses travel along the optic nerve to the brain, which processes the information and creates a visual image.

On the one hand we have the causal chain of light, corneas, retinas, photoreceptor cells, and nerve impulses etc. The attachment of conceptual content to these perceptual elements and the identification of the interactions being a construction of our thinking I'm happy with. But how do these percepts "get in" to my field of conscious awareness? High order beings precipitate those precepts to which we add our thinking. Is it something akin to Berkeley's idea where perceptions arise directly out of the omnipotence of God? I can't quite join the dots.

Anthony,

I am glad you revisited that post from Cleric, as I am also interested in following that phenomenology further. On that note, in regards to your question, I think we need to clearly distinguish between metaphysics and phenomenology to begin with.

When we ask about higher order beings precipitating percepts into our field of consciousness and so forth, we are asking for a metaphysical model. We want to view the whole process from the side, like there are Divine beings who are radiating perceptual structures into our conscious field, which we then perceive and think about. This secretly embeds the assumption that our current concepts and conceptual templates are adequate to understand what actually happens in the first-person process of cognition-perception. Notice all metaphysical models presuppose we can borrow things from our current understanding, which is generally an understanding of how inanimate objects behave, and apply them across the board to the phenomena of life, soul, and thinking (which is what the quote you shared does). A phenomenology, in contrast, naturally leads us to entirely unfamiliar ways of observing and thinking through these intimate life, soul, and thinking processes which unfold in our stream of becoming. That is, if we remain open to the fact that our current opinions, assumptions, theories, etc. should be put aside, should be sacrificed for the time being, if we want the givens of experience to shine forth and guide our reasoning.

Does that make sense?

With the question of how perception arises in relation to our will-thinking, we are implicating the lawful spaces of soul and spirit. These are living spaces with unique lawfulness, not reducible to the merely physical forces we are familiar with in secular science, which by themselves only lead to decay and death. I am sure you remember the detailed post Cleric gave on Levin's models in response to a question you asked. We need to try and keep all of that in mind. Maybe it will help to revisit it again. I will leave it here for now, because I don't have a clear sense of how to articulate my thoughts further and maybe Cleric is already writing something in response. Both he and Steiner clearly show there are viable ways of articulating these unfamiliar dynamics and building a gradient of understanding between our familiar habits of thinking and the yet unfamiliar modes which alone can elucidate the phenomena of life, soul, and spirit. We need to trust that our living and energetic thinking can reach out beyond our current state and illuminate the corridors we otherwise navigate in the most dim and clumsy way with our abstract concepts, as long as we are willing to sacrifice the personal preferences, opinions, etc. which constantly tempt us to resist a deeper understanding of these archetypal processes.

I understand the reticence to invoke metaphysical models but I think they are useful foot holes to provide some support to the novice until the phenomenological really takes root.

I remember Cleric's Levin post quite clearly and it remains quite helpful. The curvature of spaces by higher order dynamics resonates. My answer to my own question would entail something like intuitive ideas originating from the deep or higher layers of conscious reality traversing nested, causal space projecting (ala Berkeley) into our conscious space. But I'm sure there's a 7000 word elaboration of this.

[Anthony66]

My point is that I do not see any contradiction between the non-dual thought and living thinking. IMO they can and should be integrated into one wholistic approach.

I guess the point of contention or at least partial misunderstanding related to gradients in the non-dual mystical state. I think all parties finally agree the space is indeed differentiable!

[AshvinP]

With that said, I'm a little disappointed that this thread seems to have gone undeveloped. The question of how the imagination-intuition of higher-order beings precipitate into percepts within our field of conscious phenomena is something I'd love to gain a greater insight of. You started to address this here with the distinction between immediate perceptions, memory images, and imaginative images. The diverse character of these makes sense.

Where I struggle is bridging the divide between the various metaphors that have been employed here - carrier waves, Moiré patterns, fractals etc. - and the standard models of say visual perception as per ChatGPT:

On the one hand we have the causal chain of light, corneas, retinas, photoreceptor cells, and nerve impulses etc. The attachment of conceptual content to these perceptual elements and the identification of the interactions being a construction of our thinking I'm happy with. But how do these percepts "get in" to my field of conscious awareness? High order beings precipitate those precepts to which we add our thinking. Is it something akin to Berkeley's idea where perceptions arise directly out of the omnipotence of God? I can't quite join the dots.

Anthony,

I am glad you revisited that post from Cleric, as I am also interested in following that phenomenology further. On that note, in regards to your question, I think we need to clearly distinguish between metaphysics and phenomenology to begin with.

When we ask about higher order beings precipitating percepts into our field of consciousness and so forth, we are asking for a metaphysical model. We want to view the whole process from the side, like there are Divine beings who are radiating perceptual structures into our conscious field, which we then perceive and think about. This secretly embeds the assumption that our current concepts and conceptual templates are adequate to understand what actually happens in the first-person process of cognition-perception. Notice all metaphysical models presuppose we can borrow things from our current understanding, which is generally an understanding of how inanimate objects behave, and apply them across the board to the phenomena of life, soul, and thinking (which is what the quote you shared does). A phenomenology, in contrast, naturally leads us to entirely unfamiliar ways of observing and thinking through these intimate life, soul, and thinking processes which unfold in our stream of becoming. That is, if we remain open to the fact that our current opinions, assumptions, theories, etc. should be put aside, should be sacrificed for the time being, if we want the givens of experience to shine forth and guide our reasoning.

Does that make sense?

With the question of how perception arises in relation to our will-thinking, we are implicating the lawful spaces of soul and spirit. These are living spaces with unique lawfulness, not reducible to the merely physical forces we are familiar with in secular science, which by themselves only lead to decay and death. I am sure you remember the detailed post Cleric gave on Levin's models in response to a question you asked. We need to try and keep all of that in mind. Maybe it will help to revisit it again. I will leave it here for now, because I don't have a clear sense of how to articulate my thoughts further and maybe Cleric is already writing something in response. Both he and Steiner clearly show there are viable ways of articulating these unfamiliar dynamics and building a gradient of understanding between our familiar habits of thinking and the yet unfamiliar modes which alone can elucidate the phenomena of life, soul, and spirit. We need to trust that our living and energetic thinking can reach out beyond our current state and illuminate the corridors we otherwise navigate in the most dim and clumsy way with our abstract concepts, as long as we are willing to sacrifice the personal preferences, opinions, etc. which constantly tempt us to resist a deeper understanding of these archetypal processes.

I understand the reticence to invoke metaphysical models but I think they are useful foot holes to provide some support to the novice until the phenomenological really takes root.

I remember Cleric's Levin post quite clearly and it remains quite helpful. The curvature of spaces by higher order dynamics resonates. My answer to my own question would entail something like intuitive ideas originating from the deep or higher layers of conscious reality traversing nested, causal space projecting (ala Berkeley) into our conscious space. But I'm sure there's a 7000 word elaboration of this.

Anthony,

It really depends on how we approach the metaphysical models. They are not dissimilar from standard scientific models in that sense. Let's say we have a standard model of how the Earth turns on its axis once every 24 hours, the Moon revolves around the Earth once every 28 days, the Sun illuminates the Moon in four different phases every month, the Earth revolves around the Sun once every year. Now we want to understand the spiritual reality behind this model. Some people may imagine a set of Beings behind the Sun, the Moon, the Earth, who are thinking the Ideas, 'revolve every 24 hours, revolve every 28 days, illuminate in four different phases, revolve once a year', and these Ideas then manifest as our perception of the rhythms, or something similar to that. In that case, we are posivitely blocking our chance of understanding the genuine spiritual reality with the model and are much better off without relying on it.

Instead, we may say these outer rhythms described by the model as the manifestations of inner WFT activity which find a localized expression in our own body-soul-spirit organism. The bodies aren't revolving a certain distance in certain time periods, but the time periods are how we experience the lawfulness of the interrelations of these inner rhythms from our current thinking perspective. It is a fluid experience which has changed over the course of our evolution. The fact that we now have day and night rhythmic experience relates to the activity of our ego and its circuit between poles of matter and spirit (outer and inner). It turns around upon its axis, so to speak, and we experience that as the day-night rhythm. The Sun illuminating the Moon in a different phase every 7 days relates to the circuit of our astral body. The Moon orbiting the Earth every 28 days relates to the rhythm of the etheric body, and the Earth revolving the Sun in a year relates to the rhythm of the physical body. The details are much more complex, so we see how a proper inquiry already leads us into unsuspected territory which will mean very little to us outside of a more holistic context of spiritual evolution.

Within that context, the manifestations of these rhythms should all find very practical application in our lives, in terms of how the movement of our willed thoughts relate to the movement of our soul-tendencies (impulses, passions, emotions, etc.) and to the movement of our more stable soul-traits like temperament, character, etc. and to the movement of our physical existence in connection with the surrounding environment. We can start to understand all sorts of pathologies and illnesses which manifest through the disharmony between the rhythms, for ex. They all relate to each other like the hands of a clock. We aren't perfectly aligned with these Cosmic rhythms anymore, which therefore allows for inner freedom and the choice to freely reattune to the rhythms through the strength of our thinking (in effect fashioning new Earthly and Cosmic rhythms), but also manifests in illness and death.

Don't get me wrong - I don't claim to have any super deep understanding of these things myself, but am simply pointing in the direction that we need to begin interacting with conceptual models if we want to uncover the inner spiritual realities to which they are pointing, rather than simply view them from the side and thereby block our own attempts at understanding.

[Anthony66]

Instead, we may say these outer rhythms described by the model as the manifestations of inner WFT activity which find a localized expression in our own body-soul-spirit organism. The bodies aren't revolving a certain distance in certain time periods, but the time periods are how we experience the lawfulness of the interrelations of these inner rhythms from our current thinking perspective.

I guess the piece in the puzzle that I'm looking for is how the inner WFT activity of "other" agents finds expression with my body-soul-spirit. Reflecting on the many posts here over the last 12 months has given me a level of intuition for the answer here, e.g. modulations of deeper levels of conscious activity. But when talking to others about these ideas, I feel like I'm not able to effectively convey this understanding.

[Federica]

Instead, we may say these outer rhythms described by the model as the manifestations of inner WFT activity which find a localized expression in our own body-soul-spirit organism. The bodies aren't revolving a certain distance in certain time periods, but the time periods are how we experience the lawfulness of the interrelations of these inner rhythms from our current thinking perspective.

I guess the piece in the puzzle that I'm looking for is how the inner WFT activity of "other" agents finds expression with my body-soul-spirit. Reflecting on the many posts here over the last 12 months has given me a level of intuition for the answer here, e.g. modulations of deeper levels of conscious activity. But when talking to others about these ideas, I feel like I'm not able to effectively convey this understanding.

Anthony,

In between Ashvin's replies, I thought I would briefly add someting that came to mind already when you first asked this same question:

The question of how the imagination-intuition of higher-order beings precipitate into percepts within our field of conscious phenomena is something I'd love to gain a greater insight of.

and:

High order beings precipitate those precepts to which we add our thinking. Is it something akin to Berkeley's idea where perceptions arise directly out of the omnipotence of God? I can't quite join the dots.

I am certainly not the right person to best repurpose the phenomenology of cognition and show that it isn't something akin to Berkeley we strive to grasp.
I just want to say that an idea of 'pinball game’ precipitation of percepts from one being to another - if I am allowed to use this image for 'clarity' - doesn't help at all. Although also inaccurate, I think it’s much more helpful at this point to approximate understanding by imagining that everything is already there as potential, and we actively (freely in the PoF sense) expand our conscious awareness to grasp more and more of that potential under constraints/laws. One of them is that of time, which encourages us to keep a soft and flexible grasp on the ideas of potential, realization, precipitation, flow, etc. In other words, it's useful to recall that it depends much more on our willed activity of conscious expansion than on the arbitrary activity of beings supposedly sending percepts our way.
The thought itself of "joining the dots" and the sequential logic it implies, could be quite misleading as a thinking gesture, or at least that's how I intuit it. We should strive for a more holistic, intuitive, feeling-based modus operandi for understanding, just as Ashvin recently recalled in the context of polarities.

[AshvinP]

Instead, we may say these outer rhythms described by the model as the manifestations of inner WFT activity which find a localized expression in our own body-soul-spirit organism. The bodies aren't revolving a certain distance in certain time periods, but the time periods are how we experience the lawfulness of the interrelations of these inner rhythms from our current thinking perspective.

I guess the piece in the puzzle that I'm looking for is how the inner WFT activity of "other" agents finds expression with my body-soul-spirit. Reflecting on the many posts here over the last 12 months has given me a level of intuition for the answer here, e.g. modulations of deeper levels of conscious activity. But when talking to others about these ideas, I feel like I'm not able to effectively convey this understanding.

Anthony,

I'm hardly able to convey most of what I intuitively understand, either. That's why my posts on these things are so short and descriptive (rather than illustrative with graphics or metaphors). We should realize that what Cleric is able to do in that regard - translating the intuitive understanding into the language of the imagination and the intellect - comes after years of devoted practice. It is certainly a great ideal for us to aspire towards, but we shouldn't rush it or imagine we are able to immediately teach others what we have only provisionally understood. That is always a great temptation on the spiritual path, because the conscious mind generally tries to rush ahead of its organic state of development and we lean into that impulse in our efforts for higher development.

The task is pretty simple - the missing puzzle pieces of how the higher-order beings work into our WFT soul-life will be revealed to us, through our thought-life, by those higher-order beings, in proportion to how much devoted attention we pay to them. Or as Federica said, by our willed activity of conscious expansion. But this simple task is not easily approached with our modern habits of dry intellectual thinking, our disposition towards ease and convenience, our cynicism and closed-mindedness towards prayer or things considered 'superstitious', or our attachments to a life of sensuality which distracts our attention from the realms of experience which are archetypal and lasting. We should start to feel that the process of working on the enlivening and attunement of our soul-rhythms through sacrificial work is the same as the process of gaining greater insight into these higher realities.

Imagine that we think, 'well there are certain familiar and pleasurable habits of thinking, feeling, and acting which I am simply not willing to sacrifice today for this potential greater insight', and imagine that the higher-order beings can sense our thoughts (because they can). There are also 7+ billion individualities on the planet, some of whom are constantly thinking about what more of their Earthly personality they can sacrifice than they did the day before, to unclog the coarse matter permeating their soul-life and let the subtler spiritual currents flow in. They keep doing this daily even though it rarely produces immediate or tangible results. Who are the higher-order beings going to direct their archetypal Imaginations and Inspirations towards? How would you proceed with that task if you were in their position? (of course this isn't meant to anthropomorphize the higher beings, but only as a loose analogy for what qualities attract the higher ideations)

These are questions we should deeply contemplate, not necessarily searching for clear conceptual answers, but simply letting them ruminate in our soul and motivate us towards concrete efforts, if we are interested in making more sense of our lives. The more we can differentiate our core be-ing from our lower nature and its tendencies, the more we can lift our head above the latter's murky waters and start to make sense of its normal channels, its currents, its flows, its twists and turns. These are all the inner aspects which begin to make sense of why holistic spiritual intents, unfolding in a nested temporal structure, convolute into our decohered perception of fixed objects and flattened processes which are mimicked by our intellectual thoughts.

Spiritual science also gives us a language to speak of the missing puzzle pieces - we may refer to the higher hierarchies, the Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth periods of Cosmic manifestation, the Lemurian, Atlantean, Post-Atlantean 'root races' nested within those, the Ego-Astral-Etheric organism which links our current consciousness to these higher planes of consciousness, the Intuitions, Inspirations, and Imaginations which flow from these higher planes into our consciousness and modulate our WFT soul-life, etc. But whether these will refer to immanent first-person experiential realities of the depth structure within us, or flattened concepts which we horizontally combine into an ever-more complicated model of reality, will depend on our devoted persistence to the spiritual exercises and spiritual scientific study.

On the latter, notice how every new detail we learn opens up a world of possibilities for further details which provide a greater context. It is like we are reading a sentence one word at a time - 'The'... 'Sun'... 'is'... 'moving'... - we are gaining a slightly more refined understanding of the holistic meaning with each new word, but if these words are only part of a few paragraphs, pages, or a book about the astronomical-astrological path of the Sun over a Platonic year, then it would really help to have that overarching context in our view as well. Otherwise we have little idea in what direction we are moving with the words. That is where the principles of spiritual evolution, signified by some of the terms mentioned above, become very important (rhythmically exercised with our meditative practice which inflows higher impulses of understanding, normally unavailable to the intellect). But, again, if we feel like sitting down for many hours of our free time, reading and re-reading a lecture series, is too much of a demand on our time and effort, then clearly there is something within our immediate soul-life that we are as of yet unwilling to sacrifice for greater understanding.

[Cleric K]

I guess the piece in the puzzle that I'm looking for is how the inner WFT activity of "other" agents finds expression with my body-soul-spirit. Reflecting on the many posts here over the last 12 months has given me a level of intuition for the answer here, e.g. modulations of deeper levels of conscious activity. But when talking to others about these ideas, I feel like I'm not able to effectively convey this understanding.

Anthony, I just first want to say that I haven't forgotten about my promise to continue with the question in this thread. I'm just trying to manage time and I'm considering to first go through several other posts that will help establish even more shared concepts that will be useful later on. But these things take time and proper disposition, so I apologize for taking so long.

About your question above, as Ashvin noted earlier, we have to be careful not to imagine our own being as a self-contained 'device'. Otherwise the question, through our modern habits, reduces to something like: how the activity on my device generates network packets that are then propagated over the Internet and are decoded as messages/commands on a remote device. This is something that we must guard from. It feels natural only because of our modern sensory intuition of discrete bodies that influence each other across space. Yet it presents us with its unique challenges, for example - what is the spiritual space between agents? We more or less know what it means to be an atomic agent but how do we understand the 'spiritual vacuum' in between agents, where our 'network packets' propagate?

This can be counterbalanced with a view which is no less schematic but at least points as in a new direction. I have used this image before:



Here the idea is that our 'agent' is really a unique point of interference of the whole Cosmos. Thus the higher we reach through advanced cognition (towards the outer perimeter of the image), the more we understand the archetypal interferences that are common for all of us.

This gives us an alternative way to think about the way other agents find expressions in our body-soul-spirit. The key is that at each level our experience can be what it is only because it is formed as the interference pattern of all other beings at that level. This is somewhat difficult to grasp in our business age where we have our isolated inner life that is indeed impacted primarily through sensory stimuli - messages, emails, meetings, contracts and so on. Sadly, even many family relations are of such business nature today. Yet everyone can still find examples in our personal life where we do sincerely empathize with the soul and spiritual states of other beings. About these we shouldn't imagine spiritual vacuum in between us but actual interaction of our subtler strata of being. They overlap, they interfere, they shape each other.

And this is true even in our exchanges here on the forum. By gaining deeper intuition of the things we talk about, we really meet/overlap in the more archetypal levels. It is true that initially we impact each other mainly through the 'horizontal' sensory means of a forum like this, yet the ideas that are thus provoked, if grasped in their deep nature, are at the same time our meeting points, they shouldn't remain only as personal carbon copies within our heads.

So to your question I would say to pay attention to this habit of imagining our agent spheres making exchanges through 'photons' only. Our physical bodies are really like standing wave patterns that affect each other through ripples but we must bear in mind that as we move towards the soul and spirit, our being finds its consciousness also in the ripples themselves, so to speak. So we have to slightly change our attitude and make our soul boundary more 'fuzzy' and extending farther, where we are conscious of the overlap with other beings. Of course, this shouldn't happen indiscriminately. That would be like beginning to ingest all kinds of foodstuff without making any difference. We should still maintain 'selective permeability' through seeking resonance only with the forces of our highest moral ideals.