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

[Federica]

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.

This is so clearly fleshed out (as Ashvin would say) and easy to approach, including the picture (which is new to me) thank you, Cleric!

[Cleric K]

This is so clearly fleshed out (as Ashvin would say) and easy to approach, including the picture (which is new to me) thank you, Cleric!

Thank you, Federica! I'm really happy the image made sense (even though it can never be the full picture). Maybe it elucidates from another angle the milestone we reached we Eugene - that complete Oneness is at the perimeter at infinity, yet as soon as we have manifested stream of existence through time, a being's perspective already finds itself in certain 'phase relations' with other beings. These relations are much more symphonic in the higher strata but can become dissonant when the relations go out of phase in the more differentiated strata. It's important to keep in mind that instead of the perimeter we can think also of a center (like the Deep MAL picture). In both cases we deal with symbols so we can't expect that it is either one or the other. This however speaks to our deep intuition that the Divine One is both the Center and the Periphery (even if in purely geometric sense it seems contradictory). We have the Great Poles once again, in between which all exploration of differentiated potential manifests. Through all ages this mystery has been encoded with the simple occult symbol of a circle with a dot in the center.

[Anthony66]

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.

The perspective offered here is very helpful but then I can't see how it translates into mundane phenomena like blocking a stream of light with an opaque filter.

[Cleric K]

The perspective offered here is very helpful but then I can't see how it translates into mundane phenomena like blocking a stream of light with an opaque filter.

Alas, it’s not that easy to approach that question. There are so many preconceived patterns of thinking that have to be reimagined. For example, instead of simply asking the question, we can start by introspecting what we’re doing with our thinking when we think of light and filters?

We can start a little further afar by remembering that our modern conception of light is relatively recent. Before that we could speak of throwing stones and waves in the sea. These are concepts that we form against much more immediate sensory perceptions. This doesn’t mean that the moving color perception of a stone exhausts the full reality of whatever may be involved in it. But at least our concept of a stone is somewhat justified for the concrete patterns of perceptions.

Things become different, though, when we reach the time of Newton. When we speak of corpuscles of light we no longer have concrete sensory perceptions of them. All we have is the perceptions of our thoughts about corpuscles. It is very interesting to introspect what we really do when we think about photons, for example. Today even the layman confidently uses such words. But there’s an important difference between thinking of flying stones and photons. I invite everyone to try this simple experiment. Think about photons, about particles of light and try to observe what you do in your imagination. Most people will probably imagine some sparkling dots or something of that kind. Those with more rigorous scientific training may acknowledge that it is naive to imagine photons in that way and instead think only of the mathematical quantities that define them.

So this is the first step. It’s not easy. We operate within layers upon layers of such accumulated thinking habits. Please note – all this is not to say that there’s no justification to speak of particles of light or something like that. The problem is that we try to extend our everyday human-scale intuitions into these elemental depths and imagine something like miniscule flying fiery stones. Of course, this view has been completely dismantled by the sciences of the twentieth century but who would deny that even in the face of this fact we still habitually imagine flying fireballs? The experimental results of QM and GR have clearly shown that our human-scale intuition of space and objects transforming through time, breaks down in the world of the Large and the Small. The only problem is that we know nothing else. Thus science currently simply focuses on mathematical models, even though for a long time now we no longer can relate these models to something tangible from our human-level experience.

In order to continue this exploration we have to be very clear with this situation. It is very important that we identify within ourselves this kind of thinker that imagines flying fireballs that are absorbed by filters. Each one of us has this kind of thinker within ourselves. And this is not in itself the problem. The problem comes when the different thinkers in ourselves overstep their rightful domains.

We can indeed build better intuition of light and interestingly, our sciences have already led us very close, we only need the right perspective, the right mode of consciousness. But we have to first become fully aware of what we’re doing with our thinking when we think about light going through a filter. If we take our thoughts about photons traveling through space for a given fundamental fact, we’re in the position of a person that puts on a shirt, interlocks the fingers of his hands and then tries to undress it. In other words, we don’t really sense how through certain conceptions we interlock our thinking within certain frameworks which don’t allow us to breathe in and out of them.

This is somewhat discouraging for many because it seems to completely sidestep the question. One would say “I’m asking you about light, I’m not asking for lessons on thinking.” And this is precisely the difficulty – that in order to approach the living experience of deeper reality, we can’t afford to leave our thinking unexamined. We have to unceasingly seek these ever new spiritual forces that put an intellectual shirt, do something with it, then undress it, then put another and so on.

We’ll gradually continue but I wanted to point out that we need the mental readiness that in the course of exploration we may find that the explanation of photons – in the way we think about them – is to be found within our own thinking because such photons exist first and foremost as thoughts in our consciousness. I repeat that this is not to throw us in the other extreme which is very popular today – that of complete agnosticism where we look upon reality as a floating decal and consider that everything science discovers is pure illusion. No, the physical world truly has its lawful structure. It’s only that we arrive at the reality of that structure from a rather surprising angle.

We’ll continue later. In the meantime it would be valuable to examine our thinking when we think about photons of light. What do we really imagine? What do we picture when we say ‘photon’? Think about the way this conception has been built throughout our life. Finally we should really examine ourselves and see if we ask our questions about light against the framework in which we presently imagine photons or we’re open that light might be something even more mysterious and our concepts of photons are only quite rigid artifacts resulting from the way our intellect tries to extend its human-scale conceptions into the depths of reality.

[Stranger]

We’ll gradually continue but I wanted to point out that we need the mental readiness that in the course of exploration we may find that the explanation of photons – in the way we think about them – is to be found within our own thinking because such photons exist first and foremost as thoughts in our consciousness.

that is exactly right, we get it

I repeat that this is not to throw us in the other extreme which is very popular today – that of complete agnosticism where we look upon reality as a floating decal and consider that everything science discovers is pure illusion. No, the physical world truly has its lawful structure. It’s only that we arrive at the reality of that structure from a rather surprising angle.

Patiently waiting for the next chapter

[Federica]

We’ll gradually continue but I wanted to point out that we need the mental readiness that in the course of exploration we may find that the explanation of photons – in the way we think about them – is to be found within our own thinking because such photons exist first and foremost as thoughts in our consciousness.

that is exactly right, we get it

Eugene, I like that you have this trust in your fellow forum members, thank you

I repeat that this is not to throw us in the other extreme which is very popular today – that of complete agnosticism where we look upon reality as a floating decal and consider that everything science discovers is pure illusion. No, the physical world truly has its lawful structure. It’s only that we arrive at the reality of that structure from a rather surprising angle.

Patiently waiting for the next chapter

Yeah... we are so incredibly lucky! I'm thinking of the billions who don't have a next chapter to wait for, who are trying to get themselves through life, not sure what the meaning of it all is, and with no cues how to find it, and finally no longer a concrete interest in the question...

I invite everyone to try this simple experiment. Think about photons, about particles of light and try to observe what you do in your imagination. Most people will probably imagine some sparkling dots or something of that kind. Those with more rigorous scientific training may acknowledge that it is naive to imagine photons in that way and instead think only of the mathematical quantities that define them.

I am of the sparkling dots type

[Cleric K]

Let’s continue with the theme of light. As hinted, we can’t go very far by trying to understand light (and this goes for the physical world as a whole) by imagining particles and fields, no matter how subtle, ‘made of’ consciousness and so on. This probably sounds insulting to the ears of the scientifically minded people of today. But it shouldn’t be if we understand the deeper reasons. Probably the most understandable analogy, mentioned many times, is that of dreaming. We can certainly try to explain our dreaming environment from within our dreams, we can philosophize, make observations and so on. But from our waking perspective it is obvious that whatever dream-thoughts we patch up in this way will always miss something essential without which an entire world goes unsuspected and without which the dream world would never be what it is.

This is the kind of attitude we should equip ourselves with if we are to develop a proper understanding of reality. Please note – our dream world is understood from the standpoint of the waking not through fancy theories but by the simple fact that our waking consciousness in its very nature contains within itself the lower dreaming consciousness. This is key. We get a step closer to truth not when we assemble and contemplate the ‘right’ arrangement of abstract thoughts but when we use the thoughts, through their own consistency, as pointers towards the needed inner transformations. In a dream we can reach the logical conclusion that we’re dreaming but to step into lucidity we need a different inner gesture. The logical thoughts are the pointers but to step in that direction we need a different kind of activity. And those with experience with lucid dreaming know that sometimes we understand that we’re dreaming, yet this understanding doesn’t go far enough to incite the inner transformation which makes us lucid and allows us to begin transforming aspects of the dreamscape. This shows that our logical thoughts can still remain in a doubting mind. We need something more if we’re to truly transform.

The parallel between higher–ordinary consciousness and waking–dreaming, is limited, as it has been pointed out many times. The most important inadequacy is that in both waking and dreaming we deal with sensory-like experiences and intellectual thinking. This is not so in the case of higher consciousness. But nevertheless, the idea that with our thinking we can approach the threshold, even though we need different inner activity in order to cross it, remains valid in both cases and that’s why the analogy is admissible.

If we understand this analogy, we should be prepared that in order to understand the nature of light, we’ll have to approach a level of consciousness which by its own nature will give a different way to understand it. We shouldn’t imagine that this higher consciousness will simply give us the ‘right’ theory of light that we’ll then use in our intellectual life. In the same way, becoming lucid in a dream doesn’t provide us with some more fanciful means to understand the ‘dream photons’. Instead, it helps us understand dream light in a new, completely unexpected way. We have to equip ourselves with a similar attitude if we are to approach the true nature of physical light. Our intellect’s thirst for knowledge will be satisfied but not in the way it expects – as some clever arrangement of thoughts about photons.

If we understand all this we can begin using our thoughts in the proper way – as pointers to higher lucidity. If we simply stare at a source of light, a filter and a detector, it will be nearly impossible to approach the reality of light. It would be better to take our own inner experience of color as one pole and then try to think of the ways this experience is agitated. As the other pole, there’s no better choice but to think of the Sun. So we have our very simple experimental setup. We experience color sensations and think about the true nature of the Sun.

Then we can ask a question: in what ways can my experience of sunlight be effected? The most obvious is that if I stay in the basement I don’t experience sunlight. If I go out in nature, I’m bathed in it. So the first observation is that through our willing we change the configuration of our experimental setup and the sunlight can be filtered or not. This is of course quite obvious and doesn’t seem to explain anything but we have to pay attention to even such trivial details – the way we employ our spiritual activity has something to do with the fact whether we experience sunlight or not.

Now let’s imagine a similar experimental setup but take another human being as the other pole. We surely have color perceptions of the person but there’s more to a human being than that. In our interaction with other people we also exchange feelings and ideas. Thus if a person moves their hand, the sensory perception is not the whole story. We can only understand the movement if we understand the feelings and ideas behind it. To this everyone more or less agrees. But in our present culture it would sound absurd that we may need a similar attitude also in respect to the Sun. It’s not about anthropomorphizing the Sun, imagining it as a human-like personality with their whims, temperament, pretenses and so on but by being open that our understanding may remain forever incomplete if we stop only at our sense perceptions, in the same way it will remain incomplete if we dissect and analyze a moving hand without any interest in the feelings and meaningful motives of the person.

When we look at the hand gesture of a person we can understand it only as far as we can share in the feelings and ideas that motivate it. In the case of the Sun’s Intelligence, if we are to grasp anything of its true nature, we have to take a step in the orthogonal direction, towards higher lucidity. This is necessary because the spiritual processes that impress in our consciousness as light phenomena are of different order compared to our familiar human thinking, feeling, willing and perceiving. Now the really hard question is how can we approach this higher lucidity? Obviously, it can’t be reached with philosophizing alone, in the same way that in a dream it’s not enough to simply acknowledge that we’re dreaming. We need also the next step that lifts us orthogonally to the dream.

This is also why the fairy tales that Ashvin brought to attention have the power they do. In the end it is not about the concrete arrangement of images, as if they constitute a self-sufficient world but their ability to awaken the deeper strata of our soul, through which we’re lifted from the sensory spectrum. Here’s one more way to point our attention to something that is not immediately contained within the sensory plane.

In relativity it is known that for someone moving relative to us their clock ticks less time compared to ours. In the extreme case, when they move at the speed of light, it is as if their clock doesn’t tick at all. These things are very abstract so we’re looking at them only as fairy tales. The tale goes that a photon doesn’t experience any time. It takes zero time to reach from A to B even if they are infinitely far apart. Otherwise stated, it is as if a photon is everywhere at once. These things are really absurd for our rational intellect and it’s for this reason that physicists don’t really know what to do with them.

Interestingly, things wouldn’t be so baffling for men of the ancient times, as they still had an innate feeling for eternity. Modern man has completely lost that feeling. Today eternity is understood as an infinite amount of time, infinite duration (which seems scary because when taken anthropomorphically it sounds like infinite time of boredom). Now we need to resurrect the true understanding of eternity. As explained so far, this won’t be achieved by some clever arrangement of concepts like time, inertial frames of reference, photons, speed of light and so on. We’re using these only as a modern day fairy tale which should help us approach the higher levels of lucidity where things will be understood as implicit intuition in the state of consciousness itself.

If we think in the context of relativity, it seems that for light the world of spacetime collapses into a point. It’s not even a point because a point implies an infinitesimal something in a large space but here we don’t have surrounding space. Everything is everywhere all at once. Our more familiar experience in space and time can be thought of as analysis of this simultaneous potential. It’s like the points A and B are pulled apart so that they are separated by spacetime intervals and can be experienced in their relative becoming.

If we reflect on this idea, even though it is very abstract, we can conceive of a possibility to seek this timeless unity by somehow bringing As and Bs closer together. When we communicate with a person, when we get together in space, we have the chance to exchange thoughts and feelings in real time. If the person is on Mars it will take some twenty minutes for their message to reach us, which already reflects a past state. We know that from our Earthly perspective it takes about eight minutes for light to reach us from the Sun. From the sunlight’s perspective it doesn’t take any time to travel. We can use this idea as a starting point for meditation.

Hopefully it is sensed where all this is leading us. In our ordinary stream we move through spacetime states of being. Each state is a unique configuration of perceptions, feelings, thoughts and so on. If we simply analyze the perceptions and try to understand, for example, how light photons travel through space, how they are filtered and so on, we can build useful models but the essential nature of light remains outside our consciousness. We need the orthogonal action to move us closer to the spiritual essence of the Sun. In a way this means that we have to encompass an eight minute interval as something whole. To understand light we have to coincide with it.

I’m using the eight minute interval only as a symbol here. I’m not suggesting some precise quantitative relations. Please bear that in mind. To understand something of the Sun world (Inspirative cognition) our ‘attention-span’ of consciousness has to become eight minutes. Only then we’re in position to experience the spiritual nature of the Sun world. This is not the same as simply squishing the events of eight minutes of our life into a panorama. For example, we can write down all our verbal thoughts that we think in eight minutes and this will turn out into some pages of text. The encompassing that we speak of is not simply stacking together these pages.

We can approach this with a comparison. A child can play for eight minutes with its toys. If it has to encompass that time in the above sense, it will be simply a compressed picture of its play. But we can think that there are also other intelligences at work of which the child has no clue. For example, the parents are largely responsible for the daily rhythm of the child. The child may not know this but after its eight minutes it may be put to bed. From its perspective these are just successions of worldly events. From the parents’ perspective this is spiritual activity based on certain understanding of what is appropriate for a developing child. The parents themselves are unknowingly within the context of education, economics, politics, world development as a whole. The point is that the encompassing of these spacetime intervals demands completely new forms of intuition. These are not simply compound intellectual intuitions but levels of consciousness which lift us orthogonally to everything we have previously known. Yet this lifting is not in order to fly away from our previous state but instead to complement it with new depths of consciousness which alone can grasp things in their true nature.

All of this can be connected with the fairy tale in Ashvin’s thread. We’re a poor lad with our intellectual cat. The Giant is our Imaginative geometry, our sense of what existence is. For example, when Eugene says that the whole World is imagined by Consciousness, this already implies certain relations between the supposed pure Consciousness and its imagined creations. It is precisely these relations which are part of the structure of the Giant – our Imaginative heritage. Being content with such a statement is like dreaming and saying “It’s all but a dream” but never actually attempting to find that orthogonal activity that can transform our be-ing into higher lucidity.

The Giant can’t simply encompass his eight minutes of experience. That will result in nothing more than the compressed picture of the child’s toys. To find the true eight minute interval the Giant has to burst as he contacts the Sun world.

Mysticism bursts the cat instead and remains in the lap of the Giant, who however, can be conscious of the Cosmos only in soul images. That’s why he can’t do otherwise but conceive that God simply imagines these images. On the other hand, when the Giant bursts we find that the cat indeed belongs to the Earthly world but there’s also something which projects and animates it all the way from the Sun world. That’s why in the other thread we’ve talked about the meaning of ‘through’.

If we burst the cat and remain with the Giant, we remain in quite inexplicable images. These are for which people today, with certain pride, say “there are simply no words for this. It’s a world incompatible with the cat.” Yet when things go towards the Sun, there are words, even if very clumsy at first. The reason is that the higher and lower worlds remain connected in a musical gradient. This is part of the symbolism in the Caduceus.



The happenings in the Sun world can be ‘transduced’ or ‘spiraled down’ to cat gestures. That’s how it is at all possible to speak of these things like we do now. So what can we say then about this Sun world? Even only by analogy, we should anticipate that the level of consciousness that we find there lifts us orthogonally to our ordinary waking life. We come in contact with a more mature world which weaves the rhythms of our life, even if the Earthly child busy with playing knows nothing of it. In other words, when we contact the Sun world, we already live in something of the consciousness in which we live also after death until new birth. We understand something of our being that goes from incarnation to incarnation and needless to say, its perspective, goals and so on are quite different from what we usually imagine based on our Earthly life.

Even though the eight minute interval is taken as a symbol it can be used in meditation. We can start by trying to grasp what we think of in eight minutes. It might come as a surprise that very often we can’t remember much about what we thought just a minute ago. So the first step is to try and be the master of at least few-second intervals at a time. Then we can appreciate how little we really understand of the reasons why our thought jumps from here to there. Of course we may have our rationale about it, we may say “I’m interested in this, I like that” and so on but in the end so does the child say about its toys. We need completely different levels of intuition in order to understand the curvatures in which our play unfolds. This intuition doesn’t appear magically in the very same way that we don’t learn a language in a snap. Everything is developed slowly and gradually, enriching the intuitive palette little by little. So when we meditate we seek to unite with the essential Spirit that governs the streamlines of our becoming. It is as if the light of the Spirit begins to take shape in the Sun world and becomes more and more concrete towards the Earthly state. It is almost as if the ‘wavefunction’ of our Earthly is shaped in the leeway between Earth and the Sun. This is not meant in spatial terms but as ‘vertical’ levels of spiritual concretization. To reach higher consciousness means to attune to the intuitive processes that concretize the potential along the gradient.

We can’t simply inflate and encompass the higher orders of existence because in that way we’ll simply find a picture of our toys (the horizontal aspect). Instead, we start by concentration. We have to find the point in the head where we anchor the Caduceus. From there we should feel the higher Spirit as our teacher, as a Master. We need to feel the honest desire to share in its intuitive life, just like a child needs thirst for knowledge if it is to understand the forces that shape the world. Then from our point of concentration we cultivate that attentiveness, the openness that the point can only be understood when it is found to be lawfully embedded within the higher intervals. Completely new forms of intuition have to find their way into our consciousness if we are to grasp the topology of these intervals and much of our former being has to burst in the process. Most importantly, we should in no way imagine that the Sun world is simply something that exists in our imagination. This would be simply the Giant self-proclaiming his absoluteness. When we meditate, when we try to bring our Earthly center A and the Solar center B into simultaneity, we have to feel that we approach a world that is greater than our consciousness in every possible way. That’s really why the Giant has to burst. He can’t contain what’s greater than him. Instead his Imaginative nature bursts and sacrifices itself to become the Cosmic background so to speak.

Of course we have said almost nothing about how all this relates to the experience of physical light but we can’t do otherwise than prepare the proper perspective. Otherwise we’ll continually snap back to errors like trying to explain the dream world through interaction of dream photons. And I repeat that it’s not that there’s no justification to speak of these photons. I’m not saying that they are pure illusions, completely unsupported by anything of experience. It’s only that the truly satisfying understanding of their true nature can come only when we strive to understand the higher waking state. Then our understanding of light will become much more spiritual in nature. Light has all to do with resonance, with attunement between states of being. It’s like a rubber band that connects the As and Bs in their original unity. Thus the only way to understand light in its essence is by finding resonances between states of being. For example, a person may love us but we may be too self-centered to notice this. There's a filter in between us. The light of the person doesn’t reach us. It’s similar with the Sun. When we start to meditate and seek the resonance with the Solar intervals, we find that there are many filters that prevent that light from flowing. We find all the excuses to focus on the spacetime states in the vicinity of the Earthly spectrum. This sounds outrageous to the modern scientific mind but we learn infinitely more about light and filters when we investigate how and why we filter the light of our Higher Solar Being from elucidating the spacetime intervals within which our Earthly life manifests. When we understand these things then we can also approach the question of physical light, which we’ll find that is still all about spiritual relations yet at different scales.

[Cleric K]

I was playing with Midjourney. Here's a generation with the prompt: human mind expanding to encompass the spacetime interval between Earth and the Sun





a human being made of vibrant energy where the head opens up like a funnel and merges with the fabric of the Cosmos


a human figure of cosmic proportions made of energy against cosmic background. He is stepping on planet Earth. Above the head is the Sun which fills the human figure with fire from above downwards. The more the fire reaches the legs and the Earth, the more it crystalizes and becomes matter.



Unsurprisingly, it is difficult to make the AI draw such more abstract prompts.
I don't know where the world is going with this AI storm but I must say that even thinking about the prompts in itself is an interesting meditation Being able to describe an imagination in details is almost half the work.

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Cleric, for another elucidating post on a difficult esoteric topic. It is really the feat to convey these things which are necessarily 'orthogonal' to our normal conceptual-perceptual spectrum in a way that makes it feel much less orthogonal, at least in terms of a first outer approach. It gives great inspiration that a gradient of understanding between the Earthly and the Cosmic can be built and motivation to participate with our best efforts in helping to build it.

If we burst the cat and remain with the Giant, we remain in quite inexplicable images. These are for which people today, with certain pride, say “there are simply no words for this. It’s a world incompatible with the cat.” Yet when things go towards the Sun, there are words, even if very clumsy at first. The reason is that the higher and lower worlds remain connected in a musical gradient. This is part of the symbolism in the Caduceus.



The happenings in the Sun world can be ‘transduced’ or ‘spiraled down’ to cat gestures. That’s how it is at all possible to speak of these things like we do now.

This part reminded me of something I recently came across in Steiner's lectures. Perhaps it can help orient others as well, and perhaps preempt the tempting thought that anything which sounds somewhat exotic and unfamiliar to us must be a bunch of 'flowery words' with little to no import for concretely knowable reality.

I should like to begin from something seemingly quite unimportant. As soon as one takes the very first step in describing spiritual truths — truths which lead to reality and not to the maya of the outer world, not to illusion — one has to set about it in quite a different way from the way one sets about describing scientific or other matters in ordinary life. That is why it is so difficult to make oneself understood. Today men try to confine everything within the fetters which have been forged for modern science, and nothing that is not presented in this form is accepted as ‘scientific’. But with such knowledge it is impossible to penetrate into the nature of things. Hence in the lectures on Spiritual Science which are given here, a different style, a different method of presentation is used from the one to which ordinary science is accustomed; here things are so described that light is thrown upon them from several sides, and in a certain way language is taken seriously again. If one takes language seriously, one reaches what one might call the genius of language. In one of the earlier lectures of this course I said that it was not for nothing that in my second Rosicrucian Mystery Play, The Soul's Probation, I used the word dichten for an original activity of the World Creator... Anyone who appraises such words in the light of present-day usage will believe that they are just words like any other. Not at all. They are words which go back to the original genius of language, words which draw out of the language something that has not yet passed through the conscious human ego-life of ideation. And language has many instances of this.

In the book The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Mankind, I have pointed out what a beautiful expression there still was in old German for what is indicated in an abstract way by geboren werden (to be born). When a man comes into the world today he is said ‘to be born’. In old German there was another expression for this. The human being was of course not conscious of what really takes place at birth, but the genius of language, in which Dionysos plays a part, reaching in this way right into the activity of mental representation as distinct from the mere reflection of it — the genius of language knew that, when the human being goes through the gate of death, then in the first part of the time between death and a new birth, forces are at work in him which he has brought with him from his previous life and which are the forces which caused him to grow old in that life. Before we die we become old, and the forces which make us old we carry over with us. In the first part of the time between death and a new birth these forces go on working. But in the second half of the life between death and rebirth quite different forces set in. Forces take hold of us which fashion us in such a way that we return to the world as little children, that we become young. The language of the Middle Ages hinted at this mystery, by not using merely the abstract phrase geboren werden but by saying: Der Mensch ist jung geworden (the man has become young). This is an extremely significant expression! In the second part of Goethe's Faust 2 we find this phrase: im Nebellande jung geworden. Nebelland is an expression for the Germany of the Middle Ages; it means no more than to have been born in Germany, but in this expression there lies an awareness of the genius of language, thus of a higher Being than man, who participated in the creation of the human organism. That one speaks of ‘Dichtung’ in German is based on awareness that the ‘Dichter’ brings together what is outspread in the world, condenses it. One day there will be a philosophy which is not so dry and prosaic, not so philistine as that of today, because it will enter into the living genius of language, which in the ego-man of today underlies his conscious life of ideation. Much has to be elicited from this genius of language if one wants to characterise the things of the spiritual world, which lie beyond what ordinary consciousness can grasp.

Thus another method of presentation has to be used in the description of spiritual things. Hence the strangeness which is bound to be felt in many descriptions of the higher worlds. When we speak of the spiritual worlds we already meet at the very outset with something which must have originated behind what the human being has in his consciousness. It has to be drawn from the sub-conscious depths of the soul. Moreover, if one does this today something is necessary which seems quite trivial but is nevertheless important. If one wants to describe spiritual-scientific things in their true sense, one must forego the use of the customary terminology. One has perhaps even to go so far as to acknowledge quite consciously: ‘If you reject the customary terminology then the professors and all the other intellectuals will say you have no proper command of language. They will find all manner of things to object to, they will find you lacking in clarity; they will carp at all sorts of things in the way in which Spiritual Science is expressed.’ One has to accept that quite consciously, for it is inevitable. One must face up to the fact that one will probably be looked upon as stupid, because one fails to make use of the customary ‘perfectly logical’ terms, which in a higher connection are the height of imperfection.

What I have pointed out to you as a small matter — or not so small — was in ancient Greece a necessity for the pupil of the Mysteries, and is still so today. In order to come to his full self, in order to penetrate into his inmost being, which otherwise is only reflected by his external bodily organisation, the pupil must divest himself of the usual conscious external method of acquiring knowledge... What I have just put before you in a petty example was in a far higher sense a necessity for Greek pupils of the Mysteries, as it is for modern mystics also. They have to slough off completely as it were their normal consciousness, yet for all that they have to keep with them the sound common sense which goes with normal consciousness and then make use of it as an instrument for judgment in an entirely different situation, from an entirely different viewpoint. Without relinquishing his normal consciousness no one can become a mystic. He has to do without the consciousness which serves him well in the everyday world. And the challenge to the soul which emerges at this point, on the way from the customary outer world to the spiritual world, is that it should not lose its common sense and treat as nonsense what, if it has held on to its common sense, reveals itself as a deeper experience.

[Federica]

Thank you, Cleric! I am still letting this second episode of the nature of light sink in. Even if for me the destination is not in sight for the time being, I am thankful for the clear concentration and meditative directions. I am inspired to make these attempts, and I am reminded of the Sun animation you previously shared.

Ashvin, your quote seems perfectly appropriate to me, thanks! For example, this:

Steiner: As soon as one takes the very first step in describing spiritual truths — truths which lead to reality and not to the maya of the outer world, not to illusion — one has to set about it in quite a different way from the way one sets about describing scientific or other matters in ordinary life. That is why it is so difficult to make oneself understood.

is reflected in:

We get a step closer to truth not when we assemble and contemplate the ‘right’ arrangement of abstract thoughts but when we use the thoughts, through their own consistency, as pointers towards the needed inner transformations.

And this:

Steiner: If one wants to describe spiritual-scientific things in their true sense, one must forego the use of the customary terminology … One has to accept that quite consciously, for it is inevitable. One must face up to the fact that one will probably be looked upon as stupid, because one fails to make use of the customary ‘perfectly logical’ terms, which in a higher connection are the height of imperfection.

corresponds to:

This probably sounds insulting to the ears of the scientifically minded people of today. But it shouldn’t be if we understand the deeper reasons.

So we realize that we are reading two transliterations of the same ‘orthogonal’ endeavor, and we can have them intertwine, and add to each other. Steiner says, the challenge of approaching the spiritual world is to abandon normal waking cognition while maintaining common sense. In Cleric’s words: "this lifting is not in order to fly away from our previous state but instead to complement it with new depths of consciousness." At the intersection of the two transliterations, the difficulty of finding the proper attitude, or gesture, that keeps us in contact with both worlds, becomes even more expressively pointed to. There’s the risk of remaining with the Giant of ordinary consciousness, failing to take that orthogonal lifting towards the higher worlds. And what’s even worse, is when we not only remain with the Giant, but also relinquish common sense. This is the case of mystical reductionism, where it's imagined that the lifting towards the higher worlds will happen within the boundaries of our existing ‘geometrical drawing kit’, and common sense has been relinquished, together with materialism and the interest for the detailed dynamics of the World Content, deemed unimportant and superfluous.
For this reason, mystical reductionism seems to materialize the exact opposite of the appropriate attitude required to maintain connection with both worlds the right way, and in certain sense it looks more dangerous than materialism, because materialism at least remains grounded in common sense, and interested in the variety of the World Content.