Cleric K wrote: ↑Sat Apr 15, 2023 1:34 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:46 pm
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.
To continue our investigation in the nature of the sensory world we have no choice but go into some of the concrete details of initiatic science. This however requires certain determination and effort. Normally whole books have to be studied in order to begin forming intuition of the supra-sensory realms which are the basis of everything sensory. Here I’ll try to present a simple and consequently quite limited analogy but hopefully it may be of help to point us towards these foundational intuitions.
The metaphor
I’ll make use once again of the Moiré patterns as a metaphor. As a refresher you may look at videos like
this,
this and
this. So basically these patterns arise either as an
aliasing effect, which is a problem mainly in photography where the resolution is insufficient to capture the fine details of the object, or when we have the interference of two meshes (like in the videos). Now let’s imagine something more complicated. We can imagine a sock made of fine material and we can wrap it like so:
Now by moving the wrapped fabric against itself it becomes possible to form Moiré patterns. But we can do that once more. Now we have a second order pattern so to speak. To make it more complicated we can imagine that the first wrapping is able to move independently and simultaneously with the second.
This would be the basic metaphor. Now the big problem is – metaphor for what? Of course, we can very easily answer “for the folding of the Divine Consciousness” but this seems so abstract, it’s like speaking of multiverses, branes, strings and so on. It all remains only a floating picture in our intellect. And the thing is that even higher consciousness doesn’t present to us reality in such a convenient third-person perspective of the spiritual fabric of existence which folds onto itself. This is the fallacy of which we have spoken million times – about forgetting that our conscious perspective can never separate itself from the manifold of reality and observe it from the side. Thus we’re in the difficult situation that we’re trying to make sense of something within which all our thoughts, feelings, will, perceptions are intertwined. Yet we have no choice but try.
So the first thing is that all we’re describing is supposed to make sense of our
first-person spiritual experience. Simply holding an abstract model of reality in our intellect will always seem dry and disconnected from our living experience. Our thoughts through which we would think such a model
are themselves the Moiré patterns that we try to grasp in their deeper nature. So first we need to equip ourselves with the needed humility that the experience of
what interferes is not readily available in our ordinary consciousness. If we expect to understand these things by thinking abstractly about them, we only make more and more complicated combinations of the patterns but this doesn’t in itself lead us closer to the conscious experience of the interfering sheets.
So today we find ourselves in a four-fold situation. There are many ways in which this is discernible. It will take us too far to go in full details, yet we could think of the four kingdoms – mineral, plant, animal, man –, the four elements, the four stages of cognition – intellectual, Imaginative, Inspirative, Intuitive –, the forces of our soul life – willing, feeling, thinking, sensing –, the four sheaths – physical, life, soul, spiritual – and so on.
The metaphor helps us to conceive that each fold doesn’t simply add linearly to the latter, but each convolution wraps
everything that has existed so far. In a way, everything is multiplied. Look at the second fold in the image. It’s interesting that the first fold is to be found both on the inside and the outside of the second. As said, this shouldn’t be read too literally into, since we’re not trying to make a model of reality but it helps us avoid imagining the convolutions as linearly stacked one over the other. Everything is within everything, everything interpenetrates everything. So in this sense the folding that we describe here is not some spatial happening, as if one half of the Cosmos spatially moves and folds onto the other but is a matter of change in inner relations.
The inner experience of the folds
Our state today is the most complicated. There are four folds and we have to imagine that each of them
can move independently. This can help us grasp something of the natural hierarchy that emerges in this way. If the first fold moves, this has an effect on all consequent folds. On the other hand, the second fold doesn’t influence the first so much, although it certainly feeds back on it. It has to be reminded over and over again that these are simple analogies, fairy tales if you will. They are supposed to stimulate certain intuition. If we continue to look at them too literally, we’ll immediately stumble upon unsolvable paradoxes.
The first fold of the fabric would correspond to a state of existence which from our present perspective can be likened only to very deep dreamless sleep. That’s how little of that primordial spiritual state we can grasp with our present patterns of consciousness. Yet we should try to at least asymptotically approach that state, which can indeed become consciously known through proper development and at its own level is anything but dark unconsciousness. In fact it is supremely richer and Cosmic compared to anything we can experience within Earthly consciousness.
Let’s try this. Let’s picture a state of reality which is folded in that still simple way. What would that be like? To approach that we have to gradually let go of almost everything which gives the support of our present existence. We should imagine our bodily sensations dissolve, there’s no Earth, no Sun, no planets, there’s no body of personal desires, there’s no life in the sense of processes of growth and reproduction. What is left is a boundless space of rich proto spiritual experience and the will of becoming. This experience is not simply our personal but is the Cosmic archetypal world inherent in all more convoluted and differentiated forms of existence. This spiritual space is not filled with atoms and photons. We can’t even speak of spatiality, we can’t say how dimensional that space is. Neither is it a subjective experience of the ‘true’ space out there. All of such things can be conceived only later when the intellect comes into being. To this the modern thinker would respond almost by reflex: “But just because this primordial state is incapable of conceiving atoms it doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. It might be that this primitive state is still too undeveloped in order to grasp the real contents of the Cosmos. It may simply not have the needed senses and cognition in order to grasp anything beyond itself. The atoms may have been there all along.” In a way this is a logical objection. The answer however lies in the nature of this primordial state. Even though we describe that state as reached by dissolving our present form of being, this doesn’t lead into a more indeterminate state but instead into a more encompassing one. In a way, the intellect conceives of outer space and atoms because it
justifiably feels that there’s a lot going on beyond our skin. What is not understood however is that this more primordial state extends precisely into this ‘beyond our skin’ and that’s how we find the true nature of the outer world – that which the intellect tries to understand through assemblies of thoughts in the head with which it tries to fill the void that it fully lawfully feels.
Here we should mention that the foldings that we’re describing shouldn’t be taken as the actual description of how evolution looked like from the perspective of man. There are many things that have to be understood in details for that. Instead, we’re examining these states somewhat artificially, taking advantage of the fact that we’re today in position to know something of them. We do that by describing the moving in and out of these stages of foldness but let’s keep in mind that these in and out movements shouldn’t be taken as completely identical to what a proper description of the actual evolutionary movements would be. As a simple analogy, we can today picture our state of being along any age, we can go back and forth between young age and our present age but this movement is not identical to the movement through which we indeed reached our present stage. In reality, our human perspective has not yet been conscious through the initial foldings. Other beings are responsible for them. We only now awaken within an already quite complicated manifold and we can only understand our present stage if we comprehend how these folds manifest in our experience. We need to understand something of these folds, each of which is an eon of evolution and which since antiquity were known by the names Saturn condition, Sun condition, Moon condition, Earth condition – not to be confused with our present planetary bodies with the same names. It might be of interest to mention that such occult facts have been concealed by the initiates in many places such as the names of the days of week – Saturn-day, Sun-day, Moon-day.
Nested Time
Here someone may say: “What do I care about the history of evolution? What counts is the here and now. The past may be curious to learn about but all that matters is in the present.” This is only half right. It is perfectly true that we can only grow into reality from what is real in the present moment. In that sense, the historical sciences as they are practiced today in a purely intellectual manner, are indeed only arrangements of flimsy mental images. With this view it is natural that we should feel our mental picture of the past to be unreal in comparison to our living experience here and now. But the past that we talk about has to be grasped in a very different way. Our whole folding metaphor already hints that this past is not actually gone by but is present also in the now. If we imagine these folding eons as historical events along the arrow of time, they will naturally feel as long gone by and, well, in the past. But things are not of exactly this sort and herein lies the greatest challenge for the modern mind – to comprehend the mystery of Time. We can render the folding process in an alternative way:
For clarity, on the left the eons are depicted linearly. At the top we have the beginning of Time – the emergence of our evolutionary scenario from the potential of Eternity. Then there’s expansion of the initial interference, followed by contraction, where everything manifested becomes spiritualized once again. We have spoken before that these periods were well known by the ancients and were called Pralaya (Sanskrit word).
To link this to the idea of folding, the same thing is depicted on the right but now, just like the sock, the second eon unfolds within the context of the first. Then new expansion begins but in a certain sense it is enwrapped in everything that has been developed in the first eon, except that the latter is not simply an inert relic of a past stage but continues to develop in its own right. Then we have to imagine a similar process until we reach our fourth eon.
In this way we see that the four eons cannot be thought of as simply following one another. In certain sense it is so but at the same time every next eon manifests as a convolution/folding of everything that has been developed so far. Yes, these things are mind bending for the modern intellect who has become only too comfortable with the clockwork vision of reality. As noted many times, this vision is not limited to materialism. Idealistic views are equally affected by it. Take for example Bernardo’s vision, which is practically identical to the materialistic view of a Big Bang, followed by coalescence of matter. The only difference in the idealistic case is that this progression is conceived from the inner side, so to speak. There’s the spiritual Big Bang of MAL which then coalesces into dissociated islands of consciousness. Yet both approaches implicitly operate under the conception of an arrow of time along which this progression unfolds. No matter whether we’re a materialist or an idealist, the event of the Big Bang – whether physical or spiritual – is only conceived as a
mental picture of some past event long gone by. Is there any surprise then that we feel these questions about past and future to be inherently uncertain and only preventing us to find reality in the here and now?
If we understand the folding metaphor it should be clear that the past is still present in the now. We need to comprehend this folding not simply to satisfy some intellectual curiosity but because it is
our true structure here and now. We can’t understand our situation today if we’re unable to
differentiate in our experience what proceeds from Saturn man, what from Sun man, what from Moon man and what from Earth man.
This is also the greatest challenge for those who absolutize Oneness. It is true that simply speculating intellectually about such things only throws around abstract debris in our soul. That’s why people feel that they attain to deeper reality when they unite with their soul which is like a coherent container of otherwise fragmentary phenomena. This is indisputable. We indeed need this realization that in our intellectual life we’re continually dying, we are fragmenting and ossifying our life. But if we absolutize this unity of our inner life we lose all means to know the
deeper reality of the soul. Then we simply take the fourfold manifold
in its flattened experience and call it the foundation of reality. It has to be understood with perfect clarity that the true knowledge of the folds of our existence is not intellectual fragmentation. These folds are
already there. When we recognize the reality of thinking, feeling and willing, we’re simply forming concepts about what is already a fact of our present stage of existence. If just because we want everything to be One, we say “Yeah but these forces are really one and the same”, then we simply smear them out and contemplate a completely flattened experience of reality, losing all means to know how our consciousness comes to be what it is. We simply assume the way our present consciousness feels (even if ‘enlightened’), to be a fundamental axiom of existence.
Higher cognition as consciousness of the folds
Through the folding metaphor we can also very clearly understand what higher cognition is about. As said, our Earthly stage of existence is the most convoluted. Our intellectual thoughts are Moiré patterns over Moiré patterns. When we think and perceive, we have the degrees of freedom to manipulate only this most recent fold. On the contrary, our life of will exists in the most ancient fold, which is simultaneously both the physical and spiritual foundation of our reality.
The stages of higher cognition can be likened to the
unfolding of the folds. For example, we attain to the Imaginative stage when we, so to speak, unfold the Earthly convolution and find ourselves in a state similar to the Moon condition. Normally the interference of the Moon sheets are the basis for the Moiré patterns that form our Earthly consciousness. We’re barely conscious of this deeper soul life in the present age. But if we unfold the Earthly folding, then we glimpse at something of our higher being, which has its self-consciousness in the Moon sheets. At that level, spiritual activity weaves in the soul strata as consciously as we do that with our thoughts in the Earth condition. Similarly, unfolding the other foldings leads us to the stages of Inspirative and Intuitive consciousness.
Of course, this unfolding is not yet the true unfolding which will only happen in the long course of evolution. The four folds for our Earthly being are present at all times while we’re in deep meditation. Then how is higher cognition possible? It is possible through
harmonizing the spiritual activity at the different folds. In modern man these folds are quite out of tune. They are like independent pendulums, producing the most bizarre Moiré patterns. We think one thing, our heart desires another, our will does third. Higher development consists in the fully conscious and strenuous alignment of these pendulums. Thus we need to bring the fourth fold (in which we’re most conscious) in full attunement to the third such that they move as one so to speak. They are still distinct but are temporarily synchronized. The fourth fold sacrifices itself and allows to be moved by the sheet of the third. This is also what allows for the intellectual self to have consciousness of the higher realms because it is not simply destroyed but it becomes resonantly attuned to the movements of the deeper folds. When we experience these higher movements and corresponding higher intuitions, they evoke images, analogies, metaphors in the intellectual fold. Of course, this process of attunement is not linear. We always have to work on the perfection of all folds simultaneously because they are interdependent. Nevertheless, there's a certain gradation. As it should be obvious from the metaphor the Intuitive stage of cognition requires the most perfect attunement – all folds have to be synchronized such that we can live consciously in the most primordial. The independent activity of all later folds is sacrificed and synchronized with the most ancient so that we can move consciously in it. In this way we understand in a completely experiential way how our more convoluted forms of existence come about. As soon as some of the folds begin to move relative to each other, this produces the Moiré patterns and we find ourselves again in a more convoluted consciousness, where we lose awareness of the interfering realities but remain only with the resulting patterns.
Parallel between higher development and stages after death
After death each one of us will go through these deconvolutions as the physical, etheric and astral bodies are released. This however is again not the full unfolding. Even after death we exist in the fourfold context. Our physical fold – the inner experience of sensory life – is still there but it is released from the bounds of our body and expands to become our Cosmic environment. In the body this sensory life feels contracted. We feel our heart here, we feel a color in our head, smell in our nose and so on. After death this sensory spectrum is released, expands and becomes our Cosmic environment. Then it feels as if the color phenomena of our incarnate life have been gathered and contracted from this direction of the Cosmos, taste from that direction and so on (of course, here direction no longer has spatial sense). But the point is that after death these folds still exist. In fact, the imperfect alignment of the folds is what grows into the new Earthly existence (remember the analogy with the Big Bang where the imperfections in the quantum foam produce the clumped structure of galaxies, instead of fully uniform distribution of matter and energy). The actual unfolding of the folds happens only in the course of eons of evolution and is known in esoteric terms as the three future stages – Jupiter condition, Venus condition, Vulcan condition. In a certain sense these conditions are the
undoing of the corresponding primordial foldings – Jupiter undoes the Moon condition, Venus undoes the Sun condition and Vulcan undoes the Saturn condition. Of course, this unfolding is not simply the primordial stages but gone in reverse. It is a fully conscious evolutionary process which has to creatively work for this unfoldment and every step is experienced as something completely new.
It has to be repeated that as we move towards the more fundamental folds, all existence becomes more and more universal. Our perspectives are most personalized (multiplied) in the present most convoluted fourth fold but towards the end of the Vulcan condition there's practically one being of whole humanity known as Atman.
Everything is interconnected
We can see how interconnected everything is. We can’t simply take one thing and understand it in isolation. For example, if we want to understand in isolation how an animal comes about, this assumes that we already have the proper perspective, that we know what the container of reality is, and simply want to see how forms take shape within this container, in the way a sculptor gives form to his creations. Alas, we can never reach reality in this way. These foldings are the most critical thing to gain intuition of if we want to find our upright stance in reality. And we can find that intuition only if we comprehend in the most intimate way how our present existence is a manifestation of these folds. If we simply smear everything out and enjoy the oneness, we in fact
remain in the most convoluted state and confuse it for the ground of reality.
We haven’t yet spoken about the more concrete details of how the mineral nature of our Earthly stage comes about but it was necessary to first address the above questions because without this foundation nothing else can ever be comprehended. It is inevitable that initially all these folds, eons and so on will sound only as the most abstract and fantastic notions. But gradually we can recognize their concrete manifestations in our living experience and we find completely new ways to orient ourselves within reality, which attains depth that could not have been even conceived before.
) But thanks to exposure to many thoughts and conversations here, the context of my understanding has changed. I hope something similar will happen with this series on the sensory world, and I appreciate the chance we have to work, actively and passively, with your analogies and guiding ideas - Thank you, Cleric!
