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What is a liminal space?
liminal space (noun): a state or place characterized by being transitional or intermediate in some way.
We have all experienced how meaning is enhanced when our states of being - our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, desires - are in a process of transition. Whether it is the transition from night to day (sunrise or sunset), or from sleeping to waking, there is a sense of intimate change in our meaningful landscape of experience. At these times we can dimly sense that there is the potential for new possibilities to condense into our experience from unexpected directions; perhaps even the possibility for renewal and redemption in some mysterious way. These are the parts of our perceptual experience that are 'not seen' but provide context for what is seen. This invisible context includes everything from the spatial spaces between words in a text that we are reading to the temporal space experienced between when we go to sleep and wake up, or the space of what we experienced before our first memories in childhood. The post that follows is concerned only with investigating the inner cognitive and perceptual structure of this otherwise dim experience, rather than speculating on any broad conceptual explanations for what is "really going on".
We will try to step back from the accumulation of metaphysical beliefs and focus on the parts of existence that are invariant of whatever abstract thoughts we lay upon them. This is not meant to suggest that our immediate experience is all there is to reality or that we are refraining from logical inferences altogether. We are only looking for a starting point that is free of any assumptions and postulates. For this reason, in our discussion, we will begin by identifying the immediate phenomena of our experience. In philosophical terms, such an approach to the mystery of existence is known as phenomenology. What is at the root of our experience? One aspect can be collectively called "perceptions". That is our inner experience of color, sound, taste, smell, and textures. In addition to the familiar five senses, we also include any other conscious phenomena that we can identify – a sense of balance, a sense of warmth, feelings, pain, pleasure, will, and thoughts. Practically anything that can draw our attention and can be thought about is to be considered a "perception" in this context.
Why do we awaken in our thinking confronted by liminal spaces?
We have so far introduced a basic definition for the 'liminal spaces' we confront in the perceptual landscape, also defining 'perceptions', but we have not addressed why there should be any liminal spaces there to begin with - they simply manifest in our experience as a given. It will therefore help to start our investigation with a very broad overview of how we awakened in a perceptual landscape with liminal spaces. Again, we are only looking for the ideas that we can draw directly from our experience, not to formulate metaphysical speculations that go beyond that experience.
Our thinking process can be compared to the refraction and focusing of light by an optical system. We can picture our intuitive context as a mixture, a blurry atmosphere, which is the experience of our general intuitive orientation within our conscious life – the implicit holistic sense of who we are, where we are, what we are doing, feeling, and thinking. The thinking process is like the function of prisms and lenses that differentiate intuition-colors from the general mixture, which can then be focused and experienced individually.
Try for a moment to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different periods of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now. Think about all the physical and mental skills that have been developed, all that has been read, seen, and learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way, only as background potential. Now let’s encompass the room we’re in with our sight. Notice how of the innumerable things that we know about everything, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, of all the places we have been, the knowing that we now experience has a completely specific timbre, we recognize it as we recognize the voice of a friend. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms. Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition and we now know what the object is.
We can also represent this filtering process of the intuitive context with an analogy.
Before we make any moves in the chess game, all possible 'storylines' for how the game will play out - how the pieces will be moved in rhythmic alternation between the players until someone's King is captured - exist as a sort of 'wavefunction' of superimposed pathways. Notice that this state of superimposed potential is not completely random or unstructured - there is an implicit structure to this potential that is represented by the rules of the chess game, i.e. how and where the various pieces are allowed to move. These rules, of course, reflect the intents of certain human beings who designed the game. As soon as one of the players moves a pawn, this wavefunction collapses and the possible storylines for the game are greatly constrained. The move has set certain constraints on how other pieces can be moved, but more importantly, it has provided feedback to the other player that will influence how he steers his intentions in the game. Hypothetically, he may have started with 100 different strategies in his 'playbook' but now only 10 remain viable after that initial move. Once a few more pieces are moved by each of the players in succession, we end up experiencing a particular storyline as such:
This represents the state that we, as thinking individuals and collectives, awaken into. For purposes of our analogy, we should think of all the moves that came before this state as existing within the dark spaces of our consciousness that our memory can't access, like the states we can't remember in our early childhood, our sleep, or the states of 'pre-history' for humanity that took place before surviving written records and oral traditions. Now we awaken into a set of complex relations with our fellow players (which is not limited to only one other person in reality), confronted by the liminal spaces of the chessboard. These spaces represent the further meaningful possibilities that can be mined by our creative thinking while pursuing our aims in relation to other players with conflicting aims. That is a key insight here - the complex perceptual landscape with liminal spaces results, in life as in a chess game, from conflicting intentions. If life was a zero-sum game like chess, then living beings would have died out in conflict a long time ago, but fortunately, it is not and we will see why in what follows.
Examples of liminal spaces
"How deaf and stupid have I been!" he thought, walking swiftly along. "When someone reads a text, wants to discover its meaning, he will not scorn the symbols and letters and call them deceptions, coincidence, and worthless hull, but he will read them, he will study and love them, letter by letter. But I, who wanted to read the book of the world and the book of my own being, I have, for the sake of a meaning I had anticipated before I read, scorned the symbols and letters, I called the visible world a deception, called my eyes and my tongue coincidental and worthless forms without substance. No, this is over, I have awakened, I have indeed awakened and have not been born before this very day."
- Siddartha, Herman Hesse
So let's consider the liminal spaces of written text. The perceptions, in this case, are the straight and curvy shapes of the letters that make up the words, the words that make up the sentences, the sentences that make up the paragraphs, and so forth. What actually takes place when these perceptions are presented to us, in the case of reading? We perceive the outer structure of those words, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, etc., which we call their "syntax". The latter is the way morphemes, words, and clauses are related and connected with each other through subordination, coordination, direction, time, etc. That stimulates our thought to go searching for the inner conceptual meaning that makes sense of the syntactical structure, which we call the "semantics" of the text. No part of the syntax has semantic meaning in complete isolation from other parts, but rather that meaning lives in the liminal spaces between the letters, words, clauses, and sentences (we refer to this whole implicit structure as the meaningful "context"). Just as with the chess analogy above, the liminal spaces represent the meaningful possibilities that our activity can still unveil within the perceptual landscape.
Consider the following sentence in three formulations to experience carefully how your own cognitive activity responds when perceiving them. We should try to move slowly through the progression and pay close attention to how our cognitive discernment of meaning changes between them. Our modern habit in these situations is to analyze and comment to ourselves on such exercises rather than simply engaging and patiently observing without commentary. Most of the value here will come from the intimate experience of what is unfolding - although it is helpful to put this experience into concepts later, we should first focus on the intuitive experience of the activity without any prejudices, assumptions, or theoretical constructs.
(1) "hereliesthewhitemousewhowaseatenbythebrowncat".
(2) "hereli esthewhitemo usewhowaseate nbytheb rowncat".
(3) "herelies thewhitemouse, whowas eatenbythe browncat".
What else have I done in formulations #2 and #3 above apart from creating and enlarging (or modifying with punctuation) empty spaces within the syntax of the letters and words for your conceptual activity to penetrate in a different, more inviting way? Nothing else has been done besides that. Note how the empty spaces do not automatically bring meaning to the structure, but only reveal it after our cognitive activity has been invited in to assume its 'shape' and we accept the invitation with meaningful engagement. It is through our cognitive activity that the implicit meaningful context becomes manifest in the perceptions. The same principle discerned above will also apply to all other perceptual phenomena in our experience. Consider music when we are listening, singing, or dancing to it and experiencing its underlying rhythm. This rhythm is experienced, usually subconsciously, by the silent spaces ("intervals") between the beats, notes, and chords.
We have to be clear that the above doesn't mean our perceptual experience is irrelevant. If our cognitive activity working from the liminal spaces didn't have the perceptual structures of letters and phrases to meet as resistance, we would only live in some nebulous meaning without any definite resolution. In fact, cognitive activity without any perpetual resistance is unconsciousness. The lucid meaning in our experience comes from the continual interplay of spiritual activity and perceptual structures. We cannot reduce that meaning to the perceptual structures (as materialists do), nor can we reduce that meaning to the 'pure consciousness' (as many mystics/spiritualists do). The perceptual frames of our experience all need to find their proper place for genuine insight to arise, but it's only that they will remain a confusing jumble of perceptual details until we become intimately familiar with the cognitive activity that works from between the details. Once we set out on that path, we should always return to the perceptual details that Nature or Culture presents to us and organize them into harmonious constellations of meaning.
Another example we could imaginatively work with is when we are playing an instrument. Let's imagine a piano. What makes the difference between a succession of notes coming out as flat and mechanical progression and them sounding with organic freshness, depth, and inspiration? Once our fingers are set into motion - the whole chain of physiological processes through our cells, tissues, nerves, muscle fibers, etc. - it becomes a completely deterministic process. Once that process is set in motion, it can't be retracted by our will. So the difference can only come from within the liminal spaces between our physical movements. We can imbue this image with moral significance if we imagine throwing a punch to someone else's face - in the liminal space before we throw the punch, we can shape our feelings and intention, but once we set the will in motion, there is no stopping the punch in mid-stream and retracting.
That frame is an image of Schopenhauer's "blind will" - once the process is set in motion, there is no turning back from the consequences. It is "blind" because we have not yet permeated that aspect of our organism with cognition. Theoretically, if our "I"-ness was awake in our deep physiology, then it could micromanage the process and stop the punch a millimeter from the other person's face, but in our ordinary state, we are deeply asleep to such processes and therefore it quickly gets beyond our control. It is very important to be clear on where/when we actually have creative control in our stream of experience. When we actually have control is only that duration between the physiological processes and the corresponding punches or notes that are struck on the piano, where we can imbue them with noble feelings and intents. The latter will make the difference between a bad rendition of a melody, a good rendition, or a great rendition (while a perfect rendition is still out of reach). It will make the difference between reacting to a violent punch with an even more violent punch or, instead, turning the other cheek.
The quality of "I"-ness that unites the perceptual spaces of existence
We can discern that the same principle applies to the 'frames' of our individual and collective streams of experience - the days, months, seasons, and years of our individual existence; the epochs, ages, and aeons of human history. Our individual memories are such frames that are united by an overarching cognitive activity, which we broadly and dimly sense as the quality of our "I"-ness that is present within all memories. We can call those states of being "our memories" because that overarching quality spans them. What is this quality of "I"-ness?
We can approach that question by using a simple exercise - speak the sentence, "I think these words." and pay attention to the meaning. When we say "these words", we are referring to our perceptions, i.e. the perception of our inner voice. When say "I think", this simply means our invisible thinking activity recognizes itself in those perceptions. Thus, it can say, "I think these words." We don’t care about any metaphysical speculations about what an “I” is 'in reality'. In this direct experience, the word “I” is only a symbol for the experience of self-reference. It simply means that we intuitively feel to be one with the cause of the word perceptions.
Now let's return to the stream of memory that is encompassed by the quality of "I"-ness. We intuitively feel to be one with this stream of memory, just like the words we voiced above, although in a much more hazy way. There are also clear liminal spaces in that stream of memory - our states of dreaming and dreamless sleeping. Similar to the liminal spaces of a written text, song composition, or any other expression of speech (such as body gestures), could there also be cognitive activity concealed within these dark spaces of sleep that structure the conceptual and perceptual coherence of our waking experience? Most cognitive scientists would now say that is (mysteriously) the case and the research is still ongoing, often unveiling new insights into the creative role of sleep in our waking experience.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7543772/
Creative problem-solving often involves reorganisation of existing knowledge in order to identify general rules or structures (Box 1). Work over the past 10 years has shown that sleep is critical for integrating memories into an ordered framework [6], assimilating new memories with older knowledge [7,8], and facilitating the abstraction of general rules [9–11]. Such processing can provide mental clarity and facilitate creative problem-solving by promoting the comprehension of an overall structure or the extraction of hidden regularities or ‘gist’ [4,11,12]. Paradoxically, creative problem-solving often also requires the discovery of unexpected solutions through seeing beyond such rules and building new associations, which lead to novel solutions via analogical reasoning. Such creative leaps can be actively blocked by preconceptions or prejudices, which prevent us from seeing otherwise obvious solutions [13]. Importantly, these insightful rule-breaking associations are also facilitated by sleep
Gradually, humanity is using its cognitive activity to probe what goes on within the liminal spaces themselves, which we will return to later in the context of 'initiation'. It is also easy to see that the quality of our personal frames of existence (or states of being) over the course of a lifetime are not only determined by our personal cognitive activity - our consciously summoned intents, thoughts, and feelings - working within the liminal background of perceptions, i.e. our inner states between those perceptual states, as it initially appears to be in the case of reading a written text or a song we play on the piano. For example, consider the following image. What do you see?
Some people will initially perceive a fair maiden while others will initially perceive an 'old hag'. We can't say that perceiving one or the other is a result of our conscious intent to begin with. Rather, the initial meaning we impart to the image must result from more subconscious factors, like our temperament, preferences, inclinations, and so forth. Examples such as these lead us into the liminal space we typically refer to as the "subconscious", where more mysterious cognitive activity, generally related to the sphere of emotions and instincts, structures the meaning of our perception.
Due to some constellation of that subconscious context, we initially perceive an old hag instead of a maiden or vice versa, but we should also notice one more thing. If we are told that there are two meanings to the image and that the nose of the old hag could also be the chin of the maiden, then our cognitive activity can more easily alternate between both of those meanings for the image. A person who never brought this differentiation to clear consciousness may only perceive one meaning and never look at the image again, because it remains entirely unsuspected there could be another meaning that can be mined from the image and that is somewhat orthogonal to the originally perceived meaning. This fact clearly indicates that, when we engage our cognitive activity with the liminal spaces of the perceptual landscape to perceive its meaning, the depth of meaning is added only when we become conscious of our cognitive participation in the landscape, when we remain open to mining new layers of meaning, and when we exert some effort. Otherwise, we will leave many layers of meaning in our environment dormant, none the wiser.
Beyond our own personal subconscious context that influences how our cognitive activity structures perception, there is also the context of our family and friends, our nation, our historical context, our temperament, our habits, our talents, our biology, and physiology. Many of these things we were born with, developed very early in childhood, and/or were influenced heavily by a relatively independent social context. All of these labels emerge from our thinking activity that perceives a nested context through which more transpersonal cognitive activity structures the frames of its existence. It is only human hubris that rationalizes to itself that these nested contexts lack their own overarching "I"-ness, as we shall see in what follows.
Recovering the intuitive potential through the capacity of resonance
"When two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in your midst."
That is, the Logos appears in the liminal space where two or three 'personality frames' gather together with lofty thoughts, compassionate feelings, and noble intentions. It is within that space that ideal potential is born into the manifest world that could not be realized by any one personality thinking and acting alone. When we interact with another thinking individual, much of the meaning we discern is embedded in the spaces between our words and sentences - the environmental context in which we meet our conversation partner, the mood of the interaction, the usually unnoticed facial and body gestures, and so forth. Notice how, in this situation, we can sense that the meaningful Whole we perceive from the interaction is more than the sum of its particular parts - the former cannot be reduced to the latter. What makes the difference between a social interaction where we struggle to understand our conversation partner or find the dialogue tedious, and one in which we are fully engaged and inspired?
We could call the difference-maker here the quality of 'resonance'. If we know the beliefs, emotions, passions, and ideals that animate our conversation partner, not necessarily in clear-cut concepts but more importantly at an intuitive level, then we will mine more meaning from all the perceptual gestures (including words produced from gestures of the larynx) that we encounter. If our thinking 'vibrates' with a similar 'frequency' as our partner, i.e. when it is deeply interested in the underlying intents and soul-life of the other person, then a harmonic resonance becomes manifest that would otherwise remain latent.
This image is intended to symbolize the new emergent qualities that manifest when we are in sympathetic resonance with other beings. Without that resonance, these qualities remain as untapped potential. We often refer to this newborn quality of social interactions as "collective intelligence". It could be visually analogized to what our thinking perceives in a flock of birds moving in unison across the sky or a swarm of bees working on a honeycomb.
Meaningful qualities of intent, intelligence, and dynamism emerge where we would otherwise perceive something more instinctive, mechanical, and linear in the case of a single bird or bee. It is our thinking that perceives these qualities - someone who never had a chance to develop their soul-life through experience and education, i.e. developing resonance with the inner impulses of the 'bird-soul' in this case, would only perceive a confusing mess of moving pixels. Likewise, someone who never developed cognitive resonance with the intentional life that animates his fellow human beings would struggle to make sense of their social behavior and speech.
Returning to the intuitive potential we discussed at the beginning of the post, this capacity for resonance illustrates how life is not like a game of chess, in so far as the intuitive potential that was narrowed down into the perceptual landscape can be re-membered. If we imagine the perceptual landscape as hollowed-out spaces of the intuitive potential, then our capacity for resonance can give us insight into the implicit structure of these liminal spaces and we are thereby given feedback on the optimal strategies for our creative and moral thinking faculty to make that potential more transparent in the perceptual landscape.
Unlike the chess game, where the optimal strategy always involves one player losing (or at best a stalemate), the optimal strategy of resonance can only be one in which the intentions between players are harmonized and the best possible outcome for all players is sought simultaneously. Resonance simply does not work without the virtues of reverence, empathy, compassion, and love that allow the players to expand their soul-lives into one another. It requires us to sacrifice the old habits of the zero-sum game and give equal attention, respect, and dignity to the inner life of all players.
"Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him."
Exploring the liminal spaces of cognition through initiation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality
Liminality:
In anthropology, liminality (from Latin līmen 'a threshold')[1] is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.[2] During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold"[3] between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).
The above considerations also raise the question - is the 'collective intelligence' of animal and human groups something that can be experientially explored by human individuals as well? All esoteric paths across cultures and time periods have answered "yes". Just as a young child can become a mature adult participating in the productive life of their community through the liminality of a cultural rite of passage, the thinking adult can become a spiritually conscious participant in the creative life of the Divine through a process of initiation. At the heart of all initiations is the aim of growing into greater resonance with the inner life of the beings who structure our inner states and the spheres of culture and nature that provide the overarching context for those inner states. It is about penetrating the liminal spaces of our thoughts and concepts, what exists ‘between’ these thoughts and remains unconceived. We can already sense that an effort is needed that is quite orthogonal to our normal cognitive activity that penetrates the liminal spaces of outer perceptions – how do we begin to penetrate what remains unconceived?
Most initiations trace a structure that ascends through the ancient elements from the densest to the more subtle - earth, water, air, fire/warmth. That practically means a progressive purification and spiritualization of the soul-structure, the life of thoughts, emotions, desires, and impulses, through the cultivation of virtues and the strengthening of thinking forces via concentration. Our normal intellectual and sensory life is analogous to densely packed atoms with minimal leeway for the World-creative Spirit to flow and shine through. In other words, in relation to our higher-order thinking activity, the liminal spaces of our ordinary 'solid' intellect are analogous to the sentence with all letters in a string, i.e. without any spaces that invite that activity's meaningful engagement. Practically, this means our concepts are limited in scope to “eat, drink, and sleep”, “work from 9 to 5”, “have fun”, “reproduce”, and similar ones. Such concepts leave very little room for Cosmic creativity and morality to find a welcoming home in our minds and hearts.
As we progress with our inner work through various exercises of inner concentration and discipline, we are loosening the densely packed soul-structure so the water, breath, and warmth of the Spirit is met with more leeway to flow through. The syntax of our soul-structure becomes more receptive to the semantics of the Spirit. That is a process of purification (catharsis), illumination, and union. We can sense our conceptual thinking and sensory perception becoming more fluid and imaginative, more inspired by lucidly outlined ideals, more intuitive, loving, and motivated to harmonize its intentions with those of all other beings. The liminal spaces in which the Spirit can be active through our soul-life on the physical-perceptual plane have then expanded. In other words, our Earthly thinking personality has become a liminal space for the Spirit. The above is only a crude metaphor for something that can be inwardly engaged and experienced at levels of increasingly profound depth. The ways in which we can intimately experience this depth of spiritual activity are completely unsuspected to our modern habits of thinking since they remain unconceived. So, once we have conceived them, we need to always approach them with epistemic humility, appreciation for our living experience, and childlike openness to the unfamiliar and unexpected.
