Pictorial Thinking

[AshvinP]

I would like to share a quote from Sergei Prokofieff that fits well with this pictorial thinking topic and what we have been discussing on the forum recently, in terms of approaching spiritual science with the inner gesture of 'study-meditate'.

(...)
-Sergei Prokofieff, The Heavenly Sophia and the Being of Anthroposophia

Thanks, Ashvin. Prokofieff's description of how we bring into consciousness the Anthroposophy that already lies in the depths of our soul reads like a heartfelt expansion on what Cleric condensed here:

To grasp the nature of Saturn, Sun, Moon conditions, the bodies and so on, is actually not so difficult. We only need to unlearn certain cognitive habits of our mechanistic age and approach the ideas without prejudice and with living participation. It's not so difficult because these fundamental realities are present in each one of us as our most immediate essence.

As a side question, I was wondering whether reading Prokofieff has been helpful to clarify the controversy involving Tomberg that we discussed in the thread On Symbolic Ordering, Theology, and Hierarchical Mystagogy, to reconcile their respective visions?

Federica,

Not really. I have not specifically read his book on that topic.

He clearly had a fierce loyalty to Anthroposophy and its central place in bringing new spirit knowledge into the flow of history. From that perspective, I can imagine why such a penetrating spirit as Tomberg leaving the society and joining the RCC would rub him the wrong way. But upon my reading of Tomberg, for ex. MoT, I find nothing that is in mutually exclusive tension with spiritual scientific foundations or supersensible research and plenty that is harmonized with it. At the heart of all modern spirituality, of course, is the Christ impulse, and Tomberg certainly embraced that.

I do find Prokofieff's writings to be a clear, accessible, and illuminating distillation of core spiritual scientific ideas, very much in the spirit of Steiner.

[AshvinP]

Thank you Ashvin.

To have a concrete example, how would you picture karma or reincarnation?
Or the human being in the process of taming his animal (astral)?

There are many concept in Ss which are temporal, how should you flatten them out into pictures?


Aren't pictures in a sensory manner still coupled to the physical brain?

Why steiner didn't write poems instead, it would be an more artistic way of communicating higher truths.

Guney,

I would say 'picturing' here should be taken in a broader sense. When we picture our tasks for the day, for ex., we can sense how we are living in the meaning of those tasks, our intentions for how our state of being should transform to accomplish those tasks.  The visual perception of these tasks, which could be quite dim for some people (including myself), is only a second-order effect. Whether we are thinking verbally or in pictures about the tasks, these both serve as an anchor for the intuitive stream of meaning associated with the events. They can help us orient to and refine that stream of meaning, but they cannot invent that meaning out of themselves.  

It is the same principle with the Cosmic tasks that are reflected in the facts of spiritual science, such as the laws of karma, reincarnation, the relations of the sheaths, and so forth. There is no advantage in simply making everything into 'artistic' pictures if we aren't also deepening our intuition for the temporally extended nature of those tasks. For ex., if we want to picture ourselves taming our astral body and see this:





It will only help us if we already have some deepened intuition for how our stream of inner experience relates to the concentric circles, the vertical beam of light going through the central axis of the body, and so forth. This is only a distracting picture if we haven't gone through the first steps of study-meditate, really struggling with the spiritual ideas of 'astral body', 'pruification/catharsis', etc. and the inner conditions they describe. As Cleric and Prokofieff have indicated, we are struggling to penetrate our 'future-memories', our slumbering knowledge of experience that is yet to come. This knowledge truly exists because we have lived through the experiences symbolized by spiritual concepts in the spiritual worlds before incarnation, and also to some extent each night during sleep. We simply need to find the strength of cognition to recall these future-memories. Just as we need to make active gestures to recall what we ate for breakfast, or to picture our future tasks, we have to make active gestures to probe the space of supersensible ideas. 

Then we need to let the ideas descend more into our life of feeling and will. Practically, this means we should be engaged in the spiritual exercises that help us gradually cultivate high ideals and purify our lower passions, by contemplating their nature, remaining present in our "I" activity, and strategically resisting them. As long as we flow along with our lower passions, our "I' remains a passive observer of external laws that shape its flow of becoming. Imagine that you have a really bad rash and it itches a lot. You know at a conceptual level that scratching the rash will only make it worse. Nevertheless, if the "I" does not remain present, you will find yourself scratching the rash as an automatic habit and passively observing the behavior, perhaps even commenting on it like 'I shouldn't be scratching this rash but it just itches so much'. The "I" needs to remain present with a certain level of intensity to resist the scratching impulse. 

We in no way want to flatten out the pictures of our flow into momentary snapshots - it is precisely the temporal intuition of our soul states that we want to live in. We want to sense how our soul habits structure our thought-life, feelings, and many of our actions over the course of time. In our normal state that mostly lacks "I" presence, our thoughts are like random samplings of this soul structure (or like the wildly swinging pendulum that rarely finds a point of balance that elucidates its flow of becoming). Either we flow along with sensory events, in which case we are merged entirely with the soul structure like a fish in water and don't have any distance to form intuition of its patterned flow, or we reflect on our soul state and notice certain impulses, emotions, habits, etc. here and there, building a very dim intuition. It can be represented by the IFS gif that Cleric shared:





The more we can remain present and resist impulsive habits, the more distance we gain and start to notice how our conceptual states arrange in these more well-defined and self-similar patterns over time. Imagine this IFS picture was simply presented to someone without any explanation from Cleric's original post or what we have just discussed now. It would be a flattened and floating picture, what Lorenzo would say he is completely unimpressed by . Only when we have permeated the deeper layers of soul experience, at first with our lively thinking gestures, does this picture start to gain intuitive depth that relates to our temporal flow of becoming. When we picture these inner realities, the pictures should only be expressions of the holistic inner soul patterns that we live with intuitively, rather than arbitrary pictures that can easily stray into unhelpful fantasy. 

The above should also address the question of Steiner writing poems. This is simply starting from the wrong end. Even the most beautifully written poem will do little to help orient and refine our intuition for spiritual existence until we have probed the holistic inner experiences with our living, energetic concepts. This probing can permeate our life of feeling as well. Then we can come back to such poetic expressions, for ex. those Steiner gave in the Calendar of the Soul, and extract much more meaningful orientation from them. As Prokofieff indicated, there is an inestimable value to approaching spiritual reality in freedom through our precise and lucid thoughts. At first, we may catch ourselves wishing that spiritual reality would simply grab hold of our feelings and swoon us into a more intimate experience. The value of remaining free in our thoughts will only become evident later when we get a concrete sense that we are winning through to all our deeper spiritual experiences, earning them through our free and creative efforts. That doesn't mean we delude ourselves into thinking we are responsible for all development - in fact, we feel most free precisely when we realize how much of our development is the grace of higher beings in whom our consciousness is nested, responding to our intentional gestures as in a creative dialogue.

None of these steps need to be sharply segmented. In reality, it will be a rhythmic flow between conceptual probing, artistic picturing, astral purification exercises, sense-free concentration, etc. Our conceptual probing can be accompanied by artistic picturing but we should always try to sense how the latter is simply reflecting the depth of our temporal intuition, rather than something we are arbitrarily constructing. The pictures should be concentric with our intuitive context, naturally condensing from the latter. That will help make our verbal thinking concentric as well. We will sometimes lean too heavily on one aspect and mostly ignore another, or vice versa. The more present we remain in our "I" activity, the more that will become critical feedback for how to modulate our rhythms more effectively going forward - where and how to focus our efforts. Nevertheless, we can speak of a characteristic gradient that flows from conceptual probing and artistic picturing to the concentrated spiritual activity that reflects itself in panoramic images that encode the holistic patterns of our soul life, and then continuing to even more integrated spiritual experiences. 

[Güney27]

Thank you Ashvin.

To have a concrete example, how would you picture karma or reincarnation?
Or the human being in the process of taming his animal (astral)?

There are many concept in Ss which are temporal, how should you flatten them out into pictures?


Aren't pictures in a sensory manner still coupled to the physical brain?

Why steiner didn't write poems instead, it would be an more artistic way of communicating higher truths.

Guney,

I would say 'picturing' here should be taken in a broader sense. When we picture our tasks for the day, for ex., we can sense how we are living in the meaning of those tasks, our intentions for how our state of being should transform to accomplish those tasks.  The visual perception of these tasks, which could be quite dim for some people (including myself), is only a second-order effect. Whether we are thinking verbally or in pictures about the tasks, these both serve as an anchor for the intuitive stream of meaning associated with the events. They can help us orient to and refine that stream of meaning, but they cannot invent that meaning out of themselves.  

It is the same principle with the Cosmic tasks that are reflected in the facts of spiritual science, such as the laws of karma, reincarnation, the relations of the sheaths, and so forth. There is no advantage in simply making everything into 'artistic' pictures if we aren't also deepening our intuition for the temporally extended nature of those tasks. For ex., if we want to picture ourselves taming our astral body and see this:





It will only help us if we already have some deepened intuition for how our stream of inner experience relates to the concentric circles, the vertical beam of light going through the central axis of the body, and so forth. This is only a distracting picture if we haven't gone through the first steps of study-meditate, really struggling with the spiritual ideas of 'astral body', 'pruification/catharsis', etc. and the inner conditions they describe. As Cleric and Prokofieff have indicated, we are struggling to penetrate our 'future-memories', our slumbering knowledge of experience that is yet to come. This knowledge truly exists because we have lived through the experiences symbolized by spiritual concepts in the spiritual worlds before incarnation, and also to some extent each night during sleep. We simply need to find the strength of cognition to recall these future-memories. Just as we need to make active gestures to recall what we ate for breakfast, or to picture our future tasks, we have to make active gestures to probe the space of supersensible ideas. 

Then we need to let the ideas descend more into our life of feeling and will. Practically, this means we should be engaged in the spiritual exercises that help us gradually cultivate high ideals and purify our lower passions, by contemplating their nature, remaining present in our "I" activity, and strategically resisting them. As long as we flow along with our lower passions, our "I' remains a passive observer of external laws that shape its flow of becoming. Imagine that you have a really bad rash and it itches a lot. You know at a conceptual level that scratching the rash will only make it worse. Nevertheless, if the "I" does not remain present, you will find yourself scratching the rash as an automatic habit and passively observing the behavior, perhaps even commenting on it like 'I shouldn't be scratching this rash but it just itches so much'. The "I" needs to remain present with a certain level of intensity to resist the scratching impulse. 

We in no way want to flatten out the pictures of our flow into momentary snapshots - it is precisely the temporal intuition of our soul states that we want to live in. We want to sense how our soul habits structure our thought-life, feelings, and many of our actions over the course of time. In our normal state that mostly lacks "I" presence, our thoughts are like random samplings of this soul structure (or like the wildly swinging pendulum that rarely finds a point of balance that elucidates its flow of becoming). Either we flow along with sensory events, in which case we are merged entirely with the soul structure like a fish in water and don't have any distance to form intuition of its patterned flow, or we reflect on our soul state and notice certain impulses, emotions, habits, etc. here and there, building a very dim intuition. It can be represented by the IFS gif that Cleric shared:





The more we can remain present and resist impulsive habits, the more distance we gain and start to notice how our conceptual states arrange in these more well-defined and self-similar patterns over time. Imagine this IFS picture was simply presented to someone without any explanation from Cleric's original post or what we have just discussed now. It would be a flattened and floating picture, what Lorenzo would say he is completely unimpressed by . Only when we have permeated the deeper layers of soul experience, at first with our lively thinking gestures, does this picture start to gain intuitive depth that relates to our temporal flow of becoming. When we picture these inner realities, the pictures should only be expressions of the holistic inner soul patterns that we live with intuitively, rather than arbitrary pictures that can easily stray into unhelpful fantasy. 

The above should also address the question of Steiner writing poems. This is simply starting from the wrong end. Even the most beautifully written poem will do little to help orient and refine our intuition for spiritual existence until we have probed the holistic inner experiences with our living, energetic concepts. This probing can permeate our life of feeling as well. Then we can come back to such poetic expressions, for ex. those Steiner gave in the Calendar of the Soul, and extract much more meaningful orientation from them. As Prokofieff indicated, there is an inestimable value to approaching spiritual reality in freedom through our precise and lucid thoughts. At first, we may catch ourselves wishing that spiritual reality would simply grab hold of our feelings and swoon us into a more intimate experience. The value of remaining free in our thoughts will only become evident later when we get a concrete sense that we are winning through to all our deeper spiritual experiences, earning them through our free and creative efforts. That doesn't mean we delude ourselves into thinking we are responsible for all development - in fact, we feel most free precisely when we realize how much of our development is the grace of higher beings in whom our consciousness is nested, responding to our intentional gestures as in a creative dialogue.

None of these steps need to be sharply segmented. In reality, it will be a rhythmic flow between conceptual probing, artistic picturing, astral purification exercises, sense-free concentration, etc. Our conceptual probing can be accompanied by artistic picturing but we should always try to sense how the latter is simply reflecting the depth of our temporal intuition, rather than something we are arbitrarily constructing. The pictures should be concentric with our intuitive context, naturally condensing from the latter. That will help make our verbal thinking concentric as well. We will sometimes lean too heavily on one aspect and mostly ignore another, or vice versa. The more present we remain in our "I" activity, the more that will become critical feedback for how to modulate our rhythms more effectively going forward - where and how to focus our efforts. Nevertheless, we can speak of a characteristic gradient that flows from conceptual probing and artistic picturing to the concentrated spiritual activity that reflects itself in panoramic images that encode the holistic patterns of our soul life, and then continuing to even more integrated spiritual experiences. 

If we think about the idea of synthesis and analysis, we focuse the meaning of the idea into certain words (intellect), which elucidate the relation, the law so to say.

The idea is eternal and we can't change it with our thinking, we can glide trough its meaning and focus it.

This is pure thinking (it is really the exceptional state because we only get the details above trough thinking about thinking)

Then we have the intuitive activity, which we feel as our own activity ( it's hard for me to study 'this' because it's very subtle).


It is sense free because we don't find this idea trough our senses.


So is this study-meditation or not?

Somehow I find it very easy to think trough the idea above and recognize it as something real, but it is very hard to think trough and understand the astral body and the astral world.

Why do you think it is hard in one case and not the other, both ideas aren't perceptible trough eyes, ears ....

If we take the astral body and the astral world to be concrete, could you explain me how to study-meditate and recognize it realness?

How do you match the word to your inner stream of becoming( your first person experience manipulating the conscious experience of the pixels of the surrounding world trough your own activity 'thinking feeling willing')?

I think it woukd be fruitful if we could 'go the steps together'.

[AshvinP]

To have a concrete example, how would you picture karma or reincarnation?
Or the human being in the process of taming his animal (astral)?

There are many concept in Ss which are temporal, how should you flatten them out into pictures?


Aren't pictures in a sensory manner still coupled to the physical brain?

Why steiner didn't write poems instead, it would be an more artistic way of communicating higher truths.

Also, Guney, I would mention that Steiner (and other esoteric writers) themselves often provide the pictures that are most concentric with the inner realities that they are describing. That doesn't mean we are forever confined to these pictures, but they are certainly most helpful to begin with. For ex., Federica shared the following before:

Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier. It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind.

That can be a living picture we work with for orienting to the intuition of karma. Notice how it is not completely static, momentary, or spatial. The picture invites us to follow certain thinking-gestures across time that convey a meaningful dimension of karma. But, again, this requires that we are also probing the concrete examples of karmic cause-effect and struggling to relate these to our individual and collective stream of experience, even if in a very dim and abstract way at first. The picture of a heated ball transferring heat to the water it is immersed in won't by itself orient our intuition of karmic laws without much more active probing on our part.

These pictures are indeed coupled with the physical brain because, as Steiner said, it allows our sense-based thinking to find an anchor point for supersensible intuitions. There is nothing wrong with this, per se. It is completely necessary at the initial stages. Eventually, through strengthened cognitive activity, our expanded intuition will be able to reflect itself in more living sense-free images tied to the etheric brain. Then we may be able to also convey our supersensible experiences to others in sense-based pictures, as Cleric often does. This is the way that ever-more expansive spheres of beings can participate in spiritual evolution.

[AshvinP]

If we think about the idea of synthesis and analysis, we focuse the meaning of the idea into certain words (intellect), which elucidate the relation, the law so to say.

The idea is eternal and we can't change it with our thinking, we can glide trough its meaning and focus it.

This is pure thinking (it is really the exceptional state because we only get the details above trough thinking about thinking)

Then we have the intuitive activity, which we feel as our own activity ( it's hard for me to study 'this' because it's very subtle).


It is sense free because we don't find this idea trough our senses.


So is this study-meditation or not?

Somehow I find it very easy to think trough the idea above and recognize it as something real, but it is very hard to think trough and understand the astral body and the astral world.

Why do you think it is hard in one case and not the other, both ideas aren't perceptible trough eyes, ears ....

If we take the astral body and the astral world to be concrete, could you explain me how to study-meditate and recognize it realness?

How do you match the word to your inner stream of becoming( your first person experience manipulating the conscious experience of the pixels of the surrounding world trough your own activity 'thinking feeling willing')?

I think it woukd be fruitful if we could 'go the steps together'.

Guney,

I started writing a response, but to make this more interactive, it would be better if you find a lecture passage on the astral body and share it here along with your initial thoughts on what overall idea is being conveyed. Just as with the idea of synthesis-analysis, you can try to glide through the overall meaning of the passage in its context and focus that meaning into some concepts that act as points of balance for your intuitive understanding. This would be more useful than me simply laying out 'steps' to study-meditate the idea of astral body, which of course cannot be found as any isolated object or process in reality. Unlike we are accustomed to when thinking about stones and plants and so forth, the supersensible ideas always lead us into a whole Cosmic organism of interrelated ideas. Actually this is also the case with sensible ideas.

Let's say we are examining a tree outside. At the fragmented physical level, we can analyze the tree into its component parts - roots, bark, sap, leaves, and branches. These perceptions exert an influence on our thoughts and we can synthesize them into the concept of 'tree'. At a more etheric level of synthetic thinking, we can notice how the tree is a being extended in time, going through processes of growth and decay, and how its processes are entirely interwoven with the whole surrounding ecosystem of plants, insects, animals, soil and atmosphere, etc. At this level, we can't orient our understanding of the tree-being without the birds that build their nests on its branches, for ex.

We should approach supersensible ideas with a similar attitude of continuously tracing their relations into a wider spiritual ecosystem. Except, in this ecosystem, what we find will always relate concretely to our own flow of spiritual activity across some shorter or longer 'wavelength' of time. It will relate to how meaningful intents analyze and synthesize experiences within some smaller or larger curvature of potential, or scale of being. So we can see that our thinking needs to remain consistently active in order to concretely explore supersensible ideas and trace their relations into a wider context. Try this out with some passage on the astral body and just jot down your thoughts. It doesn't matter how dim or fragmented they are, or that you are using the 'proper terminology', only that you remain active as you glide through the meaning and focus it into the concepts that most naturally express your intuitive context.

[Federica]

it is very relieving to pause the intellectual commentary as much as possible and weave in more supersensible currents of meaning. It is indeed magical how, a short time ago, this degree of freedom for using our spiritual activity to structure our perceptual flow would be completely unsuspected, mere dormant potential.
Because of the self-imposed 'ban on all thinking', people go about feeling like many things simply happen to them spontaneously, randomly, etc., without realizing simple exercises such as these [pictorial thinking exercises] can invert that feeling and give a profound sense of creative responsibility within the perceptual flow.

I wanted to circle back to this idea in blue. It’s easy to imagine a common reaction to it. It would be something like:

You can try and picture your future as much as you want, feel as creative as you want, but it will make no difference on the external constraints, the laws of nature, the random events that can affect us, etcetera. They are there regardless of our pictorial thinking.

This thought could come from a physicalist, an analytic idealist, and from anyone else who considers reality monolithically external to oneself. It may sound like a common-sense objection at first, but on the way to a living understanding of reality, one comes to realize how we may get misled to thoughts of this sort. This may have to do with sneaky mind habits present in our environment. If we don’t pay attention, they influence our thoughts, even in opposition with one’s own idealist conception. Based on my personal slow-pace journey of understanding, I have imagined a slow-pace reply to the objection. Boring and incomplete, for sure, but possibly interesting for those who find some of the higher-level posts difficult to decipher (everyone else would get bored).

***


IS IT POSSIBLE TO GAIN SOME SENSE OF THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL REALITY?

Surely there are potential constraints to our experiential flow to be anticipated. If we are not proactive, they will constrain us in dissonant ways, for example if we conduct our life as if we could count on the ability to pass through metal bars, like the T1000. However, it’s not all as obvious as it seems, since this anticipation of constraints is understandable in different ways. Definitely, if I see metal bars, I should anticipate that I won’t be able to pass through them. The constraint is there. I can picture myself moving through them at will, it won’t help. But this is not the same as the objection above. It’s important to remain vigilant and ask: is the objection arising from the seamless postulate that the self is confronted by a separate external world?

We know that careful phenomenological inquiry leads to the realization that such a dualistic worldview is illusory - it only arises when inquiry goes no further than the shallow layer of sensory perceptions, ignoring our very normal sense-free experiences (thinking, feeling). There, in the sensory world, perceptions are heavily impoverished (aliased) since they only wrestle with seemingly isolated small tips of the iceberg of reality - the physical part - missing reality’s profound interconnectedness at the level of its idea-made foundations. These interconnected foundations are perceptible, but not sense-perceptible through our physical eyes and ears. Our organ of perception for these interconnected foundations is thinking. Everyone can immediately see that thinking provides sense-free perceptions (our thoughts) but perceiving the interconnectedness of reality is not as immediate. It requires some training of this sense-free organ, just like the organ of physical sight requires some training at birth - a few years of training - before it can see physical reality meaningfully. And this is the whole difficulty: giving birth to our sense-free being and his organ of sense-free perception (thinking) by engaging the necessary training, before one is able to perceive the interconnectedness. While training of the physical eyes and ears happens for us automatically, it's taken care of by the physical-etheric forces themselves, training of the sense-free eyes and ears doesn’t. That training is ‘next level’. It won’t happen by itself. We need to want it, and we need to make it happen. It's a free decision.

Freedom becomes the big differentiator of the one human race. Those who seek freedom will sooner or later train their sense-free organs, and those who don’t will let themselves go with the flow - the flow of what’s in excess in the human being once freedom is removed: animal-like instincts and feelings served by a brain that has become very efficient in the physical, and forgetful (in our epoch) of the interconnectedness at the same time. This is the worst combination ever! Man without freedom is just that: the most evolved animal, led by animal-like desires and instincts but much more efficient than animals in following through, which leads to the dramatic state of the world we witness today. No doubt, we have heard all this before. But is it possible to slowly navigate toward this realization of interconnectedness before the sense-free sight is developed?


INNER AND OUTER EXPERIENTIAL FLOWS OF ALL BEINGS

We can start from the first-person perspective of the one who navigates everyday experience. Our everyday experience is the ever-present inner and outer all-inclusive perceptual flow that conscious experience is made of. The crucial caveat here is: it’s really, really crucial to continuously remind ourselves that our everyday flow of experience is not limited to outer perceptions, but includes all perceptions: we perceive our own thoughts and feelings as well! These perceptions are mixed into the sensory ones, in one seamless experiential flow - flow of becoming, in Clerics words. Defaulting back to ‘outer mode’ is so easy and ‘natural’, because we are so conditioned to do it, but also totally unfavorable to true understanding. So I will add this visual cue (credit Cleric and Ashvin) to recall that we want to make sure we’re in inner+outer mode. We don’t want to filter out our thought-perceptions (the fact that our thoughts are an integral part of our conscious experience).

From this stance of full-spectrum experiential awareness, the goal will be to come to notice that any perceived eventline in our flow (for example the series of events that leads us from the perception of feeling thirsty to the one of being drinking a glass of water) manifests in our perceptions, not randomly, out of the 'landscape' of all potential eventlines, but in compliance with certain high-level lines of force that have shapes, and form patterns. These lines of force are the experiential flows of higher beings. One difference between our individual flow and the flows of higher beings (beside the enormous and mysterious difference in creative power) is that ours is perceived as strongly individualized (I am drinking this glass of water, that I have decided to drink, because I felt thirsty, and I ’m not aware of anyone else intruding in this eventline) while the higher beings’ flows are much more operating within each other, in fluid movements. Their thinking, feeling and will activity is perceived as co-operated, in concert with other beings.

There is one thing their flows have in common with our human perceptual flows: they also have an outer-inner character. These non-human intelligences may lack a space-specific physical extension - with a brain in a head, two arms and hands, etcetera, like we have - but they still take part in the physical world. Not that a being’s physical body is a given mountain, or color, or law of nature, but the latter are condensed physical ‘bodies’, or manifestations, resulting on the outer plane from some inner cooperation of higher beings. So for them there’s no one-to-one correspondence, like we experience, between our experiential flow and a clearly defined physical body. In our case, the conscious flow that we are is experienced as centered in a clearly defined physical body, but not for them! And just as our eventlines are continuously unfolding in our flow, the higher-level eventlines are also continuously unfolding, at a variety of paces, and they unfold both innerly and outwardly, as well. These inner+outer eventlines created by the interconnected activity of higher beings are the big lines of force that our flows (inner+outer!) comply with. So the eventline of me feeling thirsty and drinking water, flows in the specific way it flows because it complies with bigger eventlines shaped at a higher level. These lines manifest across the whole spectrum of the perceptual flow - thinking, feeling, and happenings in the physical - and guide my sensations of thirst, my thoughts about water, my physical gestures of pouring water, etcetera.

Here’s a metaphor. We can imagine that we are one individual cloud in the sky, among other clouds, within an entire natural ecosystem. Like raindrops falling from that cloud on a hilly landscape accumulate and flow downhill in compliance with the trenches and the cracks in the soil, and not in random patterns, or along the hills’ ridgeline - that would be surreal - so our flow of experience is continually constrained/oriented towards the future (downhill), by the interconnected high-level lines of force. And just like the cloud can’t decide that its raindrops will flow on the ridgeline, so we can’t decide to pour the water outside the glass.

However - even if it may be counterintuitive - these higher lines of force are not static, not even in their physical repercussions, just like the cracks in the soil are not static, but evolve in patterns, out of their own and many other’s intents.
And another crucial feature to consider is: just like even a few raindrops have an ever so slight impact on the landscape, so our human flow of experience also creates some more or less impactful difference in the totality of the interconnected inner+outer experiential flows of all beings. We could call this totality our inner+outer experiential ecosystem. This ecosystem continually takes in and adjusts to the activity we experience, creatively or not, in our flow. If we are mostly intentional about shaping our flowing eventlines in the direction of our goals (let’s say that, as clouds, we exert our will and send down heavy-rain drops) we could call our perceptual flow a navigation. Otherwise, if we are extreme in taking life one day at a time, letting uncontrolled thinking rule our consciousness, then our gestures are more instinctive. Then we are more like clouds melting into a shower of small drops that drift away in the air and finally dissolve into some cracks. We don't try to bring any ever so slight change in the soil patterns.

So there is inner and outer interconnectedness of experiential flows for all beings. It's a dynamic of continual reciprocal influence. For our part, we might not perceive it (if we haven’t developed the necessary organ), but we still have the freedom to decide how much intention we want to put in our flow, trying to influence the experiential ecosystem (other beings' actions, thoughts and feelings, including our fellow humans’) in the direction of our goals. Our impact may be small, but if we join forces with others and strive together to orient our eventlines towards shared moral goals, our small results may add up. Similarly, a few heavy raindrops from one cloud won’t change the landscape so much, but a larger rainfront probably would.
When we consider reality as a dynamic experiential ecosystem of ever-interacting inner and outer flows of countless beings, we also may start to decondition from primary identification with our physical extension (body) as the center of our outer eventlines. We decondition from that one-to-one correspondence between our experiential flow and our physical body. We may realize that we are not so much a physical body owning a purely individual flow of experience, but more like an inner + outer percpetual flow that we’re only partially conscious of as yet. This flow that we are, includes the experience of a clearly individualized material body.


HIGHER-LEVEL LINES OF FORCE ARE NOT THERE REGARDLESS OF OUR ACTIVITY

If I picture myself pouring water in a glass and drinking it (this is a thought-perception in my experiential flow) the moment I transform the picture into action, the higher intelligences who rule the behaviors of solids, fluids and gasses (who have their physical presence expressed in those forms and principles) will characterize the way water, glass and air physically interact, as I pour the water. Then, those who ideate the digestive system direct the drinking event. If I change my mind and decide to water a plant with that water, I will expect a different eventline to manifest, along different high-level lines of force. Are these static constraints? I may feel confident that I can bring that watering intention into manifestation as I want, since my intention is formed (perceived), and I have precise expectations on how the concerned intelligences may canalize/constrain my action through fixed laws of nature, as I go and water the plant. However, this sense-perceptible part of my eventline is always only made of isolated tips of the one interconnected iceberg. Some unknown movements of inner interconnectedness could be ongoing in the non-sense-perceptible spheres of reality, operated through the activity of many intentions (beings), and perhaps what I correspondingly witness, as a result in my outer flow, is that - say - someone calls me unexpectedly at that exact moment, and I completely forget about watering the plant, thereby making those seemingly pre-existing constraints that I was expecting along the eventline “plant watering” inexistent in the manifested flow that I am. In terms of the rain metaphor: as a small cloud in the sky, I may decide to target a particular area, where the cracks in the soil seem to lead to a desired spot downhill, but by the time the raindrops reach the soil, the patterns in the landscape may have changed, so the drops may end up flowing in a different future direction. My anticipation of constrained flow didn’t really play out as I expected. My drops of intention have merged with the bigger intentional interconnectedness in a way that has mysteriously resulted in inner and outer transformation of various flows, including mine.

So, the anticipated constraints, even the laws of nature, are not monolithic: they may become relevant for my eventline, in combination with many other experiences, but otherwise, they are simply inexistent. They only have a reality in dynamic interaction with many other intentions. Their existence in isolation, as immutable constants, is only real in the abstract reasoning of human beings. And like the deepest trenches in the soil, these laws of nature evolve too. If we don’t see how, it’s because the rhythms of their flow extend well beyond our mindspan. Even more incredibly, they evolve in the context of the interconnectedness with all other experiential flows, including ours!


WE CAN FREELY DECIDE TO IMPRINT INTENTIONS IN OUR ACTIVITY

Hopefully the truly creative power of pictorial thinking is getting clearer. I can decide to align how I think, feel and act with my goals, and that will have some influence on mine and other beings’ perceptual flows, even though the most powerful lines of force are the interconnected experiential flows of higher beings. Karma, for example, is one of those flows.
Again, these flows/lines of force are only indirectly detectable by the physical senses and their amplifications (measuring instruments and other tech). Our physical senses only detect the outer, physical repercussions of endlessly ‘recalculated’ patterns of interaction of the countless flows. However, they are detectable by our sense-free organs, to the extent that we develop them.

More examples: going back to the picture of my glass of water, another co-creative eventline is engaged if I decide to meditate on that picture, instead of drinking the water, and yet another one if I create a thought of me pouring the water and passing the glass to someone else, whose body is located in another region of the world. In this case, the eventline I picture will be dealt with, or filtered, through the intelligent laws of nature. Physically, the person would arguably receive no glass of water, and my physical perception of the glass would flow along different lines of force in the landscape of physical potential available to me (I may end up watering that plant, after all) but at the same time, we can’t forget that I created that thought-picture of passing the glass across geographical distance. The picture is now an experienced reality I am throwing into the collective, interconnected perceptual flow. It doesn’t matter that it’s not physical, it’s still reality (a conscious experience) and as such it enters the co-creation process. It’s a raindrop released in the experiential ecosystem. It will surely have some effects on the reality experienced by some other beings, even if I don’t yet understand how this works. The important thing is to decondition from continually defaulting back to a vision of reality as physical reality only. Especially if one calls oneself an idealist.

My picture of passing the glass across geographical distance is not affected by laws of matter. As a living reality, it will be facilitated/constrained by the higher intelligences in other mysterious ways. Maybe the picture enters that person’s flow, thereby becoming a shared reality and perceptual experience. Now the person has to deal with it. They may ignore it, or they may notice some kind of relatedness, a coincidence with their contextual flow. Maybe some meaning that goes beyond the picture of the glass is so revealed. Maybe some unknown deeper crack in the landscape of potential eventlines ("structured potential" as Ashvin calls it) has attracted the drops of intention of both our thinking activities and so the picture has become real in both flows. Even if we don’t get what the higher intentions undelying our flow may be, clearly it doesn’t make sense to search for their measurements or descriptions on the purely physical plane, it doesn’t make sense to monolithically anticipate external constraints to our flow either, but it makes complete sense to strive to use our thinking and will proactively, in harmony with the experiential ecosystem, so as to express our freedom, and take part in the pursuit of moral goals.

In metaphorical terms: while it would be ridiculous to imagine that we can make the raindrops of our intentions fall along our privately formed system of trenches (hopefully we don’t feel like megalomaniac bubbles…) we can surely influence to some extent the 'hydrological' lines of force, especially if we join forces with others, human and non human. Choosing to use this freedom is even more crucial and differentiating when we realize that negative and immoral intentions are also at work in the experietial ecosystem.


PICTORIAL THINKING IS CREATIVE FREEDOM

If we don’t try and picture/create our flow with certain desired eventlines in sight, starting from the part that we believe and hope we can effectively influence, then we are leaving on the table our creative freedom, since it’s only by engaging in the future-picturing ideational activity that we can continuously evaluate as we go the extent of what’s possible and desirable, at the best of our abilities. Our ever-evolving degrees of freedom can only progressively open as we navigate, and the more we push our attempts into more and more elevated goals and timeframes, the more influence we may expect to contribute, because extending the timeframe of our grasp means to go deeper into the causal relations that are shaping the tranches, including the possible ramification of influences ‘backward and forward’. In terms of the water example, we could end up understanding what vein of meaning attracted our thoughts about a glass of water, rather than just discovering them as data points, or constraints, in our respective flows.


MORE METAPHORS?

Another simple metaphor for the need to energetically picture the future and become an active ‘stakeholder’ in the interconnected ecosystem, is the work of entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and project managers, who pin down their vision on a vision board, or illustrate their projects in form of visual roadmaps. They try to meaningfully encompass a long enough future time-frame with their visual roadmaps, and often that works well to increase impact on their projects’ eventline (except they might do it as if “with dolls”, telling an external story, rather than enlivening it in first-person imagination).

Similar to wise ‘project managers’, we have to ‘feed-forward’ our goals (our “high ideals”) into our eventlines, filling the way ahead with thought-pictures and actions that fit both our goals and our understanding of the evolving constraints. And we have to continually reassess our route, as we become more aware of the patterns of interconnectedness, in which we also want to continually factor the reverberated reactions generated in the ecosystem by our goal-oriented picturing. Yes, it sounds twisted! The words certainly are twisted, which is why Cleric and Ashvin have often provided eloquent visual animations for this willed interconnectedness, like the ‘donut’ that rolls inside-out and outside-in at the same time.

Since we’re not in a dissociated bubble, but in perpetually evolving interconnection in the fluid of the collective activity of countless intelligences, we have to be proactive, and continually probe the possible eventlines. If we simply are ready to take in whatever may happen and never try to expand our now-vision into the more meaningful timelines, we succumb to the manifesting reality without contributing any intent. Then we can’t share any ideals, but are bound to mere reactivity, past-oriented and instinctive.

Hopefully this consolidates the idea that the environmental constraints are not really pre-existent, but only arise from the choreography we chose to dance on the evolving stage of the landscape of potential. Some constraints, like the laws of nature, may seem particularly deep and inescapable ‘trenches’, and they are in a sense, but our experience around them can be continually transformed by our intentional efforts to influence our eventlines. Some have used the expression “surfing reality” which seems a telling metaphor to me. Or we could think of a 007 car chase: unsuspected ways-out continually open up, as a result of an energetic flow of thinking and will efforts. It’s very clear: the moment 007 would stop ideating new eventlines, there would be no escape from the constraints, but as long as he applies clear intention, “pre-existing” laws of nature are continuously skipped and become irrelevant, non applicable. And the precipitating car-chase eventline (the one that continually happens) is obviously a co-creation. The first-person picturing, the other humans’, the higher level lines of force - they all continuously feed-forward into each other, to give rise to the perceived reality-surfing effect, in which there are no absolute constraints, but only the constraints that we picture-experience.


ALL COMES DOWN TO OWNING THE IDEA OF THE IDEAL NATURE OF REALITY

To intuit all the above, we have to strive to bring ‘idealism’ into our every reasoning. More and more people state that the nature of reality is ‘mind’, but as long as they don’t try to review their thought-patterns accordingly, idealism remains a theoretical statement ‘explained’ in terms of philosophical speculations, but with no connection with either the inner or the outer life. It won’t change anything of relevance in the reality of our experience, that is, in our understanding.

We really have to connect with the ideal nature of reality, from the first person perspective, and be on the lookout for the primordial role of ideational activity in it, in our every picture. Idea is the ever-present origin. Reality emerges as such, before it precipitates in physical form. If we let our field of attention endlessly shrink down to the mere physical flow, we are, as a matter of fact, behind reality at any given moment. No real impact is possible. On the contrary, if we get ahead of sense perceptions, if we try to enter their process of manifestation in inner terms first, we can expect to carve out some degrees of freedom and co-create the future, working harmoniously with the powerful lines of force. And at the end of the (eternal) day, becoming an expression of the Good depends on carving out those degrees of freedom. It’s necessary to be constantly present in the perceptual flow, responsible for our part, holding a flexible view of what eventlines seem the best ones to navigate, otherwise we don’t notice the degrees of freedom that we could experience and maybe expand on, once we get the hang of what orientation better supports fruitful co-creation in every moment. Windows continually open in front of us for intentional integration, and we have to contribute our future pictures. Otherwise the chance and task to exert freedom in service of moral intentions is continually missed, and we become passive, instinctive bystanders, easy prey for the environmental negative forces.

[Güney27]

If we think about the idea of synthesis and analysis, we focuse the meaning of the idea into certain words (intellect), which elucidate the relation, the law so to say.

The idea is eternal and we can't change it with our thinking, we can glide trough its meaning and focus it.

This is pure thinking (it is really the exceptional state because we only get the details above trough thinking about thinking)

Then we have the intuitive activity, which we feel as our own activity ( it's hard for me to study 'this' because it's very subtle).


It is sense free because we don't find this idea trough our senses.


So is this study-meditation or not?

Somehow I find it very easy to think trough the idea above and recognize it as something real, but it is very hard to think trough and understand the astral body and the astral world.

Why do you think it is hard in one case and not the other, both ideas aren't perceptible trough eyes, ears ....

If we take the astral body and the astral world to be concrete, could you explain me how to study-meditate and recognize it realness?

How do you match the word to your inner stream of becoming( your first person experience manipulating the conscious experience of the pixels of the surrounding world trough your own activity 'thinking feeling willing')?

I think it woukd be fruitful if we could 'go the steps together'.

Guney,

I started writing a response, but to make this more interactive, it would be better if you find a lecture passage on the astral body and share it here along with your initial thoughts on what overall idea is being conveyed. Just as with the idea of synthesis-analysis, you can try to glide through the overall meaning of the passage in its context and focus that meaning into some concepts that act as points of balance for your intuitive understanding. This would be more useful than me simply laying out 'steps' to study-meditate the idea of astral body, which of course cannot be found as any isolated object or process in reality. Unlike we are accustomed to when thinking about stones and plants and so forth, the supersensible ideas always lead us into a whole Cosmic organism of interrelated ideas. Actually this is also the case with sensible ideas.

Let's say we are examining a tree outside. At the fragmented physical level, we can analyze the tree into its component parts - roots, bark, sap, leaves, and branches. These perceptions exert an influence on our thoughts and we can synthesize them into the concept of 'tree'. At a more etheric level of synthetic thinking, we can notice how the tree is a being extended in time, going through processes of growth and decay, and how its processes are entirely interwoven with the whole surrounding ecosystem of plants, insects, animals, soil and atmosphere, etc. At this level, we can't orient our understanding of the tree-being without the birds that build their nests on its branches, for ex.

We should approach supersensible ideas with a similar attitude of continuously tracing their relations into a wider spiritual ecosystem. Except, in this ecosystem, what we find will always relate concretely to our own flow of spiritual activity across some shorter or longer 'wavelength' of time. It will relate to how meaningful intents analyze and synthesize experiences within some smaller or larger curvature of potential, or scale of being. So we can see that our thinking needs to remain consistently active in order to concretely explore supersensible ideas and trace their relations into a wider context. Try this out with some passage on the astral body and just jot down your thoughts. It doesn't matter how dim or fragmented they are, or that you are using the 'proper terminology', only that you remain active as you glide through the meaning and focus it into the concepts that most naturally express your intuitive context.

Ok, let's go trough the lecture I currently read

We come now to the third member of man's being, to the astral body — the “Soul Body” in Rosicrucian terminology. Man has the astral body in common only with the animals. The astral body is the bearer of feeling, of happiness and suffering, joy and pain, emotions and passions; wishes and desires, too, are anchored in the astral body. The astral body must be characterised by saying that there is within it that which is also present in the animal world. The animal world, too, has consciousness. The astral being of man and of the animal is held together by forces which have their seat in the Imaginative world or the “Elemental” world in Rosicrucian parlance. The forces which hold the astral body together and give it the form it has, are to be perceived in their true form, in the astral world. The ego-consciousness of the animal is also within this astral world. Just as in the case of a human being we speak of an individual soul, in the case of an animal we speak of a group-soul which is to be found on the astral plane. We must not think here of the single animal living on the physical plane but a whole species of animals — all lions, all tigers — have an ego in common, a group-soul to be found on the astral plane. So that the animal is really only comprehensible when it can be followed upwards to the astral plane. “Strands,” as it were, go forth from the lions, for example, and in the astral world unite into the group-soul that is common to the individual lions living on the earth. Just as the human being has an individual ego, so in every astral body there lives something of a group-ego; this animal-ego lives in the human astral body and the human being does not become independent of this animal-ego until he develops astral sight and becomes a companion of astral beings, when the group-souls of the animals confront him on the astral plane as individual animals confront him here. In the astral world there are beings who can only come down in fragments, as it were, to the physical plane as so-and-so many animals. When the life of these animals comes to an end they unite in the astral world with the rest of this astral being. A whole species of animals is a being on the astral plane, a being with whom converse can be held as with an individual here on earth. Although there is not exact similarity the group-souls are not incorrectly characterised in the second seal of the Apocalypse where they are divided into four classes: Lion, Eagle, Bull, Man (i.e., man who has not yet descended to the physical plane). These four Apocalyptic animals are the four classes of the group-souls which live in the astral world by the side of the human being with his individual soul.

I think this part here is good, because it realy is talking about the basics.

So how would you study-meditate this?

How does studying this, gives you a explanation of the currents of your metamorphosis?

And how do you can be sure if it's reality, without being clairvoyant (I understand that this is logical and understandable, but so are fairy tales too)?

I know that this isn't working like in normal science, but how do you work or study-meditate with these lectures?

[AshvinP]

Ok, let's go trough the lecture I currently read

We come now to the third member of man's being, to the astral body — the “Soul Body” in Rosicrucian terminology. Man has the astral body in common only with the animals. The astral body is the bearer of feeling, of happiness and suffering, joy and pain, emotions and passions; wishes and desires, too, are anchored in the astral body. The astral body must be characterised by saying that there is within it that which is also present in the animal world. The animal world, too, has consciousness. The astral being of man and of the animal is held together by forces which have their seat in the Imaginative world or the “Elemental” world in Rosicrucian parlance. The forces which hold the astral body together and give it the form it has, are to be perceived in their true form, in the astral world. The ego-consciousness of the animal is also within this astral world. Just as in the case of a human being we speak of an individual soul, in the case of an animal we speak of a group-soul which is to be found on the astral plane. We must not think here of the single animal living on the physical plane but a whole species of animals — all lions, all tigers — have an ego in common, a group-soul to be found on the astral plane. So that the animal is really only comprehensible when it can be followed upwards to the astral plane. “Strands,” as it were, go forth from the lions, for example, and in the astral world unite into the group-soul that is common to the individual lions living on the earth. Just as the human being has an individual ego, so in every astral body there lives something of a group-ego; this animal-ego lives in the human astral body and the human being does not become independent of this animal-ego until he develops astral sight and becomes a companion of astral beings, when the group-souls of the animals confront him on the astral plane as individual animals confront him here. In the astral world there are beings who can only come down in fragments, as it were, to the physical plane as so-and-so many animals. When the life of these animals comes to an end they unite in the astral world with the rest of this astral being. A whole species of animals is a being on the astral plane, a being with whom converse can be held as with an individual here on earth. Although there is not exact similarity the group-souls are not incorrectly characterised in the second seal of the Apocalypse where they are divided into four classes: Lion, Eagle, Bull, Man (i.e., man who has not yet descended to the physical plane). These four Apocalyptic animals are the four classes of the group-souls which live in the astral world by the side of the human being with his individual soul.

I think this part here is good, because it realy is talking about the basics.

So how would you study-meditate this?

How does studying this, gives you a explanation of the currents of your metamorphosis?

And how do you can be sure if it's reality, without being clairvoyant (I understand that this is logical and understandable, but so are fairy tales too)?

I know that this isn't working like in normal science, but how do you work or study-meditate with these lectures?

Guney, you did the easy part of quoting a lecture and asking questions... now comes the more difficult part of using your focused concepts to express the intuitive context you experience when reading through the quote. You should try to imagine how this context might relate to the currents of your metamorphosis, from first-person experience. Again, it doesn't need to be very vivid or precise, just share a few thoughts that naturally arise.

I know the first reaction will be, 'if I knew how to imagine that, I wouldn't be asking the question!' This is the attitude we need to overcome if we are going to make any progress with the study-meditate approach. The latter can't be imparted as stepwise instructions for building furniture but has to be lived through in our thinking. We should learn to trust that these supersensible ideas can only be related to the depth flow of our own thinking experience, so we already know the relevant answers to our questions at some level. Now it is a matter of using our active thinking to probe around and seek out the 'future-memories', i.e. a more lucid and encompassing intuitive orientation to our flow of existence.

We should be clear that we are not seeking some logical 'proof' for the existence of animal group-souls, like we would ask someone to prove that there are lions in Africa with written records, photos, statistical data, or something like that. The only proof we need is that, when thinking through these ideas, they help us make better sense of our totality of experience - they harmonize the facts of that experience. If we feel like we simply don't have enough facts of experience to harmonize, then this limitation our thinking bumps into is also feedback on where to focus our efforts. By no means should we expect that by applying some magical trick on the quote we will unlock the secrets of the astral body, astral plane, group-souls, and so on. When we study-meditate properly, we are led to more questions that help steer and focus our efforts. Ideally, these are questions that we didn't suspect to ask before.

Your thoughts can certainly be in the form of more questions, as long as these questions have some specificity and are actively exploring the ideal relations that may have relevance to how group-based animal consciousness also lives within our thinking, feeling, and willing life. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' thoughts or questions here. Deeper knowledge always comes from the very process of actively exploring ideal relations and therefore resonating with higher-order perspectives that are the very essence of activity and creativity (and the moral virtues cultivated through them).

[Cleric K]

I think this part here is good, because it realy is talking about the basics.

So how would you study-meditate this?

How does studying this, gives you a explanation of the currents of your metamorphosis?

And how do you can be sure if it's reality, without being clairvoyant (I understand that this is logical and understandable, but so are fairy tales too)?

I know that this isn't working like in normal science, but how do you work or study-meditate with these lectures?

Guney, let me add a concrete example that may help you start with what Ashvin suggests.

I say upfront that this should not be taken as some suggestion or criticism. I'm using it only because you have shared it previously and I know that it is something you can intimately relate to - nothing more.

I'm speaking about your passion for MMA. Here you have a perfect hands-on example through which you can understand more about the soul (astral) body, not through abstractions but in full concreteness.

For example, you can try examining more deeply why you are drawn to this sport. What do you feel when you land a good hit? What motivates you to perfect your skills? What goal do you imagine you can achieve? For example, if you become the UFC champion, how would that make you feel?

I repeat and I want to be crystal clear about this - none of this is said as hidden criticism of what you are doing. Any insights about these things should come entirely from within yourself!

The thing is, that if you wrestle with these very intimate things, you'll have a quite real experience of what the soul body is. Not as an external picture but as how it feels from within. Quite different from what you may have expected, isn't it? Surely not something that lights up before your inner eye in beautiful colors and for which you can say "Aaah, I finally see it - magnificent!" It's quite different. Seeing the soul body starts with seeing the way in which our Earthly character flows through its curvatures. Here someone may say "But that's not a body, this is what I am! My passions, my interests for this or that, are the expressions of my free spiritual essence!" And this is really why true self-knowledge is so difficult. It's not because it is technically so difficult but because the last thing we want to realize is that in order to see and understand the soul and spiritual worlds, we need to dismantle our own being. If we're not willing to decompose our being and see how certain interests and passions shape our flow of becoming, we simply unspokenly declare that we don't want to know reality. Because to know the soul world in its reality, is to know the reality of the manifold world of sympathies and antipathies. Not theoretically, but by examining how they manifest first and foremost within ourselves.

When you start to notice the secret ways in which you feel satisfied when you land a hit (or anything else that you find satisfying) then you have uncovered a 'pixel' of the inner labyrinth of the soul body, so to speak.

I can guarantee you that without examining these things within yourself, the mere words about soul bodies and worlds will remain as abstract as ever. The success in approaching these soul realities depends on being clear that we're working with powerful forces. Our thinking ego flows within the rhythmic curvatures of the soul body. It feels like something of a deeper nature, something which defines us. That's why in our ordinary consciousness we say "That's my character, that's what I am." It takes time to first know these curvatures and then to gradually begin transforming them according to insights in our high ideal.

[AshvinP]

MORE METAPHORS?

Another simple metaphor for the need to energetically picture the future and become an active ‘stakeholder’ in the interconnected ecosystem, is the work of entrepreneurs, corporate leaders and project managers, who pin down their vision on a vision board, or illustrate their projects in form of visual roadmaps. They try to meaningfully encompass a long enough future time-frame with their visual roadmaps, and often that works well to increase impact on their projects’ eventline (except they might do it as if “with dolls”, telling an external story, rather than enlivening it in first-person imagination).

Similar to wise ‘project managers’, we have to ‘feed-forward’ our goals (our “high ideals”) into our eventlines, filling the way ahead with thought-pictures and actions that fit both our goals and our understanding of the evolving constraints. And we have to continually reassess our route, as we become more aware of the patterns of interconnectedness, in which we also want to continually factor the reverberated reactions generated in the ecosystem by our goal-oriented picturing. Yes, it sounds twisted! The words certainly are twisted, which is why Cleric and Ashvin have often provided eloquent visual animations for this willed interconnectedness, like the ‘donut’ that rolls inside-out and outside-in at the same time.

Since we’re not in a dissociated bubble, but in perpetually evolving interconnection in the fluid of the collective activity of countless intelligences, we have to be proactive, and continually probe the possible eventlines. If we simply are ready to take in whatever may happen and never try to expand our now-vision into the more meaningful timelines, we succumb to the manifesting reality without contributing any intent. Then we can’t share any ideals, but are bound to mere reactivity, past-oriented and instinctive.

Hopefully this consolidates the idea that the environmental constraints are not really pre-existent, but only arise from the choreography we chose to dance on the evolving stage of the landscape of potential. Some constraints, like the laws of nature, may seem particularly deep and inescapable ‘trenches’, and they are in a sense, but our experience around them can be continually transformed by our intentional efforts to influence our eventlines. Some have used the expression “surfing reality” which seems a telling metaphor to me. Or we could think of a 007 car chase: unsuspected ways-out continually open up, as a result of an energetic flow of thinking and will efforts. It’s very clear: the moment 007 would stop ideating new eventlines, there would be no escape from the constraints, but as long as he applies clear intention, “pre-existing” laws of nature are continuously skipped and become irrelevant, non applicable. And the precipitating car-chase eventline (the one that continually happens) is obviously a co-creation. The first-person picturing, the other humans’, the higher level lines of force - they all continuously feed-forward into each other, to give rise to the perceived reality-surfing effect, in which there are no absolute constraints, but only the constraints that we picture-experience.

Thank you, Federica, for this excellent overview of our participatory spiritual activity with very helpful examples and metaphors. I think we can all appreciate how, in the very act of intending the expression of your intuitive orientation in this post, you have opened previously unsuspected eventlines for your thinking activity that concretely influence your perspective and orientation toward the curvatures of destiny. This is where we must all start and focus our efforts to gradually awaken to our participation in the unfolding symphony of existence. This vision board metaphor is especially helpful and reminds me of a metaphor I was also thinking about using.

One major obstacle to developing a proper intuition for our participatory spiritual activity is that we imagine that the vision board, for ex., is some parallel process of structuring the flow of reality that we engage in once we know it's possible. In other words, we normally go about interacting with reality according to its regular 'laws' but then, when we learn about the power of visualizing our goals, we can tweak those laws or add new laws into the mix. This either leads to understandable skepticism of 'miraculous powers' or new age-style fantasies about such powers. That is all born from our failure to pay attention and investigate the ways in which we always interact with the World in our 'trivial' activities that we take for granted, such as in the example that you gave of pouring a glass of water. 

Instead, we should imagine that, through visualization and similar techniques, we are simply awakening to the one and only process by which our state of being, across all scales of existence (individual to collective), has always evolved as something whole from primordial times to present day. Most of the time we navigate life by moving through memory images that embed feelings of pleasure and pain, sympathy and antipathy. The pleasurable-sympathetic images orient us toward a certain course of action that will make our sensory experience coincide with the image, while the painful-antipathetic ones orient us toward a course of action that avoids the corresponding sensory experience. We are rarely aware of the images themselves but mostly of the intellectual voice that has encoded the holistic imagistic experience into a linear stream of commentary.  This is what Cleric illustrated here.

However, there are also future-memory images that we unconsciously navigate. We dimly sense these as the curvatures that constrain our activity and only make certain transformations of our current state possible, such as our temperament, character, habits, and so on. When we explicitly codify these intuitions of the constraints into clear concepts that reflect natural or psychic 'laws', we are generally extrapolating based on past memory images of our states and how they transformed. In reality, however, this is a one-sided approach, and the constraints are also shaped by unknown potential - what our character, for ex., could transform into by cultivating virtues. This is why scientific understanding of the constraints, for ex. in physics, biology, and psychology, continues to evolve as we ask new questions, make new observations, and actively think through them, i.e. as we ourselves inwardly transform through that process. We aren't discovering brand new 'laws' that suddenly came into existence but unveiling more of the ideal topography through which our states flow. 

Here I will use a movie scene as a really loose metaphor:





Whenever we creatively think through something, as we sometimes do in philosophy, science, art, and spirituality, it is like we are solving a 'crime' that hasn't yet happened. We quite literally move through images of future potential and organize them in such a way that they help us chart a course to the solution we are seeking. The 'pre-cogs' in the movie are simply symbols for own imaginative soul-life. Instead of extrapolating the known laws of past states into a future state as we do with passive sensory thinking, we anticipate how so far unknown forces can open degrees of freedom for reaching future states. We normally sleep through this whole process and only dimly register it as a mysterious train of thoughts, proceeding from equally mysterious intuition, that led us into the vicinity of our solution.

Another way to think of this imaginative domain of our soul-life is as a more encompassing 'now' state. Our sensory 'now' state is like a tiny aperture of the imaginative 'state' that is experienced from the same first-person perspective. As a certain fact, we always only experience a 'now' state of being from the first-person perspective. It doesn't matter what explanation we come up with for this fact - whether it's a dream, hallucination, a result of mindless neurons emerging into a strange loop, an act of God, or whatever - the fact of experiencing a 'now' state remains the same. From there, we have to explore the intuition that embedded in our 'now' state are higher-order 'Now' states. In other words, there is a perspective from which what we normally experience as '7 years of life' is experienced as a 'Now' state. We can imagine this continues up a concentrically nested series of 'Now' states, expanding apertures, to what we can only imagine asymptotically as an infinite/eternal timespan.

In this view, the highest Individuality in which we are embedded is the superposition of all possible states of being that could be experienced - any possible constellation of ideas, feelings, desires, sensations, etc. Every other 'now' perspective traverses this superposition so as to experience it as a temporal stream of metamorphosis from state to state, with each 'next' state integrating the previous as memory. Every relative perspective within the One "I" gradually grows its aperture of 'now' to resonate with more and more states and therefore integrate them as memory, approaching the highest, all-encompassing Now state. This isn't simply an abstract metaphysical theory. These higher 'Now' perspectives are always present, active, and not at all remote from our own 'now' experience. In fact, we make use of them all the time to navigate our lives. I previously used an example of deciding to turn left across traffic at a stop sign. 

What is actually happening here? Every time we expand into the intuitive context, our 'now' state is growing to encompass more temporally extended states of being. Because of our current stage of cognitive development, though, we practically sleep through this growth experience and, instead, we later register it as dim lawful intuitions, which we can codify into 'laws', that help us make our decisions more effectively. In that way, we can only make sense of our daily thinking experience if we account for our temporally 'vertical' existence. We are constantly cycling from our current 'now' state into more integrated 'Now' states and back again in order to triangulate the best courses of action. Through higher cognitive development, we can remain awake in the higher 'Now' states and know this layer of activity in much more intimate ways. This generally begins with the more encompassing Imaginative state.  

In reality, unlike in the movie scene, we are not 'here' with our soul-life viewing images over 'there', but our soul-life is entirely woven from these images. They embed everything we experience as sensations, desires, feelings, and ideal meaning. And these images are not like a movie projected by external forces that we passively watch, but our intents are active in these images. This activity is normally obscured by the commentating intellect and therefore we don't even suspect that this is a layer of our soul-life where we are active and where our activity rhythmically propagates through more encompassing domains of organic cause-effect (which are temporally decohered in our normal sensory experience). When we awaken to this layer, then we come to realize what Federica mentioned - "...perpetually evolving interconnection in the fluid of the collective activity of countless intelligences."

These images that weave our soul-life aren't simply the result of our local spiritual activity, our personal ideas, desires, and wishes. As a metaphor, when I interact with my cat, I know that the states of being she can experience are constrained by my intentions. I stand in a certain evolutionary relationship with her such that my intentions structure the 'curvature' through which her daily experiences flow. Within that structure, she can 'choose' to follow certain sympathies or antipathies - she can avoid the laundry room, lay down on some soft surfaces, run around some hallways and rooms, and direct her attention to various birds, squirrels, and such from my balcony. But she will never run out into the streets or the woods behind my apartment, or drink milk and eat chocolate, or many similar things, because that is not part of the structured potential that I have intended for her states of being to unfold through. Of course, I am a flawed human being who may be intending things that are not necessarily best for her potential development, but we are only trying to approach the underlying principle here.

What is written above is practically undeniable. No one can reasonably deny that humans now constrain the structured potential through which many plants and animals unfold their states of being. In fact, we feel a lot of satisfaction and comfort in this reality because it means we don't have to worry so much about the wild forces of the jungle coming to devour us like it did our ancestors. My cat can imagine she has unlimited creativity within her sphere of decisions - in fact, I often feel that's exactly what she imagines in a dreamlike way - but that won't change the fact that my intentions provide the overall structure for her life 'destiny'. I often feel like she imagines that her yelping manifests food out of the 'creative void' and fails to notice there is a higher agency involved that has decided to respond out of compassion, love, or sometimes annoyance, frustration, and pity. 

Of course, my intentions for my cat's curvatures of existence are also modulated by her states, her soul-gestures. If she gestures a state of ill health, my intentional activity will be modulated to take her to the vet. If she gestures a state of patience and discipline, my intentional activity is modulated to bring treats into her curvature. This is only a crude metaphor and shouldn't be applied to the higher-order agencies that intend the curvatures for our states in any 1:1 way. Nevertheless, it can help highlight what Federica also described, how our conscious stance within the intentional architecture of existence influences the modulation of that architecture and expands the palette of 'now' states to which we can transform from our current 'now' state. It is this ever-expanding conscious stance, through the artful technique of luminous study, devotional concentration and prayer, and virtuous deeds, that is the basis for human freedom and Earthly redemption.