Simply identifying the molds and thinking about them does not attain that liberation, either. We can no more reflectively think our way out of the common molds than we can think our way into a new favorite food or color by reflecting on those preferences. Nevertheless, the imaginative exploration of our thinking structure that we are now engaging in begins to draw new life into it, slowly but surely, and eventually that will translate into the capacity to creatively restructure the molds as well. The previous parts hopefully oriented the reader to the reasons why the retracing of spiritual activity is so necessary for extending our individual and collective life potential at this critical juncture of human history, yet also why it requires us to conduct our spiritual activity in new and unsuspected directions which will be experienced as straining and uncomfortable at first.
Most people are familiar with how a physical workout routine feels the most difficult when it is first started, perhaps so much so that the mere anticipation of this difficulty prevents them from starting the routine. There is an instinctive fear that we are taking on a new and difficult obligation without any clear sense of how it will orient or improve our lives, or whether we are able to handle the flaws that it will expose in our physical nature. It is a similar principle at work on the spiritual retracing path for our psychic nature and that’s yet another reason why exploring the foundations in our conceptual reasoning is so important. This exploration is like stretching exercises and light cardio for our imaginative activity which also mitigates the instinctive fear we will harbor for engaging in the more intense spiritual workout when the time comes.
Let’s begin this section by considering how our conscious retracing of spiritual activity requires an inversion from what the spirit has grown accustomed to through the instinctive evolution of that activity. With the latter, our will and imagination reached out into the phenomenal world and grasped at its meaning, accumulating and integrating experiences for itself in volume and as quickly as possible. It was necessary for our instinctive activity to assert itself and consume whatever content came into its reach; to become rich in worldly experience. These worldly experiences simply came to meet us from the surrounding environment with minimal effort on our part and we have therefore developed expectations that our activity will attain quick and undeniable results. That is not the case with deeper spiritual experiences, however.
“Put off thy shoes from thy feet: for the place where thou standest is holy ground.” -Acts 7:33
The fully conscious path requires our imagination and will to be schooled in patience, humility, and reverence; to become ‘poor in spirit’. We should feel that the mental, psychic, and physical spaces we are retracing are much greater than our kernel of activity at any given time, existing ‘above’ that activity and modulating its becoming. The inner meaning of these spaces is not to be grasped but to be drawn toward; we should make our activity resonant with these spaces like a tuning fork. We must loosen our expectations and become comfortable with waiting in silence for the spiritual spaces to incarnate. Our instinctive thinking treats its thoughts and emotions somewhat as antiques belonging to a private collection, but fully conscious thinking discerns that the inner spaces of potential are shared and sacred, woven from the activity of countless other beings. We should tread softly such that we remain respectively receptive to how their influences mold our activity.
The first domain to relinquish from our domineering grasp is the mental space and its thoughts. As discussed in the previous parts, it is necessary to renounce spreading our atomized thoughts over reality for speculative purposes and rather experience how reality brings these sequential thoughts into existence, as overtones modulated on mysterious subharmonics. The concepts we use here are not aimed at building another theoretical framework that purports to ‘explain reality’, but rather symbolic points of balance that help us gradually and methodically scale the depths of intuitive experience, like the grips used when climbing a rock surface.1 The inner path of experience we explore here could be (and has been) expressed in innumerable different concepts and formulations, just as the experience of love can be expressed through different words in various languages or through the imagistic symbols of mythology and art. They all provide different ‘snapshots’ of the underlying inner experience that cannot be fully captured by any of them alone or combined.
(1 - See also Herbert Witzenmann’s ‘Structural Phenomenology’:
“…linguistic expressions shall not be deemed to assert the existence of objects and their properties or the truth of conclusive argumentation, but rather serve as referential and eye-opening signposts to experiential nuances and phases of one’s own mental activity and complementary phenomenal content.”)
First, we should experience how our thoughts are not fully under our control at any given time. Anyone can prove this to themselves by trying to concentrate on a unitary image or verse for a few minutes, for example, “wisdom lives in the light”. For most people, it will likely be a matter of seconds before some mysterious current comes along and drags their thinking away to various memories, anticipations, emotions, and so forth. Another simple test is to read the next few sentences very smoothly, from left to right, as if we are tracing each letter with our vision, resisting the urge to hurry past any of them or jump across them. We should try to do this while also discerning the meaning of what we are reading. That task will also prove difficult for most people in modern times, when thoughtful attention to perceptual experience has become quite erratic. Our attention is constantly jumping around from content to content, especially if we have the habit of browsing the internet while switching between a few open tabs. These soul habits even impress themselves in the physiology, such as saccadic eye movements.
(Participant during observation of a picture on a computer screen)
Not only do we find it difficult to control this jumping around, but we have no idea why it happens in the first place. These two go hand in hand on the retracing path – the more intuitive insight we gain into the dynamics of our inner life, the more we are able to conduct our inner activity with more ‘smooth pursuit’ during daily activities. We also unveil the real psychic reasons for our thinking habits. Why do we think about politics and not economics? Why are we drawn to certain publications and not others? Why do certain songs get ‘stuck in our head’ and why do certain memories remain clear while others rapidly fade away? We could go on endlessly with such questions that are simply ignored, considered unimportant, or deemed already known in the course of normal life. People say, “I find politics more interesting than economics” and consider that a sufficient explanation. On the retracing path, however, we discover that ideologies, outlooks, emotions, preferences, beliefs, and even recurring thoughts have a mysterious life of their own.
We cannot easily encompass these living ‘curvatures’ of our experiential flow with the intellect, any more than a dream character can encompass the life of the waking self. The former unfolds its dreamy states of being along the curvatures of the latter’s sensations, emotions, and ideas, but can in no way reach the reality of these curvatures from within its own dream element. No matter how it reshuffles and combines its dream images, the reality of the waking self will not emerge. The dream character will never combine images of a cannon-ridden battlefield to discover the single loud noise that sparked the imagistic flow, for example. It is the same with the conceptual ego in relation to the higher spaces of potential. Instead, the ego must shrink itself down to its honest size and humbly seek resonance with its own future potential state, the more lucid and awakened version of itself, where the answers to these questions and many more can be intuited.
In that sense, the retracing process requires a mood of prayer. It is not necessarily prayer to any specific deity or within any specific religious framework, but a humble seeking of attunement between our activity and the higher spaces of potential from which it draws insight, life, and strength. Again, these spaces stand in relation to our conceptual space as the waking self stands in relation to the dream self, i.e. we cannot encompass them with our concepts. It is immanently practical to cultivate such a reverential mood because, after all, we are retracing spiritual activity into our own soul atmosphere. The quality of that atmosphere will determine how successful we are and also what sort of new experiences we can awaken into. There are many ‘subsidiary’ exercises that can be used to improve the quality of our soul atmosphere and we will explore those in a subsequent part of the essay.
For now, try to encompass the thoughts you were just thinking over the last 30 seconds, which were hopefully related to this essay. Now compare that tiny sequence of thoughts with all the knowledge you have attained in your adult life, through education and career. We don’t need any elaborate conceptualization of this knowledge, only a loose feeling of its ‘orbit’ as it gravitates around our current perspective. Further compare those thoughts and that knowledge with all the physical and mental skills learned since you were a child, such as playing an instrument, riding a bike, drawing, thinking, speaking, and walking. Broaden out further to compare the small sequence of thoughts with not only your personal knowledge and life skills, but also the collective artistic, scientific, religious, and philosophical knowledge and skills developed by humanity over the last few centuries and millennia. It is with such an inward confession of our meager thought-life that we should approach the vast Kingdom of the inner spaces.
The novel states we traverse on this path are not simply additional contents about ‘reality’ for the mind to integrate, but creative skills that help the spirit to work back on the mental, psychic, and physical constraints that shape its flow. We no longer only push the buttons of our imagination, feeling, and bodily will to accomplish tasks, but we learn how it is that we have those buttons to push and how they relate to one another. If our normal thoughts are like mineralized sediments carried on the flow of a river, our new living thoughts become part of the flow itself, contributing to the erosion of the channels and opening new leeway for the spirit to pursue its highest ideals. We discover the mental, emotional, and physical habits that modulate our activity from an altogether different direction, discerning new paths the spirit can navigate to sublimate these habits and thereby widen its degrees of freedom.
Yet this new spiritual journey also comes with new risks for missteps and new sorts of effort that are required to avoid the common pitfalls and progress in a healthy and balanced way. When we are children, deviations from the normal phases of physical and mental development are revealed to consciousness with little effort - if a child is 10 years old and still can’t read, we know there is something wrong. If a child is 16 years old and has not gone through puberty, his parents have likely already taken him to the doctor. Yet when we are mature adults and have stagnated in our spiritual development, both the fact of this stagnation and the reasons for it require much more inner effort to discern. We can't give our ideal life a blood test or put it in the MRI machine to get an empirically verified diagnosis of its abnormal measurements. Instead, the assessment and course-correction of the ideal life require us to remain fluid and creative at every step, penetrating the layers of our being with more and more intuitive insight.
These insights cannot be conveniently stored in our memory or a digital archive but must be continually kindled anew within us. When our spiritual activity is no longer supporting the novel mental states, it can feel as if they no longer exist in our version of reality. That can even make us wonder whether their logical relations were ever rooted in reality or were just our personal musings which have now evaporated like a profound yet fleeting dream. It is akin to gradually transitioning from watching a movie to directing the movie – if we stop our directing activity, no movie sequences will be captured or playback anymore. Every new insight we gain along this journey therefore comes with new responsibility – by intimately knowing how the mental, emotional, and physiological spaces were previously managed for us, we become more responsible for managing them ourselves. It is only by virtue of other beings withdrawing their activity from these spaces that a ‘vacuum’ is created for our activity to fill and thereby become conscious of itself at higher levels.
We are not exploring these higher states for mere curiosity or pleasure. As soon as we cross the threshold of sensory-driven conceptual life, we have passed from our lone sensations, feelings, and thoughts into the shared inner space. What seems like the purely natural order of sensory life is then revealed as being embedded within a moral order, where moral activity is causally efficacious. Here, moral virtues are just as important for our spiritual activity to remain stable and oriented within its flow of experience as the law of gravity is for our physical activity to do so. These are not arbitrary moral decrees that govern the higher states, but rather the latter elucidate the knowledge of inner relations from which the moral virtues of all World religions were originally inspired. The moral decrees of religious orders and secular governance are revealed as the outer physiognomy of these inner relations, just as a person’s countenance is the outer physiognomy of their inner life.
The higher states help us see how the virtues are psychic skills that draw ever-expanding spiritual potential into manifest existence and therefore orchestrate the latter in a way that promotes overall health, harmony, and love. They help us conserve and repurpose soul forces that are otherwise expended rashly during normal sensory life, such as through fear, anxiety, anger, mistrust, frivolity, and so forth. These conserved forces then form the basis by which our spirit reflects its existence within more integrated domains of existence.
It is easy enough to see why some of the virtues help us avoid negative consequences in life. If we only pursue states of sensual pleasure and bliss, for example through a drug habit, many harmful effects can ensue for our psychic and physical organisms. Therefore, our conceptual activity can somewhat easily trace where the virtue of temperance fits into a healthy lifestyle. Yet it is not so clear why a virtue like humility, for example, will expand our understanding of reality, let alone our ability to remain healthy and to exist harmoniously with other souls. The same could be said for generosity, forgiveness, equanimity, gratitude, and similar virtues.
At best, we conceive dim hypothetical scenarios in which our virtuous behavior feeds back into our soul or sensory environment, but we are never quite sure if such behavior really makes a difference or is instead carried out in vain, causing us to miss out on life’s pleasures. Sometimes these virtues are even considered by the intellect to be signs of weakness and are therefore instinctively repelled. The imaginative state, on the other hand, already makes clear that virtuous or unvirtuous activity wields significant effects within the shared soul landscape and these effects can be traced.
Let’s use a simple metaphor to imaginatively explore one of the chief virtues that is needed at every step of the path to creatively engage with it and make progress. Imagine we are hiking on a mountain with the aim of reaching its highest peak and it is surrounded by dense fog – we can only see a very short distance around us at any given time. As we continue, we can sense that we are still walking uphill until we reach some flat surface and then it begins to descend. Since we can’t see much around us, we may assume that we have now reached the highest mountain peak, the global maximum. Yet what if this peak is only a local maximum and there are much higher peaks hidden within the foggy landscape? If the fog were to dissipate and we discovered that was the case, then we would need to descend into a valley before scaling to new heights. Perhaps we would need to make a few such ascents and descents before eventually reaching our aim at the global maximum.
That is a metaphor for fully conscious, and therefore freely given, sacrifice. In normal conceptual life, we often have to make decisions to sacrifice some pleasure or opportunity for ideal aims. Perhaps we give up a lucrative job opportunity to continue our studies for a few more years, we give up convenience for recycling, or we give up red meat to promote healthy living. Yet in this scenario, we are still on the foggy mountain, not quite sure if we are already at the global maximum and our sacrificial descent will simply take us back to ground level, or whether it is actually leading to a higher peak. Our alignment with the imaginative state, on the other hand, lifts the fog to a great extent and unveils the soul topography such that we have a much clearer idea of whether our sacrificial descents from certain soul impulses and opportunities are leading to higher peaks of rewarding soul states, not only for ourselves but for other beings within our ‘soul circumference’ as well. Indeed, it becomes known that this circumference eventually expands out to encompass all other beings of the Earthly landscape.
In that sense, we begin to understand that all of the virtues are a means of gaining more holistic intuition of our existential flow, which is comprised of the interwoven relations with many other beings, and likewise using that intuition to wisely conduct our spiritual activity in the World through the virtues. Instead of entering into a vicious feedback cycle of blindly coerced sacrifices by external authorities and corresponding resentments for missing ‘life’s pleasures’, we enter into a virtuous feedback cycle of fully conscious wisdom and freely given deeds, which are the only deeds that can be truly loving. Knowing this deeper meaning of the virtues does not lessen their virtuous character, either. Why should my sacrifices be less virtuous simply because I realize how they are expanding the circumference of my intuitive knowledge? In fact, it is this knowledge which allows me to make my sacrifices more judiciously and effectively, for more targeted aims.
Now let’s further explore the principles of how the imaginative state attains this holistic insight by retracing to the pictorial life of childhood but with the ideal fruits of our lucid conceptual life. What we will be discussing are only the initial stages of retracing the soul space. We are unveiling a new imaginative space of existence to our consciousness where we are not only alone with our instinctive and selfish pictorial activity, but where our fully conscious activity acts as a means of gaining practical insights into our experiential flow, including cultural and natural history and their potential future trajectories in so far as these overlap with that flow. It is fundamentally the same process as using our conceptual activity to understand the actualized past and anticipate the potential future flow of experience by extending our thoughts into the mental, emotional, and sensory spaces. Except now our imaginative activity has retraced deeper within that flow, into the more holistic ‘wavefunction’ of potential from which normal sensory-conceptual life collapses.
As discussed at the beginning of Part II, it is expected that many of these symbolic descriptions will sound quite abstract to begin with, like a flowery set of words that may or may not have any practical significance in our lives. To get a better feel for what we are speaking of with respect to the ‘holistic wavefunction of potential’, we should consider how we gain insights about experience during our normal conceptual life. It is only when we discern this overlap with our ordinary mental space, which we make use of every waking moment and is most intuitively transparent to us, that the higher states can also incarnate within that space and become more concrete; to feel like real living aspects of our experience. Then it is as if we have increased the ‘surface area’ of our conceptual life such that the higher states, which usually pass right through the former unnoticed, have more chances of bumping up against it and finding their lucid reflection in our conceptual states of being.
Let’s imagine that we have experienced certain negative qualities in a relationship with another person, such that we are always somewhat antipathetic toward them. We are always somewhat mistrustful of their motives, but we can’t immediately locate any reason why we should feel this way. It’s all quite mysterious to us. Now we set our conceptual activity in motion to try and get some sense of why we keep transforming into certain emotional states when interacting with this particular person. We begin making certain ‘thinking-gestures’ by which we access memory states. Whenever we think about the underlying reasons for some experience, we need to access these memory states such that we can discern already explored facts and experiences, extrapolating regularities and principles, that would help us make sense of the current experience. That is what we generally do in all intellectual inquiries including those of science.
In this case, we would explore all our previous interactions with the person in question. Did they say or do something that offended or wronged us in some way? If we can’t locate a satisfactory reason for our negative emotional state in those interactions, we could then expand to our interactions with other people, trying to discern how similar negative states have manifested in those interactions and what overlaps exist with the person in question. We could then explore our memory states going back to childhood as far as possible, with the hopes we will discern some early experiences that would shed light on our negative reactions. Theoretically, we could even interview our family, friends, teachers, etc. as well as those of the other person. Then we could begin searching World history and mythology to find some archetypal examples of antipathy and mistrust.
Recalling the IFS metaphor in Part II, if we were to conduct the inquiry described above, it would be as if we are probing tiny and dispersed points within a living and holistic memory structure. Our conceptual activity is too weak to re-member much of our own lives, let alone that of World history, but theoretically the reason for our current negative state should be somewhere discernable in all these interwoven threads of individual and collective experience. With infinite time and energy, our conceptual activity could patch together these deeper reasons for our experience. Practically speaking, though, such an approach would meet fundamental limits. That is for one single inquiry into our negative emotional state, so we can imagine how our activity would fare if we tried to do this in each instance that we desired to conceptually explore the reasons for our current mental, emotional, or physical states of being.
Another example of this principal difficulty at the collective level is the case of undeciphered writing systems. Many linguists, archaeologists, code-crackers, and other experts have attempted to decipher these scripts. While it may be possible in principle, the fact is that, if we want to trace our current mode of thinking and linguistic forms back to these ancient scripts, such that we can perceive the relationship between them and learn to read the latter, it would require a journey through many conceptual states of being, spanning human history over many thousands of years, with the coordinated efforts of many different people and their combined education and life experience. These ancient scripts stand as great riddles for our collective conceptual activity just as our emotional states stand for our individual activity.
More than 100 attempts at decipherment have been published by professional scholars and others since the 1920s. Now — as a result of increased collaboration between archaeologists, linguists and experts in the digital humanities — it looks possible that the Indus script may yield some of its secrets.
Since the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in Egypt in 1799, and the consequent decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphs beginning in the 1820s, epigraphers have learnt how to read an encouraging number of once-enigmatic ancient scripts. For example, the Brahmi script from India was 'cracked' in the 1830s; cuneiform scripts (characterized by wedge-shaped impressions in clay) from Mesopotamia in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Linear B script from Greece in the 1950s; and the Mayan glyphs from Central America in the late twentieth century.
Several important scripts still have scholars scratching their heads: for example, Linear A, Etruscan from Italy, Rongorongo from Easter Island, the signs on the Phaistos Disc from the Greek island of Crete and, of course, the Indus script.
In the view of these experts, all of these ancient civilizations are long gone, their cultural practices hidden behind the veils of linear sequential time. The only hope now, according to them, is to painstakingly probe the partial memory states that have been preserved in the various physical records. It is simply assumed that the inner life reflected in these physical records was the result of biochemical and neural processes (or, for the more mystically minded, an ‘instinctive consciousness’) that, of course, cannot be reconstructed such that we experience something of the first-person perspective from which they were written.
Our imaginative activity, on the other hand, can retrace into the living memory structure and can attain lightning flashes of insight that condense into a few moments what would otherwise span conceptual states of being over many days, months, or years. That is only possible because all of these conceptual states live as potential even when we are unconscious of them. In a real sense, all possible states of being already exist, superimposed, yet we only experience those that our spiritual activity can resonate with. It is similar to the ‘block universe theory’ except we are discovering the living imaginative foundation from which such theories arose. As we discussed in Part II, theoretical physicists have been exploring their own deeper soul movements within the imaginative space without knowing it. The reality is that time-experience is itself a function of our mode of cognition, as anyone can tell by comparing dream life to waking life, and our understanding of the ‘past’ and the ‘future’, including the ‘laws’ and theories we have conceptually developed to explain or anticipate them, evolves along with the ‘block’ of states that our activity can resonate with at any given time.
So the ‘block universe theory’ should only be taken a loose symbol for a much more profound and intimate reality that the intellect cannot encompass. It speaks to the intuition that the aperture of our current moment can grow into resonance with overarching ideal streams of destiny that provide the meaningful context for all our conceptual-sensory states of being. Within these higher states, we are much more concerned with what spiritual activity does to conceive of its scientific theories; that is, the way in which it accesses more expansive spectrums of potential. It is as if the ‘current moment’ dot is being inflated, expanding its radius in all directions such that it coincides more and more with the entire block. From a much higher perspective, the states of being that comprise an entire human lifetime, a century, or epoch of civilization is experienced as the current moment. Retracing into the higher spaces first expands our activity’s resonance such that we learn to read the script of our soul life – its various gestures, patterns, and rhythms that extend well into what we experience as both the past and the future.
This reading of the soul script occurs at the personal level to begin with but then naturally expands into the collective soul life as well. Take a look around your living space right now and take note of the various objects and their configuration – the TVs, couches, tables, chairs, appliances, paintings, and so forth. What are we cognizing here if not our inner soul configuration that desired certain items and preferred a certain arrangement for them? Except this inner soul flow has been frozen or encrusted, so to speak, and externalized through the neurosensory system as a mirror image. Of course, that does not exhaust the significance of these items – our desires and preferences did not directly generate the elements and materials out of which the items or the house were made, although their designs are certainly the product of collective desires and preferences. We could say the same for much of what we experience outside of our living spaces as well – the highways, vehicles, signs, buildings, shops, food, fashion, and so forth.
Through the imaginative state, we can experience how our living environment reflects an encrusted soul landscape of desires, preferences, habits, etc. much more directly without the mediation of the sensory-conceptual element, i.e. not so externalized in mirror images, but nevertheless made objective before our inner perception. Anyone who has kept a dream diary already has had some experience with how inner soul configurations can become more objective as we pay attention to how they are reflected in the patterns of dream narratives and imagery. Yet these experiences remain dim, fleeting, and must be interpreted piecemeal by the intellect upon waking. The diary only helps us partially reconstruct, through the conceptual-sensory element, the holistic intuition of the soul space that we can access more directly through imaginative development.
It is for this reason that imaginative spiritual activity holds the most hope of deciphering our soul life and, correspondingly, the ancient scripts, art, philosophy, religion, and cultural practices in general. We discover that our personal soul landscape is a ‘self-similar fractal’ of the collective landscape, unfolding according to archetypal patterns and rhythms that are discernable across all scales of activity from the personal to the collective. The ancient scripts and mythologies were born out of a pictorial consciousness that inhabits the same ‘phase space’ that we also inhabited in early childhood, and that we are now retracing in full lucidity. None of that collective heritage is forever lost, veiled, or left unredeemed, rather it is continually retraced from the most proximate events to the most remote ages (remember LIFO principle).
So, it should be clear that we are not ascending into some entirely new realm of activity that is discontinuous with our conceptual life, but simply becoming more conscious of what we are always doing to extract insights about the flow of experience. By becoming more conscious of what we are doing in this way, we do it much more organically, holistically, and effectively. We cut down on many unnecessary detours through the fragmented sensory element and thereby lessen the states of being that must be experienced to reach insightful understanding of the experiential flow. In Part II, we discussed how higher-order concepts can encode a whole series of pictorial states of being that reflect the meaning of a virtue like generosity or forgiveness. Retracing into the imaginative space is like a simultaneous decoding of the higher-order concepts back into their pictorial essence, and encoding of many conceptual states into the living imagistic fabric that arises.
To be clear, this holistic imagistic fabric is not simply the sum of many conceptual states but is also unique in itself - the whole is, in fact, greater than the sum of its parts. One way to get a better sense of this is to focus attention on our fingertips individually. We can move from the pinky finger to the ring finger to the middle and so on. Now if we want to also get a sense of the hand as a whole, we may try to move our focus faster and faster between the fingers until they sort of blur together. Yet then we would find the holistic quality of the hand is still missing. That quality is unique in itself and cannot be reduced to particular fingers, no matter how much we blur them together. It is the same principle difference at work between our conceptual states and higher states such as the imaginative ones.
The conceptual states can lead us into the ideal 'vicinity' of higher intuition but the latter must incarnate as something unique. As discussed above, however, there are fundamental limits to where those states can lead us. Our normal cognitive life is comparable to moving through a labyrinth of fragmented sensory facts, life situations, and fields of inquiry – physics, biology, psychology, anthropology, history, politics, etc. - bumping into the maze walls, getting lost, backtracking, and so on. After enduring enough iterations of navigating the paths of this labyrinth, we simply lose the energy, patience, and motivation to continue our efforts. The new cognitive life, on the other hand, injects water into the entrance and traces the paths directly to the relevant solutions. Its cognitive movements are transfigured such that its states can transform as in a superfluid conductor.
We can only understand the mazes of our conceptual life once we have outgrown them to some extent, so we are no longer merged with them like fish in water. Practically this means we need to gain cognitive distance from the normal channels our thinking flows through and grow sensitive to their subtle patterns and influences. It is the same principle by which our conceptual activity instinctively gained cognitive distance from its baser instincts that merely seek pleasure. Now, by distancing from the conceptual space, we begin to understand how varied fields of knowledge relate to one another in a holistic way and how they can be usefully related to our own inner development, i.e. what they offer in the way of practical insights drawn from experiential facts and what has been layered on top of those facts as assumptions and prejudices. In this way, we cut down on many unnecessary detours through conceptual states of being when navigating the accumulated wisdom of humanity and daily life decisions.
Another very helpful metaphor to stress both the continuity and differences between the conceptual and imaginative spaces of cognition is that of the ‘aliasing’ effect in signal processing. We become familiar with this effect when the TV broadcast of a live event, for example, becomes fuzzy or choppy. The original signal (imaginative and higher) gets distorted because it is reconstructed at a lower sampling rate (conceptual). We can notice how the graph below becomes lower and lower resolution as the sampling rate goes down.
In this context, the 'sampling rate' is a function of our mode of cognitive activity. Our normal sensory-driven conceptual activity only samples the totality of its intuitive experience at a slow rate, such that it can form the most low-resolution representation. It is usually here that we rest satisfied with our conceptual judgments, models, and theories. Our activity reaches for only the lowest hanging fruit in terms of understanding its flow of experience. When it observes the birth and death cycles of plant life, it tries to derive the ‘laws’ by following the transformation of sensory perceptions from ‘frame to frame’. Then it wonders how these sensory-conceptual laws should somehow explain the rhythmic functioning of life processes out of themselves. Or when it probes its memory states and reaches the picture of another person saying something ‘odd’, it concludes, “so that’s it, I feel antipathetic for this person because he says such weird things!” The deeper reasons remain aliased from perception. Generally, the inner flow of experience – the mental and emotional qualities of sensory events (our own and others) - are left out of the conceptual sampling process altogether.
Imaginative activity is when we increase the sampling frequency such that we get a more faithful representation of the intuitive flow of experience. It samples not only sensory experience, but also the transformations of psychic and spiritual experience. Practically that means we resist forming conclusive judgments, models, and theories as ‘explanations’ of experiential facts and continue asking open-ended questions; we continue tracing the relations further and further into broader constellations of meaning that are not independent of, but integrally related to, our own activity. We pay more attention to not only the final products of our activity – our perceptions/thoughts - but the inner gestures of that activity. We then find these inner soul gestures are shared in common with many other beings in our environment. Then we also discern how our normal sensory-conceptual experience is but a more aliased form of the imaginative state.
What is aliased from that experience, however, is not simply more perceptual contents, but the entire depth of conceptual, emotional, and willful states of being. Our normal life of feelings, impulses, and ideas is reflected only in so far as those relate to sensory events, perhaps a little more if we have developed artistic or mathematical skills. The rest of that activity is left behind, so to speak, in the higher spaces of potential. Yet what is missing tells a story about sensory life completely unsuspected by normal conceptual thinking. For example, it is hardly suspected how the warring currents of the soul life contribute to the causes of many deadly diseases including cancer, by the same principle as it impresses into the saccadic eye movements we discussed before. It is only through the insight gleaned from imaginative and higher retracing that modern medicine will be able to usefully address everything from cancer to the nervous diseases that increasingly plague developed societies.
In Part II, we discussed some critical functions served by the childhood development of conceptual activity – (1) encoding the pictorial flow to allow the development of higher-order ideas, and (2) acting as a ‘circuit breaker’ between the flow of imagination and will activity such that the spirit can begin choosing which images to influence its will in relative freedom. We can now add to those the function of aliasing the higher states and rendering them immobile, so to speak. The former are ever-morphing inner streams of activity (thinking, feeling, willing) and, through the neurosensory system, they are merged together and projected into a relatively stable sensory landscape. Again, these inner streams are not personal to us but belong in all reality to the Cosmos as a whole, to increasingly more universal constellations of beings. It is the rhythms of that Cosmic spiritual activity which is responsible for the metamorphoses of cultural and natural history and which is normally flattened and immobilized on the sensory screen. The minimal ‘movement’ we do perceive in sensory life is but a faint shadow of this underlying spiritual movement.
Through conceptual thinking, we begin to restore some of that movement by forming ideas that unite memory states of being. That is the only reason we can perceive continuous movement. Our thinking can discern these differentiated temporal rhythms across scales of activity that have been placed ‘side by side’ so to speak. For example, we see buildings from different architectural periods next to each other. We can put photos from different periods of our lives into a scrapbook. On our musical instruments, there are tones with varied vibrational frequencies existing side by side such that they may resonate in harmony. We see birds from the animal period of evolution nesting on top of a tree from the plant period of evolution which is rooted in the soil from the mineral period of evolution. At dusk, we may catch both the Moon and the Sun in the sky against the emerging backdrop of the Solar planets and the Zodiacal constellations, all of which have their varied temporal rhythms in relation to one another. With this objective spatial perception of flattened temporal rhythms, we begin to discern new relationships between them that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The clock is the classic example of varied temporal rhythms that have been flattened onto a spatial representation, such that we can more easily encompass them and extract some meaning from their interrelations (limited though that meaning may be).
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[/align]Imagine that you had three clocks, each with one hand (hour, minute, and second), located in different rooms. Whenever you needed to figure out the time, you would have to run from room to room, remembering what the previous clock reported and integrating that into your intuition of ‘what time it is’. We can imagine that these rooms are quite far apart such that, by the time you finish the circuit at the clock with the hour hand, the clocks with the second and minute hands have already made several more rotations. Then you would be like a dog chasing its own tail in order to reach the intuition of ‘what time it is’ – by the time you catch up to where the tail was when you set out to catch it, it has already rotated further away from your grasp. Our normal conceptual-sensory activity merges these rhythms together such that we don’t need to chase our own tail and can instead rest our activity on the statically fixed relations, extracting a low-resolution image of their meaning.
Yet now humanity is also at a stage where its activity can actually ‘catch itself’ in real-time, although in a quite different way than the conceptual ‘dog’ chasing its own tail through more and more sequential thoughts ‘about thinking’. In the latter case, we arrange a linear train of thoughts and expect that the last thought in this sequential train will somehow illuminate the whole matter for us. This approach is comparable to taking segments of water from the river and trying to shape them into an image of the channel which somehow 'explains' how the former is constrained by the latter. Yet such an approach can only lead us further and further away from the background living activity, the streaming water through the channel, as we get lost in complex arrangements of water segments. Instead, conceptual activity should invert itself through the portal of concentration like a glove turning inside-out. Then it enters into the water flow itself and experiences how it is constrained by various channels. We will discuss the phenomenology of concentration more in subsequent parts.
When we cross this inversion horizon into the imaginative state, something similar to the three clocks in different rooms begins to happen within our soul experience. Our thinking, feeling, and willing soul activity begins to split apart such that we experience these streams more distinctly and have to manage their respective flows more independently than we did during our instinctive phase of existence. We sense how each of these activities ‘stir’ our soul space in unique ways and then seek to harmonize their ‘vibrational frequencies’ like we are tuning a musical instrument. It is like we are actively seeking the conjunction points where the hands on the clock completely overlap, thus producing what we experience as ‘insights’ into the experiential flow, instead of simply waiting for them to happen as a matter of course. Now we are tuning an instrument not only for our personal pleasure or for economic reasons, but because we freely desire that the spiritual Cosmos should have a properly tuned human instrument when orchestrating its morally enriching streams of destiny.
That is the effect of our spirit being liberated from the physical body which normally holds these three streams together, i.e. the latter flattens the temporal rhythms into the immobile sensory landscape. Yet the imaginative state already gives us the certainty that the soul and spirit can remain conscious and lucid independently of the body. We can therefore begin swimming in the streams of holistic Time and discern the archetypal patterns of spiritual activity that structure our lives and history as a whole. In the next part, we will continue exploring the principles of the imaginative state and begin discussing the phenomenology of concentration, the other core technique (along with prayer and cultivating the virtues) by which the retracing is accomplished.
