Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Jul 02, 2024 4:50 am
This is something we have used as a metaphor many times so far but I would like to return to it once again.
Cleric, again, thank you for this new opportunity for spiritual practice. This form of guided imaginative meditation, with precise instructions and a clear progression toward sense-freedom, feels like the perfect complement to the various essays, yours and Ashvin’s. Surely you posted meditative walkthroughs before - I remember
this recent one in the Symphony thread - but this one feels more concrete and accessible. And this is about it for what I wished you'd read. The rest of this post is only useful for myself, and perhaps for some improbable one, new to such exercises, who'd like to compare reflections.
Not that this video feedback exercise hasn’t presented me with its own challenges, however it has proven very good for me, in the end. In the beginning, though, the experience of the entrainment didn’t seem a sufficient introduction. I felt it was necessary to grasp the feedback loop flow in its functioning, as a perceptual phenomenon first. What’s the exact idea of video feedback, even before any movement or action is introduced? The ‘proof of concept’ should be recognizable in the setup itself: a camera records a monitor’s output, generating a flow of frames at a given speed. Then, the flow is visualized on the same monitor, working at its given speed, with some delay. So the monitor shows pictures of itself, on itself. I felt it was necessary to run through this process in thought, trying to hold it in its full cycle, as a preliminary step, rather than relying on the loose intuition that a closed video loop ends up in an infinity effect. Then, the experiment shows that whatever discontinuity is introduced at any point of this ‘metabolism’ - like rotating the camera - is cascaded in the loop, progressively and forever. And, the introduction of a single change is enough to trigger infinite reverberations. Now it’s easier to see that the initial rotation imparted in the example is a metaphor for a new frame in the flow of becoming, a new overlap of conscious experiences. Every new frame is born within the context of the previous one and, at the same time, contains it. That’s what the loop feature does. But here’s another preliminary obstacle. In the flow of imagery rendered by the monitor (in the metaphor) why exactly does each frame contain the previous one? At the level of the material phenomenon, that was not clear to me at first. The normal intuition would be that a certain initial content (frame) shown by the monitor would simply circle from monitor to camera to monitor to camera in a simple sequence, statically perceived, until something new is introduced, which would in turn enter the same circuit to supplant the previous content. But the evidence is different. How does the image propagation - the nested effect - come about exactly? For me it's been easier to get that with the Google Meet example, focusing on the monitor, rather than on the camera. In fact, it’s not even necessary to simulate another meeting participant. It’s enough to start an instant meeting and then simply share the entire screen in it. The infinity effect will ensue.
What we are doing by sharing the entire screen is feeding the monitor with itself, regardless of what the laptop camera is doing. In this setup, the laptop camera is akin to the eye of the external observer in the video feedback experiment. Focusing attention on the monitor, it’s as if a virtual camera was introduced, that loops the monitor onto itself. Whatever the monitor renders is continually re-channeled into itself. Crucially, it’s the entire screen, including the
framework, (in this case, the meeting software interface) that is looped. This is similar in the video feedback experiment. This took me a moment to realize. The nested effect at infinity depends on this feature: that the entire screen is shown
inside a portion of itself. In other words, there must be some form of framework, otherwise there’s no nested effect. That portion of screen becomes a reproduction of the entire screen, which must in turn contain a portion, which is a reproduction of the entire screen, which contains a portion, etcetera etcetera. A more static version of this same loop is the picture of hands drawing a picture of hands, drawing a picture of hands, to infinity, as in
The Phonograph Metaphor Part 1.
There too, it appears that the necessary element for the receding effect to occur is the presence of the framework. I haven’t tried, but I suppose that, in video feedback, if I pointed the camera very close to a large monitor that simply shows a monochromatic background, nothing visually interesting would happen. But the Google meeting example makes it easy to see that there needs to be a contained image looped into itself, for the nested effect to work fine. Its contours structure the visual pace of the nesting. Metaphorically, the framework seems to hint to the extension of unbroken meaning. The image hints to a unity of meaning. Conversely, beyond its borders, something needs to happen, some operation, an intent by which a new gesture is formed, that pushes that integrated unit of meaning into temporal depth, by incorporating it within a larger one, which, by virtue of its timely momentum, acquires a more holistic character than the previous. The more holistic character comes from the time nexus that coordinates two distinct islands of meaning.
Back to the camera experiment, I guess it’s important to notice that our eye is also there (or a second camera, an observer) to take in the entire experiment. In meditation, this vantage point fades away, but in the sense-based phenomenon, this fact helps recognize, through the metaphor, that we are indissolubly inscribed ‘in the middle’ of the receding flow: the camera experiment only directly hints to half of it, the part that lies ‘below us’, but in reality we can imagine how higher intelligences must be thinking of how our human activity provides them with feedback into their own flow of becoming.
Another thing is that every new input is enough to trigger an infinite recession of captures, and infinite recaptures of the ever so slightly adjusted fields. This reminds that everything leaves an imperishable trace in the universal records. Whatever big or small initiative we take in our (cognitive) life, it cascades within its context to infinity, affecting our concentric levels of being, in more or less resonant accord with the other intents expressed in the shared context. So there are multiple ways in which the metaphor brings value.
And the example of the F1 pilot is also extremely helpful to keep the exercise concrete. I thought about it in association with a more complex video feedback example, like
this one. I guess the striking results in this video are much less casual than it looks, however it works greatly with the example of the pilot - and with the description of phases 3 and 4 of the meditation - to show that the flow of imagery is not necessarily rigidly constructed and paced, like in the case of the simple camera rotation. The flow may be stabilized, controlled, directed, slowed down. Similarly, for the pilot, the single frame in which the wheel is steered can be made sense of at various holistic levels. The more the pilot takes his flow seriously, engaging deeply in it, in harmony with the purpose of that race, of that racing season, career arc, and main trait of his entire life cycle, the more meaning is grasped in the now, through the entry point of a single steering of the wheel. I appreciate how this is suggested in parallel as a meditative phase (the reader is eased into sense-free thinking) and in the real life experience of the pilot (something of what one gains from sense-free efforts in meditation reverberates in the flow of normal life).
Similarly, the visual loop may present very variable patterns - unifying, fragmenting, stabilizing, like in the linked video - metaphorically suggesting that the magnitude of meaning we can ascend to from the experience of one frame/gesture is also very variable. The more we are able to behold in one gesture/frame (in the now) a harmonious aggregation of frames, the more we are moving freely within that subsystem of frames, with less constrictions in terms of sequencing and causation. If the pilot has been able to infuse with deep understanding the meaning of his life path in racing, he will feel not so stuck in the causal and temporal sequencing of single life events within that meaningful life mosaic. Today’s success or failure in the race wouldn’t generate entirely opposite TFW frames in his becoming, since his attention is catalyzed at the higher level of the life trajectory, which is his meaningful frame of reference for finding orientation in the flow, regardless of the particular result of today’s race. Within that framework, single events - like winning or losing today - simply take away some unknowns and facilitate further triangulation, so that the remaining portion of the path can be navigated as harmoniously as possible.
In this sense, uninterrupted patterns of meaning and the sense of prior-subsequent, causal-consequential, seem to stand in inversely proportional relation. The more meaning infuses and shapes the flow, the less it is necessary to apportion it through the bottlenecks of causal understanding of events in sequential time. I understand that this expansion of ‘coverage in meaning’ is the experience of thinking gestures that strive to renounce the guidance normally received through sensory perception grounded in the physical body. By letting the senses guide our thoughts through the intermediation of our physical body, as in normal cognitive activity, we get a ‘guided tour’, but it’s not free. We pay a high price, we accept that our activity is fragmented, slowed down, forced in the pipework of spacetime, which is the highly rationed environment where our physical body and brain evolve. Not to say that I have a clear experience of that, but I see that the more one strives to develop and guide the thinking gestures sense-free, the lesser the dependence on the nexus of linear sequencing in time, in order to recognize meaning. In the terms of the video feedback meditation: nudges and reverberations are fully willed, while everything sensory fades in the environment, including the body. That literally brings the reverberations in the now, making them meaningful elements of a unity, different from the sensory experience of waiting for them to happen in timely sequence.
Although sense-free thinking as a skill is developed through concentration efforts, like in this meditation, it seems to me that, as soon as the idea is planted in the soul, and kept in sight, so to say, it can bring fruits to spiritual explorations of all sorts of realities, including in their worldly dimensions - in meditation, and also in the flow of everyday life. Then there's a vague but still recognizable awareness which colors how the flow of daily events is experienced. In other words, I believe that the “life imagination” phase in the meditation is transferable to everyday life, as a color. In the example of the F1 pilot, if he is studying spiritual science, if a certain sense has arisen in his consciousness by which he realizes that the single event of adjusting the steering wheel is nested as an integral part within larger and larger rhythms (like his reason for racing as a life theme), then a sort of sense-free mood may facilitate understanding of the ‘cluster of unbroken meaning’ that runs through his racing life destiny, not only when he meditates on his life path, but also in the moment, during the race. Progressively, he will elucidate his entire life trajectory, and beyond, but only if he nurtures the idea that the space of living memories, past and future ones, opens up when he steps above the level of the sense-based thoughts, not to remain stuck in the spacetime sandbox. In there, he can only attain the bits and pieces of meaning that fit in those segments. It would be like resigning oneself to queueing indefinitely at the Spirit’s information desk, wondering what big picture they may conceal on the other side.
If we understand the above metaphor we should also have the proper intuition for what it means to have consciousness in this state. In our ordinary life we consider for real only that which forcefully impresses into our senses. In the described state however, what confronts us as real are the invisible elastic tensions of soul life – forces that continually bend the direction of our existential movie. We can never expect these forces to forcefully impinge in our consciousness and present themselves as objective facts similar to bodily perceptions. The simple reason for this is that while we remain passive we simply freefall through the elastic curvatures of the inner flow. Then we are unaware of it just like we are unaware of gravity in a free fall. We gain consciousness of the elastic forces, which from our ordinary perspective feel like sympathies and antipathies, only when we concentrate, as if by trying to maintain a certain ideal form of our inner being, and then be vigilant for the way the elastic forces try to modify that form.
I am particularly thankful for this part (and subsequent paragraphs). I have in mind the beginning of
The Phonograph Metaphor Part 2, where the question of becoming more aware of our own soul landscape is discussed. There, I had wished for some more detailed descriptions of how this sensitivity is developed, exactly what this illustration of the elastic forces, pulling and pushing our flow of becoming, provides (though I hadn't imagined such depth and usefulness). I also appreciate the connections made between imagination and the intellect. This depth definitely helps create a rich context for understanding and for the sense of life purpose, to counteract any pulls of resistence to the unknown.
But if we develop the anticipation that there’s a potential higher, nobler moral being concealed within the rigid shells of our Earthly self, then we can open up for its forces while loosening the rigidness of our lower self. It is as if we desire that the higher being becomes the organizing principle of our inner flow. Then the inertial forces of the lower self counteract that flow and thus it becomes imaginatively perceptible.
This reminds me of Meister Eckhart, as
quoted by Max Leyf, on God’s grace: “If you cannot have it, you should at least have a desire for it. If you can’t have a desire for it, you should at least desire to desire it.” Along this progression of desire, exercises such as this can definitely make a difference.
"On Earth the soul has a past, in the Cosmos it has a future. The seer must unite past and future into a true perception of the now." Dennis Klocek
It surely is. I don't recommend anyone trying it 
I was only saying that I see the importance of a metaphor that captures memory, and how it's different. I am experimenting with your exercise.
