AshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Aug 07, 2024 4:54 pm
As we saw in the previous part, modern thinking has naturally evolved to begin contemplating its own movements. It no longer only focuses on the content of its activity, as it did especially during the 18th and 19th centuries, but also on the very nature of its activity; not only what it is thinking about but also what it is doing in the act of thinking. This pattern of recursive thinking has emerged prominently in various philosophical, theological, and scientific pursuits. The following presentation, for example, points to thinkers in diverse fields who have begun seriously investigating how the
manner of their thinking influences the observations they can make and the experimental results they can participate in bringing forth. These researchers have realized that the only viable path for exploring new ideal horizons of practical significance is to actively modulate the knowing perspective engaged in research. Even the first few minutes will give us a good sense of the current recursive situation in cutting-edge scientific research.
Nevertheless, the full significance of these developments is instinctively avoided even by the recursive researchers because it ‘threatens’ the intellectual self with radical transformation if recognized and taken seriously. On one hand, all of this research is of utmost value and will stimulate humanity’s full spiritual potential once it is understood from the proper perspective. Without that perspective, on the other hand, these recursive pursuits inevitably enter the irresolvable paradox of the spiritual Catch-22 because what they seek to know - the intimate capacity of knowing - is obscured by their lack of knowing it. In other words, their recursive models don’t already contain the insights and inspirations needed to understand the models properly as
artistic symbols of deeper intuitive movements. The researchers instead become intoxicated with the models and lose sight of their analogical value for orienting to the real-time inner movements that make sense of our cognitive and perceptual capacities. “
Take heed therefore how ye hear…” (1).
Each time recursive thinking approaches the Center of the Catch-22, i.e. the real-time intuitive movements that make its thinking possible, its inquiries are bounced back as if being repelled by a magnetic barrier; a Guardian of an inner knowledge threshold. It then externalizes the intuitive movements into some material, psychic, or spiritual processes
other than the one in which the researcher is currently engaged. What the researcher is doing with his thinking - the inner gestures he is making - and what he is thinking
about - the content of his thinking - remain hopelessly out of sync with one another, spiraling around in a
hysteresis loop but never coinciding. The inner movements then begin to seek out this coincidence unconsciously, i.e. to subtly identify with its external models and search for its reality within the models, while its true reality remains merged into the background of the researcher’s conscious perspective. The models become more elaborate, encompassing, and even elucidating, but with that also comes a more intense identification and an increasing chance that thinking’s inner essence will remain obscured.
The Guardian is not a universal barrier but rather our inner tendency to carry over external thinking habits into the recursive domain, i.e. to investigate intuitive activity like it is yet another sensory phenomenon that can be eagerly consumed and encompassed with theoretical concepts. We expect that, by staring at our past thoughts in the form of doctrines, theories, and models for a long time with enough intensity, they will crack open and the secrets of the Spirit will fly out of them. We want to hack into these secrets by brute force, but with such an inner disposition, we only dissect the corpse of cognition while the
life of cognition continually eludes us. I say “we” for a reason - this tendency lurks within all modern thinking and should not be underestimated for a moment, even if we have conceptualized its existence. Everything in modern life - common world outlooks, family life, educational institutions, career life, social relationships, the entertainment industry, political institutions, etc. - reinforces the tendency and therefore generally works against our adopting responsibility for the Catch-22.
Here is an image of the hysteresis loop that can help us further orient to this continual oscillation between attention to the activity of thinking and attention to the finished content of thinking.
We can imagine this loop at the bottom represents the situation for thinking about the sensory world, when inner thinking-gestures and the content of thinking are the most out-of-phase, and narrows into slightly closer alignment when thinking approaches its own structure and movements, as seen throughout recursive research attempts. Yet it then hits a limit beyond which it cannot synchronize any further, i.e. it only briefly reaches the coincidence depicted in the top image (which we experience as “insights”), and therefore the gap widens again. As simple as it sounds, that is the basis for all philosophical, religious, and scientific theories of ‘reality’ in the modern age. The thinking at their foundations is like a pendulum that continually tries to approach the magnetic Center of its inner movements but continually gets diverted back to the periphery due to its askew ‘angle of approach’, i.e. the application of thinking habits that are maladapted to inner realities; rinse and repeat. In that scenario, these thinkers are no longer studying “cognition”, “reality”, “God”, etc. but only their own theoretical thoughts about all of those. When that fact remains unconscious, the theoretical thoughts become deceptive idols that divert attention from the inner realities they symbolize.
Why does this continually happen if the underlying issue with recursive thinking is so simple to conceptualize as we have done here? It is precisely because we have become used to
only conceptualizing the issues and retaining our seemingly stable personality in the process, with all of its ordinary traits and inclinations. Normally, we say “my” favorite color, “my” preference for Chinese food, “my” belief in a religious outlook, “my” desire to engage in political activism, and so on. We feel to possess these desires, preferences, and beliefs in our center of consciousness, but simple reflection reveals that we cannot easily switch from one favorite color to another, one preference for food to another, one religious belief to another, etc. Our normal thoughts lack the creative capacity to shape these seemingly simple aspects of our soul life, so it is much easier to leave them in place and rationalize that it is our free decision. In that sense, thinking always rationalizes excuses to maintain its ‘private’ kingdom of personal desires, which in turn maintains the oscillating hysteresis loop.
It is a case of spiritual Stockholm Syndrome - our desires, preferences, etc. possess us and we have grown very fond of being possessed. We instinctively rebel when this cradle of subconscious identifications is rocked too hard, disturbing the inner status quo. This reality was also recognized by the recursive researcher of communication media, Marshall McLuhan: (2):
After we had discussed phonetically literate man as the only private individual in human history, you mentioned that the reluctance [of this type] of Western man to consider the effects of his own technologies upon his psyche and society was his simple resistance to any invasion of privacy. Let us recall how violently people resisted and resented Jung and Freud when they invaded our privacy.
The Guardian employs many tricks to enhance this resistance of intellectual thinking. It often manifests as a demand to ‘prove’ the immanence and efficacy of spiritual activity before undertaking to experience it more intimately. We want to know how the active and participatory intuitive movements can be established in a logically satisfactory way while we remain in a detached and passive state, as we are accustomed to when accumulating sensory knowledge. It is like a man demanding proof that it is possible for him to freely open the door and walk outside his house but refusing, under all circumstances, to lift his hand and turn the knob. When the passively demanded ‘proof’ of spiritual activity is unsurprisingly not forthcoming, we feel justified in our skepticism. We ignore the Catch-22 as if it doesn’t exist and continue with our same theoretical inquiries, expecting miraculous insights from them. The reality, however, is that the participatory intuitive movements
create our capacity for insight and therefore necessarily transcend any insights gained so far. We will never find the intuitive movements hiding within the sphere of our past personal experience, knowledge, or worldview.
Normally we conceive that the explanations for reality (including ourselves) should be contained within combinations of thoughts about spatial sensations and more temporally fluid inner perceptions (desires, emotions, thoughts, etc.) that we encompass ‘in front’ of our mind’s eye. The thoughts themselves may refer to Cosmic-scale realities, but we
experience them as point-like entities in our heads that can be easily surveyed, manipulated, and rearranged in various ways. It is impossible to draw a ‘first-person image’, so it’s the responsibility of the reader to understand all images and descriptions as symbolizing that first-person experiential flow. That also helps us confess the nature of our ‘mind container’ perspective at an experiential level. Only then can we begin to appreciate the paradox and in what direction a resolution can be sought. For example, we can perform a mathematical calculation and notice how the symbols we use, whether pictorial or verbal, are located somewhere around the forehead and are manipulated as point-like entities. Then we can notice how it is through these same pointy thoughts that we ordinarily cognize the meaning of our feelings and sensations, our interactions and relationships with others.
If we try to also focus on the inner gestures we are making to manipulate these point-like mathematical symbols, we start to feel quite uncomfortable and precarious, as if losing the ground beneath our feet or trying to catch a bolt of lightning in a bottle. That reveals to us how our normal thinking habits are practically useless when applied to the inner life, which always adorns the nature of an occurrence or an event, i.e. a process continually becoming. The ongoing flow of inner activity cannot be captured in a bottle, i.e. frozen in time and diagrammed or modeled, because as soon as that is done it is no longer a flow of activity but the sediment or corpse of that flow. The habits developed for studying spatial phenomena, i.e. the corpses of inner activity, simply don’t apply here.³ To enter the flow of activity, we should instead find a way to remain fully present and concentrated within the act of thinking. Our inner attentional gestures should coincide with the focused content of our attention for longer and longer.
When you think a simple man-made object, you make significant discoveries about thinking itself and its hindrances—those factors that influence its flow, or distract or put it to a stop. The more concentratedly an object can be thought about, and the more unimportant and uninteresting it is, then the more awake thinking becomes. This wakefulness normally (in concentrated reading, in handicrafts, or in scientific and artistic work) applies to the object in question. When concentration is practiced as art for art's sake on an uninteresting object, then a heightened wakefulness extends from the object or theme to the activity, the thinking, the consciousness, without being distracted from the theme.
…
The idea is the functioning of the object, not merely the function of the particular one used as a theme of concentration, but of all such objects. All spoons realize the same principle and perform the same service. This idea is not a mental picture, because such a representation would always be of a particular spoon, whether fantasized or actually seen. And the idea is not a word, such as spoon, because anyone unfamiliar with the function spoon will not learn it from the word spoon. It was just this pictureless, wordless idea that the inventor of the spoon had.
(4)
Although concentration is not the topic of these articles, we will briefly survey its technique since that also helps clarify what inner obstacles we will meet and what conditions are necessary to invert our perspective and reach the pure Idea of our thinking capacity. Of course, the deeper value of this survey only arrives when we decide to undertake the concentration exercises and experience the inner obstacles for ourselves. Even if we have undertaken this artistic effort only a few times, what is described here will begin to resonate at a much deeper level and we will feel ourselves partaking in a courageous inner journey that is shared with many other souls across the past, present, and future.
We can make this idea, the function of the object, into the theme of the concentration exercise. At the beginning it doesn't work at all, and we always imagine a particular functioning object (a spoon for ladling soup) or we try to come up with a thought-out formulation of the function. Neither of these is the idea. We can ease the transition to the idea by imagining a whole row of functioning objects (small, big, ladles, etc.) and then try to see the common element in them—the idea. This requires pure thinking because the idea, the function, is not an image or a word; and words and pictures should therefore not be present in consciousness during the exercise, yet consciousness must remain awake, only without pictorial or already thought content.
...
If the concentration exercise has reached this phase, that of idea concentration, as will develop organically from practice, the student is still concerned with an object. He or she wants to think the idea and wants the idea to appear, to arise, to flash forth. If this is successful, and he or she has learned to stay with it, so that it is not only a lightning flash, as it tends to be at the start, then the extension of wakefulness to the activity of consciousness will surpass in intensity all earlier experience. For in thinking the idea, activity and object are one: the idea does not exist outside of the activity that thinks it; there is no memory of it and it can never be thought out. We could also say that now we really know what spoon means. The self-perception of thinking has raised itself from past consciousness into presentness.
...
In every kind of exercise, we achieve a first success with relative ease. The second success is generally much harder to reach. This is because, after the first time, the practitioner forms a memory, a mental picture of the experience, almost against his will, and he then awaits its recurrence. The second and third experiences will always be different from what preceded them.
(5)
So we see that, to intuitively perceive the ‘lightning flash’ of our real-time thinking in any lasting way, we need to overcome odds that are impossibly stacked against us. As discussed in another article on the subconscious and superconscious, as soon as we make a ‘second pass’ on the concentration attempt, our inner activity is already constrained by the memory image of what we did on the first pass. We instinctively form expectations surrounding the memory experience and those attract our inner activity back to the same sort of habitual gestures that are employed in theoretical modeling of sensory life. This spiritual activity takes its cues for movement from fully finished experiences (subconscious) rather than remaining receptively present within the living flow of experience
in potentia (superconscious). As Kuhlewind notes, that happens ‘almost against our will’, i.e. no matter how much we desire to avoid it.
It is necessary for all souls to pass through the trials of recursive research, including habituated concentration, as preparation for approaching the inner threshold of knowledge. The inner Guardian of our subconscious soul tendencies must be squarely confronted and objectively perceived before it can be crossed safely. Exploring these inner realities as we are doing now, even if only in abstract thought to begin with, helps us acclimate to their novel conditions and realize that an entirely new kind of inner configuration is needed to investigate them, where it is no longer ‘our will’ holding the reigns of spiritual activity but a higher Will into which the former has voluntarily merged.
We can also have some idea of a quite distinct will, all too clear and distinct, in fact, for our normal consciousness. The “dark” will takes hold of our bodily actions, and it cannot be consciously followed. But when we think very concentratedly, improvisationally, how do we do it? We consciously determine what we will think about, then we let thinking itself take over, while we calm our subjective willfulness as much as possible. There is a particular kind of will hidden within this will that we have allowed to take control. I do not think a particular thing; I don't even know what thought will come up in the next moment. The will in this improvisational thinking is at one with the thinking itself. It is a thought will and is not willed by me. In pure, concentrated thinking, there is always this superconscious will. In this will, in turn, the feeling for what is evident (which propels thinking) also lies hidden. Can I say that this will is my own? Not at all; I merely set it in motion, and I am not even conscious of how I do so.
(6)
It is important to note that this inner configuration is
not dissociating from spiritual activity or surrendering to ‘witness consciousness’, as is common in many modern forms of meditation. We do not become passive and renounce our sense of “doership” within the experiential flow. Several recursive researchers, such as Vervaeke and Hoffman, have recognized the value of meditation in our knowing efforts, but the proper form of meditation is not perceived clearly. By uniting with the higher Will, we should only grow more responsible for our spiritual activity and creatively active within domains of potential meaning from which our normal thoughts condense. We should directly experience how our thoughts are shaped and steered along ‘curvatures’ of more integrated meaning. In that sense, it is a
purification of the state we always experience when engaging in mathematical, artistic, or generally innovative thinking activity. That superconscious state is normally overlaid with wildly oscillating emotions and thoughts that collapse its pure flow and therefore it mostly escapes notice.
Careful attention to the thinking process nevertheless reveals that original and creative insights never arrive from combinations of thoughts within the ‘mind container’ but from the ‘other direction’, from
unperceived and unknown inner depths, as we discussed briefly when mentioning the ‘flow state’ in Part I.
To better resonate with these inflowing insights, we need a fundamental
inversion of perspective through which we intuitively experience how the sources of phenomenal reality exist ‘behind’ our mind’s eye and creatively structure our first-person perspective on all phenomenal content. We no longer try to rigidly lay hold of and freeze the inner gestures as we do with the pointy thoughts, but we start to intuitively
feel our knowing gestures modulated by a more open-ended domain of mysterious potential. Our sensory-emotional-thought life is stirred like a pot of water in one way and we experience philosophical thoughts, in another way and we experience scientific thoughts, in another and we experience political thoughts, etc. That is a simple image and should not be taken too literally, but only as a loose symbol for orientation to the inner first-person reality. We need to release our domineering grasp over our finished thoughts within the mind container and instead experience those thoughts as artistic expressions of more mysterious intuitive movements that belong, not only to us personally, but to a constellation of spiritually active beings to which we also belong, as a vital system belongs to an organism.
The inversion is akin to the shift from a me-centered perspective (geocentric) to an Other-centered perspective (Heliocentric). We become less interested in what we can know about reality through our point-like thoughts and more interested in how
we are known by reality through more integrated forms of cognition. These forms encompass the interests of many beings over both individual lifetimes and evolutionary timescales. Most of us have perceived ourselves in an unfamiliar light at least a few times, like when hearing our voice recorded or awakening to some psychophysical trait or habit we were previously merged with. These are highly uncomfortable experiences until we realize, through the lens of the inverted perspective, the infinitely valuable feedback they provide for our inner knowledge. It is not about fixating on negative qualities of the past but exploring new vistas of our being by perceiving the old ones in a brand new light, understanding the deeper context in which those old qualities were placed.
In the words of McLuhan, “
the medium is the message”, i.e. the knowing gestures, the spiritual ‘substance’, through which the content of our knowing is conveyed, become more important for our knowledge and our overall way of being than the content itself. We become more interested in what inner
qualities and capacities can be developed from understanding the medium in which our knowing unfolds.
McLuhan uses the term "message" to signify content and character. The content of the medium is a message that can be easily grasped and the character of the medium is another message which can be easily overlooked. McLuhan says "Indeed, it is only too typical that the 'content' of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium". For McLuhan, it was the medium itself that shaped and controlled "the scale and form of human association and action".[5] Taking the movie as an example, he argued that the way this medium played with conceptions of speed and time transformed "the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configuration and structure". Therefore, the message of the movie medium is this transition from "lineal connections" to "configurations."[6] Extending the argument for understanding the medium as the message itself, he proposed that the "content of any medium is always another medium"[7] – thus, speech is the content of writing, writing is the content of print, and print itself is the content of the telegraph.
The medium is always the result of past spiritual activity that has receded into memory and become the context for present activity. Normally the medium remains mostly subconscious and therefore becomes a habitual constraint on the degrees of freedom through which present activity can engage with perceptual content. By placing the content in its proper symbolic role with respect to the knowing gestures, however, the medium which was once a subconscious constraining factor on our spiritual activity is transmuted into a liberating factor. The function of the contextual medium in which our gestures unfold, in that sense, depends on what intentional perspective we approach it with. Visual entertainment media, for example, normally distracts our attention from the flow of living experiences and makes us passive, but the inverted perspective can mine that same media for its underlying message, i.e. its deeper and more intimate spiritual structure that contextualizes the content. In that way, present activity can begin to engage with the content without also being blinded to the character of its medium.
All of this can begin to sound overly technical but the above illustrations, metaphors, and examples are all pointing to a very simple inner reality that, nevertheless, needs to be approached from many angles before it can be oriented to and internalized properly. It is about the gradual and ongoing reorientation of our myopic and selfish sensory-intellectual perspective. This reorientation will only cease when the entire mind container has been turned inside-out and the true meaning of its content has been integrated. The mind-container personality is the polar opposite of the Divine personality; the quintessential Other-centered personality.⁷ To understand the inner depths of the Divine personality, our interests need to become self-similar to its interests. The Divine personality is always interested in the healthy or unhealthy reverberations of spiritual activity throughout the whole Cosmic organism. Let’s try to orient further to what this inversion means.
We normally only consider the significance of sensory impressions, emotions, ideas, interactions, and relationships for us. It is about figuring out what experiences will bring us pleasure, happiness, comfort and security, a sense of cleverness and wide-ranging knowledge, status and reputation, etc. Sometimes we fantasize about the inner lives of others, but that is only to the extent it concerns what they are thinking and feeling about us. With that myopic focus, however, we continually lose sight of what significance our spiritual activity has for various constellations of
other beings. That significance is always present but it is aliased from our me-centered perspective. We can take a look around our room right now, for example, and easily assess how many items wouldn’t be there or would be in a different configuration if we had not employed our spiritual activity in certain ways. Even that is rarely paid attention to, let alone the impact our activity has had on family, relatives, friends, associates, clients, and people we have generally interacted with in the past. We can imagine how the inner experience of these souls would be quite different if we had never existed.
That doesn’t mean their lives would necessarily be better or worse, but simply that our existence and activity leave objective footprints within the inner lives of many beings. The objective reality of these footprints is normally drowned out by our me-centered sensory existence based on personal desires, interests, and knowledge. Imagine if our eyes kept the meaning of the images they perceived for themselves and that meaning wasn’t shared with the mind or body, the ears kept the sounds they heard for themselves, the stomach kept the food ingested for itself, the lungs kept the air, etc. Then the human organism would no longer be able to function and accomplish its aims. In reality, the senses and the organs
share the meaning of their respective impressions, substances, and processes with each other and can only function properly through the continual coordination of their meaningful activity. We can learn from our living body and treat the meaning approached through thinking in a similar manner, as a common substance to be creatively coordinated for high functional aims.
We have instinctively been approaching this threshold between what others’ activity means to us and what our activity means for others, which is the same threshold we have discussed as thinking that seeks to know its capacity for knowing. In other words, our capacity to know arises through our ability to resonate with the inner lives of other beings objectively, particularly in relation to how their inner lives are entangled with our knowing perspective and spiritual activity. All contextual media we interact with can be traced to the
impulses and intents of beings. The objective footprints we impress through our activity are like tracks in the ground that stimulate us to retrace those impulses and intents. This inner resonance is what we are always seeking when we try to derive laws, archetypes, and principles that bring coherence to the fragmented content of experience, except we normally remain unconscious of this fact. Through the inversion, we reach the archetype of thinking as such, bringing coherence to the very capacities of perceiving and knowing.
Just as the recursive research of philosophers and scientists has greatly expanded in recent decades, so have various ecological and social movements concerned with the collective footprint of humanity. Thinkers in this area have instinctively noticed that many rapidly degenerating conditions of the social and physical environments can be traced back to our me-centered spiritual activity. Yet these movements also fall into the recursive trap we previously saw in the camera experiment. They bring the same well-worn sensory thinking habits into this inner domain and are thus repelled by the Central magnet, the inner Guardian, generating increasingly external and bureaucratic programs. Although they may start with the best intentions, the partakers in these movements often end up
blaming others for the World’s problems instead of taking responsibility for the objective footprints of their spiritual activity. What started as a ‘humanist’ pursuit eventually gets reversed into the exact opposite; a prioritizing of abstract ‘nature’ and human collectives over the spiritual dignity of the creatively responsible human individual (e.g. identity politics).
It is the same trend with humanity’s beeline towards the ‘technological singularity’. We can either transcend the Catch-22 by taking responsibility for our thinking through the fully conscious inversion of perspective, or we can try to avoid it by
ceasing thinking altogether, which is the unconscious aim of ‘transhumanist’ pursuits that externalize spiritual activity into mechanical devices. Again, these are
our daily pursuits, every time we desire to remain passive and let our technological devices do the imaginative movements for us while we only consume the results as end-users to gratify personal desires. When the spiritual essence of the Catch-22 remains unconscious, the instinctive approaches to understanding and dealing with it can only become more and more pathological and parasitic; more degenerative and cancerous. Instead of taking creative responsibility for the footprints left by our spiritual activity, fueled by our selfish desires and passions, we develop various technologies and excuses to
continue indulging those passions.
“What you think, you become.
What you feel, you attract.
What you imagine, you create.”
-Buddha
A major issue here is the recursive negative feedback that results from the Catch-22. When spiritual activity remains tightly conditioned to myopic interests and desires, the correlations between bodily processes and psychic life will only become more encompassing. For example, the presentation at the beginning mentioned how Warren McCulloch, through his ‘experimental epistemology’, wondered about the correlation between a circular topology of neural nets and motivational pathways that put us on an ‘endless treadmill’. It is all too easy for the mind container perspective to conclude from such correlations that psychic life is
caused by mechanical neural nets and can be reduced to them. That is because the psychic life of many people is rapidly becoming a total reflection of bodily appetites, sense-based thoughts, and corresponding physiological processes. They are increasingly motivated by only the me-centered sensory life that runs in circular loops, like a hamster on a wheel, since the corpse of religious impulses that traditionally directed attention to the ‘beyond’ continues to decompose. Machines then appear to become more conscious and intelligent, for example, relative to how unconscious and mechanistic our thinking is becoming.
That is a most pernicious expression of the Catch-22 - the longer the selfish soul life holds the reigns of recursive thinking, the more difficult it becomes for thinking to incarnate the intuitive movements that transcend bodily processes. Even if the intuitive movements are somehow discovered in this scenario - even if they are staring us in the face, so to speak - they will no longer be recognized. If we meet a man with a cane and start to identify his essence with the idea of physical infirmity and the image of the cane, the next time we see him without the cane we may walk right by without saying hello. Indeed, as we have seen, many thinkers today already walk right by the inner significance of their research without a moment’s hesitation (and a moment is all it takes to notice), while the conditions for noticing are only becoming worse. The more intuitive movements of thinking identify themselves with external processes in the form of models, theories, systems, or doctrines, the more difficult it becomes for them to experience their essence in purity.
As we can see, all roads of modern inquiry lead to the threshold of the spiritual Catch-22. We can also notice something of untold importance about this threshold. Modern inquiries in philosophy, science, and theology all have one thing in common - they attempt to discern, through thinking, what reality could be ‘within’, ‘behind’, ‘beyond’, etc. the sensory appearances of the World. In other words, they try to answer the question of how reality could be experienced without the meditation of the neurosensory organism. Implicit in all such inquiries is the fact that the latter veils subtle experiences of critical importance for our orientation to the true nature of the World and, correspondingly, of our own souls. That is why the threshold of modern recursive thinking is none other than that of
physical death. It is the great black hole of experience that we all know is inevitably on the horizon but most of us avoid thinking through in any concrete way.
We glorify death in movies, we pay homage to it in ceremonies, we analyze the fear of its effects in psychology, we speculate about it in philosophy and theology, etc., but we don’t truly
think through its significance in the lawful flow of experience. Hardly any modern thinkers are comfortable with the prospect of attaining concrete knowledge of what is experienced after death (or before birth), yet there is no other way of ‘phase-shifting’ our thinking through the threshold of the Catch-22 so our ‘thought-rays’ are not continually reflected around the periphery. The great creative task of our time is to invert through the ‘event horizon’ of death that normally tears our concepts to pieces if they are rich in worldly assumptions and prejudices. We must do something inwardly that makes our spiritual activity receptive to the heavenly benediction which can spiritualize our concepts and allow them to pass through the ‘eye of the needle’ unharmed.⁸
Religious impulses from East to West cultivated moral forces in human souls over the last few millennia as if anticipating the need for their beneficial action in the present day so that modern souls could invert through the threshold of death and experience the more integrated meaning of their spiritual activity, reorienting from the rampant me-centered perspective. Yet, as individual beings who have laid the foundation for freedom in thinking, we can no longer submit to such forces based on ancient tradition. Moral virtues that are simply accepted on authority have been stripped of their virtuous character. Now each recursive thinker must cultivate the virtuous forces within themselves from intimate knowledge of their meaningful
functions in the evolutionary drama of human history. In the next part, we will draw our attention to a few core functions of moral virtues with the help of quotes, images, and brief elaborations.
To briefly summarize the main points discussed above:
- Modern thinking is recursively attempting to grasp its living flow of activity but continually freezes that activity and only contemplates the decaying corpses of that activity, i.e. its thought-content never coincides with its inner gestures such that it can cross the threshold of inner knowledge.
- That happens because habits developed from interacting with the sensory world are carried over into studying the supersensible structure of spiritual activity, i.e. the mind container perspective, which seeks to know the World while remaining in a detached, passive state and preserving its ‘private’ kingdom of personal desires.
- To invert its perspective, the mind container should release its domineering grasp on meaningful content and become sensitive to how it is grasped, allowing itself to be known for the sake of the Whole.
- Instead of intellectually freezing the flow of inner activity in models and habitual expectations, it should intuitively feel its way into that flow as if through resonance.
- That means we become less interested in what the World content means for us and more interested in what our activity means for the World, i.e. our interests become self-similar to the quintessential Other-centered Divine interest and we seek to resonate with the inner lives of other beings who comprise the World content with and through us.
- The longer the inversion of perspective is put off, the more difficult it becomes to experientially resonate with our underlying inner activity.
- This moral-scientific technique requires the free and gradual cultivation of a virtuous disposition based on intimate knowledge and high transpersonal ideals.
CITATIONS
1 Luke 8:18
2 Marshall McLuhan, Letter to Allen Maruyama (11 January 1972)
3 Matthew 9:17
“Neither do men pour new wine into old wineskins. If they do, the skins will burst, the wine will spill, and the wineskins will be ruined. Instead, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved.”
4 Kuhlewind, Georg. From Normal to Healthy (pp. 167-168).
5 Id.
6 Kuhlewind, Georg. From Normal to Healthy (pp. 32-33)
7 1 John 4:16
“And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.”
8 Mark 10:25
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”
