From space to spacetime
The inner space stretching we presented still remains entirely spatial – our imagination moves between small and large geometric spheres in the present. Space and time, however, are related. We don’t even need advanced theories of spacetime to acknowledge that. To develop some intuition about this relation we may imagine that we are going on an excursion in a big city. The bus arrives at 8:00 and we have the whole day for sightseeing. The only constraint is that at 20:00 we need to be back at the bus for pickup. Now we stand at our starting location and we can imagine that the 12 hours we have at our disposal are represented by a large sphere of possibilities that we can circumscribe around us. We can explore many places nearby or visit a few places further away, but there are also places that lie beyond our spacetime sphere, that is, if we decide to visit these remote places (or places that are close by but would take a long time to see in full) we’ll inevitably be late for pickup.
Now imagine that we stay at the bus and can’t decide where to go. The more time we waste in this way, the more the sphere of possibilities shrinks. If we spend all 12 hours in this way, the sphere will ultimately shrink to a point and we’ll have no choice but to get back on the bus. As said, by using such an example we are not suggesting some fanciful theory of spacetime and quantum probabilities. These are all completely trivial facts of experience. We are only metaphorically expressing them in such terms. We are not implying that our future is ‘out there’, existing in some speculative probabilistic time dimension of reality. The sphere is only a symbol for our personal understanding of the ways in which the future may unfold.
The thing to get a feel for here is how in our life we continually live in such a narrowing of possibilities. This is obvious. There are only so many possible experiences that we can have in the next minute. If we consider a whole day or week, there is a much vaster palette of possibilities. If we decide to visit relatives in another town we need to start consistently guiding our thoughts and actions in that direction in the present. As we work toward the realization of this plan, other possibilities grow dimmer and further away. Here it should be mentioned that this spacetime sphere should not be thought of as exclusively spatial – that is, representing only places in space that are reachable. We may be completely stationary and still conceive of such a sphere of possibilities. For example, we may be sitting at our desk. We may have homework to do but be tempted to watch YouTube videos instead. The more videos we watch, the more the realization of the homework moves further outside the sphere of possibilities.
All this doesn’t require much philosophizing. It is simple practical intuition. It is part of our life’s education as a human being that the intuition of these spheres should increase so we can manifest our inner and outer life properly. As a toddler, this sphere may be quite small. We move from sensation to sensation, from playing with one toy to another. We have no long-term goals, and we grasp the span of neither our own life’s journey nor the historical process of humanity. If our parents weren’t there to guide our flow, we would be like a tourist who moves spontaneously from place to place, completely unaware that they might not be able to get back to the bus on time. Only as we grow up we begin to encompass greater spheres and understand that our navigation through the flow of existence needs to be organized on many levels, encompassing different spacetime scales.
Condensing flow
We can put that in our familiar Tetris metaphor. We can imagine a game of Tetris where the pieces descend from the infinite periphery as spread-out potential clouds of different qualities which gradually become more in-focus and ultimately condense into the manifold phenomena of our new inner state.
We stress once again that with such an image we’re not suggesting that one should fantasize such a speculative temporal flow ‘out there’, made of some exotic ‘energies’. The only flow of reality that we know of is the metamorphosis of our experiential ‘now’ state. The condensing Tetris flow is a metaphor for our intuitive orientation within the dynamics of this flow and its continuous concretization. Furthermore, the concretizing Tetris pieces should not be taken for the collapse of the wavefunction of elementary particles known from quantum mechanics. We are not speaking about how we can conceive of the concretization of electrons but only about the concretization of our inner states of being. In this sense, what condenses are the inner frames of existence containing our mental images and sensations. When we conceive of the quantum collapse of matter we are still experiencing only the condensation of our thinking frames about the imagined collapse. Normally we are completely blind about the concretization of our thoughts and instead, we dimly and instinctively steer through the meaning that the thoughts symbolize. For example, when we think verbally about something, we rarely pay attention to how we structure our mental words, how we pronounce them, and so on. Instead, we instinctively push in a certain intuitive direction, while the intuition is explicated as torrents of mental words that take form almost automatically. Yet, this concretization of our thoughts is an experiential fact while the pictured collapse of elementary particles is nowhere to be found as a direct experience in our inner life. It exists only as the meaning implied in our mental images of the imagined collapse which alone are the direct experience. With this we don’t imply that our thoughts can have no relevance for processes that may lay beyond the horizon of our conscious experience but that we can only have a secure foothold in the process of reality if we first recognize what is really the given direct experience: namely the condensation of our inner frames of existence and especially the mental images within these frames where the process can be experienced most clearly. Please note that the parts of our existential frames that contain the bodily sensations, and thus we feel that through them we are metamorphosing through the lawful constraints of a physical world, should by no means be conceived as condensing from our personal imagination as some kind of a thin dream picture. For the time being, we should rather stay with the facts of experience and calmly accept that the sensory spectrum of our existential frames presents us with a deeper and far more independent concretization process, within which the condensation of our more mobile thinking and feeling aspects of inner life, is embedded.
Here one may immediately object that we don’t perceive any such ‘condensation’ of inner phenomena and thus we are not speaking of anything phenomenologically real. What we consider inner experiences, however, are not only the perceptions of our already ‘collapsed’ and receding as memory thoughts and sensations. Our intuitive sense for the direction of the flow is also part of experience. Thus, when speaking of the condensing flow we should initially turn attention to the fact that we live in something like an intuitive orientation for the concretization process at the horizon of our ‘now’ state. For example, when we tell a story from our life to a friend, we certainly don’t see our thought-words traveling from the distance as clouds and condensing in the moment of speaking but we surely have the intuitive orientation for what we are trying to express and how our thoughts in a sense condense (bring to focus) aspects of this general intuition. It is entirely in this sense that we’ll be speaking when using the metaphor of the condensing Tetris pieces.
Intuitive intent as curvature of the flow
To our modern waking consciousness, only the crystalization of our frames of existence seems real. And additionally, we feel that the sensations in our physical kernel are relatively more real than our ephemeral mental images. This sense of ‘more real’ comes not out of some deep insight into the mystery of reality but simply because the sense impressions seem more consistent and intense compared to our mental images (like physical pain differs in intensity and persistence from imagined or remembered one). Yet, it is precisely of the latter that we can have a direct intuitive sense for their direction. For example, if we observe a fly whizzing erratically, every frame of our visual field manifests as something that we can hardly anticipate. On the other hand, if we set out to slowly count from one to ten in our mind, we have a very clear intuitive sense for how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like the erratic movements of the fly but as orderly condensation guided by our general meaningful intent to count. It is in this sense that we can speak metaphorically about a sphere of structured potential that gradually crystallizes as the Tetris pieces of our inner voice vibrations. Extending the metaphor further, we can say that these condensations follow certain temporal ‘curvatures’, for which we feel intuitively responsible.
When speaking of such spheres of potential and the curvature of the incoming flow, we are still not implying anything that lies beyond our conscious experience, as if in some time dimension of reality that we can only abstractly conceive of. No, we can speak realistically about this curvature of the spacetime flow only if we use that term as a metaphor for our present intuitive orientation within the flow. As far as this orientation proceeds from our own intuitive intents, we live in a quite clear awareness of what Tetris pieces we may anticipate. This is very easy to discern in the case of counting. If we are currently at five, even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a pretty good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what we will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced and heard the incoming numbers in our mind. But note that this intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present state. Artistically expressed, we may say that the mental verbalizations of the previous numbers are now compressed under the accumulating incoming Tetris pieces. Obviously, as we pronounce ‘five’ there’s nothing in the present condensation that sounds like ‘one’, ‘two’, etc., yet we feel that this ‘five’ can only be experienced in the way it is because we’re flowing through the curvature of counting and prior condensations have preceded it. As said, when speaking about these prior condensations, we’re not imagining some abstract time dimension where they exist as if in the past, but we focus on our present ‘now’ state where their reverberations can be felt. Thus we see that we don’t imply anything fantastic when we speak about the intuitively intended curvature of our flow. Everything that we speak of is to be found in the ever-metamorphosing present state (the only state we ever know). What extends back and forth is our intuitive orientation within the flow. It is further clear that this intended curvature is not absolute. We can easily get distracted at ‘six’ and the curvature of the flow quickly morphs such that completely different Tetris pieces begin to condense.
When we say that only our present state is phenomenologically real (past and future exist only as intuition and mental images within this present state), there’s something we should beware of. It is analogous to what we said previously about our spatial imagination. When we say “My imagination is only in the head (or soul bubble), the world outside is of a completely different nature (or at least we have no true point of contact with it in our inner space)” we usually still constrain the sphere of our imagination. For example, we refrain from stretching our imagination beyond the bounds of our skin because we are worried that we succumb to fantasy since our imagination is not supposed to belong there. This, however, intermixes our imagination of inner and outer space. If they don’t form a continuum why should our inner space be bounded by our conception of outer space? It turns out that even though we deny the existence of outer space as something that can be found inside our inner, nevertheless this denied space is still there in our inner space, surrounding us from our sides and placing a boundary on how far our allowed inner space can expand. Something analogous happens also with respect to time. Although we may declare that past and future can’t be found as part of our present (we only have intuition and mental/memory images about them), we nevertheless still act as if we are squished in a narrow ‘now’ surrounded by the shadows of denied time. In other words, we feel like: “My present thoughts and memories are only images of time, they are not the real time that extends into the past and future.” It is this “real time”, which although we deny can ever be found as part of our present existence, is still secretly conceived as a shadow in our inner space that squishes us from all sides. We are not claiming that there’s nothing in our present metamorphosing state of existence that justifies the feeling for this denied space and time but only that we shouldn’t be afraid to expand our intuitive rays into these denied regions of inner space, which are certainly part of our present. We simply need to awaken to the fact that all the time we are instinctively ‘stealing’ intuitions from the curvatures of these denied regions of our present inner world, yet when asked to consciously grow our intuitive activity in them, we quickly declare that this is not possible because they are seen as representing some form of reality incompatible with our inner. Alright, fine, but if this incompatible reality has nothing in common with our inner, why should it impinge and constrain it? If we are really precise in our observations we would have to admit that there’s only one phenomenological flow that we know of, and our conception of inner and outer is only imaginative partitioning of that one flow, part of which we deny, and the other part, bounded by the denied, we call ‘inner’. Since the ‘inner’ partition is what we intimately know and what should grow into the denied regions, we’ll still use that term where needed, yet it should be clear that this doesn’t imply any hard boundary between inner and outer.
Now one may object that paying such close attention to our mental processes, which are so ephemeral and discontinuous (as the slightest distraction proves), is not practical because in the end, our life flow seems to be shaped primarily by the more independent sensory perceptions, and it is their totality that we should investigate. This, however, secretly implies that our innerly intended mental flow is a solved case and there’s nothing to be gained from investigating it. Or we imply that it is in principle impossible to investigate it through our inner activity and instead, we can only resort to indirect means like EEG, MRI, etc. In both cases, everything that can be anticipated to elucidate the flow of reality is expected to arrive from phenomena manifesting independently of our inner activity. Please note, that this doesn’t necessarily imply materialism. Seeking mystical vision still expects to find true reality as something presented to our consciousness completely independently of our intuitive intents. Such an objection completely blinds us to the fact that when we get distracted in our mental process – not by independent perceptions and visions but by unwillingly switching the ‘tracks’ of our inner mental flow – this doesn’t happen because of our clear intuitive intent, and thus it already informs us of processes that are no less independent than those that we imagine are responsible for the metamorphoses of the sensory contents. Just because we call it ‘my mental flow’, doesn’t mean that we are consciously intending its curvature. Thus it is clear that there’s a lot to be known about the inner factors that shape the curvatures of condensation. In the face of this, one can still object that in this way we explore only our subjective inner world and thus can become alienated from the wider life that the senses portray. While this danger indeed exists, we should also be clear that such careful investigation of these factors is necessary, because what lies in the contents of the senses (at least the part related to human action) if not precisely the expression of the sum total of inner intents of human beings? As long as we can trace how the inner factors that secretly shape and constrain our inner activity, play out all the way to the sensory picture of our collective human life, we are developing harmoniously in both directions, so to speak.
Intuitive contextuality
All further progress in our discussion now depends on the reader grasping as clearly as possible how our temporally extended intuitive intents relate to the momentary condensations. For example, when we think about counting, we vaguely feel the process and can identify it by pronouncing the word ‘counting’ in our mind. The pronunciation of the word acts like an anchor where our intuition for the total process is focused. We can call this temporally extended intuition focused in a point, the concept. The most critical thing to realize is that this focused intuition and the mental image (the pronunciation of the word ‘counting’) that anchors it, portray only a symbol for the total process, they don’t contain it. To know the reality of the process we need to make it the curvature of our flow and thus experience the sequence of numeric mental images (we can count not only in words but also in visual pictures, for example, imagined apples). In exactly the same way, even though we keep referring to these things as ‘curvature of the flow’, ‘intuitive intents’, and so on, these verbal tokens are still only symbols for something that doesn’t fit in the scale of the sensible words themselves. They can only be known by feeling how we live in something meaningfully intended, which we can’t see perceptually as a ‘thing’, yet it clearly gives us intuition for the way the symbolic phenomena unfold.
One way to feel this contrast is to imagine that just when we pronounce ‘five’ we somehow forget that we are intentionally counting. Then we hear in our mind ‘five’ but it sounds like a thought that randomly pops in our mind. We have no intuitive sense of why it appeared nor that something else should appear afterward. So what is the difference in both cases? In the former case, our intent to count exists as a kind of intuitive context of our consciousness. Usually, when we speak of context, it is meant as some implicit understanding that hovers in the background and makes the concrete symbols comprehensible. For example, our conversation with a friend may make very little sense to a by-listener who is not aware of the context. Here we should make sure that we include in the context also its dynamic aspect, as something that makes the flow of existence meaningful (instead of being felt as a random sequence of frames).
When we hear ‘five’ in our mind without any context, it feels like the word resounds in a kind of intuitive vacuum that urges us to find the missing intuition which will hopefully fill the contextual void, and then the mental symbol will feel meaningfully embedded in a greater flow. Usually, we set out to do that by thinking. We make a mental picture of our experience (the ‘five’ sound) and then try to complement it with other mental pictures like neurons, supernatural suggestion, and so on. We feel satisfied with our explanation when put together, these mental images make intuitive sense, much like we feel when we snap together puzzle pieces. Notice, however, how this explanation made of snapping mental images remains abstract. We don’t know with certainty whether our mental puzzle truly corresponds to reality, even though the pieces may snap very convincingly together. Contrast this with the experience of suddenly remembering our counting activity. The same experience can be reached if while we philosophize about our ‘five’ mental image someone says: “Stop! What are you doing?” Then we wake up from our thinking flow and answer “Well, I’m trying to explain my ‘five’ mental image.” The ‘five’ relates to the intuitive flow of ‘counting’ in the same way our explanation mental puzzle pieces relate to the flow of ‘trying to explain’. Notice how the remembering of our intuitive intent provides us with a completely different kind of ‘explanation’. We no longer need to assemble mental puzzles but instead, the intuitive curvature of our intent to count (or philosophize) fills the vacuum. This intuitive intent is not some additional perceptual object in our consciousness but the meaningfully curved background of its flow. Obviously, by calling it ‘meaningfully curved background’ we already condense that intuition into a verbal mental image. It is critically important to feel that difference – we can make focused (compressed) symbol of the intuitive curvature of our flow (and we just did that by calling it ‘intuitive curvature of our flow’), but the latter is not contained in it, just like a road sign with the name of a river doesn’t contain the total river flow. The difficulty facing the thinking habits of our age is that we are trying to speak of the meaningful flow that we intuitively live within all the time, yet anything we can explicate about it condenses as road signs. This doesn’t mean that the dynamic intuitive context is not a real part of experience. It is nothing but prejudice if we count as explanations only the assemblies of condensed mental images (road signs). The intuitive direction of our flow is just as much a part of our experience and we can bend that flow on a deeper level. For example, we decide to count before we have pronounced the first number in our mind or have explicitly thought “Now I will count to ten.” Thus we continuously navigate the streamlines of an invisible intuitive atmosphere and condense mental Tetris pieces that bring to focus certain aspects of this intuition.
The reader is encouraged to take some time and get a really vivid feel for this contextuality of our conscious experience. Above, things were presented as a two-level system – dynamic intuitive context and concrete symbols, a river extended in spacetime and road signs – however, the contexts can be hierarchically nested. This is true even in counting but it is more easily discernable with something like a song. Our intuition for the whole song is the top-level context (not in an global sense but only for our experience of the song). We can symbolize its totality with the verbal symbol of the title. When we pronounce the title in our mind we have a vague feeling about the totality that we are focusing into the title. Yet, to experience the fullness of this totality we need to make it the curvature of our flow and start singing it. Now our singing mental voice moves through these curvatures. There’s, however, nested rhythmical structure to this playback. Our words are not only monotonically pronounced but their pitch is bent up and down according to the melody. The melody can be grasped as repeating patterns grouped in measures, phrases, verses, and so on.
We can make a similar example also with a movie or a written novel. In all cases we should pay attention how if the intuitive context was to be obliterated, we would be left with a seemingly random sequence of phenomena. Imagine that you hear a single sound, or see a cut-out movie frame, or a single word from a book. Now imagine how the situation would transform if the intuitive context expands and you hear the sound as part of the song that you’ve been singing, or see the frame of the movie that you’ve been watching for the last hour, or read the word in the sentence in the book that you’ve been reading the whole weekend.
Since we are most conscious of the concrete Tetris pieces (mental images and perceptions), these contextual intuitive curvatures are normally not lucidly recognized, even though without them our flow of existence would be a sequence of disconnected phenomena. In a way, our ordinary experience looks as if we are looking down on the condensing Tetris sphere and we are quite unaware of the condensing flow behind our back. We only witness the popping up mental images as they already fuse with the imploding kernel. Of course, we do have a sense of the context of our thoughts but as a whole, we flow through its metamorphoses quite instinctively. What we are striving for here, is to heighten our awareness of these ever-present layers of our intuitive context. It is as if we need to refine certain organs for sensing these intuitive curvatures, except that here we are not talking about attaining new kinds of sensory-like perceptions (such that we can see the intuitive curvatures visually as some colorful shape, for example) but to recognize clearly and delineate what is already there in the contextual background of our conscious experience. To ‘see’ these intuitive curvatures means that we have sufficient intuitive orientation within them such that we can use them to guide the condensation of mental images that symbolize them.
Mental images as scaled symbols of temporal scenes of existence
To better understand the contextual nature of our temporal experience, consider a simple clock. We can very easily imagine the movement of the seconds arrow. It feels comfortable because this ticking pace feels not too fast, not too slow. Now consider the hours arrow. We can hardly detect any movement. Nevertheless, we do have some intuition for what an hour feels like. For example, we can say “An hour is the continuous experience that we flow through as the hours arrow moves one tick.” Yet, when we symbolize this intuition we generally imagine the hour clock moving a lot faster. Instead of taking an hour to move from 1 to 2, we imagine it as in a timelapse movie and the movement happens in a few seconds. If we were to imagine the true movement from 1 to 2, we would have to support unbroken imagining activity for a whole hour. Thus, we certainly do have some intuition about the greater spans of time, yet when we try to think about them, we focus them into scaled-down symbols. For example, actual counting to ten could take about ten seconds (if we spend one second on pronouncing each number), while the symbol ‘counting to ten’ compresses the intuition for this temporally extended flow into words that can be pronounced in one second. This is true even for much longer periods of time. For example, when we think of an year, we can imagine a picture of the Sun and how the Earth makes one revolution around it. Yet, obviously this imagining takes only a few seconds. It is only a scaled-down symbol of something that could otherwise be beheld only through unbroken observation for a whole year at some vantage point in outer space. Things are not that different when we move toward the faster paces. For example, if we imagine a microseconds arrow, it would have to turn so fast that it would appear as a blurry disc. Thus, once again, what we can think of and imagine is only a symbol for a process that we can’t hold comfortably at our ordinary ticking pace. We can illustrate this in the following way:
We see that we as human beings, live consciously in a very narrow temporal band. Things that are too slow feel as the gradually morphing context of our existence, while things that are too fast are mostly missed because of our crude resolution in relation to them. This doesn’t prevent us from extending our intuition toward these regions but in the end, we can only symbolize it with mental images at our comfortable ticking pace. Additionally, even though we speak of a ‘band’, our inner experience doesn’t feel like a geometric band. Instead, it seems that our meso-scale sphere of conscious experience encompasses the micro-scale within it, yet most of it passes right through the openings of our conscious net, so to speak.
What kinds of experiences this narrow band consists of? To answer that we need to put aside our mental assemblies for a moment and concentrate entirely on our real-time bodily and sensory life. What we find is the movements of our body, the flow of visual and auditory perceptions, the production of verbal sounds, feelings like pain, pleasure, and so on. As we explained previously, our inner life wiggles out as a kind of ‘double vision’ overlaid on these raw bodily phenomena and we can then experience mental images representing past experiences or anticipating future ones. However, we would be able to do very little if our inner life was limited to only real-time reproductions of bodily experiences. Instead, we continuously resort to the scaling depicted above. We use the replicated images of our real-time bodily experiences as symbols for greater or lesser time spans of experience. For example, when we think in our mind ‘a year’, as far as the purely auditory content is concerned, this is a replica of a real-time verbal bodily experience at the meso scale. Producing the mental sound takes roughly the same time as the physical pronunciation of the word. However, the intuition that is anchored in this replica of bodily sound compresses (scales down) our intuitive sense of what one year of time is. We can only think about greater periods of time (memories of the past or plans for the future) if we shrink them to images at the scale of our bodily experiences. If we could remember our two-week vacation last summer only in real-time, it would take us two full weeks to do so. Instead, we grasp our overall intuition for the past period and we can anchor it in a symbol ‘my summer vacation last year’ which is a replica of real-time bodily speech. Now we can intuitively move through the landscape of these memories and condense more concrete images of the actual happenings, which in the end are also instances of real-time bodily experiences. We do something similar when we make a plan for our next summer vacation. We should get a really vivid feel for this. Consider how our verbal thinking can only flow at the pace of our physical speech and is indeed its replica, yet the words continuously focus intuitions that span greater or lesser, future or past time spans. When we think about greater periods we need to compress them. For example, when we look at a calendar we behold a real-time visual perception, yet we grasp it as a compressed symbol of our intuition for all the days in the year. When we think about faster periods – for example, the flapping of bee wings – we need to imagine them slowed down. Our real-time imagination looks like the physical perception of waving condor wings, however, we grasp that as a scaled-up image of our intuition for the rapid process. Today we also use technological aids to produce these compressed or expanded images. For example, we could hardly perceive the transformation of clouds before timelapse photography, nor the flapping of bee wings before slow motion video.
The reality of the micro and macro scales is elusive
From this perspective we can easily see how the reductionist view of existence emerges. Generally, we accept that our constitution locks our conscious experience at the meso scale and we can only make stretched images of the small and fast or compressed images of the large and slow. In physicalist reductionism, this has led to the view that only the small and fast is truly real while everything else is only the concatenation of such elementary events. Logically, this view implies that even our meso-scale conscious experience is built up from the concatenation of elementary events, while at our level we have no choice but to only make their scaled-up images and snap them together as mental puzzle pieces. The key thing to note, however, is that the images of the large and small that we make, are borrowed from our meso-scale bodily life. It is taken for granted that these scales, which obviously either don’t fit or are below the resolution of our meso consciousness, can be known through the manipulation of their meso-scale symbols.
To put that in a caricature, imagine that we know from our meso scale only the experience of chopping wood. This is a legitimate real-time bodily experience. Our situation is such that we can only think of the greater periods of time by multiplying that image as if to fill the timespan. In other words, to imagine a year's worth of time, we can only do by picturing chopping wood for one whole year. On the other hand, if we decide to ‘zoom in’ and investigate what real-time chopping wood consists of, we have no choice but to fill the expanding spacetime with more images of things that look like chopping wood. In both cases, however, our scaled activity belongs to the meso scale, where we make use of real-time mental imagining.
It is for this reason, that when we speak of the spheres of possibilities centered around the bus, through our ordinary thinking habits we have no choice but to imagine multiplied images of bodily happenings – going here or there, seeing this or that, and so on. We can then even imagine that these images correspond to possible events that are not perfectly random. There may be some structure to this potential that makes some events more probable than others and thus there would be some bias in the condensation flow. Yet, since we are perfectly aware that we are only imagining these possibilities, it is fully justified that we doubt that they may have anything to do with reality. And as we said, we by no means try to suggest that there are such speculative fields of possibilities out there. At the same time, however, there is another way to know something about the condensing flow, which doesn’t require us to make speculative assemblies of mental images.
