Returning to the main topic – the inner space stretching exercise – we can say that all these rotating movements that we perform, even though we imagine them to extend into the large and the small, are still only pictured through our familiar bodily gestures that have their home at the meso scale. These gestures are still only scaled images representing our dim intuition for the micro and macro spacetime scales. In other words, initially we can only conceive of these scales by extrapolating the experiences of the meso scale (the chopping wood caricature). Yet, as we saw, all these scales are also related to corresponding forms of inner activity that can bend the flow at that level.
When we embark on the meditative path, one may expect that soon the secrets of the Cosmos will be laid down open in our feet. However, what we begin to gain consciousness of, is far more uninteresting at first sight. It is our own thinking life. Many popular meditation schools in our age teach that we should push the mind away and seek mystical enlightenment. In the way we conduct our meditation, however, we take a fully conscious hold on our thinking activity – we concentrate it and stream it through a deeply felt temporal intuitive curvature (the meditative song). It is for this reason that when this concentration activity is resisted and modified by the interfering movements, we sense that as intuitive nudges that can potentially condense to corresponding mental images.
In our ordinary life, we are generally helplessly fused with our inner flow. We feel that we instinctively steer that flow and that our inner voice almost automatically explicates in dreamy mental images the intuitive contexts that we traverse, yet it is difficult to say to what extent we consciously steer the flow or we are being dragged by it. Liberation from the flow of necessity is gained in a fully conscious way, first and foremost in our thinking process. Here ‘liberation’ doesn’t imply some binary free-unfree division, as if at some point we may say “OK, now my thinking is fully free, determined only by me and nothing else in the universe.” Such a view may lead us to believe that free thinking means giving it free rein to summon the most random and extravagant mental images. However, being ignorant about the constraints within which our ‘random’ thoughts manifest is not the freedom we are talking about. What we aim for is the ability to peel the layers of constraints and gain consciousness of the contextual factors that shape our existence. We can only gain consciousness of such factors by resisting the usual flow through concentration – then we begin to sense the nudges of thinking gestures that would otherwise manifest as a matter of course. Now it is as if we awaken to a slightly deeper stratum of our inner being that can be more aware of the thinking process.
The horizon of thinking condensation and finding our intuitive activity beneath it
Consider how it is often said, “Think before you say something!” And indeed, we can often find ourselves in awkward situations if our inner life simply flows out directly as speech. We insult people, say inappropriate things, and so on. One solution is to wilfully withhold our speech and experience it in verbal thoughts first. Now the inner words that we hear in our mind may be just as crude but at least we have the chance to rehearse them before our intuitive intent is allowed to become the curvature within which the movements of the vocal tract unfold. Now imagine that we’re told “Try not to allow such crude thoughts even in your mind! Think before you think!” But does this even make sense? Isn’t it like saying “speak before you speak”? We may try to cheat by thinking in a soft whispering inner voice and only after we approve our words, repeat them (again in our mind) with a louder, more confident voice. The problem, however, remains exactly the same, we have only shifted it a little – our softer inner voice still manifests as something that we hear for the first time at the moment of thinking. Nevertheless, upon more careful introspection, most will admit that they feel at least marginally aware of deeper inner activity that expresses itself through the condensing mental images. When we try to explain something with hand gestures to a foreigner, we live in the meaning of what we try to explain and only seek appropriate symbols for it. Similarly, in our verbal gestures – of both physical and inner speech – we can still feel that we live in a dim intuitive flow condensing into sensory-like perceptual forms (the sounds of the words). Normally, we feel lucidly conscious of this deeper intuitive life only when we experience the concrete forms, but still, if we try to introspect more carefully about what we instinctively do when we think, we’ll have to recognize that most of our thinking activity actually takes place in the ‘pre-condensation’ flow, while the sounds of the inner words are only the final testimonies of that activity. The sense of this pre-condensation intuitive flow is heightened when we try to investigate how the same ideal meaning can be expressed in many different perceptual forms – hand gestures, words in different languages, and so on.
We can further elucidate this when we consider how words can be ambiguous. Take the sentence “He gave her a ring.” This could mean two different things – a man gave a piece of jewelry to a woman, or he gave her a phone call. Such an ambiguity, however, doesn’t exist when the words precipitate from our own thinking process. The reason is that we already live in the intuitive context of whatever we try to express in verbal symbols. Before the inner words take form, our inner intuitive activity already lives in the meaning of something like an invisible dream scene depicting the event. Then our verbal thought manifests as an almost automatic description of this intuition. When listening to someone else’s words, we face auditory perceptions that evoke a corresponding intuitive context. This intuition might or might not be what the speaker intended, as ambiguous sentences demonstrate. In our thinking life (or when we allow that life express directly as speech) we have the reverse process. We live in morphing intuitive context and from within it, resonantly attuned symbolic gestures condensate. We are interested precisely in this steering through the meaningful, yet not yet explicated in verbal (or other) symbols, intuitively grasped scenes of our inner flow. Such a distinction between intuitive flow and precipitating thought forms may not be initially obvious, but it becomes apparent as soon as we try to withhold our inner speech formation and try to intuitively feel what is it that our words describe.
The problem with the above is that when we are used to experiencing our thinking process as condensing Tetris pieces (the verbal inner words), we imagine that we can grasp the hidden flow through similar but somehow ‘pre-condensation’ Tetris pieces. The latter, however, as far as they are replicas of bodily phenomena (as our inner voice is) always manifest at the horizon of condensation. Imagine water vapor that touches a freezing-cold surface – it condenses and quickly crystallizes. The crystals are analogous to the condensed Tetris pieces, they are the sensed content of our mental experience. The vapor on the other hand cannot be seen. Even if we get away with the surface and imagine that the crystals form directly in the vaporous volume (as snowflakes) they still only indirectly portray the currents of the air that they flow through (as iron filings follow the invisible magnetic lines). This simple analogy hints that gaining consciousness within the vaporous flow demands inner activity of a different scale and quality.
A metaphor that is closer to our spacetime terminology can be borrowed from the presently fictional warp drive.
Here it is imagined that the spacecraft somehow warps spacetime and causes itself to fall forward. It’s like a fancier version of the donkey with a carrot on a stick. Instead of a carrot, we hold a blob of concentrated mass/energy (like a small planet) just in front of our spaceship. The mass/energy curves spacetime and our spaceship falls forward in its gravity well. As we move forward, however, the blob also moves forward (as if attached to the stick) and thus keeps accelerating us.
Of course, if we try to trace this simplistic picture into its details we’ll encounter innumerable problems and paradoxes of philosophical, physical, and mathematical nature. Furthermore, this analogy cannot be translated directly to what we speak of here. It has been presented only to ‘get us in the mood’, so to speak. To make it more applicable to our situation, we can imagine that our intuitive intents are the morphing spacetime curvature (the intuitive essence of our conscious space), while the spacecraft is, for example, the phenomenal contents of our moving imaginary arm. There’s no need to overintellectualize this, we’re talking about something very simple. It’s only a matter of feeling how the curvature of our intuitive activity leads the condensation of the imaginative contents.
We can grasp this if we try to realize that our mental images are already fading memory pictures. Our intuitive activity steers their condensation, we experience them at maximum intensity at the cognitive horizon and then they continue to fade, yet not totally without a trace – they become ingrained into the total picture of the World flow and that‘s why we can later remember (re-think) them as if we aim to resurrect the images from their spreading out reverberations. We are not somehow pulling the mental images out of the compressed kernel – our remembered mental images are condensed afresh, yet we seek to guide that condensation as if to repeat the form of prior mental images whose compressed reverberations are only dimly felt. We can make a limited analogy with a cathode-ray tube (CRT).
Our intuitive activity feels as if it precedes the flashing mental images, just like the bending of the electron ray precedes the luminophore’s bombardment and lighting up. Here ‘precedes’ shouldn’t be taken in a strictly temporal sense but as signifying the fact that we feel intuitively active in whatever is responsible for lighting up the mental pixels. If we try to imagine the full reality of our intuitive ray, we can only do that by lighting up new mental images, which too are already fading memory pictures. Thus, we need to calmly accept that we can never find the reality of our flow-bending intuitive activity as contained in the lighting-up mental pixels in phenomenal space. Our condensing inner activity is something that is intuitively known as our most intimate be-ing, while the lighting up and fading mental images present us with the near-zero-delay consequences of this activity. (Here we have presented the spacetime curving process as unidirectional, as if our intuitive intents are the ultimate master of the curvature within which our imagined perceptions condense, but we’ll soon see that things are more complicated.)
Things become even more intimate when instead of our imagined hands, we explore the condensation of our imagined speech. Just compare how the expression of a certain intuition can be explicated in a much more rich and nuanced way through our speech compared to hand gestures. The modulations of our voice can convey emotional states like fear or excitement, which are more difficult to articulate in sign language. This, of course, is still possible to some extent – for example, trembling gesticulating hands can still be recognized as being in the grips of fear, but the possibilities of our voice are clearly much vaster. Nevertheless, in both cases we have our intuitive inner life that seeks to express itself in symbols – verbal, hand-movements, or otherwise. It is precisely this normally subconscious inner life that we begin to know more intimately through our meditative efforts. This happens because instead of simply allowing that life to flow directly into Tetris pieces in any way it may, we withhold the crystalization process and learn to know our inner being in these secret intuitive and feeling movements that can guide the condensation.
To develop intuition of this thinking process we need to discover it anew. For so long we may have been thinking completely on autopilot, in dim dream-like ways, and now we encounter our inner words and imaginatively willed gestures as something that we marvel about like a small child. We can rotate the imagined spheres very slowly, with great concentration, as if we try to observe as tightly as possible how our intuitive movements are followed by the imaginative contents. We can similarly experiment with our inner voice, pronouncing words and sounds slowly, varying the pitch, timbre, and so on. In all cases, we gradually begin to awaken within a deeper stratum of our inner being that intuitively curves the condensation flow. These curving intuitive movements no longer feel like arrangements of mental puzzle pieces in linear strings or spatial configurations but demand that we move our intuitive being at correspondingly different scales and more fluidly.
Increasing attention span as a means of grasping the temporal intuitive curvature of inner activity
Imagine that you stand in front of a mirror and wave your hand, except that the reflection manifests only after some delay. To develop a more living feel for this we may experiment with this online demonstration.
As we move the mouse cursor (or our finger on a touch device) over the rectangular area, a red circle follows our movements. With the slider above we can increase the delay between our movements and the time the circle is drawn. There are a few things to observe here.
At zero delay (the delay is not really zero because there’s processing time between our inputs and the screen output) everything feels pretty straightforward. The red circle is simply attached to the cursor. Yet, as trivial as this is, the reader is encouraged to try move the cursor slowly and with great concentration, as if we try to feel as tightly as possible how our moving intents are reflected in the visual perception. Try to do that with unbroken attention, with gaze fully anchored at the cursor, without ‘lifting the pen’ so to speak. Even this simple activity may be challenging for some. It may feel like our attention is inherently jittery, that we can’t help but move our eyes, that our attention is divided between our hand movements and screen perceptions, and so on. Yet, with little effort, everyone should be able to sustain this smooth and fully concentrated movement for at least a second or two. Here we completely disregard the past and future movements – we are completely focused in the narrow ‘now’ and move the cursor spontaneously. The goal is simply to move our hand and behold the visual perceptions in a smoothly morphing conscious experience through time. For this to happen, we should not wait for the perception of the red circle to pull our attention but allow our moving intents to move not only our hand but also our eyes, thus we anticipate where the red circle should be instead of simply reacting to its perceptions. If we find it difficult, we simply need to slow down and smooth it out even more. Let’s call this part of the experiment Mode 1.
Then the delay can be increased to several hundred milliseconds. Now the lagging behind of the red circle is obvious. Nevertheless, with little patience, even here we can experience things in a concentrated way, as ‘being in the flow’, so to speak. In a sense, the red circle feels as if attached to the cursor with an elastic thread. Note that both the cursor and the red circle are perceptions in our present ‘now’ state. The red circle is not in the ‘past’, it’s only that its present movements no longer correspond to our real-time hand movements. Yet, the movements of both objects feel as something holistic, as if fused by intuitive temporal glue. This intuition is in the present too, yet it gives us a sense of temporal extension or ‘thickness’ of our ‘now’ state. We somehow grasp that the movements of the red circle are fully in phase with the fading reverberations of our intuitive intents from an instant ago. This is not something to overintellectualize but to intuitively feel. Our present intuitive orientation spreads over both objects and gives us a clear sense of what we are perceiving. If you find it difficult, try to make sure you are not switching your gaze between the cursor and the red circle, but instead, defocus slightly and try to grasp them both as a single object. Then again, slowing down and smoothing out always helps. We may call this Mode 2.
Then, as we continue to increase the delay toward one second and more, things become more difficult. Now much greater exertion and concentration are needed if we are to feel the movements as something whole. If we continue to increase the delay, at some point the invisible elastic thread is ‘severed’, and now we find our attention jumping between the cursor and the red circle. When our attention is on the cursor, the circle feels in the periphery and barely moving under our control. This effect becomes even more dramatic when we increase the delay to even greater values. Now the red circle may feel as if moving completely on its own, as some completely foreign object. On the other hand, if our attention is anchored on the circle, we still continue to move the cursor but on autopilot, so to speak. The consequence of this is that the temporal curvature of our movements is not vividly intuited (it remains in the background as it were) and thus by the time the circle repeats these movements, they feel as something that we do not remember sharply. Of course, we do have the general sense that the circle must be repeating what we have done, but this intuition is vague. For example, if someone secretly modifies the program to introduce small random variations along the overall path of the circle’s movement, by the time we perceive it we would hardly be able to tell that the circle is not moving in exactly the same way as we moved the cursor.
This splitting of attention may provoke us to move the cursor in small increments – we move a little, then stop, stay concentrated on our temporal intent, and simply wait until the circle catches up. This certainly works but now the whole movement consists of discrete segments of alternating activity and patient static receptivity. Another way in which we can help ourselves is if we try to maintain a more holistic temporal curvature instead of moving the cursor completely spontaneously. As an analogy, if we are asked to think of a sequence of ten random numbers, we would do that very easily but may have a very hard time repeating the exact same sequence. It is easy to understand why. The sequence has intentionally been severed from any holistic temporal curvature. As a matter of fact, this is how we think of random things – we simply try to condense a mental image by intentionally constricting our temporal intuition in a narrow ‘now’ as if to avoid feeling the mental image flowing through some temporally extended intuitive curvature, which would make the mental image no longer feel random but intended. Such a curvature is present if we are told to count to ten. We don’t have a problem repeating this sequence as many times as necessary because we are intimately familiar with the temporal curvature. In a similar way, when we move the cursor spontaneously (randomly) the sequence of movements follow each other without any extended temporal glue, and thus it is more difficult to repeat the same movements or recognize that the circle is moving in their curvature. This could be alleviated if we try to move the cursor along the lines of simple geometric figures (circle, triangle, rectangle, etc.), whose temporal intuition we can hold on to more easily. In this way we may find out that we can support Mode 2 even with greater delays. Let’s call Mode 3 the severing of the temporal thread and entering the state of jittery jumping of attention where we may see the red circle’s movements as surprising and foreign (we no longer hold on to the temporal intuition that would make the perceived movements feel holistically united with our activity).
Here we are already hinted at an important principle – to have an intuitive grasp of time, we need to compress that intuition into something space-like. For example, if we toggle the ‘show thread’ option in the experiment, encompassing the movements of the cursor and circle becomes trivial. The thread is something completely space-like. If we are shown a still image of the experiment without being told about its details, we would say “That’s just a curvy line.” However, in our dynamic case, this curvy line anchors our temporal intuition. It is no mere spatial picture but a representation of something that can only be experienced in time. Actually, when we experiment without visualizing the thread, we are already instinctively doing something similar in our inner activity – we aim to hold within our attention span the intuition of the whole path as a space-like trail (like a comet’s tail), as something that we can encompass as a whole.
It can be noted that Mode 3 is practically what we spend most of our daily cognitive life into. We are rarely in a narrowly concentrated or flow mode. Instead, at any time, our inner life consists of a patchwork of loosely related mental images. Our intuitive context certainly gives these images certain cohesion but most of our ordinary inner life feels more like trying to patch some meaningful tapestry out of the mental and emotional fragments of an inner storm.
Temporal intuition in purely imaginative activity
This whole experiment can be taken entirely in our imaginative space. We can move our focused ray of attention in our imagination and picture how it is followed in the same path by a circle. To make it easier, we may once again use our imagined hands (of course, everything that we’ll say about these exercises can always be rehearsed with our physical hands). We can take the index finger of one hand to be the cursor, while the other will be the follower. Let’s build this exercise step by step.
First, we should get a good feel for Mode 1 finger movement (we take only the leading finger in isolation). We laser-focus entirely in its tip and make spontaneous, smooth, and uninterrupted movements without any concern for past and future finger positions. We can move the finger in the full spatial volume and not only on a flat plane.
Then we take also the second finger and put them together with tips touching. Now, we move them together still in Mode 1. The next step would be to gradually separate the two fingers, yet still move them as one whole. It can help if we try to feel them as if attached by a rigid invisible rod.
The fingers can be separated even further by spreading our arms on both sides. Even though the fingers are now far apart, there shouldn’t be any jumping of attention between them. They should feel simultaneously within our attention, and they should move in full synchrony driven by a singular intuitive intent. When the fingers are far apart it becomes difficult to hold them together in our visual attention, thus we should rather try to feel holistically their kinesthetic sensations.
All of this is still Mode 1. The only difference is that our intuitive ray has now expanded to guide the lighting up of two imagined fingers. In that sense, it would be better not to imagine them lighting up sequentially as in the CRT analogy but holistically as if by the light cone of a movie projector.
So far the movements are temporally simple. We only have point-focused or spread-out (but still spatially whole) imaginative activity that metamorphoses the images with no regard to past and future movements, but only spontaneously within a very narrow ‘now’. We transition to Mode 2 when one finger begins to lag behind. Even though the imagined fingers are still both in the present moment, now our intuitive activity is temporally compound, so to speak.
In a sense, we need to keep within our attention span all the movements of the leading finger until the lagging finger repeats them. As seen, even if we don’t aim consciously for it, this is accomplished by trying to hold the intuition of the spatial picture of the path between the two fingers as something whole (besides spontaneous paths we can also experiment with simple geometric ones). Something similar is achieved also in the video feedback exercise. The visual picture of the feedback is not in the ‘past’ but anchors in a spatial way the temporally compound intuition of the receding images following in the footsteps of prior camera movements (corresponding to the leading finger). In any case, our momentary spatial experience is imbued with intuitive temporal thickness.
The whole act should feel as something whole, glued together by the intuitive curvature (which can indeed feel like a luminous curvy trail) within which both fingers move even though spatiotemporally displaced. Slow down as much as needed in order to feel everything as a high-resolution smooth fluid, without attention jumping and skipping. And again – our lagging finger is not in the ‘past’. Both fingers are in the now. It is our present temporally compound intuition – which can be grasped as consisting of the intuitive intent of the leading finger plus the reverberations of prior intents – that makes the fingers’ movements feel temporally whole.
When we imagine the finger movements, the mental images follow the thread of our intentions. Consider how the red circle on the screen is not some object-in-itself. We rather have pixels flashing red or white and producing the impression of a moving colorful blob. Now this analogy shouldn’t be taken completely literally but, as explained above with the CRT metaphor, it is still better if we do not imagine, for example, our imagined hand or a verbal word, as some metaphysical entities that exist in imaginative space, and that we somehow manipulate them with our intuitive intents. Instead, it would be more realistic if we try to feel how our intended flow continually replenishes the images, guiding their condensation anew at different places, as it were, while the reverberations of prior condensations fade and become ingrained as dim intuition in the compressed picture of the World flow. We have no justification to say that we somehow single-handedly create the inner qualia of the mental images (just like we can’t say that the electron ray creates the luminophore) but we surely feel causally involved in their lighting up.
The flow experience cannot be built from the fragments of its analysis
If we are to experience the reality of all this, we need to put all intellectual analysis aside and aim for the holistic flow where there’s no jumping of attention between the two fingers, and they follow the same temporal curvature fluidly. If we try to see our intuitive activity as ‘made of’ past reverberations, we are no longer doing the main exercise but instead, we are condensing completely different mental pictures. All such analyzing mental images can only be produced in retrospect as we try to convey the experience, yet the experience cannot be built from mechanical patching together of the mental images. In the same way, we can intellectually decompose the experience of riding a bicycle in fragments “hold the handlebars”, “step on the pedals”, etc. but it can never be built from these mental fragments. We should use the fragments as roadsigns toward reaching the real experience and only then we’ll be able to intellectually decompose it on our own if needed. This doesn’t mean that the experience is ‘made of’ these decomposed mental images any more than a tree can be said to be made of several snapshots taken of it from different angles.
The takeaway here is that when we get in the flow of Mode 2, even though we are moving the fingers as temporally displaced, we can do that in a fully conscious way, only if our intuitive intent – which lights up the images of both the leading and the lagging finger in the present moment – becomes fractal-like (in a qualitative sense, not necessarily visual), that is, it should somehow ‘buffer’ within itself all the intermediate spontaneous increments of our intuitive intents until the lagging finger repeats them. Here one may say that our brain performs this buffering and automatically ‘draws’ our lagging finger after some delay, just like the computer does that buffering for us in the interactive experiment. This, however, even if it is the case, does not contradict what we’re trying to accomplish. We are not trying to ‘explain’ what our experience is ‘made of’ but we are only striving for a holistic spatiotemporal experience. The latter is completely independent of whatever our philosophy about ‘what lies behind experience’ might be. The fact is that as long as we simply philosophize and patch mental images of neurons, energies, etc., we remain in the fragmentary Mode 3. What we aim for, however, is the holistic smooth flow of Mode 2. Our analyzing inner voice should be unbrokenly concentrated in the movements as if we need to disarm a dangerous device threatening the whole world, and any jerk of attention away from the holistic flow can trigger a disaster.