When we imagine moving mental images in inner space, we experience nearly zero delay. Here one may habitually object “This feels so in the simple case when we imagine a single finger but don’t we experience a delay when we imagine the lagging finger?” Yet it was precisely the goal of the previous lengthy elaboration to clear the confusion about this – the lighting up of both leading and lagging fingers is still produced by our present temporally ‘compound’ intuitive ray. Thus we might say that in our thinking, intuitive intent and mental image are almost ‘in phase’. Yet, as seen, the delay is not exactly zero. We still feel that our intuitive intents (whether temporally compound or simple) lead the condensation (lighting up) of mental images. It is very important to grasp this, if not vividly and concretely, at least as an intuitive feeling of anticipation. If we can’t comprehend how the artistic engineering of our intuitive flow can be experienced first and foremost at the horizon of condensing mental images – that is, our thinking life and imagination – then everything that follows will be seen only as wild speculations. If we refuse to awaken within this deeper stratum of our intuitive being, which can meaningfully (yet in the beginning only quite clumsily and instinctively) steer the condensation flow, we’ll simply experience the torrents of our criticizing and doubting inner voice, which however manifests quite automatically along intuitive curvatures that we naively call ‘me’, even though we hardly comprehend why they are such.
It is precisely when we consider such a criticizing and doubting inner voice, that we can realize how our cognitive flow is rarely navigated under the guidance of meaningful intuitive consonances and dissonances (that is – reason). In our inner life we are continuously in such a situation where we instinctively push and pull in certain directions, yet do not recognize how in this way we build up tensions within the World flow, that later manifest through elastic rebounds, which now however, may feel to us as completely foreign forces. The deeper we try to investigate why we are opposed to something like the above-described awakening, the more we may realize how our deeper inner life flows in a region of morphing feelings, where sympathies and antipathies rule. As said previously, these look like simple sensations of pleasure and displeasure only at the horizon of condensation. When we gain consciousness at their intrinsic depth, we re-discover them as meaningful path-bending forces, and we also conceive how we can transform these forces and thus bend the flow of condensation on a deeper level. In this way, every dim sympathy and antipathy that manifests as a mere feeling phenomenon in our ordinary consciousness is an invitation to grow into corresponding novel flow-bending degrees of freedom of our intuitive being. Such transformation can’t be achieved by just thinking intellectually about it (although this is a necessary starting point) because this thinking normally manifests only very close to the horizon. These thoughts are like Tetris pieces for whose condensation we barely have any intuitive sense and we only helplessly witness their collision with the accumulating kernel. Such freefalling thinking doesn’t have the momentum to bend the flow on a deeper level, thus as we saw, we’re normally prone to think under the elastic tensions of sympathies and antipathies. We condense mental images and actions from the incoming flow that our likes and dislikes unknowingly shape for us. We need greater inner strength and inner effort on a different scale if we are to augment the flow at that level. We need even greater strength and persistence if our intuitive intents are to guide the flow at the still deeper levels of character, religious and moral impulses.
Let’s try to gain a clearer intuition of all this. The delay experiment can be said to lie within our meso-scale sphere of bodily experiences. Both the cursor and the red circle are perceptions in our present visual field, except that the latter repeats the movements of the former with a certain delay (the same can be demonstrated with the fingers exercise). As long as we can sustain the reverberating temporal intuition of our prior moving intents, the red circle seems to lawfully follow in its curvature. Yet even in this flat delay experiment, there’s still a hint of depth. Both the cursor and the red circle follow our intuitive intents, but we can’t say that we find these intents as originating in the plane of our visual perceptions. Instead, as already established, it feels as if our intuitive intents take form at a different level of depth, and our hand movements and perceptions only condense accordingly, following in their lead. To refine this sense of depth, let’s examine another interactive experiment.
Here we have a simplified mechanical simulation of concentric circles (representing the spheres of our stretching exercise) that are linked to each other with elastic bands. Of all the circles we can exercise control only on the middle. We do that by using the slider to apply torque and accelerate its rotation left or right. We can quickly see how complicated the behavior of this whole system becomes. Unlike a simple harmonic pendulum, whose movements are very easy to encompass with holistic temporal intuition, here we witness a much more chaotic behavior.
The second slider controls a ‘veil’, through which we can progressively hide all circles except the middle. Try to feel how unintuitive the movements of the circle feel in that case. Although we apply torque with very clear intuitive intent, the movements exhibit quite strange behavior, such that we may even feel frustration. And isn’t this what we go through in our lives all the time? We continuously try to turn the sphere of our meso-scale intents, we picture doing this or that, going here or there, yet we constantly encounter the unintuitive elastic tensions of the World flow. In the other direction, when we are nervous and rushed, our meso-scale intents can be quite out-of-phase with the micro spheres of bodily life – our movements are jerky, we’re fidgeting, we knock objects off, we keep mistyping when writing a message, and so on. Most of our human problems can be traced to such a lack of insight into the metamorphoses of the World flow. We act naively, imagining that just because we apply torque in a certain direction, the whole World flow should conform, and follow just like the red dot follows the cursor. Yet, we soon encounter unexpected elastic tensions, bending our movie flow in unintuitive ways.
This doesn’t mean that we are completely at the mercy of unknown interferences. We can already use our feeling life as a kind of sense organ. We can’t easily convey that with the online demonstration (although the colors of the elastic bands try to represent it) but if we were to apply torque by hand, we would feel certain tension that tends to resist or assist it. Thus in our inner life it is as if we say “When I steer my mental flow in that ideal direction (that is, when I try to think about so and so) I feel certain unpleasant tension building up. When I steer in that other direction, a certain sense of well-being manifests, I feel freer and lighter.” Yet, we know from experience that simply following these sensations naively, rarely ends up well. For example, eating tasty food feels nice but if we continue to push in that direction we overeat and then feel abdominal pain. Conversely, many thoughts and actions feel unpleasant at face value, such as doing some housework, yet if we push beyond the immediate discomfort we are later rewarded with greater well-being. Thus in our sympathies and antipathies, we live in hysteresis-like or gyroscopic elastic tensions, where pushing in one direction, often bends the flow in another.
For the reactionary intellect, such dynamics are completely unintuitive. We need great wisdom to navigate this flow, which can only be gradually gained through experience.
Now this experiment should by no means be taken for a model of reality. We should clearly understand that we are not trying to make assemblies of scaled mental images that make an explanatory model of existence. Instead, our living experience is primary. The picture of elastically connected circles is only an artistic way of conveying how our inner experience feels like. It is not possible to hold these images on the surface of the intellectual sphere, move them around and say “I understand now.” We can certainly feel the planar logical consistency of the mental images snapping together, but to understand in the true sense, we can only do by entering the living experiences from whence we ourselves would be able to describe how they feel like through similar metaphors, analogies and experiments.
With that said, we can nevertheless point out a few limitations of the experiment which do not faithfully describe our inner experience. First, in the experiment, only the middle circle can be intentionally controlled. All other circles only passively follow the elastic pushes and pulls. This is different in reality where all spacetime scales can be grasped as being causally active and interfering. Second, it would be misleading if we imagine that the contextual spheres have influence only on the adjacent ones. Rather, we should conceive that all spheres fully interpenetrate and mutually constrain each other, even though not all spheres influence each other equally. Some may be more ‘in tune’ and others pass through each other like electromagnetic waves with different polarizations. Third, our inner activity is not limited only to a single sphere at the meso scale. We shouldn’t say ‘I am the green circle’. This is certainly where our activity finds its lucid reflection, and thus self-consciousness, yet we are also instinctively active in other spheres too. Our inner being spreads along the full spectrum of spacetime scales. Fourth, we should remember that the spheres are symbols for our intuitive orientation and not some metaphysical objects that can be observed in the way we behold the contents of the physical senses. What they imaginatively represent is the way the curvature of the condensation flow is shaped at different scales. Yet the reality that the spheres symbolize can only be found when we awaken to the flow-bending inner activity at the corresponding scales. It is the goal of inner development to expand our intuitive horizon and make these flow-bending movements more and more conscious and holistically attuned. This can first happen only with respect to our hidden sympathies and antipathies that secretly steer our thinking flow. If we are not willing to awaken to the way our inner flow is constantly being pulled hither and thither by as-of-yet-unknown elastic forces, everything said here will remain as jittery mental images on the surface of the intellectual sphere.
Such a statement may already clash with our preconceived ideas of what we are, where our consciousness is located, and so on. For example, when we think of our preferences, opinions, likes and dislikes, our present culture urges us to imagine that they are all contained within the bounds of our skin, probably encoded within the connections of nerve tissues. At this meso bodily scale, however, we experience only the momentary emotional sensations, which rightfully feel within our bodily sphere. However, to find the reality of the elastic forces within which our inner life unfolds, we need to stretch out and reach into denied spacetime. This might be a hard pill to swallow, but it proves true nonetheless, as soon as we allow ourselves to deepen the experiences of our inner life. To find the elastic curvatures of our soul being we already need to go through the inversion. Our deeper existence can only become unveiled to our lucid consciousness if we humbly open up toward greater encompassing spheres, where the secret forces of our soul nature elastically steer the condensation of our inner stream.
Depth experience of Mode 2
Even though the imagined rotations of the spheres engage mainly our geometric imagination, they can still be felt as imbued with intuitive temporal thickness, just like the thread in the delay experiment: even though purely spatial, it is felt to portray temporal intuition. We can start by transforming the delay experiment into movements of spheres (activate the ‘show spheres’ option for a hint). It might be easier if we focus on rotating a single sphere, just like in the regular stretching exercise, while the lagging sphere is only felt as a trail, much like a comet’s tail. Once again, we are striving for Mode 2 here. It’s not that important to feel the trailing movements very sharply but just to sense how our imaginative ray is expanded and we grasp the movements as something whole. It is especially important to feel the simultaneous movements at different scales, for example, how while we rotate a body-scale sphere, there could be a macro-scale trail that is holistically grasped within the total volume of inner space. As usual, most difficulties can be overcome if we remember to slow down and smooth out the movements. Rushing the movements always leads to erratic jumping of attention and thus Mode 3.
Once we get a feel for movements in our whole imaginative volume, the exercise naturally begins to feel similar to the interactive experiement. Now it’s not a question of specifically picturing delayed movements, but to simply feel how the rotations of the leading sphere are nested within very complicated elastic relations with all other spheres. Clearly, we can have any success in these exercises only if we have already gained some familiarity with the stretching exercise itself. The latter can be considered as the Mode 1 version of what we are now aiming for. Even though in the stretching exercise we are not rotating the spheres spontaneously but according to the general idea of alternating turning, the movements can still be considered as temporally simple as far as we are fully concentrated on the rotation of a single sphere. Now, however, our attention span needs to be compound, and thus grasp holistically also the reverberating rotations at different scales. We repeat that all these rotations are present in the ‘now’, projected by our intuitive cone. This intuition imbues the rotations with the holistic comprehension of their complicated elastic relations.
All of this leads us to the main goal in meditation and inner development. As explained, the spheres should only be grasped as geometric symbols for the contextual spheres of inner intuitive life at different scales. Thus, the rotations of the spheres that are out-of-phase and fighting each other, should be understood as the aspects of our inner life that are often in such relations. We often desire for one thing, our reason tells us another, while our bodily context constrains us into a third. By naively fighting these rotations, we usually only agitate them more.
Now we can better understand the goal of something like the meditative song. Even though we aim for a perfectly laminar flow, we shouldn’t be worried that we’ll make the World flow so simple and featureless. The goal is only that through the concentration of our inner activity at all scales, we gain the receptivity and strength to understand the movements of our inner life. This is half of our task. In concentration, we recognize the secret torques of our existential flow but learning how to harmonize them wisely, is a never-ending process that requires us to continually awaken to novel aspects of our intuitive being that can be consciously active at different scales. This harmonization is not something we achieve for ourselves in isolation but concerns the total evolutionary World flow.
Higher consciousness grows from Mode 2 experience
The key skill that we should gather from these simple exercises is the ability to instill, even for a short while, a holistic spatiotemporal flow. Even if we are only chasing our fingers, we still have the chance to feel this smooth flow, without jittery jumping of attention, where we grasp holistically not only the spatial aspect of inner space but also its temporal intuitive trails. Since these intuitive trails are not in some speculative time dimension of reality, but intuitively extend the present moment, it is possible to grasp at least a small sphere of our inner life (where we chase our fingers) as something for which we have a much more fluid and coherent intuition of the condensation flow. The most important thing to master is the unbroken continuity of the flow. Activity and receptivity flow together as a tightly integrated real-time stream. Otherwise, we are always prone to split the flow into bursts of instinctive activity followed by moments of passive receptivity. Deeper investigation of this tendency reveals that it is at the basis of our dual intellectual cognition which decomposes the flow into orthogonal space and time, forms and transformations, things and processes. This finds its reflection even in the structure of language (which largely formats our thinking) based on nouns (space) and verbs (time).
From this point onward, it is really a matter of growing the coherency of this sphere in all directions. We can by no means accomplish this by force. This would simply throw us into the hectic movements of Mode 3. Neither can we go too far if we keep philosophizing and seek to grasp everything through meso-scale mental models. We should gradually let go even of the images of the spheres that we have so deliberately built here. Their elastic rotations are only symbolic expressions for the infinitely rich experience of the condensing flow.
Any concentrated Mode 2 state can serve as a gateway from within which consciousness can expand through the scales of inner life. It is a matter of resisting our usual intellectual movements which analyze and rip apart the coherent state into mental fragments. When we are able to sufficiently sustain the Mode 2 concentration, our whole inner space begins to feel as metamorphosing within the holistic coherency of a deeper soul life. Just as the movement of our two fingers feels like something whole, so now even greater volume of inner space assumes such a fluidly cohered character. This doesn’t mean that it becomes simple and featureless. In fact, the inner imagery that begins to flash in our consciousness feels to be far richer and manifold than what our visual senses normally portray. This is also why it is so tempting to break down these images and analyze them into convenient (for our intellect) fragments.
Nevertheless, this manifoldness is felt to be intuitively coherent when grasped at the corresponding scales. Ultimately, in this way, we discover a completely new way of comprehending space and time. Instead of patching a tapestry of scaled spacetime mental images that feel subjective and abstract, while their meaning points to the ‘real’ space and time ‘out there’, by starting from our own inner activity, we gradually find the intuitively intended curvatures of the spacetime flow as experiential reality expanding from the Mode 2 concentration.
The veil in the second experiment is not something that we can lift mechanically (at least not in a healthy way). Instead, it should be the natural result of increasing musical cohesion between intuitive movements at different scales. As long as we are locked in our intellectual meso-scale sphere and we struggle with the unintuitive elastic tensions, the whole World flow impresses into our inner life as some foreign, even hostile force. We can only know the inner reality of this flow if we start from our most immediate vicinity – the soul context within which our ordinary conscious flow condenses. If we take an honest survey of our inner life, we would have to admit that we are rarely in control of our inner flow. When we give ourselves to the senses, the physical spectrum of the World flow is the main factor stimulating the mental images and feelings of our conscious life. In other instances, when we withdraw within ourselves, we enter a state that is popularly known as daydreaming. Most of these daydreams are reverberations of meso-scale experiences guided by desires, hopes, fears, etc., but just what we flow through, is rarely our conscious decision. It is in such moments that we can get a hint of the deeper soul processes that elastically pull our intellectual activity into one direction or another, and we often struggle and fight with these tensions.
As we seek to tame down the elastic rebounds and find cohesion with the higher-order contextual spheres, we begin to recognize how our inner life has always flown through such unsuspected curvatures of a deeper soul being. In a sense, this deeper being continuously dreams and navigates a dream environment. Daydreams are these moments when we can more clearly recognize how our intellectual self is caught into such dream flows. At our meso-scale we feel that we navigate a space of physical constraints. For example, if we face an obstacle and we stubbornly keep moving forward, we’ll experience repelling forces that prevent us from moving that way. Instead, we need to find wiser ways of applying the torques of our will and circumvent the obstacle. In a similar way, our deeper soul being navigates and bends a higher-order dream flow manifesting within an elastic space of feeling tensions. Here, instead of physical obstacles, our being faces the resistance of a fear, difficult relations with another soul, a desire, aspiration, and so on. All these interferences are just as real as the physical obstacle, and we might say that they are even more real because they are experienced in a much more intimate way within expanded inner space, while the physical constraints, even though undeniable, still face us only as a mysterious tapestry. For example, when we experience pain, we couldn’t care less if there’s a neurological basis for it. What matters is that we experience the condensation of a real painful feeling and that we need to exercise our degrees of freedom in such a way that the condensation flow can be bent differently. In this sense, our soul-self navigates a complicated space of feeling tensions, whose intuitive aspects can artistically manifest in a dream-like flow of imagery. As such, we may say that what the meso-scale physical constraints are for our waking intellectual self, is what the higher-order curvatures of destiny are for our deeper soul-self. The soul-self’s natural environment is within the greater and more inert contextual spheres, which largely drag around the lighter spheres where our ordinary ticking-scale flow manifests. The soul-self is concerned not with perceived objects but with comprehending and shaping the existential flow.
Even though in essence we are one with that soul-self, it still hovers as an independent being within the deeper spheres of our existence. The movements of our intellectual self can easily oppose and experience tensions with the deeper dream flow of the soul being. As said previously, we shouldn’t imagine that this soul being dreams the physical world (including our body and life processes). This is also the reason why this soul-self is still developing, it is still acting instinctively because the torques it applies at these scales are not always wisely harmonized with all other scales. For instance, the soul being does not yet fully comprehend the constraints of the physical world and that’s why some of its aspirations can in fact increase tensions in the greater flow. Thus, we may say that the dream flow of the undeveloped soul tends to drift into fantasy, and soon clashes with the deeper World flow. On the other hand, our sensory-intellectual being at the meso scale has a fair intuitive orientation within the metamorphoses of the physical spectrum, yet moves within the higher-order movements of destiny completely blindly, fighting them and causing elastic rebounds. We can easily see from this how our evolutionary development consists precisely in this vertical (or depth) integration of being.
Inner activity at any scale provides a causally active ‘spectral band’ of the World flow that can’t be compensated for by any other scale. Our higher soul being cannot properly gain orientation within the flow of destiny without the intuitive insights that can only be gained at the sensory-intellectual scale. At the same time, as the veil hints, the expansion of consciousness proceeds in both directions, so to speak. When we begin to awaken within our higher soul being, we also begin to comprehend certain aspects of our micro-scale life. In particular, we begin to sense how the dream flow of the soul being is very tightly related with the functioning of the bodily organs, like the liver, heart, lungs, and so on. In all cases, however, these intuitive insights are not gained by mere patching or mental images but from our consciousness expanding from the Mode 2 concentration. Then, just as our fingers chase one another along a holistic intuitive flow, so we begin to experience our thinking flow as holistically embedded into the deeper dream-like soul flow. As soon as we begin to ponder questions like “But what am I in relation to that deeper soul being?”, the flow state fragments and we find ourselves patching up metaphysical mental images. For the duration of the harmonized flow we feel to be one with the higher being and we feel that we navigate and bend the dream flow together, even though our intellectual being has a very limited intuition of the soul-flow dynamics. In the other direction, the sensations in the physical kernel become much more differentiated, we begin to sense the presence of the various internal organs, and, for example, we gain much deeper insight about the way our soul life is unfolded over the rhythms of breathing and blood circulation. As such, proper harmonization of our meso-scale sensory-intellectual flow with the deeper soul flow (macro scale), is simultaneously related to rhythmic harmonization of the lower (micro-scale) life, of which, breathing and circulation are the most proximate.
Finding the relation of our intellectual self to the totality of the World flow is an inherently difficult task. It’s not that it is technically difficult but it is constantly undermined by the tendency of the intellectual self to define and identify itself with certain sets of mental images. For instance, this tends to make the soul-self feel like some completely distinct entity that influences our flow from outside our inner experience. In reality, however, even though the movements of the deeper soul spheres are indeed quite independent of our meso-scale intuitive intents, all these spheres are one within another. This also gives deeper meaning to the word ‘concentration’. In that, we truly make the spheres concentric (sharing the same center) and musically attuned. The soul-self bends the flow from within the very same ‘here and now’ that we know in our intellectual being. The difference is within the greater scope of the intuitive curvature that is being shaped from within this center, and within which our ordinary inner life, at our meso ticking scale, is modulated.
