"Bring forth the blind people that have eyes, and the deaf that have ears." (Is. 43:8)
In Part I, we began to distinguish between the contents of sensory, emotional, and mental experience, on the one hand, and the invisible inner constraints which shape and steer those contents, on the other. We began to invisibly ‘touch’ our way through some of these constraints with our thinking, relating them to the flow of our first-person experience. As mentioned, such a broad and relatively abstract conceptual foundation can act as the soil from which more concrete intuitions of the inner constraints will eventually grow. By “abstract”, we don’t mean what normally passes for philosophical thinking these days, i.e. theoretical systems which appeal to metaphysical concepts about the ‘nature of reality’, where the latter is felt as unrelated to our first-person spiritual activity. Instead, the concepts we use here are always related to our ongoing spiritual activity and the meaningful experience that feeds back on it. These concepts will remain abstract, however, insofar as our inner experience is normally tightly ‘laminated’ together and feels like a homogenous domain of ‘consciousness’ or nebulous impulses, emotions, and thoughts.
So, to begin with, we may not have many points of contact between the spiritual concepts we are using and our lucid memory intuition of experiences we have gone through and corresponding knowledge we have attained. These concepts are then felt like mathematical formulas for the person who has not yet moved their thinking through timeless mathematical relations. What follows should help us further ‘delaminate’ the temporally thick strata of inner experience and establish more points of contact, so the concepts become less and less abstract, more and more intimate to our daily experience. Many people today seek the ‘spiritual’ as a nebulous feeling of Unity with the Cosmos, but in this way we do nothing to differentiate the inner life and attain a refined intuitive orientation to its contextual structure. This inner differentiation brings us to the Unity of perceptual experience in a much different way, a way that was instinctively experienced by our ancestors and that is highly practical for life.
It helps to briefly survey this different way of ‘seeing’ that was experienced by our ancestors, which is also the spiritual sight that we aim to recover in more lucid thinking consciousness.
(1)We can best approach the difference, if we conceive that formerly it was really unavoidable, it was the normal thing, to experience the phenomena of nature in a way which we only achieve by special effort, and with the help of the faculty we call “imagination”. In a moment of vision, and of heightened consciousness, with the help of the poet or painter, we may perhaps say to ourselves “all the world that passes away, is only a similitude”, but the moment fades; and we find ourselves once more in the old familiar world of expressive objects and events… What does it signify to behold nature in this way – imaginatively? It signifies, necessarily, that the consciousness of the beholder has another link with nature besides the link through the “contacts of the senses.” If I apprehend the visible as an image, or copy, of the invisible soul-spiritual substance, then I feel a relation between that soul-spiritual substance and my own soul and spirit just as I feel myself related, not only to the visible body, but also to the invisible soul and spirit of another human being. It signifies an extra sensory link between man and the phenomenon.
At this time of ‘atavistic clairvoyance’, as it is sometimes referred to, the phenomena of Nature were instinctively known as symbolic testimonies to invisible realms populated by Divine beings and their intentional activities. By ‘realms’, we don’t mean some remote and theoretical domains of reality, but differentiated contents of experience within the depths of the soul. These contents lawfully metamorphose in unique ways and therefore can be experienced as distinct ‘realms’ or ‘worlds’, just as the sensory elements of life metamorphose according to ‘laws of nature’ and are experienced as the ‘physical world’. None of the realms were felt to exist only as abstract concepts or theories like we have in many spiritual movements today, but rather the soul (which was not yet ‘individual’, but more entangled in what we now feel as ‘communities’) concretely felt that a better part of its existence unfolded in these realms, especially during dreaming and sleeping states. In other words, the soul could not possibly imagine the events that it experienced in its immediate surroundings belonged to a self-enclosed domain of ‘natural laws’. It could not imagine that perceptible objects and events caused other perceptible objects and events in a domino-like chain of linear cause and effect.
Such an painting can act as a metaphorical pointer to the inner experience of what Owen Barfield called ‘original participation’. It is the experience that one’s thoughts, feelings, and impulses are not ‘private’ or possessed by an individual subject, contained within the boundaries of the skull and skin. Rather, these experiences were felt to be completely interwoven with and structured through a common invisible environment of intelligent perspectives, just as we know our physical body is structured through the elements of the common sensory environment in which we breathe air, digest food, etc. We can recover a dim sense of that original participation if we imagine entering a daydream state where our mental pictures seem to be bubbling up within us as if they have a life of their own; like we have stuck our heads into a metaphorical anthill and our thoughts are now crawling around independently of our will. In the state of original participation, there are no sharp boundaries between “our” thoughts, feelings, and impulses, and those imaged by the natural phenomena of the environment (including perceptions of other humans).
Another way to feel this participatory state at the more conscious end of the spectrum is to imagine the experience of listening to an engrossing lecture or presentation on a topic in which we are highly interested. In this state, it is as if the ‘ticking’ of our combinatorial mental states has stopped and rather the meaningful speech of the presenter is thinking through us in a holistic way. There is hardly any sense of a surrounding environment of fragmented sensations that is distinct from ‘who we are’ and drags out attention, rather our sense of identity is entirely entangled with the ideal flow of meaning into which we are merged (at least until we get distracted by personal thoughts, feelings, or sensations). We may have also experienced a similar sense of entanglement in an ideal flow when working intensely on an important project with others. Then we may have had moments where we felt as belonging to a ‘hive mind’ in which no particular person was producing private thoughts, but rather the inspiring and insightful ideas were incarnating as collective phenomena into the hive.
Barfield goes on to describe how, in the heart of ancient Egyptian culture that was still enmeshed in the natural participatory and image-making consciousness, there arose a personality named Moses who was inspired to lead his people toward, not only distancing themselves from the natural image-making capacity of the ancient cultures at that time, but actively suppressing it. A new impulse exploded onto the scene of human history that began to individuate the hive mind. “Thou shalt utterly overthrow them, and quite break down their images… ye shall destroy their images, break their altars and cut down their groves.” (2) He brings our attention to Psalm 104 where, unlike the Greek plays and myths, the author does not experience the Gods clothed in natural objects and events but rather as a Grand Architect of nature, fashioning its measures, weights, and quantities from without. All natural processes have now transitioned into testimonies for the unified, invisible, and mysterious God that is responsible for the former, but cannot be found contained within its sensory content.
"He made the moon to mark the seasons;
the sun knows when to set.
You bring darkness, and it becomes night,
when all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The young lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they withdraw;
they lie down in their dens.
Man goes forth to his work
and to his labor until evening.
How many are Your works, O LORD!
In wisdom You have made them all;
the earth is full of Your creatures.
Here is the sea, vast and wide,
teeming with creatures beyond number,
living things both great and small.
There the ships pass,
and Leviathan, which You formed to frolic there." (3)
the sun knows when to set.
You bring darkness, and it becomes night,
when all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The young lions roar for their prey
and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they withdraw;
they lie down in their dens.
Man goes forth to his work
and to his labor until evening.
How many are Your works, O LORD!
In wisdom You have made them all;
the earth is full of Your creatures.
Here is the sea, vast and wide,
teeming with creatures beyond number,
living things both great and small.
There the ships pass,
and Leviathan, which You formed to frolic there." (3)
We can regain a lot of inner sensitivity for these metamorphosing aspects of experience by living into the impulses underlying such words. They can act as a portal through which we begin to feel the evolution of our own modern thinking. Another such portal is the development from ancient to modern artistic forms. For example, we can sense how the non-perspectival religious paintings of the pre-modern era reflected a much more integrated feeling for the soul-spiritual essence of 'outer' objects and events, which were equally present on a 2D plane, than the modern perspectival paintings where people and objects are dispersed and isolated from each other in 3D space. In the former, everything depicted feels like it is a critical yet mysterious element of the inner narrative that is being artistically portrayed, whereas in the latter, there is a central theme surrounded by various clear-cut and intelligible details which could just as easily be changed or eliminated. Of course, we are not judging the quality of the art here, only pointing to an unfolding shift in conscious experience.
The transition from the medieval era to the modern era was the culmination of the seeds planted in ancient Judea. Notice how, in the very act of resisting the natural imaginative capacity, the ancient Hebrews and those who inherited their impulse (which was eventually everyone in the Western world) became more acutely aware of their own personality (in distinction to the natural environment) and their own personal responsibility for the creation of new, more ghostly images (thoughts) that could symbolize the meaning they were experiencing. They began to experience themselves wrestling mightily with these thoughts as Jacob wrestled with the Angel. Through such active resistance, the holistic and naturally entangled images that flowed into them from without could now be more clearly sensed as pieced together from within, in relatively increasing freedom from ancient traditions, blood ties, nationalities, etc. (4) By the time of the Scholastics in the Middle Ages, thinkers had to reason their way to the conclusion that the transpersonal Divine was still active in the soul life, i.e. it was no longer a matter of self-evident experience.
We only approach the deeper meaning of such religious and philosophical narratives when we understand them as phenomenological descriptions of evolving streams of soul experience in which we ourselves are still taking part and in which we still have concrete roles to play in bringing the narratives to their completion. By taking that recursive perspective on the historical content, we are building a bridge from our modern intellectual experience to the imaginative participatory experience of our ancestors. The natural world for modern man has now become a series of perceptual objects (including other souls) with clearly defined contours separated in space and time, linked with each other through abstract ‘principles’, ‘laws’, ‘doctrines’, ‘mechanisms’, etc. which are effortfully pieced together in our intellectual thoughts. We can use an analogy to the cathode-ray tube (CRT) used in modern devices to symbolize how the modern experience of thinking has ‘decohered’ and metamorphosed from the holistic state of original participation.
Our modern intellect dimly steers through meaning and then ‘lights up’ mental pixels in the form of memory pictures and words. It can only light up these mental pixels ‘line by line’ and the lines that have receded from our present activity quicky fade away. This CRT mode of thinking feels satisfactory when we only need to hold a few thoughts at a time to complete various tasks (like memorizing a phone number), but it quickly fails us when we try to build mental panoramas of the spiritual reality our ancestors once experienced holistically, whether that is attempted via philosophy, theology, science, art, etc. Our thinking must continuously move over all the elements of our intellectual pixels and light them up, line by line, bringing them into intuitive focus. The moment we move on to new lines of pixels, the insights anchored by the previous lines quickly recede out of focus again. Many modern thinkers have driven themselves into insanity by attempting to illuminate the pixels faster and faster, striving toward a ‘theory of everything’, simply because the alternative of attaining spiritual sight was unsuspected.
It is now time for us to begin a new kind of resistance at the intellectual scale, like the ancient Hebrews did at the atavistic imaginative scale, which will give rise to correspondingly new forms of individual thinking experience that expand the intuitive aperture of the CRT and keep more elements illuminated and in focus simultaneously. It is not simply about expanding awareness to encompass more pixels or smear out all pixels into one homogenous blur, but rather we move perpendicular to the pixel plane with our intuitive activity and start to sense the deeper scales that holistically structure the flashing of mental pixels, like the acts, chapters, and phrases of a musical symphony structure the flashing of tones. As we discussed in Part I, this perpendicular movement will never be attained by flashing mental pixels with our intellectual scale gestures faster and faster. It can’t be cobbled together from the bottom-up via imaginative replicas of familiar bodily experiences, but must be attracted by the mysterious realms of intuition above.
The Desire and Expectation to “See”
As mentioned at the end of Part I, spiritual sight is difficult to obtain in our time, not because of any metaphysical (e.g. Kant) or technical obstacles, but because we have grown so comfortable with our activity resting on the stability and consistency of perceptual pixels that feel independent of us. It is similar to why people find it easier to criticize the use of fossil fuels, for example, than to stop driving their cars or using gas to heat their homes. Likewise, we find it easier to speculate about “spiritual activity” and criticize the intellectual supports, while continuing to rest on them, than to transform and liberate that activity from the supports. We can hardly imagine what existence would be like if we could no longer ‘gas up’ our thinking with the pixelated concepts drawn from sensory experience or mathematical relations. Indeed, whenever we are deprived of that fuel, what we experience is the unconsciousness of sleep (and, conversely, trouble sleeping can be traced to an excessive dependence on this intellectual fuel).
What would it be like to transition from drawing our thinking energy from the intellectual fossil fuels to the Sunlight and warmth that originally deposited those fuels? That is a ‘phase-transition’ from resting on the pixelated mental support to flowing within the inner geometry of spiritual activity itself. This activity can never be ‘seen’ in the same manner as we see the perceptual pixels - rocks, rivers, trees, squirrels, etc., or memory pictures and thought-images that we have called forth like mathematical symbols. If we were to ‘see’ our spiritual activity in this way, we would once again be resting on perceptual supports and our real-time activity would still elude us, merged into the background of our intuitive perspective and constraining its content. It is akin to if we are drawing a picture of a hand and we aim to catch our real-time drawing activity by drawing our hand drawing a picture of a hand, drawing a picture of a hand, etc.
As obvious of a trap as that seems when we illustrate it this way, practically all of our modern existential inquiries have fallen into exactly that trap - the desire and expectation to “see” the real-time intuitive movements in the same way we see the continually receding memory pictures of those movements. The natural consequence of such a desire and expectation is to lose consciousness of the real-time movements and begin seeking the latter’s reality within the receded pictures themselves. That is the case in modern philosophy, theology, science, and spiritual pursuits alike. Surveying the general beliefs and expectations of modern people, we quickly discern how many souls are passively waiting to see some salvific force arrive in a direction orthogonal to their intimate spiritual activity - the technological advances that make humanity immortal, the ETs who restore planet Earth, the death which releases the physical-sensory constraints such that we merge with ‘pure consciousness’, the geopolitical circumstances that lead to the rebuilding of the Temple, the Rapture and Second Coming, and so on.
Modern mystical practices are also entirely oriented toward ‘seeing’ spiritual activity in this way as ‘co-dependent arisings’ through the passive ‘witness consciousness’. It is concluded that we are reaching the Divine source of our existence because we have eliminated the normal perceptions and thoughts which feedback on our spiritual activity and thus feel nebulously united with the totality of inner experience. It is soon concluded that spiritual (intentional) activity as such does not exist, but passive witness perspectives of the ‘One Consciousness’ have simply become deluded into feeling that it does. In this scenario, we become blinded to the fact that our real-time activity still exists behind our knowing perspective and contorts our thoughts into a shape with the meaning of, “spiritual activity is a delusion” and “consciousness has become united with the Source”. The deeper meaning of such thoughts is, “I don’t want sacrificial responsibility for perfecting my spiritual activity” and “I want to feel like the top-tier container of all possible content”.
There is nothing in the mystical state itself which suggests the superficial meaning, rather it is something we add as an intellectual commentary on the state after the fact. We can easily see how many logical holes are in this intellectual conviction that has become so fortified by mystical thinkers in modern times. For example, such a nebulous mystical state cannot tell us any details about how our unique perspective on the World takes shape. It reveals nothing of the sympathies and antipathies which steer our attention, feelings, and actions in one direction or another. It cannot even assure us that we are not simply a brain in a vat within a mindless Universe which has managed to smear out all its perceptual content and thus feels “at one” with the Cosmos. This becomes a pernicious trap because, no matter how many logical holes are in this commentary, the ego has inflated itself to feel above them all. It becomes extremely insensitive to how its spiritual activity is weaving within webs of dissonant meaning. That is why all genuine pursuits of spiritual sight begin with the pursuit of intimate self-knowledge of the soul constraints.
This desire and expectation to “see” spiritual activity acts as a tight constraint on that activity (remember the diving suit), preventing it from becoming more acutely aware of the subtle gestures that are always present in our daily flow of experience, modulating our flow of thoughts and perceptions. The influences of these gestures don’t disappear when we lose sight of them any more than the influences of the Sun, Moon, and stellar firmament disappear during the daytime or nighttime. To loosen this constraint, we should courageously expose ourselves to its underlying nature and its outer expressions more intimately. Such constraints don’t emerge randomly, for no practical purpose, and we can therefore trace them back into these purposes. It is not necessarily about eliminating these desires and expectations, but about freely modulating them depending on what domain of experience we are approaching. It is about making such soul factors into assets rather than liabilities; into flexible tools of our spiritual activity rather than immutable constraints on it.
Through much life experience, we have formed the expectation that sensory impressions forcefully impress themselves within our consciousness whether we are actively seeking them or not. We don’t feel like we need to do anything before the day changes into night, or the birds fly from tree to tree, the leaves change colors and fall to the ground, and so on. The same can be said for most of our urges, feelings, and desires that arise throughout the course of ordinary life, like the bodily urge of hunger and thirst, the feelings of dissatisfaction or contentment, the sympathy for certain sensuous or intellectual pleasures, and so on. Our thoughts that track our psycho-physical experience and comment on it, which is the vast majority for modern souls, are also experienced passively in this way. All of these simply arise in our consciousness without much initiative or effort on our part as the unquestionable data of our experience. In this way, we have become naturally conditioned consumers of meaningful experience, to begin with sensuous experience, and we habitually carry over this conditioning into the intellectual domain where we seek to answer existential questions.
As discussed in Part I, the practical purpose of this passive and consumptive orientation toward meaningful experience is that it provides the stable support against which we can gradually explore aspects of our existence. Imagine what it would be like if you are contemplating a landscape and, every time your feelings or thoughts shifted, the entire landscape morphed as well. That may make for interesting psychedelic effects but not for physically navigating the landscape or for any kind of precise philosophical or scientific inquiry. It is to that rigid stability of spiritual experience that we owe all the advantages and conveniences of our modern civilization that we now take for granted. We would not be freely embarking on a path to attaining spiritual sight without these critical supports.
(5)If we are present at a church service, where a censer is swinging, we may either attend to the whole representation or we may select for attention the actual movement to and fro of the censer. in the latter case, if we are a Galileo, we may discover the law of the pendulum. It is a good thing to discover the law of the pendulum. It is not such a good thing to lose, for that reason, all interest in, and ultimately even perception of, the incense whose savour it was the whole purpose of the pendulum to release. Participation ceases to be conscious precisely because we cease to attend to it. But, as already pointed out, participation does not cease to be a fact because it ceases to be conscious. It merely ceases to be what I have called 'original' participation.
When we normally think about experience, all the energy of our inner activity is utilized so that we can perceive the relevant objects and conceptualize their lawful dynamics. In the process of divesting its energy in this way, however, the spiritual activity becomes insensitive to its own movements. We can experiment with this, for example, by trying to add a few numbers together. First, we focus on performing the math operations to get the proper result. Then we try to shift focus to what we are doing inwardly, the inner gestures we are making to manipulate the mathematical symbols. We can only focus on the latter in an unstable and nebulous way - unlike the manipulated mathematical symbols, the inner gestures remain dim and mostly merged in the background of our conscious experience. That is what it means to become insensitive to the inner purposeful context through which we perceive, think, feel, and will, in the same way as we may attend to the swinging censer and lose interest in, and thus perception of, the sacred purpose underlying the act of swinging the censer.
The more we merely spin out theoretical thoughts about our how our mental images move to and fro, or about the ‘sacred purpose’ they are involved in, the more insensitive we become to the real-time purposeful activity. It is simple enough to see why - under this theoretical habit, the content always points to some other substances, energies, forces, mechanisms, Platonic ideas, Divine beings, and so on, which should ‘explain’ our first-person thinking experience. Thinking keeps searching for its own reality in the content of its thoughts which has been shaped into all sorts of clever laws, doctrines, models, and systems. It is like, whenever we begin directing attention to the intimate experience of our inner activity, our first instinct is to quarantine it in a glass box and only interact with it via hazmat gloves. We try to isolate our inner activity from the flow of experience and dissect it from a safe distance with our familiar intellectual tools. That way we feel it is only our responsibility to passively analyze and comment on the inner experience, but not to actively transform it.
To get a better feel for that, we can try to smoothly ‘scan’ our body from the top of the head to the toes. We should focus our attention within our first-person bodily experience, i.e. the kinesthetic sensations of the body that allow us to inwardly know the constraints and possibilities of our muscles, limbs, joints, etc. Try to do this as slowly and smoothly as possible, devoting a few seconds to the forehead, the nose, the mouth, the neck, the chest area, the arms and hands, etc. Most of us will notice that, during this scanning exercise, we are often lapsing into a 3rd-person perspective, picturing our body like a doll-sized figure in our head and scanning the doll picture instead. The more slowly we try to scan, the more sensitive we will become to this lapsing tendency into doll-mode that continually occurs when we try to focus on our first-person flow of inner experience. Even by calmly registering this fact, we have grown much more intimate with the nature of our experience than most people ever attain via academic psychology, cognitive science, and so on, with their manifold theories and models about that experience.
Interestingly enough, all of the ideas we reach in this way are invisible - the ‘laws of nature’ cannot be seen like the sensory perceptions they provide us with an orientation to, neither can the religious doctrines be felt like the impulses, emotions, and thoughts they aim to purify - but that fact is either not noticed or not taken seriously enough. We pay too much attention to what we are thinking about and not enough attention to what we are doing to develop these ideas through the thinking process itself. It doesn’t occur to us that we can refine and purify the experience of thinking those invisible ideas such that their meaning begins to ‘densify’ as concrete realities, just as concretely as our bodily sensations of colors, sounds, warmth, etc. (but not ‘seen’ in the same way). That is why the potential of attaining spiritual sight is always floating right behind our eyes, so to speak, implicitly present in even the most trivial thoughts and actions. We only need to begin seeing all these trivial experiences from a new perspective, in a new light.
What is Ordinary Sight?
One way to further loosen this constraint and decondition from expecting intuitive meaning to approach us as sensory-like contents, like shiny psychedelic visuals, is to consider more carefully the nature of our ordinary, everyday sight. When we look at a table, a chair, a bird, a plant, or a mountain, what is that we actually see? What we first see is something we can refer to as invisible functional meaning. That meaning is not something inherent in the perceptual qualities themselves - the colors, shapes, sizes, etc. - but is something we learned to perceive through our mostly instinctive education from childhood to adulthood. Most of that education came, not through explicit instruction, but through repeated experiences in the sensory environment which gave us a basic orientation to how certain aspects of that environment respond or don’t respond to our spiritual activity. When we perceive a mountain, the functional meaning shines forth and orients us toward potential ways in which the mountain can relate to our spiritual activity, and only later can we analyze its particular perceptual qualities. In modern times, that analysis itself has become a primary function of objects (which is a critical way of strengthening our spiritual activity if we don’t lose sight of the function).
Notice how this functional meaning will vary depending on the perspective and constraints in question. If I am antipathetic to scaling heights, for example, the meaning of using the mountain for hiking will not shine forth as strongly as it would for someone who is sympathetic to such risks. Likewise, if my perspective is confined to only modern materialistic ways of thinking, the meaning of using the mountain as a sacred place for communing with Divine forces of the Cosmos may not shine forth at all. Yet these layered meanings are still implicit in my sight of the mountain, even if deeply buried within the substrata of consciousness. Even if we have no explicit awareness of how the mountain can act as a sacred ‘hub’ of intersecting Cosmic forces, we surely feel that climbing high up the mountain gives us a unique perspective on ordinary experience. We may feel temporarily lifted above the mechanical routines of daily life, which can give us a more encompassing view on things, i.e. the overview effect. That effect is but a dim echo of what our ancestors experienced more intuitively and which thus made mountains into sacred places of contact with the Divine.
All of that intuitive meaning, including all ‘past’ functions of the mountain, is still present and implicit in our sight of the mountain (or rather, it is our sight of the mountain), even though most of it is normally aliased from our lucid consciousness. Of course, the mountain peak doesn’t exist by itself in isolation, but in relation to the valleys which are formed between the peaks. Here we have an archetypal polar relation - in the valleys we are committed to the routine flow of daily life, while on the mountains we have great conditions for spiritual work, to widen our horizons, to see things in their manifold relations, to take an interest in the neighboring communities that were previously blocked from view, and so on. The meaning we perceive is always polar and relational in this way. We can’t spend all our time on the mountain peaks or in the valleys, but ideally our activity should rhythmically alternate between them and ‘triangulate’ the most optimal course toward our ideals. As John Wheeler once said, “Spacetime tells matter how to move, matter tells spacetime how to curve.”
In this way, the process of attaining spiritual sight is simultaneously the process of seeing the physical world anew in its polar and rhythmical relations, as the continual revelation of spiritual activity (spacetime) and its meaningful feedback (matter). We begin to realize the meaning we are actually steering through in our sensory life, rather than the meaning of molecules, atoms, energies and forces, and so on that we only imagine in our pixelated thoughts. Our spiritual activity has grown so accustomed to its naturally developed capacities in the bodily context, like sensory seeing, that they are taken for granted and remain unquestioned. We readily imagine that we already know what such capacities are and how they function, simply because we have become so used to them functioning as we need for them for our routine tasks in the valleys of life. Yet, through the exploration so far, we should already be able to intimate that our default understanding of such capacities is the equivalent of noise.
It is like we are at a coffee shop and we hear the conversations at other tables (the wider World of perceptual content beyond our local thoughts) as only a blurry background concatenation of voice perceptions. Yet we know that, for the people at those tables, the conversation is intuitively clear. If all souls at the coffee shop were to begin singing in harmony, the blurry noise would become intuitively crisp experience. Attaining spiritual sight is, at its core, a harmonization of our inner intents/impulses, feelings, thoughts, and perceptions with the rhythms of the wider World. It is a means of tuning our soul instrument to these rhythms via deeper knowledge of their purposeful aims in Earthly evolution. In modern times, such terms have become associated with speculative ‘new age’ movements that seem to speak of remote alternate dimensions, but we understand the symbols properly only when we are able to relate them coherently to the most basic facts of our human lives on Earth. Consider, for example, what the Earthly environment would look like if we are born blind and have a sight-restoring operation as an adult.
Experiments have confirmed that people born blind who undergo a sight-restoring operation later in life must learn how to see, i.e. seeing doesn’t come automatically. This fact indicates that normal seeing is a cognitive skill which most of us take for granted because it unfolds through our natural human development. It is likewise well known that if language is not acquired in the first years of life it can only be acquired with great difficulty later, if at all. In the first years of life, the nervous system is especially plastic and is organized in direct response to stimuli and thinking. When a blind person undergoes operation they are flooded with color stimuli but, initially, this is only an unintelligible chaos of impressions, just like the blurry background noise from the other tables of the coffee shop. Gradually they may learn to orient themselves through these perceptions, but as the experiments show, even then the seeing ability rarely reaches the full potential of what is possible when sight is developed in the normal way.
This gives us a good way to distinguish between simply entertaining more ‘subtle’ perceptions, such as we aim for in many psychedelic and mystical practices, and purifying and organizing (attuning) the strata of our inner being such that our perceptions attain a harmonious musical character which provides insight into their unfoldment. It is the greatest error of our age when spiritual seekers believe that more subtle imagery represents some objective perception of the deeper scales of existence, just like the error of naive perception that imagines sensory colors, shapes, and sizes presents an independent reality of ‘things’ how they are. The mystical and psychedelic experiences only present us a flood of phenomena, similar to the color sensations that a formerly blind person receives after an operation. At best, it only provides a more expansive spectrum of pixels for the CRT intellect to interpret line by line. Opening the ‘doors of perception’ and experiencing a flood of phenomena does not equate to seeing. To see means to be able to intuitively make sense of the perceptions, such that everything gradually integrates into a musical whole.
Our sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses should gradually be experienced as a symphony permeated with no less lucid meaning than our mathematical thoughts. We should feel that we are but members of an ensemble contributing our unique talents for the benefit of the Whole. In all cases, the horizon of our spiritual sight will only reach so far as our interest and love for the Whole extend. The reason we see only a sensory world is because, deep down, that is all we are interested to see. We are comfortable and satisfied with the seemingly unlimited sensuous and intellectual pleasures this world can offer. Only when we grow exceedingly tired of indulging in the mere outer surfaces of sensory events, and when we feel a burning desire for the fully conscious soul and spirit to press into us through those events from all sides (6), do we inwardly confess that we have so far been blind and deaf and gradually begin to open our spiritual eyes and ears, as if being born anew. We will continue exploring the stages of this spiritual birth in the next part.
CITATIONS:
(1) Owen Barfield, Israel and the Michael Impulse
(2) Psalm 104:19-26
(3) Matthew 15:11
“Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man.”
(4) Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry
(5) Luke 16:16
“The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of God is preached, and every man presseth into it.”
