The Game Loop: Part 6 Concentration

[Federica]

It's interesting to consider that, whenever we try to get proficient at something, we are instinctively pursuing higher cognition. To invoke the chess example again, a high level of play is only possible when we work on making our inner gestures very patient, disciplined, and concentrated within the moment-to-moment states of play. Cultivating those inner qualities allows us to more keenly sense the compounded intuitive reverberations of our stacking mental pictures and therefore find optimal moves in the various board states we encounter. Such games are helpful as examples because the rules of transformation are simple, and therefore we can more easily hone in on the inner process at play, but the same principles apply to any life skills that we are trying to develop within the wider IO flows. The main reason such pursuits do not lead to higher cognition is that the goal state, or series of goal states, is arbitrarily limited by our past natural-cultural conditioning. The inner process is cultivated to only reach such myopic goal states that are prescribed for us, rather than being pursued for its own sake in an open-ended way.

I would comment here that, while games are extremely helpful examples (for the reasons given above, and because they are very relatable for many) they don’t have - by nature - “their own sake”. If the reason why pursuits of proficiency in the wider IO flows don’t lead to higher cognition is that the process is only executed myopically, to attain culturally prescribed end goals, and not for their own sake, then games can become dangerous, when used beyond their function of example, because they simply and intrinsically lack an "own sake".

The nature of game is educational. The mere entertainment value of game is an unserious value of game. Game allows the young and the neophyte to learn, under favorable, staged conditions, something that has to be later applied in the wider IO flows. Once, by their simplicity, games have instructed the mind to identify and trace the nature of the cognitive process that navigates them, they have exhausted their function. Any further insistence and persistence in the world of game beyond its educational value (and all that relates to it) is a deformation of the good curvature, in my opinion.

Right, and in a certain sense, all human activities (not only games, but work, relationships, etc.) are only pursued for 'their own sake' when they become pedagogical tools for a higher existence. Until then, such activities remain constrained by myopic cultural and natural conditioning. The native existence of our deeper being, on the other hand, is characterized by cultivating and perfecting the inner process for its own sake. The broad evolutionary goal-states of the Divine flow are themselves the open-ended perfection of the inner process, which then provides the conditions for new waves of perspectives to go through their corresponding evolutionary development, and so on, in an iterative fashion.

All human artistic, scientific, sporting, intellectual, etc. pursuits can be seen as a dim shadow of this native existence, as we instinctively sense the goal states of the Divine flow but lack the inner strength to support our pursuit of this flow without short-term and self-centered incentives, anchored by our mineralized imaginative states. After becoming entangled in this myopic pursuit of the Divine flow for a while, we simply lose sight of the flow altogether and begin to feel that we are involved in the pursuit of an entirely different flow consisting of localized Earthly goal states. We can no longer clearly intuit the nature of what we are doing within its wider Divine context.

If we can properly perceive and orient to the native essence of these human activities, however, then they provide infinite potential for pedagogical lessons. They can help us live through the most varied circumstances (even if only imaginatively in many cases, like video games) and kindle intuitions for the inner dynamics that we would otherwise have no basis to discover. Attaining that proper orientation, however, is no simple task since we are constantly tempted back into the myopic flow through our instinctive soul habits, as also discussed in the other thread. So there are plenty of risks and dangers of deformation, in that sense.

Unless it's only a matter of adjusting the vocabulary, it doesn't seem that we agree. True, human activities can remain constrained by social and natural conditioning, and they often do, but when they don't, I don't think they become pedagogical tools for a higher existence, in the same way that the game metaphor can become a tool. A relationship is not a tool for achieving something else, neither is an artistic activity a tool, or a practice. These are direct expressions of a higher existence - or at least they can become part of such expression, when they are free. They have meaning on their own, while a pedagogical tool borrows its meaning from something else. I am going to post in the other thread, to develop some more.

[Federica]

What does it mean that we got distracted? It means that some unknown factor beyond the power of our focused input has nudged our flow into a differently shaped riverbed. Here, the physicist or biologist would immediately object, “But such unknown factors are only mirages in consciousness. In reality, there’s nothing ‘nudging’ our ‘flow’. It is all an emergent picture of fundamental physical processes.” The fact, however, is that even if we call these nudges mirages, this in no way makes it possible to ‘walk through them’. From a phenomenological perspective, when we speak of such nudging forces, we are not in the least postulating any metaphysical processes that ‘explain’ them. As long as we’re focused on the bare facts, we can’t go wrong. It is to these bare facts that we point when we speak of nudging forces, not to some speculative glowing energies. In other words, we are concerned not with mental stacks that try to explain what causes these forces, what stands behind them, and so on, but only with the most immediate fact that our intuitive input is being modified and thus the actual output differs from the intuitively anticipated one.

Brief note about the bare facts: these are the bare facts of experience. With many people, it may be necessary to double down on this point that the bare facts can only be the bare facts of experience. Because many immediately would say: “The “facts of experience” are subjective facts, submitted to all sorts of illusions. The true bare facts may be different, and those are the ones we want to investigate. The right way to do that is to emit hypotheses about the true bare facts, test them, and then accept the most plausible ones, remaining open to possibly change them in the future, should more plausible theories arise.” A related thought Max wrote:

starting from scientific abstractions and attempting to work our way back to the consciousness that conceives of these abstraction is an example of looking through the wrong end of the telescope. what does it mean to be "looking through the wrong end of the telescope"? it means to try to prove or explain something self-evident by something that is not. not everything can be proved: “...it is obvious that there are many things of this kind, and to prove what is obvious by what is not is the mark of a man who is unable to distinguish what is self-evident from what is not.”

Yes we have discussed this hundreds of times from various angles. I'm just pointing to a possible stumbling block for the average future reader of this series.

[Federica]

A similar exercise can be performed by producing a continuous vowel sound with our inner voice and slowly and smoothly morphing it through different vowels (a, e, i, o, u). This exercise is especially valuable because it helps us close the leeway even further. When we move the focal point of our attention, we still have the implicit feeling that we are ‘here’ and we focus on a point within phenomenal space ‘over there’. When we focus on the sound of our inner voice, the experience is even more intimate. We may actually discover that while we were focusing on the movement of attention, our inner voice was still mumbling something in the background. When we consciously engage in the shaping of inner sound, such background mumbling becomes practically impossible because we find ourselves unable to split our inner voice into two – one which produces a continuous vowel sound and another which comments in words.

Such experiments with our inner voice can be of the greatest value. We may find a strange tendency that fiercely resists such an exercise. There could be a strange, uneasy feeling when we experience our inner voice so consciously, much like we may feel when we hear our physical voice on a recording. We would much rather let the exercise free-fall instinctively, while we only oversee and comment from the background. If we are not clearly aware of this tendency, even if we try such exercises, it may happen that we secretly perform them as if we observe someone else doing them, or we vaguely imagine what it could be if we were to do them. This gives us a feeling of security that our inner sense of self, secretly hidden in the background, is safe and immutable. It is implicitly assumed that any such exercises only concern the reconfiguration of some output phenomena at a distance, while the goal is precisely to experience more closely the process that produces the reconfiguration and comments from the background. This reluctance to approach the process of shaping our inner mental gestures needs to be overcome if we are to gain a deeper experience at the IO interface. The two are simply mutually exclusive. We cannot attain deeper intuition for the way inputs are impressed in the outputs if we are unwilling to actively explore the only place where this can be found as an actual experience. If we refuse to approach this experience, we may try to build some theoretical picture about it, we may picture someone else going through it, but that mental picture will always feel remote and unrelated to the true inner inputs hidden in the background, which speak the theoretical thoughts or imagine what the experience of the exercise could be like. As long as our cognitive process remains instinctively proceeding from the background, we have the false security that we can pre-calculate everything in our mind before entering into contact with the wider flow. However, here it is precisely the goal to become lucidly aware at the threshold where even our pre-calculating thoughts (i.e., the background mumbling) can no longer be pre-calculated (we can’t think before we think). We need to get the clear feeling that we’re at the threshold between the known (past) and the unknown (future), and be willing to observe how even our inner voice precipitates as something that we could not have perceived as imaginative output before we have intuitively pushed into the unknown next state.

Granted that the reader has the goodwill to follow along this path of inner experience (otherwise, what follows simply won’t make much sense), we nevertheless stumble upon the next obstacle. It is enough to attempt these focused exercises even for a second to realize that it often feels like trying to draw a smooth line with our hand amid a battlefield. We are constantly assailed from all directions by influences that very easily throw us off track.

A couple of questions:

- I have always found that I can only smoothly modulate the sequence: a, e, i, u, o, a, not: a, e, i, o, u, a. Going from "i" to "o", we can't but pass through "u", if it has to be continuous and smooth. In any case, to attenuate the 'performance stress', which can occupy the feeling and prevent it from being open to the bold, I am wondering if a simplified version may be to go from the most open "a" to the most gloomy "o", and back to "a" and back to "o". Or perhaps it's just me still feeling like not nailing this exercise as I should.

- In this exercise, we occupy the inner voice with active modulation, so it can’t mumble unnoticed so easily. On the other hand, we are leaving unguarded the picturing capability of the mind. While the inner voice is in focus, distraction can come from the side of picturing, just as, during concentration on an image, the inner voice is the most likely entry point of distraction. So I have tried to do the exercise with a visual element in mind at the same time, to see if it helps. Because otherwise there may be fleeting background pictures underlying the modulation. These could represent for example the written appearance of the vowel in question, or the mouth/palate pronouncing it, and it's an element of instability that can disrupt the exercise. I have to say, I am still not entirely sure whether it is possible to completely rule out everything pictorial - and so any visual context is merely a sign that the moment is not being split enough - or, concentration can have an auditory focus and a visual context at the same time, and thus it’s valuable to set a fixed visual context, at the beginning, as a sort of fence or protection against fleeting images that may insinuate distractions that end up slacken the tension of the inner voice. Based on my attempts, I believe it can be helpful to set something pictorial, for example a thick color, or light, as a context shield. I am not actively maintaining it - my focus must be on modulation - however there is a visual context that I can rest on, to guard against moving images trying to pop in. Vice versa, can a fixed background tone - a vowel - help protect concentration on an image? I would say yes (though I have not tried too hard yet). Has anyone else experimented with anything similar?

[AshvinP]

The first thing to notice is that this is exactly the kind of inner experimentation that is so critical for higher development. The fact that you are even doing it and paying attention to some of the feedback transforms your entire intuitive context as you approach the wider flow, the APs, and so forth. Even if you don't explicitly recognize your inner gestures when focusing on that flow, you still have some heightened sense of how those differentiated gestures participate in the meaning of what you are perceiving, contemplating, and feeling. Such a heightened sense is simply indispensable for the perspective inversion that is needed in our time. The imaginative life needs to be finely differentiated in this way for there to be any chance of expanding sensitivity to its place within the flow, i.e., how it continually modulates and is being modulated by that flow. This is the unglamorous, and often tedious, inner work that needs to be pursued. Of course, the exercises also should not be pursued without a broader phenomenological context for what they entail, how they function, and why they matter.

- I have always found that I can only smoothly modulate the sequence: a, e, i, u, o, a, not: a, e, i, o, u, a. Going from "i" to "o", we can't but pass through "u", if it has to be continuous and smooth. In any case, to attenuate the 'performance stress', which can occupy the feeling and prevent it from being open to the bold, I am wondering if a simplified version may be to go from the most open "a" to the most gloomy "o", and back to "a" and back to "o". Or perhaps it's just me still feeling like not nailing this exercise as I should.

The difficulty in the smooth transition certainly resonates with my experience. I have found that it is often linked to how my inner voice is instinctively connected with my physical breathing and speech capacity. For example, if we do the exercise with physical speech, the transition from A to O certainly feels smoother than going through U. On the other hand, I think that the more the inner voice is modulated without that connection to physical speech, as if we are weaving through the pure intuitive meaning without allowing it to condense too far into the perceptible spectrum, the less cumbersome it is experienced to transition through U or any other vowel. Put another way, we become less concerned with how smoothly the transition unfolds (which is generally a background concern when we physically articulate speech) and more 'locked into' our experience of the modulating flow in response to our intuitive inputs, however rough and bumpy the latter may initially feel.

At the extreme, it would be as if we were not even making any transition, but focusing on the holistic superposition of intuitive meaning associated with 'vowels'. Yet that completely holistic, undifferentiated input process cannot be further expanded and refined unless we also try to bring it into subtle contact with a more dynamic imaginative output flow. The art of concentration is centered around holding this subtle tension without polarizing to one extreme or another, passively contemplating the holistic meaning or getting sucked completely into micro-managing the particular transitions.

- In this exercise, we occupy the inner voice with active modulation, so it can’t mumble unnoticed so easily. On the other hand, we are leaving unguarded the picturing capability of the mind. While the inner voice is in focus, distraction can come from the side of picturing, just as, during concentration on an image, the inner voice is the most likely entry point of distraction. So I have tried to do the exercise with a visual element in mind at the same time, to see if it helps. Because otherwise there may be fleeting background pictures underlying the modulation. These could represent for example the written appearance of the vowel in question, or the mouth/palate pronouncing it, and it's an element of instability that can disrupt the exercise. I have to say, I am still not entirely sure whether it is possible to completely rule out everything pictorial - and so any visual context is merely a sign that the moment is not being split enough - or, concentration can have an auditory focus and a visual context at the same time, and thus it’s valuable to set a fixed visual context, at the beginning, as a sort of fence or protection against fleeting images that may insinuate distractions that end up slacken the tension of the inner voice. Based on my attempts, I believe it can be helpful to set something pictorial, for example a thick color, or light, as a context shield. I am not actively maintaining it - my focus must be on modulation - however there is a visual context that I can rest on, to guard against moving images trying to pop in. Vice versa, can a fixed background tone - a vowel - help protect concentration on an image? I would say yes (though I have not tried too hard yet). Has anyone else experimented with anything similar?

Personally, I think it is counterproductive to split our attention between maintaining background context and sustaining an image or a vowel. I know you said you will not actively maintain the context to 'rest on', but that is effectively what we must attempt to do if we set the intention to have a 'background context' of additional outputs. Our inner flow is then bifurcated into one part that attempts to rest on a background context of colors or tones, and one part that attempts to sustain the mental image or sound. The concentration can only bear fruit if our inner flow is completely undivided, as it intensely projects into the mental image. Although it may not seem so, the background context we attempt to put in place would function the same way as our distracting inner commentary when focusing on an image - it would be continually perforating our attentional flow.

Generally, we should guard against the pursuit of complete technical accuracy in this domain. I think we can easily overcomplicate the exercise by trying to set up too many elements that are 'perfectly placed', like setting a dinner table. This can become too much micromanagement of the meditation, rather than entrusting those interrupting elements to the peripheral forces. I think we need to calmly accept that there are many such elements that cannot be 'ruled out' through our own personal effort, but can only be relaxed and entrusted to the periphery as much as possible, as we focus entirely on the simple task at hand.

[Federica]

...

Thanks, this is very clear writing, helpful.