Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Sep 16, 2026 12:11 pmIt occurs to me that I'm not aware of what JW's stance is on the matter of inner activity. I mean the following:
From what I see above, it seems that he uses 'energy' in a more or less phenomenological sense, as the raw pixels/vibrations of experience - the elemental ground of experience. He keeps openness about the 'other-sidedness' of this energy, realizing that this leads to abstract metaphysics. We can more or less imply that our human-scale experience can be thought of as the stream of elementary energetic/vibratory phenomenal experiences. Things, however, become trickier when we include inner activity. If we want to hold fast to the view of reality as a stream of concatenated elementary events, then we must conclude that things like intentionality and activity are also merely what the elementary domino-train feels like. For example, reaching with my hand for a glass of water feels like something at my human scale, but at the energetic level it is nothing more than the concatenation of elementary events, following the gradient (thus, there's nothing at the human scale that really tips the World flow in one direction or another).
Has he ever clarified his position on this? Does he see inner activity as a kind of illusory playback of the raw energetic stream, or does he admit the possibility that this activity contributes something unique to the stream, something that does not result from the mere locally interacting energetic domino pieces? If it is the latter, then naturally it can be reasoned what the limits of such contributions might be.
Through the discussion, it has become much clearer to me how he views this question. Basically, he would see the very formulation of the question as stepping into the rigged metaphysical projective game. It presupposes that we can positively articulate something about the 'true causal relationship' between energy and inner activity, rather than sticking to the directly experienced correlation between the two and going no further. In that sense, it is like what you expressed before:
"We are not here to tell whether the sense of agency is real or not, but only to elucidate that it is possible to utilize that agency in such a way that more and more phenomenal outputs are grasped as receding impressions of intuitively guided will."
Except he would hold only the first bold part as sound philosophy, and discard the underlined part as highly likely to result in a subtler process of metaphysically projecting 'intuitively guided will' into the prearticulate mystery. In that sense, he has thoroughly worked out all the common intellectual traps that spiritual science also describes in the domain of philosophy, science, and religion, and is extremely consistent in that standpoint when trying to explore the implications of various ideas. He feels that energy can be validly described as the 'primary articulation' as a result of scientific observation, but refuses to ascribe any further implications to that observation for the evolutionary relationship between the bodily organization and the possibilities of consciousness.
It seems the fundamental obstacle, as usual, is an implicit pride in the evolved state his consciousness has so far reached. Anything that speaks as if there is deeper potential for lucid consciousness to explore is considered a completely possible, yet hypothetical scenario for everyone. If it is suggested that this potential is already presently accessible, then the suggestion must be a metaphysical projection of imagined possibilities into the mystery.
Here are a few more (and perhaps final) comments. I am curious, however, if you have any suggestions about addressing his content-less meditation and why the very technique he is employing prevents his consciousness from feeling concretely entangled with other conscious perspectives. Given the implicit pride in these situations, it is very difficult to touch on these intimate matters without automatically shutting down receptivity to what is conveyed (as we often saw with Eugene, for example).
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JW: I think your seismograph metaphor actually helps locate our difference. With an actual seismograph, we know that the line registers perturbations originating beyond the line because the larger physical constellation—instrument, ground, vibration, recording mechanism—is independently available to investigation. The line is not our only access to a hypothetical “silent context.”
In your application to consciousness, however, that context is precisely what remains in question. To describe imaginative flashes as effects of a hidden context is therefore already to have interpreted the experience. And when that context becomes “spiritual-energetic,” still more has been added. I can accept the experience you describe without accepting the ontology subsequently articulated around it.
This is not because I regard bodily consciousness as a metaphysical certainty. I don’t. Nor do I claim that consciousness independent of present bodily organization is impossible. Consciousness may evolve into forms we cannot presently imagine. But possibility and disclosure are different things.
What has not become articulated cannot be borrowed from possibility and treated as though it had already been disclosed.
Your final question therefore seems to me to reverse the burden. You ask how we could discover consciousness independent of bodily constraints if we classify the possibility as metaphysical projection whenever it enters thought. My answer is: by encountering something that requires us to reconsider our present articulation. That is very different from imagining what such an encounter might someday disclose and then allowing the imagined possibility to guide our interpretation of present experience.
Quantum physics is instructive here. The breakdown of classical categories was not licensed because someone imagined that locality, causality, separability or subject/object might someday fail. Experiment forced reconsideration of articulations that had previously seemed secure. Sometimes what is encountered breaks the articulation.
I would welcome the same thing here. If experience breaks our present articulation of consciousness, then the articulation should change. What I resist is deciding beforehand what the breakthrough will reveal.
And this is why I don’t think openness requires keeping particular metaphysical possibilities alive. Genuine openness is more severe than that. It must remain open even to something for which we presently have no name—and therefore cannot already call “spiritual,” “disembodied,” or “Gnostic.”
There is also a possibility much nearer at hand that interests me more than speculation about future or disembodied consciousness. We already experience forms of disclosure that do not proceed by fixing the flashing image, pulling it apart, and converting it into determinate knowledge. Poetry and music have worked in that region for a very long time. They can gather without demanding that what is gathered become an object or a system.
Perhaps the discipline you describe is most interesting precisely at the moment before we ask what the flashing image is “made of,” what hidden reality caused it, or what metaphysical possibility it confirms. Perhaps we should sometimes allow it to resonate without forcing it to become knowledge.
That would not be a failure to follow the disclosure. It might be a different way of listening to it.
A: Right, so my position can be summarized as follows:
What I am pointing to is not any kind of theoretical ontology about how consciousness, loosened from bodily constraints, may be experienced. What I am describing are empirical facts of supersensible experience that can be directly encountered. I speak of "possibility" only to emphasize that it requires active inner effort to become manifest, just as experiencing the space of advanced mathematical intuitions is only a "possibility" for those who have not yet actively probed its intuitive landscape. Those who have experimented in this direction, in contrast, unmistakably encounter something that requires them to reconsider their present articulation that previously seemed secure. The new horizon of experience breaks our present articulation of consciousness in characteristic ways, but I have no choice but to convey how it does so in symbols drawn from familiar articulated experience. Nevertheless, these symbols point to living encounters that break the distribution of familiar articulated experience in completely novel ways that could never have been extrapolated, derived, deduced, etc. from within the latter, just as the novel intuitions of QM could not have been extrapolated from within the classical categories of Newtonian physics.
In both cases, concrete experimentation in a direction orthogonal to the classical perspective is necessary. As a similar analogy, we can consider how Oersted accidentally discovered the magnetic properties of an electrical current at a right angle (perpendicular) to the flow of that current, while completely missing those properties when directly seeking them on the same plane (parallel) as the electrical flow. In the history of modern science, paradigm-shifting discoveries have often been made despite the expectations and existing conceptual palette of the discoverers. Similarly, we can faithfully and openly seek holistic intuitions of how the 'silent context' constrains our intuitive process at 'right angles' to the familiar flow of bodily experience. Unlike the forces detected by the natural sciences, however, the perpendicular inner 'forces' that constrain our intimate intuitive process cannot be stumbled into by accident, but only through fully conscious and purposeful efforts.
Again, I know why it is tempting to take all of the above and lump it into the category of "allowing the imagined possibility to guide our interpretation of present experience". That is by far the way most similar presentations in philosophy and theology unfold. I have encountered the same thing in many idealist, panpsychist, panentheist, etc. philosophical positions. But I hope you can also appreciate how, from my perspective, that is not at all what I am doing. In fact, the way you characterize your answer to my final question sounds much more like what I am doing and how the intuitive process as a spiritual path unfolds more generally. It is truly an experimental science that, however, doesn't self-constrain itself to only the empirical dynamics of bodily experience, but also integrates the expanded empirical dynamics of all that we normally associate with psychological, esthetic, and religious experience. This naturally clarifies many aspects of individual and collective life experience that otherwise remain enigmatic and unpredictable, but these novel 1st-person scientific efforts are still in their infancy.
"Consciousness may evolve into forms we cannot presently imagine. But possibility and disclosure are different things." (JW)
Most likely, this new consciousness would not evolve uniformly in every human being simultaneously, correct? Some would still be in the old form of consciousness while the new is already evolving and taking root, just as the vast majority of scientists were in the classical perspective of physics while QM intuitions, developed through concrete experimentation, were evolving and taking root.
In that case, how could those firmly rooted in the old form ever confirm that those participating in the new form are speaking of something directly encountered, of concrete disclosures, rather than imagined possibilities that are being projected into disclosures and clothed in all sorts of concepts? I am really curious what that process might look like, from your perspective. Is there any way for the old to develop trust in the new, or can it only be as Planck observed: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”?
JW: Only through direct experience of its revelation. In the end, if you believe you have the beginnings of that revelation, then that is the path that opens for you. While I have similar experiences of meditation, I never encounter anything pointing to a primitive consciousness separate from living beings. If I come close to removing all content in my mediation, I only encounter my own consciousness—which in itself is enough mystery for me. A different path from yours opens for me.