Philosophical Speculations

AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2024 6:13 pm This article was stimulated by recent discussion on the forum and is essentially a summary of that discussion, with one or two new considerations.

Thank you Ashvin for this great treatment on this fundamental polarity.

I think today's thought ties very well to the topic:

Popular consciousness says: When conscience speaks, it is God speaking in the soul. The highest spiritual consciousness says that when conscience speaks, it is truly the cosmic Spirit speaking. And spiritual science brings out the connection between conscience and the greatest event in the evolution of mankind, the Christ-Event. Hence it is not surprising that conscience has thereby been ennobled and raised to a higher sphere. When we hear that something has been done for reasons of conscience, we feel that conscience is regarded as one of the most important possessions of mankind.

Thus we can see how natural and right it is for the human heart to speak of conscience as “God in man”.

[…] conscience is the highest voice in our inward life. On this account, also, we are aware that our dignity as human beings is inseparable from conscience. We are human beings because we have an ego-consciousness; and the conscience we have at our side is also at the side of our ego. Thus we look on conscience as a most sacred individual possession, inviolable by the external world, whose voice enables us to determine our direction and our goal. When conscience speaks, no other voice may intrude.

So it is that on one side conscience ensures our connection with the primordial power of the world and on the other guarantees the fact that in our inmost self we have something like a drop flowing from the Godhead. And man can know: When conscience speaks in him, it is a God speaking.

Source: Rudolf Steiner – GA 59 – Metamorphoses of the Soul 2: Lecture 8: Human Conscience – Berlin, 5th May 1910

AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jul 19, 2024 6:13 pm After imaginatively rolling our spiritual activity through the meaningful landscape and reaching some insight, we can relax into that insight and let the superconscious patiently work out the kinks.

This is a very good observation. We can often encounter such inner postures where things feel right and flowing, even though not yet with a clear cognitive element but only as a feeling. It is very valuable to hold on to that feeling and bask in its aura for as long as we can sustain it. This basking is akin to breathing. BD says "prayer is the breathing of the soul". Our proper orientation toward the superconsious is indeed very well described as breathing. We can imagine how we breathe in the forces of superconscious/conscience, how these forces infuse our inner space, ignite it, and work out the kinks.

Cleric K wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 3:34 pm I think today's thought ties very well to the topic:

...

This is a very good observation. We can often encounter such inner postures where things feel right and flowing, even though not yet with a clear cognitive element but only as a feeling. It is very valuable to hold on to that feeling and bask in its aura for as long as we can sustain it. This basking is akin to breathing. BD says "prayer is the breathing of the soul". Our proper orientation toward the superconsious is indeed very well described as breathing. We can imagine how we breathe in the forces of superconscious/conscience, how these forces infuse our inner space, ignite it, and work out the kinks.

Thanks, Cleric, for also sharing today's thought on conscience! In the Substack version, I had decided to make that more explicit and phrase it as follows:

In that sense, the subconscious still plays its critical role but is directed from above, out of lucid ideas and conscience, rather than from below, out of shadowy impulses; it performs the gesture, “Be it unto me according to Thy Word” (Luke 1:38).


It's interesting how the physical gesture of breathing out, which I would associate with relaxing into physical pressure, is like a mirror image of the soul gesture of breathing in the forces of superconscious/conscience. Like if we start feeling anxious because we are trying to intellectually track too many elements at once, we usually breathe out physically in a pronounced way. It is an expression of releasing our domineering grasp over the soul life. The technique here is to translate (or purify) the inner meaning of that physical gesture into the soul life, which is the inner posture of basking in the unverbalized aura and breathing in conscience.

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jul 21, 2024 7:53 pm For sure, I am constantly living with this and many more questions. I also like to listen to, and then read, lectures, though I am often short of time these days and do that in a fragmented way, unfortunately. I appreciate the enormous work done by Rudolf Steiner Press Audio for that.

Regarding the quoted posts by Cleric, I don't feel they are dizzying They are illuminating, but I took them to express something of our experience across the threshold in the present evolutionary phase, rather than in a far-off future, after the end of sexual reproduction, after the Moon has rejoined the Earth. The one difficulty I may have is the one Cleric mentioned: that understanding of those descriptions starts abstract, and is only progressively filled with recognition and intuition. For example, the fact that, across the threshold, understanding some other being requires that we make an ideal place for it in our will - that we obliterate our thoughts, as Steiner says. For now I see this like a retreat from the ideal space, a negative inquiry, with an intention turned towards a particular being or event. In the sense world, the act of getting to know someone or something has the character of inquiry. That is because of space and matter. But in the spiritual world, knowing the activity of another thinker is to withdraw inquisitive intention in relation to that particular movement of activity, so that it can make itself known by inhabiting us, which means that the idea temporary becomes a shared organ, or mode of being. Spiritual activity is not hidden in the folds of matter, so the only barrier to it is our capacity and, within its scope, the openness to become one with that idea. Now, this remains an abstract description, and I hope I will refine this sense, but I don’t have any real difficulty with that.

We should try to sense the concrete overlap here between higher cognition, experiences across the threshold in the present day, and the future Earthly stages of evolution. These all explore the same spiritual relations in many important ways. For example, we can contemplate the following connection drawn by Steiner about 'moonstruck' people, or what most of us now call 'sleepwalkers' because we have lost the inner knowledge. 

The moment a man enters the realm of Moon-evolution, he behaves as though he did not live in the physical realm of the Earth at all, but in the astral world, though the astral enters into the physical and makes use of the physical body. And that which the astral develops physically in this way was at one time Moon-evolution. We are reminded that astral activity in the physical was once world-evolution—Moon-evolution—and will be so again. But then a man will be able in full consciousness to walk up steeply sloping surfaces, as flies can do to-day. This is an indication of what will come about in the future during the Jupiter-evolution. Thus, if we rightly understand the somnambulist, we can study the physical picture he presents, as if nature herself were giving us a demonstration of what we experienced during our Moon-existence—not, certainly, in a physical body of flesh, but in an infinitely finer substance—and of what we shall experience again when we learn to master physical substance quite consciously, during the Jupiter-evolution. So this sleep-walking state points both to the past and to the future in the evolution of the world.

Of course, Steiner drew this knowledge from higher cognition. That is the key - the higher cognitive stages allow us to resonate with the holistic 'wavefunctions' that span what we conceive as both the past and the future (the past retraced). It allows us to experience what we normally only experience after death as we journey back-forward to the holistic Saturn-Vulcan stage of existence. These past-future stages are still (or already) working into our present-day experience, as in the case of the sleepwalker. So when we phenomenologically approach Intuitive cognition, we are indeed resonating with modes of consciousness that will be characteristic of future epochs and through which we will experience the same ideal relations we currently experience from our temporally decohered perspective. 

Cleric's follow-up post from that thread is also very helpful:

Now simply calling this kind of existence illusionary, doesn’t help us to understand the nature of the spiritual world. Actually, it makes it even more impossible to understand because we practically deny any spiritual reality. To move further than this personal existence, we have to observe that through our presence in the world, we contribute something to its structure. It’s not a matter of thinking big of ourselves. Even the simplest man has his footprint in the world. Look around. How many of the objects around you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t touched them? Even if minimal, we have some impact on the physical structure of the world. But we also have impact on the other kingdoms, especially our close fellow human beings. For good or worse, our presence in the world makes a difference in at least a few other human beings. Their own inner soul life wouldn’t be what it is if we didn’t exist. I repeat – it’s not about thinking of positive impact, as if our presence in the world makes it a better place. It might be quite the opposite in fact. It’s just to recognize that our cumulative spiritual activity throughout our life leaves some impact in the world’s totality.

The thing is that as a whole we’re barely conscious of this impact. Many people today live entirely in the senses and all impact is an indirect consequence of their pursuit of certain goals and desires.

Now to gain some intuition of the spiritual world we have to imagine that our senses and desires are stripped away, our mental images are stripped away and now we receive our sense of individual being entirely from the intuition of this impact that we have on the world’s spiritual organism.
...Now only when we begin to have trouble understanding the speech of the person [whose ideas we were previously immersed in] we begin to notice the sounds of the words. Now instead of the intuitions of the story, we begin to experience intuition of the sort “What’s that word supposed to mean?” Please, feel the difference. Until a moment ago we lived in shared meaning. Now we live in meaning that has become personal to us. We no longer grasp the flow of ideas of the person but ask what their incomprehensible words mean to us. Now it feels that the person’s ideas are somewhere out there, while we have to build our own personal interpretation of them (which hopefully will converge with the true meaning at some point).

What you wrote about withdrawing inquisitive attention is similar. I think that's a good way of characterizing the inner gesture that needs to be made to restore the meaning of our holistic impact on the spiritual organism, to once again be immersed in the flow of shared meaning rather than the personal meaning of particular elements of the decohered flow. If we understand even that much, we are already beginning to understand the archetypal stages through which humanity should evolve and which are described by spiritual science as the upcoming epochs when certain cultural and natural forms of life will decay and metamorphose into other modes of life. 

We only need capitalistic commerce involving private property, for example, as long as people are fixated on what psychological-sensory experiences mean for them personally. When we live in clear consciousness of the reverberations of our spiritual activity for the whole planetary organism, however, the idea of 'working for others' and sharing property will no longer cut so strongly across our sense of 'fairness' and so forth. We can likewise sense how the act of reproduction has come to subtly carry the more selfish meaning of generating new living forms for ourselves, enriching our family, preserving our bloodline, ensuring the concentration of our privately amassed wealth, etc. These things will naturally fade away as we reorient consciousness toward the holistic spiritual organism. 

Of course, that should all result as a consequence of the natural outflowing of the spiritual evolutionary process and we can't simply legislate away or otherwise eradicate these cultural and natural bridges to the Spirit. They will still be necessary as we gradually learn to dispense with the sensory-psychic crutches and live in the same underlying spiritual relations from the perspective of holistic sense-free consciousness. So to summarize this portion:

1/ We explore the same spiritual relations on Earth and after death, only from unique cognitive perspectives.

2/  Modern initiation is seeking resonance with the spheres of more integrated meaningful potential that will later crystallize as future Earthly epochs. That is synonymous with experiencing and investigating across the threshold with Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. 

3/ Across the threshold, our intuitive lens shifts from what objects, people, and events mean to us, to what our spiritual activity means for them. (and that can only be cognized in an intimate and holistic way, unlike the meaning of particular decohered sensations, emotions, and thoughts that we can analyze at a distance in a fragmented way) 

4/ To refine our orientation of moving between these intuitive lenses, we need to work on deconditioning from the instinctive impulse to only mine experiences for their personal meaning to us. That is where various spiritual exercises, such as those discussed in the article, become helpful. (also discussed below)

5/ All of this work is gradual and we cannot prematurely dispense with all the subconscious crutches before we are prepared to do so through higher cognitive development.

Federica wrote: About verbalizing (I didn't reply before) your examples were of impulsive thoughts and then I agree it's valuable to refrain from verbalizing them, to counteract the impulse directly. But in the case of cold thoughts, maybe appearing in pictures, if the sense is that the thought is unfree, or the effect of undue influences, then I believe it's best to really grab it, verbalize it (to oneself of course, not to others), and process it, maybe even correct it with neutralizing, more free thoughts. For example, a thought that something bad may happen to a dear person, or a thought that is only made up to flatter the ego, or to egotistically protect us from an unpleasant situation, in anticipation. When these thoughts come - as I unfortunately know from direct experience - they are not triggered by sensory events (cat doing funny things, sports on TV,...). They are rather ‘cold’, and I believe those shouldn’t be left thriving in the consciousness. Sometimes they try to hide, but with even moderate vigilance, they can be unmasked (verbalized) and treated.

I am not sure, but the 'cold thoughts' you describe sound like the fruits of inner work. That is what I meant to suggest with 'bubbling up' from the depths. We should start to experience these feelings and thoughts more often even when they are not triggered by specific outer occasions. Indeed they are usually hiding beneath the surface of waking consciousness and they often never make it above the surface. With the delamination of the soul life, however, we are not shielded from these cold thoughts as much, rather we are invited to become more creatively responsible for them. At first, it is important to pay attention to these thoughts in an objective and dispassionate way (not to indulge them), to bring them into greater light of consciousness before they go back into hiding, as you say. 

Once we have noticed certain patterns in these cold thoughts (remember the IFS analogy), though, we can start to creatively modulate the underlying L-configuration through resistance efforts. First, we become conscious of the patterns, which is a part of the work, and the other part is to begin strategically 'blotting out' some of these cold thoughts (which could be connected with the virtue of forgiveness). It is similar to the transition between imagination and inspiration, in that sense. We blot out or willfully forget the mental images (not only visual images but all sense-like content) so we become more sensitive to the underlying spiritual gestures. That is when we really begin transitioning from what the World content means to us toward what our spiritual gestures mean to the World. How does our L-configuration that generates these cold thoughts influence our family, relatives, friends, clients, and souls we have never even met in our current incarnation? Those are the holistic relations that the exercises help us develop sensitivity for and which will take on much more comprehensive meaning through the stages of higher cognition.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 4:41 pm We should try to sense the concrete overlap here between higher cognition, experiences across the threshold in the present day, and the future Earthly stages of evolution. These all explore the same spiritual relations in many important ways. For example, we can contemplate the following connection drawn by Steiner about 'moonstruck' people, or what most of us now call 'sleepwalkers' because we have lost the inner knowledge. 

The moment a man enters the realm of Moon-evolution, he behaves as though he did not live in the physical realm of the Earth at all, but in the astral world, though the astral enters into the physical and makes use of the physical body. And that which the astral develops physically in this way was at one time Moon-evolution. We are reminded that astral activity in the physical was once world-evolution—Moon-evolution—and will be so again. But then a man will be able in full consciousness to walk up steeply sloping surfaces, as flies can do to-day. This is an indication of what will come about in the future during the Jupiter-evolution. Thus, if we rightly understand the somnambulist, we can study the physical picture he presents, as if nature herself were giving us a demonstration of what we experienced during our Moon-existence—not, certainly, in a physical body of flesh, but in an infinitely finer substance—and of what we shall experience again when we learn to master physical substance quite consciously, during the Jupiter-evolution. So this sleep-walking state points both to the past and to the future in the evolution of the world.

Of course, Steiner drew this knowledge from higher cognition. That is the key - the higher cognitive stages allow us to resonate with the holistic 'wavefunctions' that span what we conceive as both the past and the future (the past retraced). It allows us to experience what we normally only experience after death as we journey back-forward to the holistic Saturn-Vulcan stage of existence. These past-future stages are still (or already) working into our present-day experience, as in the case of the sleepwalker. So when we phenomenologically approach Intuitive cognition, we are indeed resonating with modes of consciousness that will be characteristic of future epochs and through which we will experience the same ideal relations we currently experience from our temporally decohered perspective. 

Cleric's follow-up post from that thread is also very helpful:

Now simply calling this kind of existence illusionary, doesn’t help us to understand the nature of the spiritual world. Actually, it makes it even more impossible to understand because we practically deny any spiritual reality. To move further than this personal existence, we have to observe that through our presence in the world, we contribute something to its structure. It’s not a matter of thinking big of ourselves. Even the simplest man has his footprint in the world. Look around. How many of the objects around you wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t touched them? Even if minimal, we have some impact on the physical structure of the world. But we also have impact on the other kingdoms, especially our close fellow human beings. For good or worse, our presence in the world makes a difference in at least a few other human beings. Their own inner soul life wouldn’t be what it is if we didn’t exist. I repeat – it’s not about thinking of positive impact, as if our presence in the world makes it a better place. It might be quite the opposite in fact. It’s just to recognize that our cumulative spiritual activity throughout our life leaves some impact in the world’s totality.

The thing is that as a whole we’re barely conscious of this impact. Many people today live entirely in the senses and all impact is an indirect consequence of their pursuit of certain goals and desires.

Now to gain some intuition of the spiritual world we have to imagine that our senses and desires are stripped away, our mental images are stripped away and now we receive our sense of individual being entirely from the intuition of this impact that we have on the world’s spiritual organism.
...Now only when we begin to have trouble understanding the speech of the person [whose ideas we were previously immersed in] we begin to notice the sounds of the words. Now instead of the intuitions of the story, we begin to experience intuition of the sort “What’s that word supposed to mean?” Please, feel the difference. Until a moment ago we lived in shared meaning. Now we live in meaning that has become personal to us. We no longer grasp the flow of ideas of the person but ask what their incomprehensible words mean to us. Now it feels that the person’s ideas are somewhere out there, while we have to build our own personal interpretation of them (which hopefully will converge with the true meaning at some point).

What you wrote about withdrawing inquisitive attention is similar. I think that's a good way of characterizing the inner gesture that needs to be made to restore the meaning of our holistic impact on the spiritual organism, to once again be immersed in the flow of shared meaning rather than the personal meaning of particular elements of the decohered flow. If we understand even that much, we are already beginning to understand the archetypal stages through which humanity should evolve and which are described by spiritual science as the upcoming epochs when certain cultural and natural forms of life will decay and metamorphose into other modes of life. 

We only need capitalistic commerce involving private property, for example, as long as people are fixated on what psychological-sensory experiences mean for them personally. When we live in clear consciousness of the reverberations of our spiritual activity for the whole planetary organism, however, the idea of 'working for others' and sharing property will no longer cut so strongly across our sense of 'fairness' and so forth. We can likewise sense how the act of reproduction has come to subtly carry the more selfish meaning of generating new living forms for ourselves, enriching our family, preserving our bloodline, ensuring the concentration of our privately amassed wealth, etc. These things will naturally fade away as we reorient consciousness toward the holistic spiritual organism. 

Of course, that should all result as a consequence of the natural outflowing of the spiritual evolutionary process and we can't simply legislate away or otherwise eradicate these cultural and natural bridges to the Spirit. They will still be necessary as we gradually learn to dispense with the sensory-psychic crutches and live in the same underlying spiritual relations from the perspective of holistic sense-free consciousness. So to summarize this portion:

1/ We explore the same spiritual relations on Earth and after death, only from unique cognitive perspectives.

2/  Modern initiation is seeking resonance with the spheres of more integrated meaningful potential that will later crystallize as future Earthly epochs. That is synonymous with experiencing and investigating across the threshold with Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition. 

3/ Across the threshold, our intuitive lens shifts from what objects, people, and events mean to us, to what our spiritual activity means for them. (and that can only be cognized in an intimate and holistic way, unlike the meaning of particular decohered sensations, emotions, and thoughts that we can analyze at a distance in a fragmented way) 

4/ To refine our orientation of moving between these intuitive lenses, we need to work on deconditioning from the instinctive impulse to only mine experiences for their personal meaning to us. That is where various spiritual exercises, such as those discussed in the article, become helpful. (also discussed below)

5/ All of this work is gradual and we cannot prematurely dispense with all the subconscious crutches before we are prepared to do so through higher cognitive development.

Thanks, Ashvin, that was expressed in very clear language. The quote from Steiner is not the easiest for me to relate to, as is. I thought that in the Jupiter times there wouldn’t be surfaces of any kind. But leaving the example of sleep walkers aside, coming to this:

So when we phenomenologically approach Intuitive cognition, we are indeed resonating with modes of consciousness that will be characteristic of future epochs and through which we will experience the same ideal relations we currently experience from our temporally decohered perspective.

I understand that to an extent - that the spiritual world stands as a unitary, holistic correspondence to the multiple time-specific portals to it on the side of the sequential sensory world. Nonetheless, since the spiritual world is also in constant evolution itself, can’t we equally say that our future overall constitution, as an integral part of that spiritual evolution, will make us experience the Spirit in an evolving way, different from the current possibilities as we experience them from the limited perspective of our current incarnation? In this sense, when I read Cleric’s “Imagine that you are a mathematician…” I took it as an exercise to do now, through the mediation of the present constitution. In the future, when one is incarnated as spoken word, has a more resonant physical-etheric body, and a more extended conscious potential, will such exercise even be needed?

Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jul 24, 2024 7:29 pm Thanks, Ashvin, that was expressed in very clear language. The quote from Steiner is not the easiest for me to relate to, as is. I thought that in the Jupiter times there wouldn’t be surfaces of any kind. But leaving the example of sleep walkers aside, coming to this:

Right, at that stage it will be the 'infinitely finer substance' just as it was during Old Moon evolution. That is just one example of the mirrored evolutionary process that we can find throughout spiritual scientific research. It was meant to highlight how, essentially, our current Earthly perspective teases apart the holistic Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive spaces of spiritual activity into 'past' and 'future' (and all other poles).

Federica wrote:

So when we phenomenologically approach Intuitive cognition, we are indeed resonating with modes of consciousness that will be characteristic of future epochs and through which we will experience the same ideal relations we currently experience from our temporally decohered perspective.

I understand that to an extent - that the spiritual world stands as a unitary, holistic correspondence to the multiple time-specific portals to it on the side of the sequential sensory world. Nonetheless, since the spiritual world is also in constant evolution itself, can’t we equally say that our future overall constitution, as an integral part of that spiritual evolution, will make us experience the Spirit in an evolving way, different from the current possibilities as we experience them from the limited perspective of our current incarnation? In this sense, when I read Cleric’s “Imagine that you are a mathematician…” I took it as an exercise to do now, through the mediation of the present constitution. In the future, when one is incarnated as spoken word, has a more resonant physical-etheric body, and a more extended conscious potential, will such exercise even be needed?

Yes, we won't need the exercise anymore because we will experience the reality that the exercise acts as a portal for. We will be able to resonate directly with soul perspectives without needing the portals of speech incarnated in airwaves or in the mineral element for writings. But we wouldn't say that this text you are reading, which acts as a portal to my soul perspective, provides you with no idea of the latter. That is the essential point - the exercise provides you with some concrete idea of the Intuitive perspective from which these future stages are intended.

I was generally trying to address your initial question of what it means for us to wean off the subconscious psycho-physical crutches and experience more and more "Christ in me". The higher cognitive perspectives are what it means. That weaning is what we experience with every journey within the liminal spaces of consciousness even now (for ex. in Kamaloca we burn off those desires that can only be satisfied through the physical body). It is true that our intellectual consciousness will remain the most 'in focus' now even if we develop higher cognition, but nevertheless the latter gives us a preview into the concrete experience of the future evolutionary stages where we increasingly ensoul and embody Christ.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 22, 2024 4:41 pm

Federica wrote: About verbalizing (I didn't reply before) your examples were of impulsive thoughts and then I agree it's valuable to refrain from verbalizing them, to counteract the impulse directly. But in the case of cold thoughts, maybe appearing in pictures, if the sense is that the thought is unfree, or the effect of undue influences, then I believe it's best to really grab it, verbalize it (to oneself of course, not to others), and process it, maybe even correct it with neutralizing, more free thoughts. For example, a thought that something bad may happen to a dear person, or a thought that is only made up to flatter the ego, or to egotistically protect us from an unpleasant situation, in anticipation. When these thoughts come - as I unfortunately know from direct experience - they are not triggered by sensory events (cat doing funny things, sports on TV,...). They are rather ‘cold’, and I believe those shouldn’t be left thriving in the consciousness. Sometimes they try to hide, but with even moderate vigilance, they can be unmasked (verbalized) and treated.

I am not sure, but the 'cold thoughts' you describe sound like the fruits of inner work. That is what I meant to suggest with 'bubbling up' from the depths. We should start to experience these feelings and thoughts more often even when they are not triggered by specific outer occasions. Indeed they are usually hiding beneath the surface of waking consciousness and they often never make it above the surface. With the delamination of the soul life, however, we are not shielded from these cold thoughts as much, rather we are invited to become more creatively responsible for them. At first, it is important to pay attention to these thoughts in an objective and dispassionate way (not to indulge them), to bring them into greater light of consciousness before they go back into hiding, as you say. 

Once we have noticed certain patterns in these cold thoughts (remember the IFS analogy), though, we can start to creatively modulate the underlying L-configuration through resistance efforts. First, we become conscious of the patterns, which is a part of the work, and the other part is to begin strategically 'blotting out' some of these cold thoughts (which could be connected with the virtue of forgiveness). It is similar to the transition between imagination and inspiration, in that sense. We blot out or willfully forget the mental images (not only visual images but all sense-like content) so we become more sensitive to the underlying spiritual gestures. That is when we really begin transitioning from what the World content means to us toward what our spiritual gestures mean to the World. How does our L-configuration that generates these cold thoughts influence our family, relatives, friends, clients, and souls we have never even met in our current incarnation? Those are the holistic relations that the exercises help us develop sensitivity for and which will take on much more comprehensive meaning through the stages of higher cognition.

Not sure the cold thoughts are the fruit of inner work, since I am not rigorous enough with it. I believe they were there before, but lately they have become less seamless. There’s more general vigilance for thoughts coming and going. Yes, I often think about the influence my activity may have in the environment and sometimes I even wonder if there is any connection with occurrences I notice, unless it's self suggestion. In any case, all the reminders and further thoughts you keep providing are of great help - thanks, Ashvin.