Federica, Anthony, thank you for your feedback! Everything I receive is very valuable to me. I don’t have much time right now, I just would like to remind that in the end we’re looking for a deeper cognitive perspective. Our attempt to hold ten apples in our hand is really the intellect’s attempt to build the Cosmos within its arrangement of thoughts. This is not to say that these attempts are wasted. In fact we do need them. But we should also find the proper attitude. We can stretch fingers one by one in different directions. Then we feel frustrated that we can’t grasp all directions simultaneously. But the whole hand is found in a different way, not by mechanically patching together the momentary experiences of the individual stretched fingers. This is an interesting exercise to try out. We can spread our hand and hold visual and kinesthetic focus on the tips of individual fingers. We hold focus for some time and switch to another finger. Now what if we want to feel all fingers simultaneously? If we know nothing else, we may try to switch our focus faster and faster between fingers as if to blur together their sensations. This however doesn’t feel satisfactory. The natural way is to focus and feel our whole hand. Notice that this is not simply the mechanical sum of the sensations of the individual fingers. The feeling of a hand is a unique sensation in itself, yet the kinesthetic feeling of the fingers seem to be embedded in it.
In a similar way, many of the things that we understand in the course of inner development are the result of actual changes in our inner organization. Some descriptions may seem logical but they can’t be grasped as a whole. Blurring them together by thinking them faster and faster in sequence doesn’t help. Our thinking organ has to grow a ‘hand’. Then we say “now I see!”
Now the big question is how do we grow that hand? Obviously, by just keeping counting the fingers, we get nowhere. Here’s where we need the science of thinking and becoming in general. Our culture leads us to a point where we feel more or less complete beings. We accept in humility that we know very little fingers, there are far smarter people who know many more fingers than us, but the idea that we may need to know also a hand simply makes no sense to the average person of our age. This leads us to believe that if we don’t know something, it is enough to perceive the corresponding finger in order to add it to our knowledge.
When things such as the ones we speak of in this forum are presented, people see many fingers but soon become frustrated and say “This is simply a hierarchy of fantasies! There’s nothing holding these fingers together except your fantasy.” And in truth, the hand that unites the fingers can’t be found as some additional perception on top of them. This unity can only grow as a new organ of our thinking organism.
This of course sounds as nothing but the next level of fantasy in the hierarchy. Yet this is so only because we’re searching for that unity on our intellectual plane. The moment we hear ‘organ of our thinking organism’ this immediately becomes the next floating puzzle-piece on our intellectual desktop.
We can only leave this infernal loop if we take seriously that to understand these things, something must be transformed in the way our thinking organ works. And by transformation it is not meant adopting some other axiomatic basis, other ontological primes, some new kind of non-Aristotelian logic and so on. All these things still arrange puzzle-pieces on the intellectual desktop, no matter how ingeniously we recombine them.
Here’s where our present mindset becomes conflicted. We believe that the solution is in front of us, within the puzzle pieces and we simply need more time to experiment with their combinations until we find the one that clicks. To grow the hand, however, we need more of a different kind of
time. Here it is really a problem with our present civilization and we’re all affected.
The missing understanding is directly contained in the intuition that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Yet we’re not clear how the whole comes about. In truth, this whole continually incarnates in us. Think about it. Even one minute from now, you’ll be a being that knows a tiny bit more than what you know now – even if this knowledge is merely the fact that you have existed for one more minute. In this sense, our thinking should be seen as a two-fold process. On one hand we exert ourselves to focus on the fingers one by one. Yet no matter how fast we switch, we can’t get a feeling for the hand. So we need the second part – to realize that our thinking of the fingers really prepares the body into which the whole hand can incarnate.
So many mysteries become clear to us if we at least consider that we’re not a static soul sphere that simply accumulates images in its interior. We can instead imagine that our soul is largely outside our consciousness and continually incarnates. In every thought that we think, something of our soul incarnates and precipitates as a thought-image. So our deeper being lives a double life so to speak. On one hand it has a certain higher order structure but on the other it is self-conscious of it only within the unity of the ego. Higher development consists in taking conscious stance within this continual incarnation. We understand that through our thinking, feeling and willing at the surface, we either prepare the soil within which our not yet incarnated being awakens or we obstruct the path. This doesn’t mean that our being doesn’t incarnate, it still does – time flows. But it is as if it enters into a bodily environment with certain amount of alcohol in the bloodstream. Our being tries to act but thinking, feeling and willing swing wildly as a three-arm pendulum. Thus our whole thinking life can be considered as only one half of the work – the preparation of the soil. The wholeness of the hand can only incarnate through the flow of time, as something new, which for the first time awakens within our bodily complex. If we understand this, then a lot of the frustration is eliminated. That frustration comes primarily because we believe that we’re already a complete being and understanding something amounts to contemplating some arrangement of puzzle-pieces on the desktop. I’m serious about this: coming to experience time as the continual incarnation of our being is one of the most transformative experiences that we’re ripe to have in our epoch. I think Ashvin will agree with that.
What happens when our being is fully incarnated? Very simple – we die. Our being fills our bodily complex as water fills a bottle. This water is time and the accumulation is memory. When the bottle is full (or broken) the water overflows into the environment and we experience an overflow of consciousness. Then we begin to grasp also the environment as fabric of the same nature as our memory being. Normally we take our sensory environment for something independent, going forward in time while we only think and worry about it. At the moment of death we see that our environment has been accumulating in the same way that our memory body has. We simply have been too much sucked into the sensory organs to notice that. Then gradually our memory body spreads out and becomes embedded into the memory body of the environment and now we can no longer see our past life as something that can be considered in isolation. Everything begins to emerge in its living connections.
For many people of our age, the being that incarnates is ripe to overflow a little from the slots of our sensory suit. Initially this overflow happens only in the form of thought-images. Even by thinking livingly about what is described here, our flow of time incarnates into thought-forms that don’t fit the ordinary slots, they overflow. If we’re not allowing for this leeway, thoughts incarnate in the sensory slots – they appear like just another sensory perception on the desktop and we ask “The things you speak of don’t make any sense. I arranged the thought-images as you describe, they click together but just sit there as any other metaphysical combination of puzzle-pieces.” Yes, you arranged them but you didn’t allow them to overflow the slots.
The overflow is not a quality of the thought-image itself. It doesn’t make sense to ask: “How do I recognize thought images that overflow from those that don’t?” The difference is not in the image. The overflow is in our thinking activity. It’s not in what the thought-image is but in what we can
do with it. We feel this strange wiggle, we begin to jiggle the thought-images, as if gaining unsuspected finer control before they are stamped on the screen.
This is how our being incarnates its fingers. In thinking, our being begins to wiggle its thoughts and says “Yo, I can feel my thinking-fingers now”. From this point onwards it’s all a matter of patience and persistence. If we want our being to incarnate its whole hand, it is up to us to prepare the soil. We continue to exercise the wiggles of the fingers, even if we get frustrated that we can’t build the hand out of the fingers, no matter how fast we switch focus between them. We have to wait for
time to enter and incarnate the hand. We wait as we wait for our beloved one at the train station. We have prepared the room, cooked dinner, lit the candles and now we’re waiting for the embrace. This is what happens in every instance of our life. Every thought is an embrace that we meet at the train station called ‘now’. Sending the Love letters to negotiate the arrival is prayer.
Now people may say “But this is nonsense! It flies in the face of non-dualism! We lose our oneness, split and fantasize some other being that incarnates in us – that’s dualism!” If one calls living in a single frame of existence, oneness – then OK. Because this is what modern non-dualism leads to. Time, as we speak of it, not as an abstract philosophical concept but as the living flow of being, simply doesn’t exist there.
When the hand incarnates, then will the elbow, the shoulder, the head and then the whole being. This corresponds to the loosening of the whole life body, which provides the leeway in which our higher being can overflow and gain self-consciousness. Now we already begin to bridge the worlds. We have overflown something which for most people overflows only after death. Now we grasp the accumulation of our incarnating being – our memory body. When we look at a plant we see its temporal existence as a space-picture. The trunk is the past, the growing tips are the now. Our life/memory body feels in a similar way. It can’t be drawn because it is not a sensory impression. It is
known by filling it with our fluid imaginative thinking. It feels as a seed that has grown and accumulated layers as tree rings. Now we understand that when we normally try to remember something, we’re really browsing like through a cardfile for the layer we need. When remembering in our ordinary consciousness, we live only in the fingertips that touch the files and grasp from there whatever can fit our
present slots. Needless to say, these layers are only metaphors. They are not spatially separated but are like living and interpenetrating snapshots of our inner life, which however, can be grasped as something holistic.
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I would like to share an exercise that I've been experimenting with lately. It really came as an extension of the clutch disc metaphor.
In engineering, physics and so on, it’s always important to ‘reset the zero’. We have to adjust the origin of the coordinate system, to calibrate the tools and so on. Our inner investigations also benefit from such a reset. It’s always good to have a stable origin of the coordinate system before departing.
The first thing has been mentioned many times. These are the linear springs through which we find our center of imagination, the area in the head. In this way we find the origin in
space.
To find the origin in
time we have to go in three steps.
1. We take the clock dial of thinking. We begin to rotate left and right. We think about what we did few minutes ago, we think about we’ll be doing few minutes from now. We think about yesterday, about tomorrow, about birth, about death, about the beginning of the world, about its end. We can fly through time effortlessly in thought. As we feel the spring tension to left and right, past and future, we gradually feel the neutral now.
2. We take the dial of feeling. When we turn to the past, in the broadest sense we have positive and negative feelings. We feel nostalgia for what was good or regret for what went bad. For the future we feel either joyful anticipation – the things that we ‘can’t wait’ to come – or anxiety and fear. When we release the tension of the springs to the center, we find
gratitude. This may sound strange at first but I hope everything said above gives proper context. We are grateful for the flow of time, for everything that continually incarnates in us and resurrects us to richer life. The dial of feelings is more inert to move.
3. Then we take the dial of bodily will. Here we don’t have much to do because we can’t really will in the future and past. This dial is very heavy. All we need is simply bring to consciousness our present bodily life. I’m not conclusive about this but so far it seems that I can very easily center in the present bodily state if I focus on the sense of
weight. Just feel how our body presses against whatever we’re sitting, how our organs themselves press into each other down. It’s very interesting that it’s almost impossible to have memory of weight. If we try to remember that bench press in the fitness, we can see the image, we can feel the exertion but in a certain sense we live as a movie actor that lifts phony weights. In a way we have to
pretend in our memory that we’re lifting a heavy weight. We can very easily modify the imagination and lift the weight with one hand, then throw it around, balance it on our finger. The true drag of gravity we feel only in the present. Other senses seem to me more similar to the corresponding memory images. So an easy way to find the origin of our bodily will is to simply feel our weight and how with our will we have to overcome it.
Once we have found the spatial center and the three temporal centers, we try to put them on the same axis passing through the center of space and try to keep things stable while time flows. The dials have their natural rotations in time and they spin with different ratios but we have to bring them to a musical chord. Most of the time they rotate wildly in all directions. These rotations are connected in mysterious ways, just like the three arrows of a clock are related through the gears. We swing one disc, all others move in unintended directions, we try to correct them, the first moves again and so on. It’s a wild three-arm pendulum and that’s how, alas, the inner life of modern man looks like.
This exercise is not the end, it is only the beginning. When we have the origin and can sustain centered space and musical rotation of time, we begin to grasp much more clearly the incarnating flow of our being. We begin to sense peripheral discs of time that we haven’t suspected could exist.
Here’s an image I’ve just found. I haven’t investigated it in depth but in a general sense I think it fits our topic. A spiral of this kind becomes a real Imaginative experience. We can indeed feel our central seed around which time has inflown. We can also feel that which is yet to flow and grow in our thinking and for which we prepare the soil.
