Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part IV)
Posted: Sat May 18, 2024 7:11 pm
It is no shocking revelation to anyone paying attention that humanity has become alienated from Nature and the Cosmos to the greatest possible extent in modern times. That is because the thoughts through which we perceive and think about the World are not felt to be a concrete part of that same World, but rather some parallel commentary on its happenings. Our mental pictures and concepts are experienced as point-like entities confined to the boundaries of our skull. They are generally assumed to be neural firings in our brain that mysteriously become conscious of themselves. In fact, this correspondence is so tight that ‘we’, as conscious entities, are normally felt to be located somewhere amongst the upper portion of our head. When we refer to our chest, our feet, or to the ground, we say they are ‘below us’. Indeed, there is some truth to this materialistic understanding because our normal cognitive life is reflected through the neurosensory system (not caused by it), which is dominated by the visual and audial senses. Our thoughts are locked ‘in-phase’ with these sequential neural firings and that’s how we initially become conscious of ourselves as creative agencies who can participate in shaping the experiential flow.
A key reason why we feel mental pictures and concepts to be so insubstantial and ‘subjective’ in relation to the ‘objective world’ is because it is only within the mental space that experiences are ordered in a linear temporal chain of events; a sequence of memory pictures extending backward or predictive pictures extending forward. At any given time, we feel only a ‘thin frame’ of this temporal chain is immanently present for our inner experience. Everything else of thought-nature feels to exist in quickly receding memory intuition, nebulous anticipatory intuition (of future states), or as intellectual speculation and fantasy. On the other hand, in the sensory domain, as we briefly discussed in Part III (for example, the clock illustration), temporally extended spiritual activity is merged and ordered together in a space-like way. That gives it the characteristic quality of stability and concreteness relative to our linearly sequential mental life. It is from this dualized experience that modern thinking has rooted countless theories about the ‘nature of reality’ and the potentialities of cognition (e.g. Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’).
The sensory-spatial domain feels concrete but, at the same time, opaque; it lacks the quality of intuitive insight that our thoughts carry. The latter was gained from the rendering of thought linear and insubstantial, i.e. that rendering was the price to pay for reaching the grounds of creative freedom. When our thoughts lack living substantiality, they also cannot compel us to act one way or another. It is as if a living thought-organism has been calcified into mineralized units that are lifeless, therefore not compulsive, and more manageable for the spirit to grasp and manipulate. The spirit begins to feel active in the process of bringing forth and rearranging these mineralized thoughts. All other perceptions are then confronted by it as something foreign and mysterious, while thoughts are felt to be intimate and immediately understood. This fact points to the domain of experience where we already have inner knowledge of the cause for the transforming perceptual flow because our activity is that cause.
Consider how, when we think, our inner voice perceptions are immediately united with meaning. Unlike all other perceptions, such as sensations and feelings, we don’t need to reflect on the sound of our inner voice perceptions to discern their meaning. If we had to do that, it would be an endless recursion, since each act of reflection would generate a new stream of inner voice sounds that would need to be reflected upon, and so on. Instead, the inner voice perceptions are immediately united with their meaning, and we use them to reflect on all other perceptions. It is through the lens of thought that all other experiences are contextualized and made sensible. Put another way, the organic relations between thoughts (like cause-effect, spatial-temporal, quantity-quality, etc.) are intuitively transparent to us, unlike emotional or sensory relations. It is due to this transparency that Aristotle could develop his ten categories of human apprehension which Kant later adopted as well.
Imagine the last time you listened to someone else telling an unfamiliar story. That experience would have met you as visual or audial sensations that you reflected on to follow their meaning. You would not have had a keen intuitive sense of the overarching 'plot' of the story, why particular images and words were chosen to illustrate the story, or where the story was headed. All of these met you as mysterious elements that will only be made a comprehensive whole at some later time. That is different in the case of when we ourselves tell a story. Then we live directly in the meaningful intuitive 'shape' of the story. This shape has a unique fingerprint - we can tell our intuition for the story of getting in a car accident apart from the story of going to the circus. The particular images and words that illustrate the story are condensed from our own activity and therefore we live in clear intuition, at every stage of its development, of what the story is about, where it is headed, and how it will conclude.
Nevertheless, our intuitively transparent thoughts remain insubstantial as long as they are tightly coupled with the sequential neural firings. As we have seen in the previous part, however, it is possible for thinking to release the crutch of its neurosensory system, through the retracing effort, and swim freely within imaginative currents of meaning. These meaningful currents reflect objective relations just as our normal thoughts about the World. Our inner thought-memory stream then becomes more space-like, except now that space-like experience is also united with the intuitive insight we normally experience in the act of stimulating and relating thoughts. We can eventually experience a panoramic imagistic tableau of memory experience, which shares the concreteness and immediacy of normal spatial experience. Now we have united the concrete spatial ordering of sensory experience with the intuitive insight of the mental space. We should appreciate how this is a degree of freedom for our spiritual activity that is entirely unsuspected for most.
Just as we try to make sense of the sensory space through the concepts expressed by the inner voice, we make sense of the conceptual space through imaginative experiences (which likewise shed more light on sensory experience in so far as the latter is modulated by our conceptual life). Notice how it makes just as little sense to question the validity of such imaginative experiences as it does to question the validity of our own inner voice that expresses our thoughts, for example when telling a story. We can question the intellectual interpretations added to the story-telling experience, i.e. the relation of the experience to other facts of experience, but not the experience itself. In fact, the phenomenon of doubt arises first within the conceptual space because our activity splits up the holistic thought-organism into manageable fragments and is given freedom over what portion of experience it pays attention to and how it interpretively relates the thought-fragments together. These fragments precipitate from the imaginative space like pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles.
That is why the intellect perceives its environment as weaved of polar relations and can always assert a truth claim and its opposite, hypothesis and null hypothesis, with equal conviction. It perceives light and darkness, hot and cold, high and low, north and south, sweet and bitter, canine and feline, mental and material, inner and outer, heaven and hell, faith and works, grace and karma, etc., ad infinitum. These polar relations of content certainly speak to deeper aspects within the experiential flow of our soul space, such as the soul polarity between sympathy and antipathy, or the spiritual polarity between consciousness and unconsciousness, but the intellect rarely becomes aware of how its infinitely polarized perceptual-conceptual content is a symbolic testimony to that deeper flow. Instead, our thinking habitually chooses to identify with one part of the virtual pair (like ‘matter’) and then tries to derive the other part (like ‘mind’) from the former. It is from such habits that the intellect is left in constant doubts about the nature of its experiential flow and its own relationship to that flow.
An animal does not experience such doubts because the holistic thought-organism is instinctively pushed through its being. In fact, even our relatively recent ancestors in ancient India, China, Persia, or Egypt did not and could not experience such doubts regarding most things we scratch our heads over today. There would have been no possibility of people back then questioning the existence of an immortal soul that clothes itself in the transient body, for example, because they imaginatively experienced the soul’s existence in a concrete way and distinctly from the body. Neither could the reality of the soul’s multiple incarnations be questioned. It is only with the proto-development of intellectual thinking in ancient Greece that we see the glimmerings of such questions emerge in philosophical discourse, yet even then we were still descending into mineralized thinking with a parachute. It took another few thousand years of expanding cognitive degrees of freedom for these nascent doubts to become the rabid spiritual skepticism we find today. In that sense, materialism and atheism are the best testimonies to the fact that the Spirit has united itself with the physical world in our thinking.
That degree of freedom for doubt won through the conceptual space is not lost in our further imaginative development, but it is redeemed. Now the relations of the thought-organism are kept intact and therefore we have a more informed choice of whether to remain mired in doubt, forming rigid conclusions from fleeting frames of experience, or to gradually regain our inner certainty by remaining faithful to the explorative journey itself. The fruits of the imaginative state can be compared to learning about a tumor within the depths of the organism and then having the choice to address it or let it grow unchecked, whereas the conceptual state leaves us mostly ignorant of the tumor’s presence – in the latter case, there isn’t even the possibility of a choice. At their core, all these higher experiences provide the opportunity for ever-expanding spiritual freedom and, therefore, genuine moral agency.
The panoramic space-like imaginative experience is often reported during near-death encounters in which the subject was clinically ‘dead’ for some time before returning to lucid consciousness. They speak of a ‘life review’ where all life memories are present simultaneously, ‘flashing before the eyes’, and, moreover, they can be experienced with particular emphasis on how they affected others (we will return to the significance of this fact later). That is because the soul-spirit has loosened from the rigid formatting of the neurosensory system and begins to reflect its existence within the imaginative space. Yet since such experiences are, by definition, not cognitively trained for, their true significance can only be dimly intuited and later interpreted within the normal conceptual space, with all its unconscious psychic coloring. It is for this reason that such reports can remain perfectly consistent with a materialistic outlook, and are often treated as such, since the underlying reasons for why such a phenomenon occurs are not properly understood within their deeper spiritual context.
Spiritual retracing, on the other hand, provides the basis for systematically approaching such states and understanding them within their own native element, where the psychic coloring is also rendered transparent. What we have been discussing so far already gives us a better understanding of these higher experiences than we would ever get from accidentally drowning, or what have you, without any such conceptual preparation. The Earthly human being is already a ‘cross-section’ of all the higher spaces and therefore, in our conceptual activity, we are extracting meaningful fragments from the higher states, as discussed throughout the previous essays. In truth, the states after death (and during sleep) are already superimposed on our waking experience during incarnate existence and are simply aliased from perception. The more we imbue our conceptual activity with imaginative life, the more we develop resonance with the subtle and more holistic spiritual gestures of the sleep and after-death states.
Through such resonance, the effects of our ideas and emotions are not felt as constricted to the boundaries of our skin any more than an enraged blow to another person’s face. Because the ideas and emotions that lead to such a blow are clothed in the conceptual-sensory element, we receive visible feedback on some of their effects. As discussed in the previous part, however, there are many residual effects of that inner activity which are not clothed in the sensory element and therefore are aliased from perception. If we think about the deed enough, it becomes evident that punching another person could precipitate soul entanglements that span many years or even generations. Perhaps it will cause the other person physical and psychological trauma that influences their relationships for a long time, or perhaps their family members will also be affected such that hostility arises between that family and ours. We could also imagine this hostile act profoundly influencing a young impressionable child who happened to witness it. These effects could likewise get entangled in an endless subconscious chain of Nth-order effects. All of these potential threads of destiny can only remain vague and nebulous at the conceptual level.
When we start delaminating and retracing with our spirit into the imaginative space, on the other hand, we begin developing intuitive sensitivity for the lawfulness within these arcs of time. We can start to sense how previous activity has seeded the conditions for our present state of being and how the latter, in turn, seeds the potential for new paths of experience. Imagine you are walking between rooms of your home but with each new room, it is as if you wake up from a dream and the previous room you walked through is but a hazy feeling that something happened. You move from the bedroom to the bathroom but, by the time you get in the shower, you barely remember how or why you are there. Such a dreamy and disoriented experience of spatial-sensory existence is rare, but it is practically the norm when it comes to inner temporal rhythms. We normally have a dim and fragmented memory intuition for how streams of past inner activity – of thinking, feeling, and willing - are rhythmically feeding back into our current state of being, and anticipation for how present activity feeds forward.
These temporal streams are not only personal to us, but also involve the activity of other individuals and collectives, such as families, communities, and nations. Although we have developed sensitivity for the spatial consequences of our bodily will activity, we have almost none for the temporal consequences of our inner activity. For example, in a previous essay, I attempted to convey a phenomenology of truthfulness, in which the “truth” is understood as the harmonious alignment of concentric layers of experience – intents, thoughts, feelings, sensations. When we intentionally misalign our inner layers of thinking, feeling, and memory/sensation, i.e. what we know as “lying”, how does this feedback into the experiential flow of our lives, the lives of others, and, at a larger scale, the historical flow of the World? Where do our lies go, so to speak, and from whence do they return into the experiential landscape? Such questions are hardly even asked in our time due to the aliasing effect mentioned above. As a simple image for this process, let’s consider the water cycle.
The Sun symbolizes the entirely inner domain of existence from whence the manifest spectrum condenses; the ‘forces’ mediating the entire cycle through which inner activity becomes outer manifestation and engagement with these manifestations feeds back to the flow of inner activity. These invisible forces precipitate into our inner experience and crystallize as thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions, and deeds before percolating in the subconscious as memories. Then we conduct our spiritual activity based on the lawfulness of this subconscious memory intuition and radiate inner impulses back to the Sun sphere, yet in this ‘evaporation’ process the impulses we send back become more and more ‘subtle’ until we lose sight of them, which is to say our thinking consciousness can no longer trace their relations. For that reason, we assume they no longer have any influence in our stream of development anymore. Again, it isn’t only our personal activity at work here but the collective activity of many beings.
Our normal intuition is that we are self-enclosed bubbles of consciousness confronting an ‘external’ world that runs its course mostly independently of our activity. Yet we know that our genetic material is woven from a line of ancestors that becomes increasingly wider in scope, more universal, the further we trace them back. Likewise, the substances that comprise our body are drawn daily from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The air we inhale one moment was outside of us the moment before. Our psychic life is woven from memories of interactions with the outer world and its beings. On the path of retracing, we find these outer facts are genuine reflections of inner realities that also go in the other direction – our inner life is continually finding its way into outer forms and events. Our inner experiential space is felt to be superimposed with the experiential spaces of many other beings, not bounded by our skin and bones. This doesn’t mean we dissolve into a homogenous soup, because we can still discern what our activity uniquely contributes within this space, except the boundaries are not so neatly and sharply defined as they usually are.
So, returning to the metaphor, when the impulses we sent to the Sun sphere precipitate back into the Earthly stream of development, we often meet them with various shades of ignorance, pride, perplexity, fear, and resentment. We are graced with insight, skills, and good fortune, and we often attribute these to our individual efforts. On the flip side, we are struck by accidents, illnesses, traumas, economic disasters, wars, and similar events, and we search for all manner of external parties to blame. The situation is crudely comparable to a woman who goes through the trials of pregnancy without any consciousness that her sufferings were either the result of her previous intent to have a child or would in fact lead to the realization of that intent. The whole temporal arc that would connect the beginning with the end, and make sense of the sacrifices involved, is conspicuously missing. That is not to say all suffering is intended, but simply that the inner relations which lead to the suffering and the inner potential which could result from the suffering are generally obscured from view. An untold degree of unnecessary suffering is added on top of any intended resistance in our time simply due to this blind spot of consciousness.
An excess of pride, on the one hand, and projective blame and resentment, on the other, occurs in modern society because our sensory cognition loses sight of the spiritual water cycle and feels forced to locate the reasons for all sensory events within the spatial domain, in which every being appears to be self-sufficient bubble of inner experience, an island-unto-himself. It is comparable to a person who has a magnetic compass and tries to locate the reasons for the needle’s movement only within the mechanical bounds of the compass, rather than broadening out their search to the whole Earth’s magnetic field, i.e. the invisible influences which primarily make sense of the needle’s movements. Similarly, the movements of individual and collective destinies can only be made sense of in relation to the inner Cosmos as a whole and its manifold influences. Most of our passionate intellectual convictions result from a combination of ignorance and a craving to have immediate answers as to the reasons for our experience. When we mitigate that ignorance by retracing into the temporal arcs, we also find it easier to resist the craving for quick and convenient answers. Instead, we become enthusiastic to gradually unveil those reasons at an intuitive level.
We can represent these overlapping temporal arcs of activity as follows:
The smallest arcs represent the temporal rhythms that are most ‘in-phase’ in our normal experience, where intentional activity and the perceptual result of that activity follow in close synchronization. When we intend to think about politics, for example, a stream of inner voice perceptions (thoughts) flows immediately as a testimony of that intention. The meaning of the thoughts will closely reflect our political intuition, and if some thoughts are out of place within that intuitive context, we get immediate feedback that our activity needs some adjustment. Perhaps we notice a glaring gap in the logic of our political thinking and therefore get feedback that we need to do more research on the history of nations. These are the sorts of rhythms that are most evident to us, so much so that we normally don’t pay any attention to them. We just take it for granted that when we intend to think, a stream of thoughts issues forth in close synchronization.
On the other hand, if we have a job interview and lie about our resume, it’s not so transparent how such an intent will feedback on our experience. It may at first give us an advantage for the position we are seeking, and then only months or years later it feeds back on us from an unexpected direction. Perhaps we are led into a path of experience with our boss and colleagues where more and more lies are needed to support the initial lie, and we end up entangled in an unstable web of lies that eventually costs us not only our job, but our family, friends, and freedom. Such temporal rhythms are somewhat ‘out-of-phase’ and, therefore, are more easily ignored as we conduct our spiritual activity. This domain of the spiritual ‘water cycle’ remains in the blind spot for some people today, hence lying is not seen as a big deal and is even welcomed in some spheres of life.
There are temporal arcs that are even more out-of-phase, where our creative and moral (or immoral) thoughts, feelings, and deeds feed back into the very psychic and bodily support matrix for our activity, including cultural institutions and the natural kingdoms. It is clear how a person can ruin their physical health by choosing to indulge the ‘deadly sins’, yet what is not so clear is how the body attains its initial state of health to begin with, such that it can be ruined later. Because we are practically guaranteed in the modern age to lose sight of these influences where activity and perception are so out-of-phase, we have ended up with mechanistic theories about the occurrences and evolution of the natural world. There is simply no consciousness of how spiritual activity has precipitated and flowed through the complex channels of Earthly life, ‘evaporated’ into supersensible domains, and precipitated back as natural processes and events.
Imagine you are following the meaning of a political speech – everything said is coherent and logical, perhaps even noble and upright, yet you still wonder about the inner being standing behind the words. Is the soul speaking with inner conviction, does it stand behind these words with its whole mind and heart? That is also the situation with respect to the ‘words’ of the broader perceptual flow we perceive with intellectual thinking. We can’t seem to ever be quite sure about the inner being that animates this flow – what are the convictions driving its metamorphoses? All we know is that we ‘hear’ certain words when we study the transformations of minerals, plants, animals, and humans, and their internal logic seems coherent to us. Everything seems to work together relatively harmoniously (at least within the lower kingdoms) toward some evolutionary aims, but these aims are entirely veiled to our cognitive perception (so they are reduced to the lowest common denominator of ‘survival of the fittest’).
To retrace the Cosmic Speech that adapted us to sensory existence and provided the support for our physical, intellectual, artistic, and ethical activity, our spirit enters into the overlapping temporal arcs of inner relations. We begin from the most in-phase domain – our mental life - and expand from the inside outwards. For example, we can become more intuitively sensitive to a wider aperture of our inner states of being, such that we anticipate what we would be thinking and feeling if we allowed certain impulses to take hold and influence our activity. We begin experiencing the ‘wavefunction’ of thought-potential, which ‘surfs’ through holistic images, before it collapses into a linear sequence of verbal encodings and corresponding feelings and deeds. Now we have a larger dataset by which to discern the patterned flow of inner life in relation to our activity (or passivity), i.e. we gain more sensitivity for the living IFS structure (see Part II). If this inner life was previously a dark room that we were stumbling through, it is now as if certain parts of the room take on an increasingly luminous glow, making them especially noticeable throughout our daily experiences.
At a broader level, we can develop sensitivity for how certain world conceptions were adopted at various phases of life to explore diverse mental states that were necessary for specific individual and cultural tasks, and which develop specific soul forces. We may also become sensitive to how our childhood experiences planted the seeds of certain qualities, capacities, relationships, or opportunities that grew and blossomed in adult life. These isolated experiences in time may seem unrelated to one another from the perspective of outer life, but they find their deeper connecting substructure in the characteristic rhythms of the inner life, like protruding islands united by an underwater archipelago. Now we sense there was a purpose animating these temporal arcs and can freely seek to harmonize our activity with the overarching aims. It is ‘free’ because we are acting only out of deep insight into and unconditional love for the ideal aim rather than any external compulsion of natural drives, cultural authorities, or hypothesized metaphysical entities.
As we ascend to the broader arcs, we are dealing with increasingly collective forms of activity that contextualize the narrower arcs and feedback on our experience. Our whole life destiny is contextualized by the epoch of civilization in which we were born, for example, and this epoch associates with its own unique tasks for individuals, groups, nations, and civilizations. There are no rigid boundaries between these contextual ‘arcs’ and they are constantly influencing one another in complex ways. When we notice the patterns within individual arcs, we also begin to notice self-similar patterns at the collective scales. In that way, we find that our current state of being can only be what it is by virtue of a spiritual symphony conducted through the most varied constellations of beings and their activity across many scales. It is an ‘interference’ of many overlapping ‘time-waves’ of intentional activity (human or otherwise), which are attracting our experiential stream of becoming across multiple scales.
We previously touched upon how Time experience becomes something quite different within the imaginative space, such that the ‘current moment’ at higher levels of integration can encompass conceptual states over a long duration. We can utilize a simple analogy here. Consider how, when we move our arm to reach for some object, a whole complex cascade of muscular processes unfolds (depicted in the video above). Now imagine one of these muscle cells is a conscious observer of our intent to move the arm. From its perspective, that intent is experienced as a drawn out evolutionary process in its musculature universe. What takes a few seconds from our perspective and is a simple perceptual flow of arm extension and retraction, unfolds over many muscular epochs from its perspective and involves a complex perceptual flow of countless components. Our momentary intent to move the arm provides the overarching context in which many cellular states of being unfold.
It is an analogous relation between the conceptual-sensory states we experience unfolding over long periods and the momentary imaginative or higher intents that structure the temporal arcs along which the former unfold. We could therefore say that there is only a nested configuration of ‘now’ perspectives that experience ‘spiritual relativity’, i.e. the unfolding of ‘now’ states for any given perspective is determined by its relation to all other intentional perspectives that contextualize its experience. When the transformation of our human ‘now’ state feels to unfold at a snail’s pace, we call that the ‘sensory world’ which provides the greatest resistance to our intents. On the other hand, when it feels to transform the most quickly, we call that the ‘mental world’ or ‘imaginative world’ where our intents meet the least resistance. In this way, we arrive at the LIFO principle discussed in Part I from an experiential angle – the domain of our being that was ‘last in’ is the ‘first out’ because our intentional activity meets the least resistance in its transformation.
The sensory landscape where we sometimes seem to receive quick feedback for our activity is, in fact, the most out-of-phase domain of experience. There, we are interacting with the feedback of long past activity; intents already accomplished in bygone ages that have receded into collective memory. That is what we know as ‘physicality’ or, more esoterically, as ‘karmic destiny’. We normally feel like we are freely in control of our thoughts, feelings, and actions during sensory life, but is that actually the case? One way to approach this question is to think about how often things happen to us independently of our agency, such as the actions of other beings, the weather, illnesses, etc., or likewise how often we simply stumble into various experiences in a dreamlike way. For example, we do many things on autopilot, like brushing our teeth, taking a shower, drinking coffee, etc. Even going from home to work can become so habitual that we end up at work and awaken saying, "oh great, I'm at work now." Similarly, we often get carried away on impulsive trains of thoughts and feelings and have little idea how we ended up immersed in them.
It is just like awakening in a dream and not knowing how we ended up in the dreamscape. Our spiritual agency simply isn't present and active in most of our daily experiences. These cannot be called ‘free’ experiences but rather must be considered experiences that stem from the spirit flowing through etched channels of its mental, psychic, and physiological spaces. Did we consciously choose our birthplace, our family, our native language (in which we think), our temperament (which also influences our career choice and social relationships), and so forth? Clearly not. It is only in our mental space, in the feedback of thoughts, where our present activity finds its lucid reflection. That is why spiritual retracing into the imaginative space begins with the observation of thinking, where the time arc of activity and perceptual feedback is almost completely in-phase and therefore the most intuitively transparent. The spirit can then leverage this point of intersection to render the broader temporal arcs more transparent as well. All of that collective past activity serves as the ‘womb’ for our present activity. It is where the latter is conceived and can orient itself, develop spiritual organs of perception, and be born again into the higher spaces where, for the very first time, it becomes free.
The next part will conclude the principled investigation of the imaginative state and begin exploring how we can further our retracing efforts by observing our thinking, through the technique of concentration, in an even more intimate way than we have been doing so far. By intensely focusing our concepts as testimonies to the process which birthed them, as we have been doing so far, we have already on a gradient of free activity. The free act of concentration, however, takes us much further. We can never stumble into the act of concentration, awaken and say, 'oh great, it appears I am concentrating now!' The spirit must be deliberate, present, and active the whole way - if it is truly concentrated, it will always know exactly how it reached its current state. In other words, it can always retrace the contextual relations that are funneling its experience. This act has been referred to as 'creation ex nihilo'. It is an act of the spirit that cannot be traced back to any causal chain, rather emanating from the intuitive depths of existence. It is an act independent of past karmic factors which condition the spirit’s experience; independent of all the channels etched through the instinctive spaces. Nevertheless, the experience of the activity is still constrained and formatted by those contextual arcs and, by concentrating the ray of its activity, the spirit grows more and more sensitive to their inner dimensions.
A key reason why we feel mental pictures and concepts to be so insubstantial and ‘subjective’ in relation to the ‘objective world’ is because it is only within the mental space that experiences are ordered in a linear temporal chain of events; a sequence of memory pictures extending backward or predictive pictures extending forward. At any given time, we feel only a ‘thin frame’ of this temporal chain is immanently present for our inner experience. Everything else of thought-nature feels to exist in quickly receding memory intuition, nebulous anticipatory intuition (of future states), or as intellectual speculation and fantasy. On the other hand, in the sensory domain, as we briefly discussed in Part III (for example, the clock illustration), temporally extended spiritual activity is merged and ordered together in a space-like way. That gives it the characteristic quality of stability and concreteness relative to our linearly sequential mental life. It is from this dualized experience that modern thinking has rooted countless theories about the ‘nature of reality’ and the potentialities of cognition (e.g. Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’).
The sensory-spatial domain feels concrete but, at the same time, opaque; it lacks the quality of intuitive insight that our thoughts carry. The latter was gained from the rendering of thought linear and insubstantial, i.e. that rendering was the price to pay for reaching the grounds of creative freedom. When our thoughts lack living substantiality, they also cannot compel us to act one way or another. It is as if a living thought-organism has been calcified into mineralized units that are lifeless, therefore not compulsive, and more manageable for the spirit to grasp and manipulate. The spirit begins to feel active in the process of bringing forth and rearranging these mineralized thoughts. All other perceptions are then confronted by it as something foreign and mysterious, while thoughts are felt to be intimate and immediately understood. This fact points to the domain of experience where we already have inner knowledge of the cause for the transforming perceptual flow because our activity is that cause.
Consider how, when we think, our inner voice perceptions are immediately united with meaning. Unlike all other perceptions, such as sensations and feelings, we don’t need to reflect on the sound of our inner voice perceptions to discern their meaning. If we had to do that, it would be an endless recursion, since each act of reflection would generate a new stream of inner voice sounds that would need to be reflected upon, and so on. Instead, the inner voice perceptions are immediately united with their meaning, and we use them to reflect on all other perceptions. It is through the lens of thought that all other experiences are contextualized and made sensible. Put another way, the organic relations between thoughts (like cause-effect, spatial-temporal, quantity-quality, etc.) are intuitively transparent to us, unlike emotional or sensory relations. It is due to this transparency that Aristotle could develop his ten categories of human apprehension which Kant later adopted as well.
Imagine the last time you listened to someone else telling an unfamiliar story. That experience would have met you as visual or audial sensations that you reflected on to follow their meaning. You would not have had a keen intuitive sense of the overarching 'plot' of the story, why particular images and words were chosen to illustrate the story, or where the story was headed. All of these met you as mysterious elements that will only be made a comprehensive whole at some later time. That is different in the case of when we ourselves tell a story. Then we live directly in the meaningful intuitive 'shape' of the story. This shape has a unique fingerprint - we can tell our intuition for the story of getting in a car accident apart from the story of going to the circus. The particular images and words that illustrate the story are condensed from our own activity and therefore we live in clear intuition, at every stage of its development, of what the story is about, where it is headed, and how it will conclude.
Nevertheless, our intuitively transparent thoughts remain insubstantial as long as they are tightly coupled with the sequential neural firings. As we have seen in the previous part, however, it is possible for thinking to release the crutch of its neurosensory system, through the retracing effort, and swim freely within imaginative currents of meaning. These meaningful currents reflect objective relations just as our normal thoughts about the World. Our inner thought-memory stream then becomes more space-like, except now that space-like experience is also united with the intuitive insight we normally experience in the act of stimulating and relating thoughts. We can eventually experience a panoramic imagistic tableau of memory experience, which shares the concreteness and immediacy of normal spatial experience. Now we have united the concrete spatial ordering of sensory experience with the intuitive insight of the mental space. We should appreciate how this is a degree of freedom for our spiritual activity that is entirely unsuspected for most.
Just as we try to make sense of the sensory space through the concepts expressed by the inner voice, we make sense of the conceptual space through imaginative experiences (which likewise shed more light on sensory experience in so far as the latter is modulated by our conceptual life). Notice how it makes just as little sense to question the validity of such imaginative experiences as it does to question the validity of our own inner voice that expresses our thoughts, for example when telling a story. We can question the intellectual interpretations added to the story-telling experience, i.e. the relation of the experience to other facts of experience, but not the experience itself. In fact, the phenomenon of doubt arises first within the conceptual space because our activity splits up the holistic thought-organism into manageable fragments and is given freedom over what portion of experience it pays attention to and how it interpretively relates the thought-fragments together. These fragments precipitate from the imaginative space like pairs of virtual particles and antiparticles.
That is why the intellect perceives its environment as weaved of polar relations and can always assert a truth claim and its opposite, hypothesis and null hypothesis, with equal conviction. It perceives light and darkness, hot and cold, high and low, north and south, sweet and bitter, canine and feline, mental and material, inner and outer, heaven and hell, faith and works, grace and karma, etc., ad infinitum. These polar relations of content certainly speak to deeper aspects within the experiential flow of our soul space, such as the soul polarity between sympathy and antipathy, or the spiritual polarity between consciousness and unconsciousness, but the intellect rarely becomes aware of how its infinitely polarized perceptual-conceptual content is a symbolic testimony to that deeper flow. Instead, our thinking habitually chooses to identify with one part of the virtual pair (like ‘matter’) and then tries to derive the other part (like ‘mind’) from the former. It is from such habits that the intellect is left in constant doubts about the nature of its experiential flow and its own relationship to that flow.
An animal does not experience such doubts because the holistic thought-organism is instinctively pushed through its being. In fact, even our relatively recent ancestors in ancient India, China, Persia, or Egypt did not and could not experience such doubts regarding most things we scratch our heads over today. There would have been no possibility of people back then questioning the existence of an immortal soul that clothes itself in the transient body, for example, because they imaginatively experienced the soul’s existence in a concrete way and distinctly from the body. Neither could the reality of the soul’s multiple incarnations be questioned. It is only with the proto-development of intellectual thinking in ancient Greece that we see the glimmerings of such questions emerge in philosophical discourse, yet even then we were still descending into mineralized thinking with a parachute. It took another few thousand years of expanding cognitive degrees of freedom for these nascent doubts to become the rabid spiritual skepticism we find today. In that sense, materialism and atheism are the best testimonies to the fact that the Spirit has united itself with the physical world in our thinking.
That degree of freedom for doubt won through the conceptual space is not lost in our further imaginative development, but it is redeemed. Now the relations of the thought-organism are kept intact and therefore we have a more informed choice of whether to remain mired in doubt, forming rigid conclusions from fleeting frames of experience, or to gradually regain our inner certainty by remaining faithful to the explorative journey itself. The fruits of the imaginative state can be compared to learning about a tumor within the depths of the organism and then having the choice to address it or let it grow unchecked, whereas the conceptual state leaves us mostly ignorant of the tumor’s presence – in the latter case, there isn’t even the possibility of a choice. At their core, all these higher experiences provide the opportunity for ever-expanding spiritual freedom and, therefore, genuine moral agency.
The panoramic space-like imaginative experience is often reported during near-death encounters in which the subject was clinically ‘dead’ for some time before returning to lucid consciousness. They speak of a ‘life review’ where all life memories are present simultaneously, ‘flashing before the eyes’, and, moreover, they can be experienced with particular emphasis on how they affected others (we will return to the significance of this fact later). That is because the soul-spirit has loosened from the rigid formatting of the neurosensory system and begins to reflect its existence within the imaginative space. Yet since such experiences are, by definition, not cognitively trained for, their true significance can only be dimly intuited and later interpreted within the normal conceptual space, with all its unconscious psychic coloring. It is for this reason that such reports can remain perfectly consistent with a materialistic outlook, and are often treated as such, since the underlying reasons for why such a phenomenon occurs are not properly understood within their deeper spiritual context.
Spiritual retracing, on the other hand, provides the basis for systematically approaching such states and understanding them within their own native element, where the psychic coloring is also rendered transparent. What we have been discussing so far already gives us a better understanding of these higher experiences than we would ever get from accidentally drowning, or what have you, without any such conceptual preparation. The Earthly human being is already a ‘cross-section’ of all the higher spaces and therefore, in our conceptual activity, we are extracting meaningful fragments from the higher states, as discussed throughout the previous essays. In truth, the states after death (and during sleep) are already superimposed on our waking experience during incarnate existence and are simply aliased from perception. The more we imbue our conceptual activity with imaginative life, the more we develop resonance with the subtle and more holistic spiritual gestures of the sleep and after-death states.
Through such resonance, the effects of our ideas and emotions are not felt as constricted to the boundaries of our skin any more than an enraged blow to another person’s face. Because the ideas and emotions that lead to such a blow are clothed in the conceptual-sensory element, we receive visible feedback on some of their effects. As discussed in the previous part, however, there are many residual effects of that inner activity which are not clothed in the sensory element and therefore are aliased from perception. If we think about the deed enough, it becomes evident that punching another person could precipitate soul entanglements that span many years or even generations. Perhaps it will cause the other person physical and psychological trauma that influences their relationships for a long time, or perhaps their family members will also be affected such that hostility arises between that family and ours. We could also imagine this hostile act profoundly influencing a young impressionable child who happened to witness it. These effects could likewise get entangled in an endless subconscious chain of Nth-order effects. All of these potential threads of destiny can only remain vague and nebulous at the conceptual level.
When we start delaminating and retracing with our spirit into the imaginative space, on the other hand, we begin developing intuitive sensitivity for the lawfulness within these arcs of time. We can start to sense how previous activity has seeded the conditions for our present state of being and how the latter, in turn, seeds the potential for new paths of experience. Imagine you are walking between rooms of your home but with each new room, it is as if you wake up from a dream and the previous room you walked through is but a hazy feeling that something happened. You move from the bedroom to the bathroom but, by the time you get in the shower, you barely remember how or why you are there. Such a dreamy and disoriented experience of spatial-sensory existence is rare, but it is practically the norm when it comes to inner temporal rhythms. We normally have a dim and fragmented memory intuition for how streams of past inner activity – of thinking, feeling, and willing - are rhythmically feeding back into our current state of being, and anticipation for how present activity feeds forward.
These temporal streams are not only personal to us, but also involve the activity of other individuals and collectives, such as families, communities, and nations. Although we have developed sensitivity for the spatial consequences of our bodily will activity, we have almost none for the temporal consequences of our inner activity. For example, in a previous essay, I attempted to convey a phenomenology of truthfulness, in which the “truth” is understood as the harmonious alignment of concentric layers of experience – intents, thoughts, feelings, sensations. When we intentionally misalign our inner layers of thinking, feeling, and memory/sensation, i.e. what we know as “lying”, how does this feedback into the experiential flow of our lives, the lives of others, and, at a larger scale, the historical flow of the World? Where do our lies go, so to speak, and from whence do they return into the experiential landscape? Such questions are hardly even asked in our time due to the aliasing effect mentioned above. As a simple image for this process, let’s consider the water cycle.
The Sun symbolizes the entirely inner domain of existence from whence the manifest spectrum condenses; the ‘forces’ mediating the entire cycle through which inner activity becomes outer manifestation and engagement with these manifestations feeds back to the flow of inner activity. These invisible forces precipitate into our inner experience and crystallize as thoughts, feelings, sensory impressions, and deeds before percolating in the subconscious as memories. Then we conduct our spiritual activity based on the lawfulness of this subconscious memory intuition and radiate inner impulses back to the Sun sphere, yet in this ‘evaporation’ process the impulses we send back become more and more ‘subtle’ until we lose sight of them, which is to say our thinking consciousness can no longer trace their relations. For that reason, we assume they no longer have any influence in our stream of development anymore. Again, it isn’t only our personal activity at work here but the collective activity of many beings.
Our normal intuition is that we are self-enclosed bubbles of consciousness confronting an ‘external’ world that runs its course mostly independently of our activity. Yet we know that our genetic material is woven from a line of ancestors that becomes increasingly wider in scope, more universal, the further we trace them back. Likewise, the substances that comprise our body are drawn daily from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The air we inhale one moment was outside of us the moment before. Our psychic life is woven from memories of interactions with the outer world and its beings. On the path of retracing, we find these outer facts are genuine reflections of inner realities that also go in the other direction – our inner life is continually finding its way into outer forms and events. Our inner experiential space is felt to be superimposed with the experiential spaces of many other beings, not bounded by our skin and bones. This doesn’t mean we dissolve into a homogenous soup, because we can still discern what our activity uniquely contributes within this space, except the boundaries are not so neatly and sharply defined as they usually are.
So, returning to the metaphor, when the impulses we sent to the Sun sphere precipitate back into the Earthly stream of development, we often meet them with various shades of ignorance, pride, perplexity, fear, and resentment. We are graced with insight, skills, and good fortune, and we often attribute these to our individual efforts. On the flip side, we are struck by accidents, illnesses, traumas, economic disasters, wars, and similar events, and we search for all manner of external parties to blame. The situation is crudely comparable to a woman who goes through the trials of pregnancy without any consciousness that her sufferings were either the result of her previous intent to have a child or would in fact lead to the realization of that intent. The whole temporal arc that would connect the beginning with the end, and make sense of the sacrifices involved, is conspicuously missing. That is not to say all suffering is intended, but simply that the inner relations which lead to the suffering and the inner potential which could result from the suffering are generally obscured from view. An untold degree of unnecessary suffering is added on top of any intended resistance in our time simply due to this blind spot of consciousness.
An excess of pride, on the one hand, and projective blame and resentment, on the other, occurs in modern society because our sensory cognition loses sight of the spiritual water cycle and feels forced to locate the reasons for all sensory events within the spatial domain, in which every being appears to be self-sufficient bubble of inner experience, an island-unto-himself. It is comparable to a person who has a magnetic compass and tries to locate the reasons for the needle’s movement only within the mechanical bounds of the compass, rather than broadening out their search to the whole Earth’s magnetic field, i.e. the invisible influences which primarily make sense of the needle’s movements. Similarly, the movements of individual and collective destinies can only be made sense of in relation to the inner Cosmos as a whole and its manifold influences. Most of our passionate intellectual convictions result from a combination of ignorance and a craving to have immediate answers as to the reasons for our experience. When we mitigate that ignorance by retracing into the temporal arcs, we also find it easier to resist the craving for quick and convenient answers. Instead, we become enthusiastic to gradually unveil those reasons at an intuitive level.
We can represent these overlapping temporal arcs of activity as follows:
The smallest arcs represent the temporal rhythms that are most ‘in-phase’ in our normal experience, where intentional activity and the perceptual result of that activity follow in close synchronization. When we intend to think about politics, for example, a stream of inner voice perceptions (thoughts) flows immediately as a testimony of that intention. The meaning of the thoughts will closely reflect our political intuition, and if some thoughts are out of place within that intuitive context, we get immediate feedback that our activity needs some adjustment. Perhaps we notice a glaring gap in the logic of our political thinking and therefore get feedback that we need to do more research on the history of nations. These are the sorts of rhythms that are most evident to us, so much so that we normally don’t pay any attention to them. We just take it for granted that when we intend to think, a stream of thoughts issues forth in close synchronization.
On the other hand, if we have a job interview and lie about our resume, it’s not so transparent how such an intent will feedback on our experience. It may at first give us an advantage for the position we are seeking, and then only months or years later it feeds back on us from an unexpected direction. Perhaps we are led into a path of experience with our boss and colleagues where more and more lies are needed to support the initial lie, and we end up entangled in an unstable web of lies that eventually costs us not only our job, but our family, friends, and freedom. Such temporal rhythms are somewhat ‘out-of-phase’ and, therefore, are more easily ignored as we conduct our spiritual activity. This domain of the spiritual ‘water cycle’ remains in the blind spot for some people today, hence lying is not seen as a big deal and is even welcomed in some spheres of life.
There are temporal arcs that are even more out-of-phase, where our creative and moral (or immoral) thoughts, feelings, and deeds feed back into the very psychic and bodily support matrix for our activity, including cultural institutions and the natural kingdoms. It is clear how a person can ruin their physical health by choosing to indulge the ‘deadly sins’, yet what is not so clear is how the body attains its initial state of health to begin with, such that it can be ruined later. Because we are practically guaranteed in the modern age to lose sight of these influences where activity and perception are so out-of-phase, we have ended up with mechanistic theories about the occurrences and evolution of the natural world. There is simply no consciousness of how spiritual activity has precipitated and flowed through the complex channels of Earthly life, ‘evaporated’ into supersensible domains, and precipitated back as natural processes and events.
Imagine you are following the meaning of a political speech – everything said is coherent and logical, perhaps even noble and upright, yet you still wonder about the inner being standing behind the words. Is the soul speaking with inner conviction, does it stand behind these words with its whole mind and heart? That is also the situation with respect to the ‘words’ of the broader perceptual flow we perceive with intellectual thinking. We can’t seem to ever be quite sure about the inner being that animates this flow – what are the convictions driving its metamorphoses? All we know is that we ‘hear’ certain words when we study the transformations of minerals, plants, animals, and humans, and their internal logic seems coherent to us. Everything seems to work together relatively harmoniously (at least within the lower kingdoms) toward some evolutionary aims, but these aims are entirely veiled to our cognitive perception (so they are reduced to the lowest common denominator of ‘survival of the fittest’).
To retrace the Cosmic Speech that adapted us to sensory existence and provided the support for our physical, intellectual, artistic, and ethical activity, our spirit enters into the overlapping temporal arcs of inner relations. We begin from the most in-phase domain – our mental life - and expand from the inside outwards. For example, we can become more intuitively sensitive to a wider aperture of our inner states of being, such that we anticipate what we would be thinking and feeling if we allowed certain impulses to take hold and influence our activity. We begin experiencing the ‘wavefunction’ of thought-potential, which ‘surfs’ through holistic images, before it collapses into a linear sequence of verbal encodings and corresponding feelings and deeds. Now we have a larger dataset by which to discern the patterned flow of inner life in relation to our activity (or passivity), i.e. we gain more sensitivity for the living IFS structure (see Part II). If this inner life was previously a dark room that we were stumbling through, it is now as if certain parts of the room take on an increasingly luminous glow, making them especially noticeable throughout our daily experiences.
At a broader level, we can develop sensitivity for how certain world conceptions were adopted at various phases of life to explore diverse mental states that were necessary for specific individual and cultural tasks, and which develop specific soul forces. We may also become sensitive to how our childhood experiences planted the seeds of certain qualities, capacities, relationships, or opportunities that grew and blossomed in adult life. These isolated experiences in time may seem unrelated to one another from the perspective of outer life, but they find their deeper connecting substructure in the characteristic rhythms of the inner life, like protruding islands united by an underwater archipelago. Now we sense there was a purpose animating these temporal arcs and can freely seek to harmonize our activity with the overarching aims. It is ‘free’ because we are acting only out of deep insight into and unconditional love for the ideal aim rather than any external compulsion of natural drives, cultural authorities, or hypothesized metaphysical entities.
As we ascend to the broader arcs, we are dealing with increasingly collective forms of activity that contextualize the narrower arcs and feedback on our experience. Our whole life destiny is contextualized by the epoch of civilization in which we were born, for example, and this epoch associates with its own unique tasks for individuals, groups, nations, and civilizations. There are no rigid boundaries between these contextual ‘arcs’ and they are constantly influencing one another in complex ways. When we notice the patterns within individual arcs, we also begin to notice self-similar patterns at the collective scales. In that way, we find that our current state of being can only be what it is by virtue of a spiritual symphony conducted through the most varied constellations of beings and their activity across many scales. It is an ‘interference’ of many overlapping ‘time-waves’ of intentional activity (human or otherwise), which are attracting our experiential stream of becoming across multiple scales.
We previously touched upon how Time experience becomes something quite different within the imaginative space, such that the ‘current moment’ at higher levels of integration can encompass conceptual states over a long duration. We can utilize a simple analogy here. Consider how, when we move our arm to reach for some object, a whole complex cascade of muscular processes unfolds (depicted in the video above). Now imagine one of these muscle cells is a conscious observer of our intent to move the arm. From its perspective, that intent is experienced as a drawn out evolutionary process in its musculature universe. What takes a few seconds from our perspective and is a simple perceptual flow of arm extension and retraction, unfolds over many muscular epochs from its perspective and involves a complex perceptual flow of countless components. Our momentary intent to move the arm provides the overarching context in which many cellular states of being unfold.
It is an analogous relation between the conceptual-sensory states we experience unfolding over long periods and the momentary imaginative or higher intents that structure the temporal arcs along which the former unfold. We could therefore say that there is only a nested configuration of ‘now’ perspectives that experience ‘spiritual relativity’, i.e. the unfolding of ‘now’ states for any given perspective is determined by its relation to all other intentional perspectives that contextualize its experience. When the transformation of our human ‘now’ state feels to unfold at a snail’s pace, we call that the ‘sensory world’ which provides the greatest resistance to our intents. On the other hand, when it feels to transform the most quickly, we call that the ‘mental world’ or ‘imaginative world’ where our intents meet the least resistance. In this way, we arrive at the LIFO principle discussed in Part I from an experiential angle – the domain of our being that was ‘last in’ is the ‘first out’ because our intentional activity meets the least resistance in its transformation.
The sensory landscape where we sometimes seem to receive quick feedback for our activity is, in fact, the most out-of-phase domain of experience. There, we are interacting with the feedback of long past activity; intents already accomplished in bygone ages that have receded into collective memory. That is what we know as ‘physicality’ or, more esoterically, as ‘karmic destiny’. We normally feel like we are freely in control of our thoughts, feelings, and actions during sensory life, but is that actually the case? One way to approach this question is to think about how often things happen to us independently of our agency, such as the actions of other beings, the weather, illnesses, etc., or likewise how often we simply stumble into various experiences in a dreamlike way. For example, we do many things on autopilot, like brushing our teeth, taking a shower, drinking coffee, etc. Even going from home to work can become so habitual that we end up at work and awaken saying, "oh great, I'm at work now." Similarly, we often get carried away on impulsive trains of thoughts and feelings and have little idea how we ended up immersed in them.
It is just like awakening in a dream and not knowing how we ended up in the dreamscape. Our spiritual agency simply isn't present and active in most of our daily experiences. These cannot be called ‘free’ experiences but rather must be considered experiences that stem from the spirit flowing through etched channels of its mental, psychic, and physiological spaces. Did we consciously choose our birthplace, our family, our native language (in which we think), our temperament (which also influences our career choice and social relationships), and so forth? Clearly not. It is only in our mental space, in the feedback of thoughts, where our present activity finds its lucid reflection. That is why spiritual retracing into the imaginative space begins with the observation of thinking, where the time arc of activity and perceptual feedback is almost completely in-phase and therefore the most intuitively transparent. The spirit can then leverage this point of intersection to render the broader temporal arcs more transparent as well. All of that collective past activity serves as the ‘womb’ for our present activity. It is where the latter is conceived and can orient itself, develop spiritual organs of perception, and be born again into the higher spaces where, for the very first time, it becomes free.
The next part will conclude the principled investigation of the imaginative state and begin exploring how we can further our retracing efforts by observing our thinking, through the technique of concentration, in an even more intimate way than we have been doing so far. By intensely focusing our concepts as testimonies to the process which birthed them, as we have been doing so far, we have already on a gradient of free activity. The free act of concentration, however, takes us much further. We can never stumble into the act of concentration, awaken and say, 'oh great, it appears I am concentrating now!' The spirit must be deliberate, present, and active the whole way - if it is truly concentrated, it will always know exactly how it reached its current state. In other words, it can always retrace the contextual relations that are funneling its experience. This act has been referred to as 'creation ex nihilo'. It is an act of the spirit that cannot be traced back to any causal chain, rather emanating from the intuitive depths of existence. It is an act independent of past karmic factors which condition the spirit’s experience; independent of all the channels etched through the instinctive spaces. Nevertheless, the experience of the activity is still constrained and formatted by those contextual arcs and, by concentrating the ray of its activity, the spirit grows more and more sensitive to their inner dimensions.
