Essay: Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part VIII)
Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2024 1:47 pm
The previous essay was a broad survey of how spiritual retracing splits the ‘current moment’ and reveals the holistic temporal rhythms that give meaning to the momentary conceptual-perceptual state. The former is always implicit in the latter. We dimly recognize that implicit meaning if we try to conceive the whole history of experience that went into making our current state possible, as well as the anticipation of future experiences that are playing into the current state. For example, if our current state is permeated by the meaning of ‘drinking a cold glass of orange juice’, that meaning could be retraced to various individual, cultural, and natural experiential processes that went into our capacity to grasp objects, to consume substances, to emotionally appreciate the taste; the harvesting and distribution of oranges and their juices, the invention of glass, and the evolution of the orange-producing capacity in trees (to name a few of infinitely many experiential factors). At the same time, implicit in the meaning is the desire or purpose for which we are drinking the juice. That will be rooted in past experiences, like our preferences, but it also points us toward the domain of future experiences – perhaps we anticipate future tasks that will prevent us from eating for a while, so we have the juice instead.
When we spiritually retrace that meaning of our momentary state, we aren’t inserting phantom mechanisms to explain it away (like ‘the randomly mutated and selected genes of the tree allow it to produce oranges’), but instead, we are gradually expanding our cognitive resonance into the domains of holistic spiritual activity that encompass the palette of ‘past’ and ‘future’ experiences, many of which are aliased from normal conceptual activity. This is genuine science that traces experiential relations without assumptions or arbitrarily limiting its purview to the sensory domain. It is obvious how the cultivation and distribution of oranges is rooted in spiritual activity, which in turn is the expression of life experiences and corresponding skills and ideas, but less obvious how that is the case for the natural functions of orange trees or the existence of sand that is made into glass. We need to become comfortable that some relations of spiritual activity will remain mysterious until we progress further down the retracing path, even while we can have full confidence the mysteries will be unveiled. Until then, we can prepare the soil for the incarnation of new insights by exploring the overarching principles at work.
Let’s imaginatively explore another analogy to this principle of superimposed domains of spiritual activity before proceeding to more practical considerations of how their functions overlap with our everyday experience.
We can imagine the holistic spiritual activity as the most zoomed-out perspective of the temporal fractal structure, i.e. a perspective from which self-similar rhythms of spiritual activity are encompassed and manipulated as we normally manipulate our thought-perceptions, for example when we organize and condense those thoughts into writing. From this perspective, the spirit can traverse whole temporal domains of potential states with relatively few inner gestures, as if manipulating the ‘wavefunctions’ from which our thinking states collapse. When we organize our thoughts into the rhythmic structure of writing [Bergson quote], we perform thinking-gestures that take hold of our arms and hands. Likewise, this most holistic perspective makes ideal gestures that ‘take hold’ of the evolutionary time-spirals of experience. These ideal gestures are what make possible our physical structure and movements. In that sense, our aliased perspective is always utilizing this most holistic perspective to accomplish tasks in the World through the physical body (even if we are sitting still and only thinking, our spiritual activity takes hold of the brain and nerves).
When our aliased activity engages with sensory forms like text, it ‘erases’ the perceptual characteristics to reveal their meaning. It must renounce its attention to the particular shapes or sounds of letters and words to recover the inner gestures that give them holistic meaning. Likewise, when this intuitive activity mines meaning from the evolutionary time-spirals - the rhythms we experience as bodily processes or as unfolding in the outer environment over years, epochs, and eons - the result is monumental transformations in our lives, in human civilization, and/or the whole planetary system. For example, the whole period between the last ‘ice age’ and the next one can be understood as the ideal gesture of this holistic perspective. All the individual, cultural, and natural events that unfold between these two poles are analogous to the letters, words, and sentences you are reading on this page - they will kindle meaning for the intuitive perspective that helps it orient to the existential flow and conduct its spiritual activity.
"I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds." - Bhagavad Gita 11:32
Within the same ‘current moment’ of the holistic intuitive perspective, the spirit’s movements are experienced as a more finely detailed exploration of states when it is ‘zoomed into’ one of its rhythmic processes (image above), such as the oscillation of sympathies and antipathies. The spirit becomes entangled with that rhythm and must micromanage the transition between states of being, which is experienced as traversing a wide spectrum of emotional states in connection with other relative perspectives. These states are now experienced as being endured over long durations relative to the holistic intuitive gestures. In that sense, the current moment of the entangled imaginative perspective becomes an ‘aperture’ of the holistic intuitive perspective, a partial window of the latter’s meaning. The intuitive perspective serves as the ‘carrier wave’ in which the soul rhythms of the imaginative perspective unfold, which it experiences as a process of temporal development (remember the triple pendulum video in Part V). In other words, the former has become the latter’s objectified spatiotemporal environment (which is experienced in a way more akin to our current dream life).
If the spirit further zooms into the conceptual-sensory rhythm, it then experiences the greatest temporal decoherence; a wider spectrum of infinitely detailed sensory states that must be traversed to fulfill its conscious intents. When the spirit becomes entangled with this rhythm, it eventually reaches the perspective from which its conscious states unfold at the pace of second-hand ‘ticks’ in connection with many other relative perspectives. From here, the more holistic domains of potential states are objectified as the vast expanses of the Cosmos and as lifetimes, epochs, and eons of evolutionary history extending into the far distant past and the far distant future. The whole Mandelbrot fractal structure of potential has been teased apart and sequenced by the spirit into a linear chain of events. Once modern idolatrous habits take hold, the events appearing earlier in that chain are conceived as ‘causes’ for the later ones which are conceived as their ‘effects’. That linear conception is then applied across the board to Cosmic events, Earthly events, and quantum-scale events alike. Such a mental habit will always obscure the true rhythms of development and lead to irresolvable reductive conundrums.
The reality is that the whole sequential chain of perceptual events should be considered the effect of the Spirit’s holistic movements that are superimposed on its conceptual-sensory experience. We cannot reconstruct the meaning of these holistic movements by piecing together their sensory or conceptual effects any more than we can reconstruct the meaning of a dance choreography by piecing together footprints left on the floor. The footprints can only be dim pointers toward the structured, aesthetic, and dramatic narrative of the Sprit. The most important thing for the individualized spirit at this stage of entanglement is to resist idolizing its current spatiotemporal perspective and to remain faithful to the living movements of its activity, resisting the temptations to reduce the latter to their sensory-conceptual footprints. In those movements, something of the highest intuitive Spirit is always present. Our conceptual state at any given time only needs to be refined and purified such that the intuitive gestures can shine through, like cleansing the dirt that has amassed around a diamond.
We can polish our intuitive diamond by becoming more conscious of how it is already expressing itself within our normal conceptual activity under encrusted layers of shadowy soul habits. Many of these habits have already been discussed in previous sections. Our sluggish conceptual-sensory tempo, for example, is not an absolute law of nature, but is related to our sensual and selfish interests, our soul’s tendency to indulge in every immediately pleasurable sensation and thought. The soul’s desire bounces around from sensation to sensation, thought to thought, and experiences that as the sluggish tempo of its becoming. While that tendency is necessary for much of Earthly life and its tasks, it doesn’t need to dominate our spiritual activity at all times. In general, the shadowy soul habits fix the spirit’s gaze on the ‘past’, i.e. the objectified and receding images of its intuitive movements that have become crystallized in memory intuition. With that default past-oriented spiritual gaze, much of the psychic experiential flow looks like this:
Our ordinary thoughts are tightly coupled with sensory life, so they feel to approach us quite independently of our spiritual activity, from the ‘other side’ of that activity. Since we pay very little attention to how we are thinking, we have almost no control over the sort of 'thought-shapes' that are available for use when trying to understand the experiential flow. Most of those shapes seem to randomly spawn in our consciousness and won’t find anywhere to fit in our holistic intuitive structure – they clash with existing ideas and with each other, so they become ‘aborted’ attempts at orienting toward the intuitive flow. The ones that do happen to fit, don’t fit so tightly. They stack up quickly in our mental models and become more complexified and unwieldy, leaving less and less room for new harmonious insights to flow in. Our mental space becomes like a studio apartment belonging to someone with a hoarding problem. Every new phenomenon we encounter is evaluated on the basis of worn-out concepts related only to our narrow personal sympathies and interests. These conceptual towers clog up the flow of spiritual activity and drag its attention into loops.
Let’s imagine we intend on taking a month-long vacation, but instead of planning our trip as usual, we decide to ‘freestyle’ and go wherever the flow of life takes us. Instead of carefully choosing a destination, we use a GPS bot to select randomized coordinates on the map. We don’t pack any bags but simply leave our house with whatever we are wearing. No flight is booked but we show up at the airport and wait for the next available one to our destination. Once we reach our destination, we don’t have a hotel lined up but ask around the airport if someone can put us up for a few weeks. We have no idea what the exchange rate is or whether we have enough money to last that long. Our normal daily life of thinking is quite similar to this nightmarish unplanned vacation. The holistic domains of spiritual potential that await us get narrowed down into concrete paths of mental experience without our thoughtful participation. That in turn feeds into our emotional and sensory experience as well. We forget about our initial decision to freestyle and awaken with our thoughts into a chaotic soul landscape that pushes and pulls those thoughts hither and thither, becoming frustrated and resentful in the process.
Throughout these essays, we have been gradually reorienting our mental gaze toward the domains of future potential by exploring the method of spiritual retracing. We are no longer bouncing around between fragmented sensations and thoughts related to our personal interests, but rather, by taking an active interest in its own living structure, our spiritual activity is realizing its self-similarity to the holistic perspectives that maintain the spaces of potential. The latter are what give existential meaning to our current state, and we can grow into that meaning by renouncing our focus on the particular content of that state, which has already crystallized in the experiential flow, and reorienting toward the living and fluid gestures embedded in the state. Then we are freeing up some of the spiritual forces that normally maintain the meaningful state so they can be used for self-consciousness at higher states of aggregation. For example, before letting an impulsive thought come to expression in speech, we can pull one of these moves below and redirect the force inwardly.
When we resist bringing impulsive speech to outer expression, we become more inwardly sensitive to the ideal forces that are always there and make speech possible. In this way, spiritual retracing is inextricably bound up with the sacrifice of selfish impulses and conveniences. It asks us to stop instinctively pushing out all the spiritual forces into sensual gratifications and conceptual block towers so they can be repurposed inwardly to develop higher organs of perception, attuned to more living and holistic inner gestures. Thoughtful contemplation of the sort we are engaged in now, where the content of our state has become an explicit symbol for the inner gestures of our state, is itself a renunciation of sensual indulgence in and rash judgments about the World. It requires a repurposing of time and effort that would otherwise be expended on the pursuit of personal interests, of people and things we feel sympathetically drawn to for some shadowy reason or another. We are not forsaking any of those interests or sympathies, but rather expanding their horizons to include the inner relations that also make sense of why they exist and how they function within the stream of our life destiny.
We can further cultivate our future-oriented activity by contemplating our inner gestures when we remember events or plan for events. Let’s imagine that we want to remember where we have placed some recently purchased trinkets. We often forget such things because, when we place the trinket somewhere, we don’t think about it too much. We don’t run our thoughts through the event of placing the trinket, the whole environmental context in which the event unfolds, but casually throw it on a table or in the drawer. The next time we look for it, we can’t quite remember where we placed it because our act was not permeated with enough thought-gestures. It is the same principle when we want to remember something we perceived, for example, the way the clouds were formed and arranged when we took a stroll the day before. The more we run our thoughts through that context at the time of perception, the more vividly we can remember it and place it in relation to other memory pictures. That is a great way to become more sensitive to the subtle imaginative gestures we are always making in the act of perceiving.
When blind people want to get a sense of an object’s shape, volume, dimensions, and textures, they reach out and grasp it from all sides. The imaginative state reveals that we do something similar when we visually perceive objects in the World – our ‘thinking vision’ reaches out and scans the object from various angles with a kind of refined touching sense. The more we permeate that tactile scanning process with thoughts, the more easily we remember the object. That same principle can be applied not only to past experiences, but also ‘future-memories’ that we have yet to experience. That is possible because, with each incarnation, the spirit clothes itself in an imaginative ‘wavefunction’ of potential states that can be experienced between the rhythmic poles of birth and death in harmony with higher intents. This wavefunction is then collapsed and explored sequentially as the patterned stages of its Earthly life (the most characteristic pattern is 7-year developmental phases). The potential states that we have yet to experience at any given time are just as ‘real’ as the states crystallized as memory intuition – with imaginative effort, we can reach out with our refined thinking vision and permeate them with thought-gestures. Then these future-memories become easier to remember and integrate into our conscious intuition of existence.
We are always exploring these future-memories when we make plans and engage in problem-solving, yet we are normally too insensitive to the subtle gestures carried out in the process. Most people flow along with the mental habit of assuming what isn’t perceived doesn’t exist and therefore treat the sphere of future potential as non-existent; as a domain that cannot be intimately known in any way similar to our normal memory intuition. It is like pet owners who imagine their houses smell pleasant and aromatic because they have lived with the foul smells for so long that they can no longer perceive them. These future-memories are entirely merged with our normal conscious perspective – they are so integral to that perspective that we fail to notice them and declare them non-existent. If we were to attain a clearer vision of what foul domains of potential our present activity is inevitably leading us toward, then we would become more interested in transforming that activity; in participating more actively in our destiny. The subconscious fear of this creative responsibility is a prime reason why many souls stubbornly remain asleep to the living and holistic gestures of their spiritual activity.
Keeping the movements hidden, however, doesn’t negate their existence or their influence. It only means we cannot safeguard these gestures from corrosive agents, such as disorderly soul habits, and maximize their potential for reaching our highest ideals. As long as we remain unconscious of the holistic subtle movements, we have placed the spirit in a straitjacket so that its thinking-gestures can only reach the most limited and myopic states of being. It is like being broke and forgetting about the cash we stuffed under the mattress a long time ago - the spirit simply cannot reach a state of being that it has no reason to suspect exists, no matter how desperately it needs to. Humanity has descended into a state of maximum spiritual poverty and desperately needs to expand its intuitive horizons again in full consciousness. Each individual can play their part in accomplishing that task by gradually permeating their inner movements with living thoughts via the sort of explorations we are currently engaged in and through complementary spiritual exercises. We can then remember more holistic states of existence that our spirit can reach within the current moment.
We can illustrate the principle at work in the spirit’s imaginative activity that surfs through future-memories with the following metaphor to inverse kinematics (IK).
This IK problem can arise in many varied contexts, for example where a robotic arm with many moving parts is used to grasp and move objects, such as on a space station. In forward kinematics, an individual would need to control the angle and movement of each arm segment so that the End Effector can grasp and move the desired object. This can become an exceedingly complex and time-consuming endeavor. With inverse kinematics, however, the individual can set the exact position and orientation of the End Effector to coincide with the desired object and use algorithms that solve the forward equations in the opposite direction. In other words, we ask the question: "What should be the angles of all the motors if I want the endpoint to be at position X, Y, Z?". In this way, the angles and movements of the segments can be ‘retroactively’ arranged so that they are made to coincide with the desired object.
Here is an animated illustration of the process at work:
The reality is that, in our conscious life of desires, intentions and ideas, we routinely make use of the IK technique without being clearly aware of it. It is the same principle when an archer is told to imagine his arrow already at the bull’s eye if he wants to increase his chance of shooting the arrow precisely toward the desired center ("sin" or hamartia is 'to miss the mark'). The skilled archer ‘anchors’ his imagination at the desired center and his physical movements are ‘solved in the opposite direction’. Let’s see what else this could mean in our practical lives. As a simple example, when we reach for a cup on the table, we don’t need to rotate the angles of each arm joint and move them one at a time, but we simply focus on the cup and let our imaginative state of grasping the cup attract the physical joint angles and movements toward its realization. To appreciate how special this ability is, we can try moving our arm, hand, and finger joints one at a time in order to grasp something in front of us. Not so quick and convenient, is it? By engaging in such exercises, we can build our inner sensitivity to the mysterious spiritual IK processes we are normally merged with and take for granted.
Now we can consider an example that extends to more attenuated domains of future-memory potential. Let's say we are preparing our plans for the evening, perhaps we desire to meet a friend for dinner. So now we plant our ‘imaginative beacon’ at our desired state and begin structuring our day such that it can come to fruition - we need to get our studies/work done, do some errands, plan our meals, plan what to wear, and so on, such that the evening dinner appointment is met and enjoyed properly. Perhaps we decide to delay gratification by skipping lunch so the desired potential state is enriched. In the sense of the IK metaphor, we can say our imaginative activity is already anchored at our desired state and then attracts our current state of being, i.e. transforms it through certain intermediate conceptual, emotional, and sensory states that will culminate in the desired state. We are establishing a state of resonance such that the relevant ‘equations’ are solved in the opposite direction, i.e. certain ideas, insights, feelings, and actions that are relevant to the anchored state flow into our current state so that they gradually coincide with one another.
In this way, the retracing process is becoming conscious of what we are always doing; the IK equations we are always intuitively ‘solving in the opposite direction’ to realize certain desired states of being. Our living qualitative experience, of course, is not a mechanical transformation that can be calculated. These technical illustrations and metaphors are simply a way of symbolically pointing to the intuition of how our lives unfold on a day-to-day basis. They help us gradually refine and illuminate that intuition, provided that we also seek how their principles express in the rhythms of our first-person living experience. The more we remain present within that experiential flow and pay thought-full attention to its living details, no matter how ‘trivial’ these details may seem, the more we develop an intuitive resonance with the inner gestures that make sense of the flow. Our intuitions of the Whole are only as rich as the living texture given to them by actively exploring the detailed rhythms that bring the Whole to concrete expression.
The spiritual IK principle also provides a basis for understanding the role of prayer in spiritual retracing. Through fully conscious prayer, we place our imaginative beacon at holistic future-memory states that we cannot conceive clearly but coincide with our highest ideals for ourselves, humanity, the Earth, and the Cosmic organism. The reality is that we will often be unclear on what is best for hitting the bull’s eye within the circumference of our ever-expanding ideals, i.e. what states we need to reach and what paths of experience can lead us there. We can’t picture these more expansive future-memories like we can picture meeting a friend for dinner. Even in the latter case, we know that the harmonic activity of many other relative perspectives is required - our friend, the other drivers on the road, the employees at the restaurant, and so forth. In the case of transpersonal ideals, there are much more complex interferences of spiritual activity involved. Through the technique of prayer, we recognize in humility that our personal desires and purposes are not the sole factors involved in reaching these states, but that the former unfold within the context of much wiser constellations of intents.
The holistic contextual perspectives will not properly receive our prayers and attract our current state through the relevant insights and inspirations if our thoughts and feelings are not concentrically aligned with these wide-ranging evolutionary ideals, since the latter are of primary concern to their holistic gestures. These perspectives are undergoing their own evolution with tasks to accomplish that encompass the inner lives and destinies of many relative perspectives. If we pray for only selfish aims, it is like we are presenting them with gibberish words and sentences from which no useful meaning can be mined. When such concentric alignment is attained, on the other hand, prayer can become the most effective tool for our overall development. It can attract our spirit to holistic states that make possible psychic and even bodily healing for individuals and communities; healing which would otherwise unfold through natural rhythms over relatively longer timespans.
Here is another visual symbol to help refine and orient our intuition of the spiritual IK principle:
Here we have two eyes on a vertical axis – the imaginative ‘eye’ and the sensory-conceptual eye. Our imaginative ‘eye’ lives in the ‘wavefunction’ of potential states that can be reached through present spiritual activity while our sensory eye lives in the already collapsed memory states of past spiritual activity. As discussed above, normally our imaginative eye is shut insofar as we are unaware of its future-oriented activity, while our gaze is fixed firmly on the actualized past. Even from a standard scientific perspective, we are always physically perceiving the past since it takes time for light to reach the eye from various objects. In Part V, we also discussed how ‘physicality’ is spiritual activity that has receded the furthest into collective memory and thereby becomes the support or ‘womb’ for present activity. When our lives unfold entirely in lockstep with physical events, we are quite literally stuck in the past. There is not much we can do about that insofar as we are physical beings with organic necessities, but insofar as we are psychic and spiritual (thinking) beings, there is untold room for harmonizing our activity with supersensible intents that have yet to actualize in the experiential flow.
Through the coordination of the imaginative and sensory ‘eyes’ within the current moment, a connecting stream of events ‘decoheres’ from the potential such that the past stream is made to coincide with the future stream, which becomes our new current moment. Again, this process is always happening when we live out an intentional thought-life and we are now simply trying to become more conscious of it, which in turn improves our subtle coordination. We are becoming more familiar with how the causal relationship which apparently holds good in outer sensory life is inverted for the inner life – there, cause truly comes after effect. We can only understand our experiential flow when we rhythmically bounce our activity between these poles, seeking holistic insight with our imaginative eye and the proper means of embodying that insight with our sensory eye so that it translates into practical work. This coordination gives us more control over the type of ‘thought-shapes’ we collapse from the domain of potential as necessary for our fully conscious aims. Every aspect of our intuitive being has its proper function if only we discern how to harmonize their respective activities. Through that harmony, the spirit learns to be fully present within the flow of experience, centered within the intentional architecture of the contextual spheres.
All the events of our individual and collective lives can be understood as precipitating along intentional curvatures that encompass what we experience as both the ‘past’ and the ‘future’. The exceptional point of the intuitive-perceptual rhythm has become the effect of both streams – it is the crown of the instinctive developmental process that we experience as ‘past’, and it is always what comprises the current moment that is being attracted by what we experience as ‘future’. No matter how far the spirit evolves, it will always be halfway between what is known and unknown, and it will always explore what remains unknown through its intuitive-perceptual rhythm. Through the retracing effort, we seek to penetrate the mystery of the exceptional point’s past-future causes in the sphere of ideal potential. From higher contextual perspectives, the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ are truly One. They are both united within an archetypal ideal seed that contextualizes the sprouting forms of imaginative and conceptual states. It is only from the relative human perspective that the ideal intent is ‘arrested’ in its fulfillment while the relative stages and forms are explored sequentially.
Nevertheless, that sequential exploration mysteriously enriches the eternal ideal seed with the fruits of its efforts. Just as Earthly humanity looks upon the eternal Divine with holy reverence and awe, the Divine looks upon humanity with astonishment and eager anticipation. It perceives how we existentially struggle from frame to frame of experience surrounded by threats on all sides, like a tightrope walker balancing above a pit of snakes, and how we get back up each time we are knocked down by the vicissitudes of temporal decoherence. The holistic perspectives artistically guiding our temporal development do not withhold their wisdom, love, and grace from humanity, but bestow it abundantly upon those who seek their higher potential states of existence in righteousness. In the next installment, we will further explore how prayerfully expanding our resonance with the holistic perspectives unveils the contextual rhythms of our experiential flow and therefore leads to more free, creative, and effective paths of experience in the pursuit of our highest moral ideals.
When we spiritually retrace that meaning of our momentary state, we aren’t inserting phantom mechanisms to explain it away (like ‘the randomly mutated and selected genes of the tree allow it to produce oranges’), but instead, we are gradually expanding our cognitive resonance into the domains of holistic spiritual activity that encompass the palette of ‘past’ and ‘future’ experiences, many of which are aliased from normal conceptual activity. This is genuine science that traces experiential relations without assumptions or arbitrarily limiting its purview to the sensory domain. It is obvious how the cultivation and distribution of oranges is rooted in spiritual activity, which in turn is the expression of life experiences and corresponding skills and ideas, but less obvious how that is the case for the natural functions of orange trees or the existence of sand that is made into glass. We need to become comfortable that some relations of spiritual activity will remain mysterious until we progress further down the retracing path, even while we can have full confidence the mysteries will be unveiled. Until then, we can prepare the soil for the incarnation of new insights by exploring the overarching principles at work.
Let’s imaginatively explore another analogy to this principle of superimposed domains of spiritual activity before proceeding to more practical considerations of how their functions overlap with our everyday experience.
We can imagine the holistic spiritual activity as the most zoomed-out perspective of the temporal fractal structure, i.e. a perspective from which self-similar rhythms of spiritual activity are encompassed and manipulated as we normally manipulate our thought-perceptions, for example when we organize and condense those thoughts into writing. From this perspective, the spirit can traverse whole temporal domains of potential states with relatively few inner gestures, as if manipulating the ‘wavefunctions’ from which our thinking states collapse. When we organize our thoughts into the rhythmic structure of writing [Bergson quote], we perform thinking-gestures that take hold of our arms and hands. Likewise, this most holistic perspective makes ideal gestures that ‘take hold’ of the evolutionary time-spirals of experience. These ideal gestures are what make possible our physical structure and movements. In that sense, our aliased perspective is always utilizing this most holistic perspective to accomplish tasks in the World through the physical body (even if we are sitting still and only thinking, our spiritual activity takes hold of the brain and nerves).
To [understand the author, the pupil] must fall into step with him by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection. The intelligence will later add shades of meaning. But shade and color are nothing without design. Before intellection properly so-called, there is the perception of structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and rhythm.
Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culminating point that the art of diction consists.
...
There is a certain analogy, be it said in passing, between the art of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy.
-Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind (1946)
When our aliased activity engages with sensory forms like text, it ‘erases’ the perceptual characteristics to reveal their meaning. It must renounce its attention to the particular shapes or sounds of letters and words to recover the inner gestures that give them holistic meaning. Likewise, when this intuitive activity mines meaning from the evolutionary time-spirals - the rhythms we experience as bodily processes or as unfolding in the outer environment over years, epochs, and eons - the result is monumental transformations in our lives, in human civilization, and/or the whole planetary system. For example, the whole period between the last ‘ice age’ and the next one can be understood as the ideal gesture of this holistic perspective. All the individual, cultural, and natural events that unfold between these two poles are analogous to the letters, words, and sentences you are reading on this page - they will kindle meaning for the intuitive perspective that helps it orient to the existential flow and conduct its spiritual activity.
"I am mighty Time, the source of destruction that comes forth to annihilate the worlds." - Bhagavad Gita 11:32
Within the same ‘current moment’ of the holistic intuitive perspective, the spirit’s movements are experienced as a more finely detailed exploration of states when it is ‘zoomed into’ one of its rhythmic processes (image above), such as the oscillation of sympathies and antipathies. The spirit becomes entangled with that rhythm and must micromanage the transition between states of being, which is experienced as traversing a wide spectrum of emotional states in connection with other relative perspectives. These states are now experienced as being endured over long durations relative to the holistic intuitive gestures. In that sense, the current moment of the entangled imaginative perspective becomes an ‘aperture’ of the holistic intuitive perspective, a partial window of the latter’s meaning. The intuitive perspective serves as the ‘carrier wave’ in which the soul rhythms of the imaginative perspective unfold, which it experiences as a process of temporal development (remember the triple pendulum video in Part V). In other words, the former has become the latter’s objectified spatiotemporal environment (which is experienced in a way more akin to our current dream life).
If the spirit further zooms into the conceptual-sensory rhythm, it then experiences the greatest temporal decoherence; a wider spectrum of infinitely detailed sensory states that must be traversed to fulfill its conscious intents. When the spirit becomes entangled with this rhythm, it eventually reaches the perspective from which its conscious states unfold at the pace of second-hand ‘ticks’ in connection with many other relative perspectives. From here, the more holistic domains of potential states are objectified as the vast expanses of the Cosmos and as lifetimes, epochs, and eons of evolutionary history extending into the far distant past and the far distant future. The whole Mandelbrot fractal structure of potential has been teased apart and sequenced by the spirit into a linear chain of events. Once modern idolatrous habits take hold, the events appearing earlier in that chain are conceived as ‘causes’ for the later ones which are conceived as their ‘effects’. That linear conception is then applied across the board to Cosmic events, Earthly events, and quantum-scale events alike. Such a mental habit will always obscure the true rhythms of development and lead to irresolvable reductive conundrums.
The reality is that the whole sequential chain of perceptual events should be considered the effect of the Spirit’s holistic movements that are superimposed on its conceptual-sensory experience. We cannot reconstruct the meaning of these holistic movements by piecing together their sensory or conceptual effects any more than we can reconstruct the meaning of a dance choreography by piecing together footprints left on the floor. The footprints can only be dim pointers toward the structured, aesthetic, and dramatic narrative of the Sprit. The most important thing for the individualized spirit at this stage of entanglement is to resist idolizing its current spatiotemporal perspective and to remain faithful to the living movements of its activity, resisting the temptations to reduce the latter to their sensory-conceptual footprints. In those movements, something of the highest intuitive Spirit is always present. Our conceptual state at any given time only needs to be refined and purified such that the intuitive gestures can shine through, like cleansing the dirt that has amassed around a diamond.
Steiner (GA 146, L2) wrote:If a pearl is lying in the roadway and a chicken finds it, the chicken does not value the pearl. Most men and women today are chickens in this respect. They do not value the pearl that lies there in full view before them. What they value is something quite different. They value their concepts and ideas, but no one could think abstractly, could have thoughts and ideas, if he were not clairvoyant. In our ordinary thinking the pearl of clairvoyance is contained from the start.
We can polish our intuitive diamond by becoming more conscious of how it is already expressing itself within our normal conceptual activity under encrusted layers of shadowy soul habits. Many of these habits have already been discussed in previous sections. Our sluggish conceptual-sensory tempo, for example, is not an absolute law of nature, but is related to our sensual and selfish interests, our soul’s tendency to indulge in every immediately pleasurable sensation and thought. The soul’s desire bounces around from sensation to sensation, thought to thought, and experiences that as the sluggish tempo of its becoming. While that tendency is necessary for much of Earthly life and its tasks, it doesn’t need to dominate our spiritual activity at all times. In general, the shadowy soul habits fix the spirit’s gaze on the ‘past’, i.e. the objectified and receding images of its intuitive movements that have become crystallized in memory intuition. With that default past-oriented spiritual gaze, much of the psychic experiential flow looks like this:
Our ordinary thoughts are tightly coupled with sensory life, so they feel to approach us quite independently of our spiritual activity, from the ‘other side’ of that activity. Since we pay very little attention to how we are thinking, we have almost no control over the sort of 'thought-shapes' that are available for use when trying to understand the experiential flow. Most of those shapes seem to randomly spawn in our consciousness and won’t find anywhere to fit in our holistic intuitive structure – they clash with existing ideas and with each other, so they become ‘aborted’ attempts at orienting toward the intuitive flow. The ones that do happen to fit, don’t fit so tightly. They stack up quickly in our mental models and become more complexified and unwieldy, leaving less and less room for new harmonious insights to flow in. Our mental space becomes like a studio apartment belonging to someone with a hoarding problem. Every new phenomenon we encounter is evaluated on the basis of worn-out concepts related only to our narrow personal sympathies and interests. These conceptual towers clog up the flow of spiritual activity and drag its attention into loops.
Let’s imagine we intend on taking a month-long vacation, but instead of planning our trip as usual, we decide to ‘freestyle’ and go wherever the flow of life takes us. Instead of carefully choosing a destination, we use a GPS bot to select randomized coordinates on the map. We don’t pack any bags but simply leave our house with whatever we are wearing. No flight is booked but we show up at the airport and wait for the next available one to our destination. Once we reach our destination, we don’t have a hotel lined up but ask around the airport if someone can put us up for a few weeks. We have no idea what the exchange rate is or whether we have enough money to last that long. Our normal daily life of thinking is quite similar to this nightmarish unplanned vacation. The holistic domains of spiritual potential that await us get narrowed down into concrete paths of mental experience without our thoughtful participation. That in turn feeds into our emotional and sensory experience as well. We forget about our initial decision to freestyle and awaken with our thoughts into a chaotic soul landscape that pushes and pulls those thoughts hither and thither, becoming frustrated and resentful in the process.
Throughout these essays, we have been gradually reorienting our mental gaze toward the domains of future potential by exploring the method of spiritual retracing. We are no longer bouncing around between fragmented sensations and thoughts related to our personal interests, but rather, by taking an active interest in its own living structure, our spiritual activity is realizing its self-similarity to the holistic perspectives that maintain the spaces of potential. The latter are what give existential meaning to our current state, and we can grow into that meaning by renouncing our focus on the particular content of that state, which has already crystallized in the experiential flow, and reorienting toward the living and fluid gestures embedded in the state. Then we are freeing up some of the spiritual forces that normally maintain the meaningful state so they can be used for self-consciousness at higher states of aggregation. For example, before letting an impulsive thought come to expression in speech, we can pull one of these moves below and redirect the force inwardly.
When we resist bringing impulsive speech to outer expression, we become more inwardly sensitive to the ideal forces that are always there and make speech possible. In this way, spiritual retracing is inextricably bound up with the sacrifice of selfish impulses and conveniences. It asks us to stop instinctively pushing out all the spiritual forces into sensual gratifications and conceptual block towers so they can be repurposed inwardly to develop higher organs of perception, attuned to more living and holistic inner gestures. Thoughtful contemplation of the sort we are engaged in now, where the content of our state has become an explicit symbol for the inner gestures of our state, is itself a renunciation of sensual indulgence in and rash judgments about the World. It requires a repurposing of time and effort that would otherwise be expended on the pursuit of personal interests, of people and things we feel sympathetically drawn to for some shadowy reason or another. We are not forsaking any of those interests or sympathies, but rather expanding their horizons to include the inner relations that also make sense of why they exist and how they function within the stream of our life destiny.
We can further cultivate our future-oriented activity by contemplating our inner gestures when we remember events or plan for events. Let’s imagine that we want to remember where we have placed some recently purchased trinkets. We often forget such things because, when we place the trinket somewhere, we don’t think about it too much. We don’t run our thoughts through the event of placing the trinket, the whole environmental context in which the event unfolds, but casually throw it on a table or in the drawer. The next time we look for it, we can’t quite remember where we placed it because our act was not permeated with enough thought-gestures. It is the same principle when we want to remember something we perceived, for example, the way the clouds were formed and arranged when we took a stroll the day before. The more we run our thoughts through that context at the time of perception, the more vividly we can remember it and place it in relation to other memory pictures. That is a great way to become more sensitive to the subtle imaginative gestures we are always making in the act of perceiving.
When blind people want to get a sense of an object’s shape, volume, dimensions, and textures, they reach out and grasp it from all sides. The imaginative state reveals that we do something similar when we visually perceive objects in the World – our ‘thinking vision’ reaches out and scans the object from various angles with a kind of refined touching sense. The more we permeate that tactile scanning process with thoughts, the more easily we remember the object. That same principle can be applied not only to past experiences, but also ‘future-memories’ that we have yet to experience. That is possible because, with each incarnation, the spirit clothes itself in an imaginative ‘wavefunction’ of potential states that can be experienced between the rhythmic poles of birth and death in harmony with higher intents. This wavefunction is then collapsed and explored sequentially as the patterned stages of its Earthly life (the most characteristic pattern is 7-year developmental phases). The potential states that we have yet to experience at any given time are just as ‘real’ as the states crystallized as memory intuition – with imaginative effort, we can reach out with our refined thinking vision and permeate them with thought-gestures. Then these future-memories become easier to remember and integrate into our conscious intuition of existence.
We are always exploring these future-memories when we make plans and engage in problem-solving, yet we are normally too insensitive to the subtle gestures carried out in the process. Most people flow along with the mental habit of assuming what isn’t perceived doesn’t exist and therefore treat the sphere of future potential as non-existent; as a domain that cannot be intimately known in any way similar to our normal memory intuition. It is like pet owners who imagine their houses smell pleasant and aromatic because they have lived with the foul smells for so long that they can no longer perceive them. These future-memories are entirely merged with our normal conscious perspective – they are so integral to that perspective that we fail to notice them and declare them non-existent. If we were to attain a clearer vision of what foul domains of potential our present activity is inevitably leading us toward, then we would become more interested in transforming that activity; in participating more actively in our destiny. The subconscious fear of this creative responsibility is a prime reason why many souls stubbornly remain asleep to the living and holistic gestures of their spiritual activity.
Keeping the movements hidden, however, doesn’t negate their existence or their influence. It only means we cannot safeguard these gestures from corrosive agents, such as disorderly soul habits, and maximize their potential for reaching our highest ideals. As long as we remain unconscious of the holistic subtle movements, we have placed the spirit in a straitjacket so that its thinking-gestures can only reach the most limited and myopic states of being. It is like being broke and forgetting about the cash we stuffed under the mattress a long time ago - the spirit simply cannot reach a state of being that it has no reason to suspect exists, no matter how desperately it needs to. Humanity has descended into a state of maximum spiritual poverty and desperately needs to expand its intuitive horizons again in full consciousness. Each individual can play their part in accomplishing that task by gradually permeating their inner movements with living thoughts via the sort of explorations we are currently engaged in and through complementary spiritual exercises. We can then remember more holistic states of existence that our spirit can reach within the current moment.
We can illustrate the principle at work in the spirit’s imaginative activity that surfs through future-memories with the following metaphor to inverse kinematics (IK).
This IK problem can arise in many varied contexts, for example where a robotic arm with many moving parts is used to grasp and move objects, such as on a space station. In forward kinematics, an individual would need to control the angle and movement of each arm segment so that the End Effector can grasp and move the desired object. This can become an exceedingly complex and time-consuming endeavor. With inverse kinematics, however, the individual can set the exact position and orientation of the End Effector to coincide with the desired object and use algorithms that solve the forward equations in the opposite direction. In other words, we ask the question: "What should be the angles of all the motors if I want the endpoint to be at position X, Y, Z?". In this way, the angles and movements of the segments can be ‘retroactively’ arranged so that they are made to coincide with the desired object.
Here is an animated illustration of the process at work:
The reality is that, in our conscious life of desires, intentions and ideas, we routinely make use of the IK technique without being clearly aware of it. It is the same principle when an archer is told to imagine his arrow already at the bull’s eye if he wants to increase his chance of shooting the arrow precisely toward the desired center ("sin" or hamartia is 'to miss the mark'). The skilled archer ‘anchors’ his imagination at the desired center and his physical movements are ‘solved in the opposite direction’. Let’s see what else this could mean in our practical lives. As a simple example, when we reach for a cup on the table, we don’t need to rotate the angles of each arm joint and move them one at a time, but we simply focus on the cup and let our imaginative state of grasping the cup attract the physical joint angles and movements toward its realization. To appreciate how special this ability is, we can try moving our arm, hand, and finger joints one at a time in order to grasp something in front of us. Not so quick and convenient, is it? By engaging in such exercises, we can build our inner sensitivity to the mysterious spiritual IK processes we are normally merged with and take for granted.
Now we can consider an example that extends to more attenuated domains of future-memory potential. Let's say we are preparing our plans for the evening, perhaps we desire to meet a friend for dinner. So now we plant our ‘imaginative beacon’ at our desired state and begin structuring our day such that it can come to fruition - we need to get our studies/work done, do some errands, plan our meals, plan what to wear, and so on, such that the evening dinner appointment is met and enjoyed properly. Perhaps we decide to delay gratification by skipping lunch so the desired potential state is enriched. In the sense of the IK metaphor, we can say our imaginative activity is already anchored at our desired state and then attracts our current state of being, i.e. transforms it through certain intermediate conceptual, emotional, and sensory states that will culminate in the desired state. We are establishing a state of resonance such that the relevant ‘equations’ are solved in the opposite direction, i.e. certain ideas, insights, feelings, and actions that are relevant to the anchored state flow into our current state so that they gradually coincide with one another.
In this way, the retracing process is becoming conscious of what we are always doing; the IK equations we are always intuitively ‘solving in the opposite direction’ to realize certain desired states of being. Our living qualitative experience, of course, is not a mechanical transformation that can be calculated. These technical illustrations and metaphors are simply a way of symbolically pointing to the intuition of how our lives unfold on a day-to-day basis. They help us gradually refine and illuminate that intuition, provided that we also seek how their principles express in the rhythms of our first-person living experience. The more we remain present within that experiential flow and pay thought-full attention to its living details, no matter how ‘trivial’ these details may seem, the more we develop an intuitive resonance with the inner gestures that make sense of the flow. Our intuitions of the Whole are only as rich as the living texture given to them by actively exploring the detailed rhythms that bring the Whole to concrete expression.
The spiritual IK principle also provides a basis for understanding the role of prayer in spiritual retracing. Through fully conscious prayer, we place our imaginative beacon at holistic future-memory states that we cannot conceive clearly but coincide with our highest ideals for ourselves, humanity, the Earth, and the Cosmic organism. The reality is that we will often be unclear on what is best for hitting the bull’s eye within the circumference of our ever-expanding ideals, i.e. what states we need to reach and what paths of experience can lead us there. We can’t picture these more expansive future-memories like we can picture meeting a friend for dinner. Even in the latter case, we know that the harmonic activity of many other relative perspectives is required - our friend, the other drivers on the road, the employees at the restaurant, and so forth. In the case of transpersonal ideals, there are much more complex interferences of spiritual activity involved. Through the technique of prayer, we recognize in humility that our personal desires and purposes are not the sole factors involved in reaching these states, but that the former unfold within the context of much wiser constellations of intents.
The holistic contextual perspectives will not properly receive our prayers and attract our current state through the relevant insights and inspirations if our thoughts and feelings are not concentrically aligned with these wide-ranging evolutionary ideals, since the latter are of primary concern to their holistic gestures. These perspectives are undergoing their own evolution with tasks to accomplish that encompass the inner lives and destinies of many relative perspectives. If we pray for only selfish aims, it is like we are presenting them with gibberish words and sentences from which no useful meaning can be mined. When such concentric alignment is attained, on the other hand, prayer can become the most effective tool for our overall development. It can attract our spirit to holistic states that make possible psychic and even bodily healing for individuals and communities; healing which would otherwise unfold through natural rhythms over relatively longer timespans.
Here is another visual symbol to help refine and orient our intuition of the spiritual IK principle:
Here we have two eyes on a vertical axis – the imaginative ‘eye’ and the sensory-conceptual eye. Our imaginative ‘eye’ lives in the ‘wavefunction’ of potential states that can be reached through present spiritual activity while our sensory eye lives in the already collapsed memory states of past spiritual activity. As discussed above, normally our imaginative eye is shut insofar as we are unaware of its future-oriented activity, while our gaze is fixed firmly on the actualized past. Even from a standard scientific perspective, we are always physically perceiving the past since it takes time for light to reach the eye from various objects. In Part V, we also discussed how ‘physicality’ is spiritual activity that has receded the furthest into collective memory and thereby becomes the support or ‘womb’ for present activity. When our lives unfold entirely in lockstep with physical events, we are quite literally stuck in the past. There is not much we can do about that insofar as we are physical beings with organic necessities, but insofar as we are psychic and spiritual (thinking) beings, there is untold room for harmonizing our activity with supersensible intents that have yet to actualize in the experiential flow.
Through the coordination of the imaginative and sensory ‘eyes’ within the current moment, a connecting stream of events ‘decoheres’ from the potential such that the past stream is made to coincide with the future stream, which becomes our new current moment. Again, this process is always happening when we live out an intentional thought-life and we are now simply trying to become more conscious of it, which in turn improves our subtle coordination. We are becoming more familiar with how the causal relationship which apparently holds good in outer sensory life is inverted for the inner life – there, cause truly comes after effect. We can only understand our experiential flow when we rhythmically bounce our activity between these poles, seeking holistic insight with our imaginative eye and the proper means of embodying that insight with our sensory eye so that it translates into practical work. This coordination gives us more control over the type of ‘thought-shapes’ we collapse from the domain of potential as necessary for our fully conscious aims. Every aspect of our intuitive being has its proper function if only we discern how to harmonize their respective activities. Through that harmony, the spirit learns to be fully present within the flow of experience, centered within the intentional architecture of the contextual spheres.
All the events of our individual and collective lives can be understood as precipitating along intentional curvatures that encompass what we experience as both the ‘past’ and the ‘future’. The exceptional point of the intuitive-perceptual rhythm has become the effect of both streams – it is the crown of the instinctive developmental process that we experience as ‘past’, and it is always what comprises the current moment that is being attracted by what we experience as ‘future’. No matter how far the spirit evolves, it will always be halfway between what is known and unknown, and it will always explore what remains unknown through its intuitive-perceptual rhythm. Through the retracing effort, we seek to penetrate the mystery of the exceptional point’s past-future causes in the sphere of ideal potential. From higher contextual perspectives, the ‘past’ and the ‘future’ are truly One. They are both united within an archetypal ideal seed that contextualizes the sprouting forms of imaginative and conceptual states. It is only from the relative human perspective that the ideal intent is ‘arrested’ in its fulfillment while the relative stages and forms are explored sequentially.
Nevertheless, that sequential exploration mysteriously enriches the eternal ideal seed with the fruits of its efforts. Just as Earthly humanity looks upon the eternal Divine with holy reverence and awe, the Divine looks upon humanity with astonishment and eager anticipation. It perceives how we existentially struggle from frame to frame of experience surrounded by threats on all sides, like a tightrope walker balancing above a pit of snakes, and how we get back up each time we are knocked down by the vicissitudes of temporal decoherence. The holistic perspectives artistically guiding our temporal development do not withhold their wisdom, love, and grace from humanity, but bestow it abundantly upon those who seek their higher potential states of existence in righteousness. In the next installment, we will further explore how prayerfully expanding our resonance with the holistic perspectives unveils the contextual rhythms of our experiential flow and therefore leads to more free, creative, and effective paths of experience in the pursuit of our highest moral ideals.
