This subtle activity is not only responsible for our active thinking but also contributes to what we normally experience as the passive perception of an objective World. Our senses were educated by that subtle activity during early childhood and that is why, for example, our visual sense perceives objects situated in a dimension of depth that appears to be extending away from us infinitely into the distance. That depth perception is naively taken as a given by most people, as something that has always existed, but through retracing we can relearn our individual and collective participation in the emergence of spatial depth. (1) It is well known that if we cover one of our eyes, we gradually reduce depth perception. That is because it results from both eyes scanning the objective environment from unique angles and continually coordinating with one another. What is not well known is that this coordination is the result of subtle spiritual activity, of imaginative gestures, rather than blind neural mechanisms. People only began hypothesizing the latter when they lost experiential contact with the former.
We can actively experiment with this a bit to become more sensitive to the imaginative gestures, for example as follows:
Through such experiments, we may get a dim sense of how we are mysteriously participating in bringing this depth dimension into manifest existence. That is, if we are no longer flowing passively with the mental habit of explaining away our experience with external mechanisms, and instead have become enthusiastic to take creative responsibility for it. Otherwise, it is as if we are trying to feel our toes wiggling after administering a shot of novocaine - through the externalizing mental habit, we declare our intention to dissociate from the inner gestures and therefore numb our sensitivity to them. A simple (but not necessarily easy) shift in perspective and intention will work wonders for our inner sensitivity. That is also why these retracing inquiries cannot be summed up in one or two articles as is typically the case for strictly theoretical inquiries - it is the ongoing journey through cognitive and perceptual experience that makes all the difference. This journey helps us gradually decondition from dissociative mental habits that numb the truthful flow of spiritual activity. We learn to stop instinctively grasping, upon the first insights that flash into consciousness, for theoretical realities ‘behind’ the perceptual and cognitive phenomena and patiently immerse ourselves into the phenomenal experience.
This coordinating ocular activity developed alongside our conceptual life, the latter being the vehicle of objective consciousness. As we discussed in previous installments, our conceptual-sensory activity merges the entire temporal depth of nested spiritual activity onto the screen of perceptual experience, reflecting that activity within the neurosensory system. That leads to the experience of spatialized states of being unfolding sequentially in lockstep with neural firings. Imagine a beam of light that travels through a dark room and hits the floor, creating a bright spot - this corresponds to our normal flow of spiritual activity that only lights up when it comes to rest against the resistance of the neurosensory system, through which we experience our sequential stream of sense-based feelings and thoughts. The temporal ‘cone’ of the light beam through the nested contextual spheres of meaning is normally unobserved. Now imagine that some new resistance is introduced within the path of the light beam, such as a swirl of dust particles, which then make the cone of light visible before it reaches the floor.
The swirling dust particles correspond with the imaginative palette of spiritual concepts that we have developed through explorations such as these, which serve as new reflective resistance deeper within the flow of spiritual activity. Through concentration, we strengthen the intensity of the light beam and begin to delaminate the normally merged-together layers of activity, becoming sensitive to what is always taking place ‘under the hood’ of our cognitive-perceptual experience; the spiritual movements that are unfolding before reflecting against the neurosensory structure. We then begin to realize that these imaginative gestures weave in wider ‘apertures’ of meaningful memory experiences that are, in turn, animated by more encompassing intentional perspectives. Unlike our mechanical conceptual gestures, these imaginative gestures are permeated with life. Imaginative experience immerses us in living scenes that unfold with no less reality than an event in sensory life, and no less cognitive clarity than conceptual life. These holistic experiences comprise what we normally know as mental functions and skills, including the skill of visual perception. Please keep in mind that, in all of what preceded and follows, we are only surveying the barest outlines of the imaginative state to get a principled orientation toward it.
To get a slight sense of the holistic memory experience, we can contemplate how much meaningful sensory, thought, and emotional content is packed into each state of being but normally remains unperceived or only dimly recognized. It will be easier to sense if we try to encompass that content over the last 30 to 60 seconds. Try to imagine all the sensory content over that duration superimposed - the sense of spatial awareness, warmth sensations, tactile sensations, kinesthetic bodily sensations, olfactory sensations, audial sensations, visual sensations, etc. Then add all the thoughts experienced over that duration along with the underlying mood or emotions, and finally the very intent of doing the exercise. It will be easier if we close our eyes because it is the visual sense that normally dominates our attention and obscures the other implicit perceptual content. The point of the exercise is to simply get a feel for how much subtle content we fail to notice in each momentary state. That gives us some sense of how much meaningful activity is implicit in our normal memory faculty, but which we usually only scratch the surface of when perceiving and remembering events.
Before we continue, let’s look at another exercise that can help us develop sensitivity to our imaginative activity.
Our normal conceptual activity is quite erratic as it sensually jumps around spatially discrete experiences (remember the saccadic eye movements from Part III). In contrast, our imaginative activity is characterized by smoother and more fluid movements since we are weaving in unitary soul images. Through our selfish and erratic conceptual life, we have thrown these underlying imaginative currents into disarray and that has also impressed into our physiology, such as our eye movements. To grow our sensitivity to these ‘smooth pursuit’ movements that are normally merged into the background of inner life, we should strive to make our conscious activity self-similar to the more fluid gestures. Then we are setting and pursuing a concrete intention to resonate with the higher perspectives that animate our conceptual activity through smooth spiritual gestures. At the same time, this resonance ‘makes straight the paths’ of the disorderly imaginative flow and allows for the transduction of more holistic insights into our experiential flow.
With our eyes closed, we can move the focus of attention around a figure ∞ that traces the boundaries of our eyes. It is as if we are tracing the frames of glasses that are shaped as a lemniscate. This exercise has the additional advantage of being somewhat engaging for the conceptual intellect, so it doesn’t get restless and dragged away by distractions so quickly.
The more smoothly we can perform this movement, without lifting the ‘pen’ of attention that we are tracing with, the more we ‘comb’ the imaginative streams in the head area. To begin with, most people will tend to 'toss' their attention from one end to the other in rapid movements, but this should be avoided. Instead, we need to feel our activity as the firm tip of the pen at any point along the path, tracing a well-defined lemniscate without any gaps in the form. After a few revolutions, we can stop at the crossing point and stay still and focused in the center for a few moments. Normally, our activity is chaotically tugged in many different directions by turbulent thoughts and emotions. That is true even when we feel to be somewhat focused during the day - these torrential currents are simply merged into the background and we are insensitive to them. When we stop at the crossing point, distractions will still be there but they may start to feel a bit differently, like smoother waves that only gently nudge our concentrated activity rather than a jackhammer that completely displaces it.
The first few times we perform such exercises, we will meet many inner obstacles and it will start to feel like we are simply incapable of doing it properly; we will be tempted to ‘save’ our efforts and give up. If we persist, then we will often start commenting on the exercise with the inner voice while the movements unfold on autopilot, like we are brushing our teeth. All of that is OK and even beneficial for our sensitivity because we are creating the conditions to notice inner factors that are normally obscured. It is a form of rudimentary spiritual science - we are setting up crude ‘experiments’ that control for certain variables, like external distractions, and paying attention to the feedback we receive from the new ‘questions’ that we have posed to our inner nature. Every natural scientist knows that often the most significant advances come from ‘unsuccessful’ experiments because they help reveal precisely where the scientific thinking went astray - the poor experimental setup, the faulty assumptions, the premature conclusions, etc. That allows the experimenters to gain new insights and steer their spiritual activity in a more fruitful direction.
It is the same principle with the spiritual scientific method, except now the experimental feedback comes at a more intuitive level and relates to deeper factors of our soul configuration, not only our intellectual thinking content. We don’t need to string fragmented conceptual-sensory states together with the intellect but can gain cognitive flashes of insight that condense those states into much shorter durations. Eventually, our intuitive sensitivity and insights into the holistic experiential flow will expand even if it takes some days, weeks, or months to notice a significant inner difference, just like natural scientific hypotheses can take many years or decades to bear fruit. With each new meditation session, new imaginative seeds are planted that germinate within the soil of our disciplined and devoted soul life. These seeds are mostly cultivated during ‘non-local’ phases of sleep and eventually begin to grow into waking life as a sense of temporal depth. We will begin to experience the normal faculty of memory becoming more transparent, as our spirit retraces into the living cognitive fabric that makes that faculty possible.
(3)GA 324, Leture IV wrote:Thus through imaginative mental images one not only gains understanding of the sense world, one also has important inner experiences of knowledge. I would like to speak of these inner experiences of knowledge in purely empirical terms.
As human beings we are in a position to look back with our ordinary memory to what took place in our waking life, back to a certain year in our childhood; with our power of memory we can call up one or another event in pictorial form out of the stream of our experiences. Still, we are clearly aware that to do this we must exert a distinct effort to raise individual pictures out of the past stream of time. As this imaginative vision develops further, however, we arrive gradually at a point where time takes on the quality of space. This comes about very gradually. It should not be imagined that the results of something like imaginative vision come all at once. It is pointless to think that the acquisition of the imaginative method is easier than the methods employed in the clinic, the observatory, and so on. Both require years of work: one, mental work; the other, inner work in the soul. The result of this inner work is that the individual pictorial experiences join one another. At this point, time—which we usually experience as “running” when we look over the course of our experiences and draw up one or another memory experience—now time, at least to some extent, becomes spatial to us. All that we have lived through in life—almost from birth—comes together in a meaningful memory picture. Through this exertion of imaginative life, of “looking back,” of remembering back, individual moments appear before the soul. These moments are more than a mere remembering. We have a subjective experience of viewing our life lived here on earth. This, as I said, is a practical result of imaginative mental imaging.
In that sense, the soul space into which we retrace with imaginative development is an archetypally structured configuration of superimposed imagistic scenes drawn from countless life experiences. Everything we think of as beliefs, interests, desires, preferences, and so forth, are unique configurations of these living images that form the meaningful psychic context in which our conceptual-sensory states of being unfold. These images are not the fragmented pictures we see in normal life but holistic experiences imbued with rich emotional meaning of the intensity we only dimly feel when observing remarkable natural phenomena (such as a sunset) or listening to sublime music. Melodious music, which must necessarily span many states of being to be heard, is like a simultaneous remembrance and premonition of these more holistic states. The latter convey archetypal narratives in which the interwoven destinies of many relative perspectives are unfolding, much like the narrative stages of a musical, literary, or theatrical composition. We are now retracing into the mythic consciousness of our ancestors from which countless symbolic dramas of the Divine were born. (4)
Here is an example of how modern artists have attempted to express something of the newly dawning imaginative consciousness in visual form:
(5)Yet it is precisely integrality or wholeness which are expressed in Picasso’s drawing, because for the first time, time itself has been incorporated into the representation. When we look at this drawing, we take in at one glance the whole man, perceiving not just one possible aspect, but simultaneously the front, the side, and the back. In sum, all of the various aspects are present at once. To state it in very general terms, we are spared both the need to walk around the human figure in time, in order to obtain a sequential view of the various aspects, and the need to synthesize or sum up these partial aspects which can only be realized through our conceptualization. Previously, such “sheafing” of the various sectors of vision into a whole was possible only by the synthesizing recollection of successively viewed aspects, and consequently such “wholeness” had only an abstract quality.
In this drawing, however, space and body have become transparent. In this sense the drawing is neither unperspectival, i.e., a two-dimensional rendering of a surface in which the body is imprisoned, nor is it perspectival, i.e., a three-dimensional visual sector cut out of reality that surrounds the figure with breathing space. The drawing is “aperspectival” in our sense of the term; time is no longer spatialized but integrated and concretized as a fourth dimension. By this means it renders the whole visible to insight, a whole which becomes visible only because the previously missing component, time, is expressed in an intensified and valid form as the present. It is no longer the moment, or the “twinkling of the eye”—time viewed through the organ of sight as spatialized time—but the pure present, the quintessence of time that radiates from this drawing.
In the imaginative state, we are no longer ‘over here’ looking at sensory or mental pictures ‘over there’, but rather we are interwoven with the images, and the latter have become panoramic and two-dimensional in spatial extension (width and height). The third quantitative dimension of space (depth) has been ‘folded back in’ and its qualitative essence has been integrated into the remaining two dimensions, thereby adding temporal depth of meaning to what is perceived. The normal inner life feels to be laminated together into a thin ‘sheet’ of nebulous experience while the spirit is confronted with an outer world of clear contours extending infinitely in all directions, comprised of objects that seem mostly unrelated to its activity. Through imaginative development, the inner life begins to delaminate into clearly distinct ‘phase spaces’ of experience, which go from more individualized to more universally shared with other relative perspectives. At the same time, the perceptual World is once again experienced as a more direct mirror of the meaningful inner relations explored by our spiritual activity.
Thus the spirit can eventually reach the panoramic imaginative experience referred to by Steiner above and often reported during near-death encounters (NDEs). They speak of a ‘life review’ where all life memories are present simultaneously, ‘flashing before the eyes’, and, moreover, these events can be experienced with particular emphasis on how they affected others. 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 NDEs are, by definition, not the result of cognitive and emotional training, their true significance can only be dimly intuited and later interpreted within the normal conceptual space, with all of its unconscious psychic colorings. For this reason, 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. The same sort of confusion arises from most psychedelic and mystical spiritual experiences.
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 (memory faculty) 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 from ingesting psychoactive substances, without any such conceptual preparation. The human being is already a ‘cross-section’ of all the contextual spheres of experience and, therefore, we are resonating with meaningful fragments of the higher spheres through our conceptual activity. In truth, the contextual spheres we journey through after death (and during sleep) are already superimposed on our waking experience during incarnate existence and are only made opaque to perception due to shadowy soul habits. The more we imbue our conceptual activity with imaginative life, purifying and straightening our soul currents, the more we develop resonance with the subtler and more holistic spiritual gestures of the sleep and after-death states.
Consider how we experience a common intuition that overarches our memory or anticipatory pictures with our current state, which is the intuition that they all 'happened to us' or ‘will happen to us’. Likewise, if we think about some person we know, we can look at a photograph of the person, imagine a past meeting, imagine meeting the person in the future, or physically meet the person. Even though these experiences are quite different from one another, there is something common between them that is associated uniquely with our intuition of that person. The visual image (or the way they smell or sound) anchors that dim intuition. Our state of being at any given time is comprised of many such overarching intuitions that ‘glue together’ the memory frames of existence - we abstractly label these intuitive configurations of memory states as our beliefs, desires, preferences, character, temperament, relationships, anticipated trajectories of experience, language, nation, the ‘laws of nature’, and so forth. These overarching intuitions of memory and anticipated states are always present in our current state as its meaningful context. Our current experience of a relationship with another person, for example, is not only based on past occurrences but also potential trajectories of experience with them.
At the conceptual level, our spirit knows itself and others in the reflections of this dim and fragmented memory or anticipatory intuition, anchored by conscious sensations and thoughts. Yet if we try to reflect on this memory intuition, only the sensory qualities of those states stand out (mostly visual), whereas the ideal and emotional qualities of memories have mostly faded away. For anticipated states, we can hardly envision them with any precision or depth apart from routine activities. That is an example of how meaning is ‘aliased’ from intellectual perception. Try to remember what you had for breakfast yesterday morning as vividly as possible. You can easily call up the visual qualities of the breakfast, perhaps some dim taste qualities, even dimmer tactile qualities, but what exactly you were thinking and feeling will be very difficult to recall unless it was an unusual breakfast. At best, we can try to infer what we may have been thinking and feeling based on the sensory qualities and our daily routine. We often think and feel the same things around the same time since we routinely experience the same events that stimulate the same etched soul pathways.
Within the imaginative space, where our memory states are experienced with panoramic depth, our spirit now knows itself in the reflection of its holistic life experience. This embeds not only sensory qualities but also mental and emotional qualities, and not only our personal qualities but also the qualities that were implicit in our interactions with other relative perspectives (as also reported in NDEs). Now we know that there is no such thing as a ‘private inner life’; that the latter was simply an artifact of our aliased conceptual perspective. Notice how nothing has essentially changed - it's not as if, by retracing to the imaginative state, we retroactively change the memories to be something other than what they have always been. Yet our experience of those memories grows richer in its meaningful temporal dimension and, for all intents and purposes, this enrichment translates into a whole new unfamiliar realm of our existence. We feel as though we are weaving in meaningful content that is not drawn from anything we have experienced since birth.
One of the few comparable experiences from normal life is when we read philosophical or spiritual work and then return to it after a few months or even years of inner maturation and development. We may then experience the ‘same’ perceptual symbols - the words and sentences - as conveying much more profound and previously unsuspected insights. Try to vividly imagine how many more insights could be extracted from your memories if, through proper inner development, they were experienced as if superimposed on your current state and embedding the full spectrum of inner content (not just dim sensory qualities). The important details you failed to notice in the environment, the errors you made, the questionable ways you have treated other people, etc. These insights are not only limited to what we know as the ‘past’, but also extend to the ‘future’ insofar as we discern how our life destiny is entangled with that of other souls and where our streams may intersect. We may even perceive that our stream is on course to intersect with a soul who we have yet to meet on the sensory plane. In any case, our inner rhythms are perceived as belonging to a wider network of souls.
In that sense, we decondition from conceptual memory that is mostly interested in how we were treated by others and become oriented to imaginative experience that is more interested in how others were or will be treated by us; we begin to sense how we have been, and how we can potentially be, measuring up to the Golden Rule. (6) What is the significance of our spiritual activity – the thoughts, speech, and deeds we have impressed into our environment over the years - for the World state? In recent decades, that has become a marked conceptual concern as reflected in various political, social, and ecological ideologies and programs. As we have discussed, the imaginative state is not exploring a fundamentally different reality than the conceptual state, so naturally, the latter can also dreamily explore the deeper karmic threads that weave individual human activity into a Whole with its cultural and natural environments. Yet when we only have dim conceptual connections to work with, there is neither the insight, the motivation, nor the creativity to adequately engage the self-transformation that is needed to make a significant course correction from the momentum of personal alienation, cultural tribalization, and environmental degradation.
That correction can only come through conducting our spiritual activity in ways more resonant with the inner landscape. Another helpful exercise for cultivating that resonance is to try and remember the events of our day so far in reverse, following the experiential details as tightly as possible, not only visual impressions but also thoughts and feelings. Instead of the whole day, we could take a small segment where we encountered another person and try to remember all of their clothing, gestures, speech, expressions, and so on, with intricate detail. It is best to perform this exercise at night before going to sleep. These reverse experiential movements help us resonate with something characteristic of the higher states, which is the analysis and synthesis of life experiences. The reason they run in reverse is because they are experienced from the perspective of the overarching intents that are attracting the states of being rather than the reflection of those intents in sense-based thoughts (think of how the ordering of text becomes reversed in a mirror). That is the deeper spiritual significance of the life review experienced during NDEs.
In a team sporting event, the coaches and players have an idealized scenario for what should result based on overall knowledge of their team's potential in comparison with other teams. This ideal overarches and contextualizes the entire competition. After the game, win or lose, a good team will review the footage to assess the differential between the idealized scenario and what resulted. The imaginative state reveals an analogous principle at work during sleep and across the threshold of death. There is indeed an idealized scenario for each individual, which is the meaning of being fully human. (7) It is what it means to reach the full potential of the free human spirit that we have only just begun to realize as individuals and as a species over the last two millennia. (8) After death (and to some extent during sleep), our whole life is reviewed (in reverse) within the context of this fully human ideal and the differential becomes the seed for a new incarnation, a new opportunity for realizing the ideal. Through spiritual retracing, however, we begin to participate in consciously assessing the differential and closing the ideal gap during waking Earthly life.
When our activity becomes more resonant with the soul landscape, we begin developing intuitive sensitivity for the lawfulness within 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 are rhythmically feeding back into our current state of being, and anticipation for how present activity feeds forward.
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. It is considered the height of absurdity to imagine our inner states can be involved in a lawful process that extends beyond the boundaries of our skin. Nevertheless, that inner lawfulness is revealed through spiritual retracing. As a simple imagistic symbol 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 contextually nested ‘forces’ mediating the entire cycle through which inner activity gradually objectifies that activity into perceptual manifestations, and engagement with these manifestations feeds back to orient the flow of inner activity through the contextual perspectives. These invisible forces precipitate into our inner life 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, for example when we decide to tell a lie because we have rationally determined it will help us (or even help others) in some way. Yet in this ‘evaporation’ process, the impulses we send back become more and more ‘subtle’ as they ascend into more integrated domains of relative perspectives until we lose sight of them, which is to say our thinking consciousness can no longer trace their relations. For that reason, we forget to even consider how they may be still influencing the Earthly stream of development.
It isn’t only our personal activity at work here but the collective activity of many relative perspectives pursuing intents. 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 our skin the moment before and will be outside of it again the next moment. 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. 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.
Returning to the metaphor, when the impulses we send to the Sun sphere precipitate back into the Earthly stream of development, we often meet them with various shades of pride, perplexity, fear, and resentment. We are graced with insight, skills, and good fortune, and we often attribute these to our personal 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 the result of her previous intent to have a child or are in fact leading 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 that lead to the suffering and the inner potential that could result from the suffering are generally obscured from view. An untold degree of unnecessary suffering is invited into the experiential stream simply due to this blind spot of consciousness.
An excess of pride, on the one hand, and projective fear, 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 a 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 when considering 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 for our experiences. 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 continually trace those reasons at an intuitive level.
In the final installment, we will further explore the meaning of the temporal arcs into which we are retracing in light of all that we have discussed so far in these essays. Although we have been focusing on the imaginative state where the spirit reflects its existence through holistic and living scenes, we should be clear that these scenes would be like disconnected letters and words if we could not also resonate with the higher spiritual intents that make sense of their manifestation and ordering. We discover these encompassing intents overarching the temporal arcs of individual and cultural life within the invisible Sun sphere. To resonate with these intents, the spirit must cultivate more integrated ways of meaningfully orienting to its experiential flow. We will briefly touch on those more integrated forms of spiritual activity before wrapping up our contemplations and experiments on the path of retracing spiritual activity.
Citations:
1 - Jean Gebser, ‘The Ever-Present Origin’
“Petrarch’s letter is in the nature of a confession; it is addressed to the Augustinian professor of theology who had taught him to treasure and emulate Augustine’s Confessions. Now, a person makes a confession or an admission only if he believes he has transgressed against something; and it is this vision of space, as extended before him from the mountain top, this vision of space as a reality, and its overwhelming impression, together with his shock and dismay, his bewilderment at his perception and acceptance of the panorama, that are reflected in his letter. It marks him as the first European to step out of the transcendental gilt ground of the Siena masters, the first to emerge from a space dormant in time and soul, into “real” space where he discovers landscape. When Petrarch’s glance spatially isolated a part of “nature” from the whole, the all-encompassing attachment to sky and earth and the unquestioned, closed unperspectival ties are severed. The isolated part becomes a piece of land created by his perception.”
2 - Matthew 3:3
“For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.”
3 - Rudolf Steiner (GA 324, Leture IV)
4 - Jean Gebser, ‘The Ever-Present Origin’
“The mythical structure, in turn, leads to the emergent awareness of the internal world of the soul; its symbol is the circle, the age-old symbol for the soul. The individuated point of the magic structure is expanded into an encompassing ring on a two-dimensional surface. It encompasses, balances, and ties together all polarities, as the year, in the course of its perpetual polar cycle of summer and winter, turns back upon itself; as the course of the sun encloses midday and midnight, daylight and darkness; as the orbit of the planets, in their rising and setting, encompasses visible as well as invisible paths and returns unto itself.”
5 - Ibid.
6 - Luke 6:31
“And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise.”
7 - Ephesians 4:13
“Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:”
8 - 2 Corinthians 3:18
“But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.”
