In the last couple of years I increasingly realized that one of the main obstacles to proper phenomenological experience of reality is that one usually still tries to stand back and encompass some structure in their consciousness. This may be true even if the person has otherwise sincere intentions.
To counteract this tendency we need to consider seriously the idea of flow. This was also my main motivation for the Phonograph Metaphor. When reading PoF people still end up with a concept of ‘idea’ and a concept of ‘perception’, they hold them in their mind as some structures and don’t know what to do with them. What I attempted was ‘PoF in motion’ so to speak. FB said before: “as Steiner said, he wished he could have danced The Philosophy of Freedom rather than writing it”. We should really resonate with this statement. Reality can only be comprehended in motion, when our cognitive flow coincides with the World flow. We should immediately say that by ‘flow’ it is not meant simply the endless stream of inner chatter and chaotic bodily movements. Let’s try to approach the deeper inner experience of the flow.
Here I’ll try to make use of contemporary technology in hope that we will be able to get a better feeling for the meditative flow.
To make it as easy as possible we can use this online tool: https://webcamtoy.com/app/
To use it, a web camera is needed which we can point at the screen. Unfortunately, most people today use laptops with web cameras embedded in the screen panel, and thus detaching is not an option. One possible solution is to use our phone as a web camera. This can be accomplished by using a free app, for example this: https://iriun.com/ It needs to be installed on both the phone and on the computer and they need to be connected to the same WiFi network.
After we have the camera set up we open the webcamtoy website. The browser may ask for permission to use the camera. If it is not showing video from the correct camera, we click the settings icon (the cog) and choose the right camera.
Let’s first start with the simplest possible video feedback. The mirror option in the settings menu (cog button) needs to be off and the effect (the central button) should be ‘Normal’. Here’s how it looks:
Even though it seems elementary, I encourage everyone to try it for themselves. When we experiment we should try to feel how we will our hand movements (which holds the camera/phone) and how this affects the image. It’s better to start with short discrete movements (like the example above) and then just observe how the changes propagate.
Of course, when we activate mirroring effects we can produce much more interesting images (here’s an example) but for our needs the simplest case will suffice. About the more complex cases it can only be noted how the original image quickly becomes unrecognizable and instead we are now engaged in a new level of abstraction as we observe certain geometric patterns forming a more convoluted (folded) experience.
After we have spent some time with this, we can continue with meditation. The first step is to simply remember/imagine everything we’ve done so far. We can vividly imagine how we move our hand holding the imaginary camera. This should be fairly easy for anyone. The next step, however, already poses a difference. When we do the experiment with the computer, we are active with our hands but we perceive the video image passively. Our visual attention is entrained by the receding images. When we remember/imagine this, we need to use our own will not only to move our imaginary hand but also to glide our attention along the imagined image tunnel. It is crucially important to understand that we are not after visual vividness. We are not trying to perform some mental trick that should trigger hallucinations which we behold passively just like we behold the visual perceptions. We should be fully aware that we are using our own will to replicate the same inner movements that are otherwise externally stimulated. To use the dancing analogy again, it’s not about hallucinating a dancing partner that still leads the moves and we passively follow, but that by following the moves for a while, we can then replicate them through our own forces. This is why I think it is important to spend some time with the real camera images. We need to first experience the entrainment in order to be later able to replicate it.
It is also important that our whole inner being should be engaged in the exercise. It is common that we do something with our hands while we talk or verbally think about completely unrelated things. This can happen also in meditation. We may be doing the visualization but our inner chatter may be drifting. This is especially true when we become so familiar with the visualization that we perform it mechanically, out of habit. To counteract this we may try to engage our inner voice too. For example, when we turn our imaginary camera left or right we can pronounce in our mind ‘left’, ‘right’, or simply sounds. This is not strictly necessary but it can be useful in the beginning because it helps us feel what it means to be fully engaged in the movements with our whole being. Imagine that we are a Formula One driver. We are involved in the driving process with our whole body – we steer with our hands, push the pedals with our feet, resist the G forces with our whole body. If we let our inner chatter drift even for a second and we leave our body to act on autopilot, it may cost us our life. Thus full and intense concentration is needed. Not only that, but our movements are not arbitrary. Everything we do is embedded in the temporal context of the whole race and the goal of getting a good time. The race itself is embedded in the context of who we are and how we developed a passion for racing. In this way, a single nudge of the steering wheel is meaningfully embedded in a deep temporal context.
Our exercise should feel similar. The rotations in our imagination are not simply arbitrary movements. They receive meaning within the context of the whole exercise that we have decided to do for a few minutes. The exercise has meaning only within the context of our life story and the chapter where we began to develop a certain interest in how existence works. When we imagine the rotations they should really feel like key phrases in our life’s movie, without which the ideal storyline would remain obscure to the viewer. When we see things in this way we should readily recognize a certain gradient of our imaginative activity:
1. Bodily imagination (kinesthetic). Here we picture willed bodily movements.
2. Visual imagination. Here we replicate the inner sensations and movements of attention that we normally experience through the visual system.
3. Verbal imagination. Here we replicate speaking and hearing speech (not just as an auditory experience but as expression of thinking).
4. Life imagination. This is somewhat more difficult to grasp because it is not related to a particular bodily sense but it integrates all experiences in the life of our thinking ego-being and fits everything that we experience in our life story. Without this overarching activity our conscious existence would resemble a sequence of disconnected fragments.
The first two points feel more peripheral to our inner being, while by going through 3 and 4 we increasingly approach our more intimate inner life. We should really take a moment to appreciate how when we imagine bodily and visual movements, our inner being stays in the background and even may mumble some verbal thoughts. When we try to be consciously active also in our inner speech, something of our hidden being emerges from the darkness – we can no longer mumble from the background while we are consciously engaged with our inner voice. And finally, we get even closer to our inner being when we try to feel how everything we do only has value when it fits in the unfolding movie of our life’s story. Our meditation is most fruitful when all those factors are aligned. Even though our exercise doesn’t pose the dangers that the Formula One driver faces, we should still, at least for a few seconds, try to feel the intensity and engagement of our total being in the rotations of inner images, as if the direction of our whole destiny depends on that steering.
Once we get comfortable with the inner replication of the physical experience, we can proceed by loosening our bodily imagination and leaving it as an environment. Then we become much more focused in the head region where we imagine the rotations entirely in the visual element (once again – it is fine if we don’t behold any vivid imagery, it’s the inner movements and the knowing of what we imagine that matter).
The value of this particular visualization is that it is a very good metaphor for our cognitive flow. When we think something it immediately recedes from us as memory. We should feel how the receding image is not some isolated moving object, like a falling stone, but is rather the effect of trying to encompass the totality of experience in a new image. Of course, in reality we don’t see our thoughts receding from us as some visual objects. That’s why we say that the exercise is only a metaphor. When we do the exercise we first imagine a nudge and then imagine how this nudge ripples down the tunnel. However, in reality, these rippling movements are still willed by us in the very same way we will the first nudge. Thus they are not in the ‘past’ – each one of them is still in the now. Yet it is possible to get a feeling for the reality of this memory flow.
To make this clearer we can try to imagine a certain pattern of nudges that we choose on the fly, say, left, left, right. We perform these nudges without trying to imagine the receding effects, we only imagine the nudges, as if we nudge a steering wheel. Then we put the nudges aside for a moment, for example we may count to five, and then try to repeat them.
Here we have something that on first look seems completely trivial but which is very fruitful if we give it the needed attention. When we try to repeat the pattern we should try to feel what gives us the possibility to do so? In the first pass we chose the pattern without any constraints. Whether that choice was truly free doesn’t matter. There are certainly invisible constraints to our imagination so our choice is probably biased but normally we’re not aware of these constraints. In the second pass, however, we wilfully try to imagine something that is not random but fits in certain constraints. When we perform the first pass it is as if something of our act diffuses and continues to reverberate in our conscious context. Then when we try the second pass we seek the movements that resonate with the invisible reverberations. If we do the wrong pattern we feel “that’s not what I did”. How do we know? Because the knowing of what we did in the first pass still hovers in our conscious context and allows us to feel whether the pattern we perform in the second pass resonates or dissonates with it.
When we look at things with such intimacy we can see that there’s something phenomenologically real for which our visualization is a symbolic expression. We may not visually see our thoughts receding but it is obviously true that every thought is infused in our conscious context and can be sought when we try to align new movements with it.
In this way, we reach a third phase of the exercise where we focus only on the immediate movements and only feel how what we have done is now beyond our control and sinks in the conscious context. It doesn’t look like a tunnel of receding images but it can be felt like that. Then the video feedback tunnel can be used as an artistic expression of that feeling. It is very important to grasp this in full concreteness. Only in this way we can feel that we are grounded in phenomenological realities. Otherwise, everything said will sound like some wild philosophical model of time and memory.
The more we focus on the image rotation in the head region, the more we should relax everything else in the periphery. Our bodily sensations, our face, our psyche – they are not eradicated but are loosened and become our environment while our whole energy is focused on the image rotation.
Then we can describe a fourth stage – we begin to slow down the rotations. Here slowing down doesn’t mean being sluggish and boring but making the movements smooth and uninterrupted. Every jump of attention ‘lifts the pen’ and interrupts the smooth rotation. A key word here is ‘gentleness’. Everything we do should happen with a light touch. (Interestingly, we may find out that these smooth steering habits with a light touch make us a better driver also in physical life).
As we get more comfortable in this phase we should also gently reduce the amplitude of rotations (how far we rotate left or right). Effectively our movements should resemble something like this:
This doesn’t imply that our rotations should be perfectly rhythmic and that they should be strictly monotonically dampened. It’s the overall tendency that matters and that should happen naturally as we get more and more comfortable at each step.
Together with reducing the amplitude of rotations we also further slow down, and we correspondingly reduce the size of the image in our mind such that it feels like we focus in a point in the head region.
It needs to be reminded that our inner forces normally manifesting in 3 and 4, should also be engaged. We should feel our movements as something meaningful, expressing our deeper intuitive life, just like the hand gestures of sign language do.
The end result of this is that our rotations slow down to a halt (the time for rotation is infinitely stretched) and we remain focused in a single point. Here however is the most important part. If we have really developed the feeling for the way our inner activity sinks in the conscious context, then this state of concentration would not at all feel like the end of all conscious life. Instead, we now live entirely in the vibrant feeling of the inner flow of being. In the video feedback, even if we don’t move the camera, the flow of images still continues. Furthermore, if there are other kinds of movements in the environment (not of our hand) they will be captured in the stream, so the flow may feel dynamic, even though we are still fully concentrated. This is an important stage of our development because we begin to recognize that this inner flow is always there and it serves as a kind of ‘carrier wave’ for our whole stream of existence. This flow is not like some perceptual object that we encompass in an otherwise static pure consciousness contaiener but instead, every aspect of our experience is modulated over the flow. As such, we don’t perceive the ‘objective’ reality of the flow (as something outside of us) but the nature of phenomena expresses our intuitive grasp of the flow within which our existence is embedded. As an analogy, in the following animation we don’t see a ‘flow’ as some ‘object’ but technically we see only moving particles. Our sense of flow comes as an additional intuitive grasp of the way the particles move.
As we’ll certainly find out, reaching this state is not without difficulties. Our attention is pulled in all directions by both bodily perceptions and bubbling thoughts and feelings.
It feels as if the rotations of the mental image are not entirely free but our imaginative will is entangled with all kinds of elastic threads that pull it in various directions. Once again, we shouldn’t expect to see such elastic bands as some objective perceptual fact. It’s the other way around – our living experience of the elastic constraints within which our intuitive activity operates is artistically expressed.
If we understand the above metaphor we should also have the proper intuition for what it means to have consciousness in this state. In our ordinary life we consider for real only that which forcefully impresses into our senses. In the described state however, what confronts us as real are the invisible elastic tensions of soul life – forces that continually bend the direction of our existential movie. We can never expect these forces to forcefully impinge in our consciousness and present themselves as objective facts similar to bodily perceptions. The simple reason for this is that while we remain passive we simply freefall through the elastic curvatures of the inner flow. Then we are unaware of it just like we are unaware of gravity in a free fall. We gain consciousness of the elastic forces, which from our ordinary perspective feel like sympathies and antipathies, only when we concentrate, as if by trying to maintain a certain ideal form of our inner being, and then be vigilant for the way the elastic forces try to modify that form.
To make this more accessible, imagine a seismograph:
We have a continuously rotating cylinder of paper and a needle with a pencil tip. Imagine that our concentrated activity represents the contact of the needle with the paper. The elastic soul forces nudge our needle and this results in spikes in the graph (analogous to inner images). Now in this case it will be obviously wrong to say that when we perceive the spikes we see the objective reality of the forces. It’s rather that we behold only their effects and furthermore these effects wouldn’t be recognized if we were not trying to hold the needle steady. Without this effort we simply freefall through a stream of spikes and naively accept them for the unquestionable nature of who we are and how existence functions.
This indirection of the inner imagery is the reason why in esoteric literature we can often read that in the soul/astral realm (Imaginative state) everything that we perceive is like a negative image of reality. Obviously, here ‘negative’ shouldn’t be conceived in the literal visual sense but in the way we describe it above – as the effect of forces that bend our flow of becoming at a deeper level. In this sense, every imaginative impression that flashes in our consciousness while we behold the inner flow, should be thought of as a riddle: “How can I better know the reality of the elastic soul forces that bend my inner stream such that images like these flash in my consciousness?”
The technical side of the concentration (steering the image to a halt) is only one part. As explained above with 1, 2, 3, and 4, our meditative exercise is embedded in the contextual layers of our being. If we one-sidedly focus on 1, 2, and probably 3, but leave 4 in the background, we may easily become proficient in the technical side of the meditation but then reach a point of stagnation. We may say “I succeed in bringing my inner movements to a halt, I feel the inner flow, but it is all dark and featureless. There’s nothing there.” This is actually completely natural. We necessarily pass through such a dark phase before the inner flow begins to lighten up with soul imagery. Then we really begin to have an imaginative perceptual experience of the flow. This lightening up is directly dependent on the deeper (and probably not yet fully conscious) intents with which we approach the meditative exercises (which are concealed in 4). If we secretly try to preserve our present understanding of what we are and what existence is, this results in inner rigidness. We become excessively stiff and insensitive to the elastic soul tensions – thus nothing is able to nudge us. But if we develop the anticipation that there’s a potential higher, nobler moral being concealed within the rigid shells of our Earthly self, then we can open up for its forces while loosening the rigidness of our lower self. It is as if we desire that the higher being becomes the organizing principle of our inner flow. Then the inertial forces of the lower self counteract that flow and thus it becomes imaginatively perceptible. The higher the ideal we nourish for our flow of being, the greater the spectrum of resisting forces we perceive, and the greater the insights. The opposite also happens. Since we are always somewhere along the path of development, it is possible that we experience the higher organizing forces as impinging on our present state and manifesting imaginatively. The higher curvatures, however, act in a much gentler way. This is simply due to the fact that we can only find the higher resonance in freedom, it cannot be forced upon us (this would leave the lower self feeling oppressed and it would simply quietly wait for its chance to retaliate).
Even though we describe our flow of being in an uncommon way, the same principles hold even in our ordinary intellectual state. The difference is that in our intellectual consciousness the flow can only be grasped in sequences of conceptual flashes. It has been chopped up into intuitive fragments, so to speak. Nevertheless, the way we navigate the flow can still be described as a kind of instinctive steering. If we introspect we can easily see that most of the time we’re not consciously structuring our sequences of thought fragments (verbal thoughts for example). Instead, we instinctively steer through feelings and ideas, and the words flow only as quite automatic commentary.
We reach the higher stage of consciousness not by simply turning away from the sequential thoughts but by trying to feel intimately responsible for them. That’s why we concentrate on a single thought as if to stabilize our dreamy steering activity and be able to better reflect how it manifests and how it is resisted by the most varied forces. In our ordinary intellectual state we accept the meaning of the conceptual sequences as thoughts and ideas about reality but never try to intimately experience the way this fragmentary flow comes to be. In the Imaginative state we don’t think about reality but follow reality within our inner phenomenal flow. Then, like the seismograph, we begin to recognize certain invisible soul forces that modulate the flow.
In all of this we still feel as an ensouled being. The invisible forces of other beings interfere as elastic tensions in our soul life but the imaginative aspect of the latter is still something personal. Like the seismograph, we behold only the effects of the invisible bending forces.
Even though we use a very simple metaphor of steering, which presumes two degrees of freedom – steering left or right –, in reality our flow is far more complicated. Every possible thought, idea, desire or action is a different direction in which our inner movie can metamorphose into. Furthermore, the elastic tensions are themselves in constant metamorphosis, thus we can’t simply ‘trim the sails’ and expect that we can flow on autopilot undisturbedly. We need constant vigilance and never-ceasing efforts to expand our intuitive orientation within the flow. Artistically we can depict this like a labyrinth:
Our flow through time is like movement through the vertical depth of the labyrinth. Of course, here it is not implied that this depth exists as some fantastic predetermined structure (like Einstein’s block universe). The metaphor only serves to show that there’s a lot to learn and master in the mysterious flow of existence.
The movie bending forces, which we dimly experience as pushes and pulls of sympathies and antipathies, are ideal in their origin, just like our own conscious steering is. Through concentration into the region of our even more intimate intuitive (ideal) gestures (and not so much on their imaginative reverberations) we begin to grasp the seismic forces in their ideal aspects. We begin to comprehend the meaning implied in the flow-bending forces as Cosmic Thoughts. With this we touch upon the still higher forms of consciousness (Inspirative and Intuitive) but these fall outside the scope of our current focus. It is enough to keep in mind that all elastic flow-bending forces can be known in their inner reality by resonating (becoming one) with their ideal intents proceeding from contextual and autonomous Cosmic Minds.
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To summarize our whole topic we can say that the overall goal is to get hold of our inner activity by gradually bringing it to focus.First, we simply play with the video feedback through our hands and perceive the results.
Then we try to replicate/remember the experience in our imagination. Now the difference is that we are responsible not only for our imagined hand movement but also for picturing the receding images.
Then we loosen our bodily imagination and focus more and more in the head region where we rotate a purely mental image and its receding reverberations.
Then we try to focus only on the immediate rotation and grasp the reverberations through time as a feeling for the way everything we do becomes infused in the conscious context and allows us to remember it (to repeat it). Here we begin to approach the reality of the inner flow.
Then we strive for uninterrupted inner movements that gradually slow down and concentrate into a rotating point. The pace of rotation stretches so much that it seems it halts (yet the flow continues). This halting does not mean “OK, I’m done with this, now I can drift away with my inner chatter”. Instead, our whole inner being should be focused in that concentrated state. After we endure the phase of darkness we begin to recognize the underlying carrier flow of our existential movie. Now we being to comprehend our whole prior existence as modulations over this flow and we recognize the most varied seismic forces that bend its course (the imaginative flow reflects the consequences of the forces, not their ‘objective’ nature).
And finally, all of these steps need to be embedded in the healthy context of a high ideal. We should remember that we seek perception and mastery of the flow not to satisfy our personal curiosity but because only in this way we take responsibility for our existence and can seek to harmonize our flow with the Divine.
I’ve been experimenting with this method for some time now and I think that the value (if any) is that it gives a nice gradient for our intellectual being to approach the concentrated flow-state. If we jump directly into concentration this may be too much of a leap for many, the intellect may feel vulnerable and continuously seek ways to drift away. Through what we described here, however, things can be approached almost as a game that we playfully engage in. Then as we gain experience we gradually move down the gradient. If at any point we feel stagnant or distracted we can backtrack and use the easier steps. This also proves to be a useful habit in our daily life, where we can visualize for a second few rotations, quickly re-center ourselves, and restore our balance.
It can be reminded that ultimately the goal is to grow our intuitive orientation within the flow as indicated in the Phonograph Metaphor:
Only the present experience of the World state is phenomenologically real. Our spiritual growth consists in the gradual organization and expansion of intuition into the intuitive curvatures (resulting from the activity of Minds at different scales) within which the World state metamorphoses and which we recognize as ‘flow’.
