Inner Space Stretching Part 3: Bending the Spacetime Flow
Posted: Fri Sep 20, 2024 4:25 pm
Symthapthies and antipathies as flow-bending forces
When we consider our fully conscious intents, it is clear that we do give direction to the incoming flow. For example, returning to the city and bus metaphor, if we decide to visit a museum, all our actions in the ‘now’ begin to converge toward the goal. This doesn’t mean that we somehow reach into speculative time dimensions of reality and create the future there with some absolute authority. It may turn out that the museum is closed, midway we may decide that we’ll visit something else, and so on. But the fact remains that our conscious intent, from within the ‘now’, tries to bend the flow of the existential movie toward the specific goal. Even if we become engrossed in other thoughts on our way, this intent may still hover in the background and guide the unfolding of our bodily will. We then see the museum and awaken: “Oh, I’ve arrived.”
What about other inner factors? For example, why have we chosen to visit a museum instead of a shopping center? Maybe we simply like museums more. When we put on a scale the inner movie scenes of walking through a museum and walking through a shopping center, the former feels more sympathetic to us. Thus we encounter a deeper stratum of our inner life where sympathies and antipathies rule. We are used to thinking about sympathies and antipathies only in their meso-scale expressions as feelings of pleasure and displeasure which are present in the ‘now’. Seen more broadly, however, sympathies and antipathies are dynamic aspects of our inner life that actively curve our existential flow. For our inner life it is not enough that we simply feel a desire as a timeless feeling in the present. It matters that this desire is capable of bending our flow such that it can be resolved.
Most of the time we are barely conscious of how almost all aspects of our existential flow are ruled by such secret sympathies and antipathies. And even when we think rationally and try to snap together mental puzzle pieces, we are usually secretly steered so that we condense such puzzle configurations that fit the curvatures of our desires, preferences, opinions, and so on. For example, if we decide to go to the shopping center we may do that simply because it feels the most natural thing to do. It may even never cross our mind that there could be other things to do, such as visiting a museum. If we are asked why we chose the shopping center, we would rarely doubt the decision itself but instead, we begin to condense mental puzzle pieces that align well with the curvature of the desire. In other words, we seek ways to justify our unquestioned sympathy for shopping centers.
Inner activity at deeper scales
The characteristic feature of our human nature, however, is that as soon as we become conscious of a desire, we also feel that it lies within the degrees of freedom of our inner activity, to modulate it. This is not something that we’ll readily do. The last thing that the person going to the shopping center wants to hear is that they can bend the flow of condensation in a different direction. That would be difficult because one needs to resist the usual curvatures. Yet, hardly anyone will deny that such bending is possible. Most people would say “Yes, of course it is possible, but I don’t want to do it because I don’t want to experience the discomfort of resisting my usual inclinations.” Nevertheless, whether we want to do it or not, we can surely recognize that in this way we approach a deeper way of guiding the flow of condensation. There’s no denying that if we could modulate our sympathies and antipathies we would be able to explore paths of experience that would otherwise be completely beyond our spacetime sphere.
Now one may ask “Why would I want to change anything in my sympathies and antipathies? This is what defines me as a unique personality!” The need for such a change may only come in the right way as a result of our expanding cognitive horizon. When we begin to recognize the hidden curvatures of our inner life, new kinds of scaled mental images start to flow in our consciousness. For example, we may experience certain scenes of our life and clearly recognize how they have flown through the curvature of a specific desire or uncontrollable emotion. By gaining intuitive orientation within these curvatures (and this orientation manifests in our ability to scale down the intuition into mental images and concepts), we obtain a more panoramic comprehension of our general flow and may recognize how this curvature may be in conflict with others. As a simple example, let’s imagine that we like gossiping. We may have never questioned this tendency, maybe we don’t even recognize that we do that. We simply freefall through its curvature. One day, in inner reflection we experience panoramic recollections of our own life and realize how it has been unknowingly flowing within the curvature. Now that we have gained intuitive orientation within this aspect of the flow, and are capable of condensing our intuition into mental images, we may recognize how this tendency has got us into trouble many times, how friendships were ruined, and so on. From this perspective, a clear conscious intent may take form: “I need to transform this habit.”
Obviously, it is not enough to simply recognize the curvature of the habit and conceive of another curvature that can potentially transform our flow. Through our mental skills we can surely scale it down and symbolize it in mental words but to support it in place and make it the effective curvature of our future incoming flow we need to gather much deeper forces of our inner life, which we may have never even suspected exist (if we have never tried to resist a desire before).
This brings us to an important principle – to modulate the curvature of the incoming flow at different scales, we need correspondingly different scales of our inner activity. Resisting a fleeting whim may not be too hard. These are curvatures that only sporadically impinge on our flow. Changing a trait of our character, like gossiping, is harder because this curvature is much more deeply ingrained. It is even more difficult to change something like our handwriting, and it may be almost impossible to alter our temperament, not to mention altering certain biological processes in our body and the condensing physical structure.
In all cases, to willfully modulate the incoming flow, we need to first gain consciousness at the corresponding scales. If we observe closely, we can see that the deeper the level of modulation, the more we need to consider everything in its manifold relations. If we are simply freefalling through existence, flowing completely unconsciously through the curvatures of our character, then we’ll behold the outcomes of whatever that character is. If we easily get angry, we’ll continuously witness scenes of our inner movie where we get into conflict and all kinds of trouble. There are many curvatures that we might be willing to augment only for our own sake, for example, transforming an unhealthy habit. Yet as the horizon of our intuitive life widens, we begin to grasp in mental images how our flow affects everything around us, and vice versa. Thus we now consider also the perspectives of other beings, our impact on the Natural environment, and so on. Even deeper transformations can proceed when we gain intuitive orientation within much greater-scale curvatures, many of which have already been condensed into images by the various religious traditions. Thus, it becomes obvious that the greater the horizon of our intuitive orientation, the more we naturally reach the depth of moral life. In the true sense, moral life is not simply forcing ourselves to follow certain rules devised by religious or secular institutions but growing into an ever more encompassing intuition of the holistic World flow, and from within this intuitive orientation being able to modulate the flow’s curvatures at various scales by employing the corresponding scales of inner activity.
Ideally, our intuitive grasp should expand toward such a spacetime sphere that far exceeds the sphere that begins with our physical birth and terminates at the end of our Earthly life. As long as we can only envision this sphere as filled with purely bodily experiences of seeing this, tasting that – that is, as mere concatenation of such experiences – it will be difficult to recognize the higher-order curvature of the flow. If we return to our caricature, when we envision the sphere with images of ‘chopping wood’, we may say “There’s so much chopping yet to experiences in my future.” This, however, doesn’t recognize all the sympathies, antipathies, specifics of our temperament, and all other factors that secretly bend the incoming flow and largely determine the kinds of Tetris pieces we’ll witness manifesting at our conscious horizon. Then one may say “Then, to avoid being one-sided, I’ll do everything in my power to conceive of many other bodily experiences that fill the spacetime sphere, not only chopping wood.” This, however, still tackles the question in a mechanical way. We still live entirely at the horizon of condensation and lack deeper intuition of the World flow. As indicated, such intuition can only be gained by gradually recognizing the hidden curvatures of our inner life and together with that, the corresponding degrees of freedom of our inner activity, through which we can modulate the curvatures according to our ever-expanding moral intuition of the World flow.
With risk of being repetitive, we need to make it crystal clear that when we speak of flow-bending at greater spacetime scales, we still do not imply that our activity somehow travels into the future and makes modifications there. Not in the least! All flow-bending happens in the here and now, and it is only here that its reality can be intuitively known. The difference of scale refers to the extent of our temporal intuition and the strength and determinacy to support it in place.
Stretching intuition along the spacetime scale
Now one may object that by seeking such an expanded consciousness of our inner life, and ways to lucidly modulate it at different scales, we by no means gain any useful knowledge of the World flow. As said, this is a valid concern if we indeed remain isolated in our inner images. However, when we follow everything into the full spectrum of our experience, such one-sidedness can most certainly be avoided.
To make this clearer let’s consider another meditative exercise. We should always start with general relaxation of our body, mind, and feelings. The ignition of our physical kernel is a great way to start. Then we can continue wiggling out our imaginative being and proceed with inner space stretching (scaling and turning spheres), striving for the state where we are grounded in our physical kernel, yet the wrinkles of our inner space are expanded and ‘combed’, so to speak. In this context we have fertile conditions to continue with the meditation. There are two aspects to it, which are related to activity and receptivity. To clarify the first aspect consider again the song example. As said, if we concentrate on the title of a song, we have a mental image at the focus of our conscious experience, which anchors our overall intuition for the sphere of potential experiences that can manifest were we to start singing the song. In a way, we have some intuitive sense for the time span of the song and the rhythmic transformations our inner voice would have to go through. We can approach a similar sense even if we simply try to feel what a minute or an hour is, not by abstractly philosophizing about it or imagining a clock, but by trying to stretch our inner life in all directions as if to feel how our present ‘ticking’ of thinking is embedded in a greater flow. We can’t simply encompass this flow – we need to traverse it in all its details – yet we have an intuitive feeling for it and can symbolize this intuition with a scaled-down mental symbol that can be comfortably handled at our mental ticking scale.
We should calmly accept the fact that our intellect struggles with such an exercise. When we try to feel the time span of the song, we can’t grasp its totality as something sharp and concrete. What we grasp concretely is either the words of the title or the perceptual musical and lyrical fragments that need to be experienced individually at the ticking scale. The overarching ideal curvature of the whole song remains something elusive yet factual since we do have intuitive orientation within the song’s progression (without this ideal curvature the song would be experienced like randomly popping up sounds). We are facing a peculiar dichotomy. If we concentrate on the title of the song, it is as if we try to anchor the totality of this elusive temporal intuition in a symbol at our mental ticking scale. When, however, we begin to sing the song in our mind, the phenomena at our ticking scale are now the moment-by-moment lyrics, now we experience the playback as it were. Thus we have something like a bi-stable condition, where we focus either on the title or engage in the playback, but the two activities feel more or less mutually exclusive. When we concentrate on the title anchoring the total intuition of the song, we feel that we know what this title-symbol signifies. To feel the contrast, imagine that we think of the title of a song that we don’t know. The thought of the title would be merely a floating word. Thus when we focus on the title of a song that we do know, we feel that our conscious context contains everything needed to guide our singing through it (and this implicit knowledge and skills are what the title symbolizes). When we start singing, however, the intuitive totality tends to recede even further in the background of our conscious context and instead, we experience the moment-by-moment words, invisibly guided by a hidden curvature.
Now we can take the song example and morph it into a meditative exercise, as if by ‘straightening’ it. Imagine a song that consists of a single pure tone that is sustained for the whole duration. There’s no need to stay with auditory phenomena only. We can imagine a ‘song’ that plays back a visual, tactile, or whatever sensation. Even a single point works (the point is not defined by its visual content but by acting as a sink for our focused attention). Now we sustain our concentration on this point. Even though we are holding on to a seemingly static image, we should still feel that we need to continuously ‘sing’ it into existence, just like an infinite tone seems unchanging but needs to be continuously sustained with our voice. This is a very simple (and not particularly exciting) song but it is precisely because of this that we can also have a much clearer intuition of the potential that we are condensing. Our temporal intuition of the song feels as if the sphere of possibilities around us is shaped as a quite unremarkable laminar flow that continually collapses into the center (as if by gravity) where our focused attention is anchored. This focal point should feel like buoyantly resting within the physical kernel.
In this way we achieve something very interesting. We conceive of a way to bring the poles of the bi-stable dichotomy closer and closer into unity. The point of our focused activity can be grasped as both the playback of the meditative song and its symbol. In other words, the meditative song consists of the continuous singing of the title, which is both the element of playback and also the symbol for the totality of the temporal activity. In a sense, our meditative activity becomes self-reflective (or recursive) – the momentary playback of the image is at the same time a symbolic image of the whole activity through time.
We can only engage in this meditative song because the temporal structure is simple. The point at our singing focus doesn’t change from moment to moment. In a regular song the image of the title cannot possibly capture the whole richness of the melody and lyrics, but here, the focus point at any time very well anchors the intuition of the full meditative song. By focusing on the point, which is like the title of the meditation, we don’t feel that we miss something from its full playback (as is the case with a regular song). On the contrary – the point at the same time realizes the playback of the greater intuition.
Even though the above is conceptually very clear, it turns out that it is not that easy to achieve. The moment we try to sustain this laminar meditative song, we become immediately aware of all the factors that pull our activity in all directions. This leads us to the second aspect – receptivity. By trying to sustain our meditative song, in a sense we aim to artificially impose a perfectly laminar flow to the perspective of the World flow that we experience. This intended flow, however, conflicts with the World flow. It is as if so far we have been freefalling together with certain aspects of the World flow (and thus they didn’t evoke any conscious recognition) but now, at the moment we try to maintain a flow on our own, the World flow begins to drag against us and immediately a whole spectrum of phenomena becomes apparent. Here ‘World flow’ doesn’t mean only things outside us. For example, the processes in our body and brain, randomly popping up thoughts and feelings, are also an inseparable part of the total World flow. In other words, we can conceive that our personal condensation flow is only a limited ‘aperture’ of the condensing World flow, within which our whole existence is embedded. In a way, our inner activity and the intuitive curvatures that we aim to impose on our flow are not something that exists in isolation but are like modulations over the first-person experience of the World flow.
With this we have the basic principles in meditation. On the one hand (activity), we aim to artificially sustain a perfectly laminar flow compressing into a focal point, but on the other (receptivity), this activity delineates how the intended flow conflicts with the wider flow within which our individually intended flow is concentrically embedded and modulated. The deeper our concentration is, and reciprocally, the greater the time span of the sphere of our meditative song, the greater the spectrum of scales we can intuitively grasp. As a simple example, imagine that we begin our meditation and try to feel our meditative song extending into an one-month time span. Our immediate reaction would be “One month? But this is impossible!” But why is it impossible? Because such an artificially sustained one-month laminar flow would be severely resisted by the World flow. We say: “My body will ache, I’ll fall asleep, my wife will kick me out, I have other things to do too”, and so on. Yet this already shows in a rudimentary way how even at the purely intellectual prospect of this meditation, we begin to gain awareness of many patterns of the World flow, within which our existence is normally embedded. Most of them are completely trivial but we can only notice them if we resist them. Of course, we are by no means suggesting that meditation could or should last so long. Neither we are saying that our goal should be to rebel against the World flow and aim to replace it with one of our liking. What matters is that even if the meditation itself lasts only five minutes, when the intuitive sphere is expanded into greater scales, we prepare ourselves to sense inner movements that correspond to these scales. Ideally, we should asymptotically strive for temporal intuition stretching into an infinitely large spacetime sphere, while the point of compression within the physical kernel tends toward the infinitely small, which as it were has imploded the whole past flow. The proof that we are successful in maintaining the intended laminar flow through time is that we can sustain its fully continuous playback – that is, we maintain full and unbroken concentration. The result is that we feel anchored at an infinitesimal point sinking into the physical kernel, yet our imaginative space is greatly expanded and laminar. This expanded space doesn’t feel only as spatially large but as encompassing the great duration of our meditative song.
Interference of flow-bending intuitive intents
In a sense, the continuous laminar flow between the expanded (yet very simple and easily intuited) temporal potential and the point of compression, becomes like a ‘taut string’. Here, however, ‘string’ shouldn’t evoke in us the sense of a geometric line that our attention can trace in space. If we feel that we seek the temporal intuition of the flow by moving our attention, as if seeking to find it at some point in space other than the point of concentration, this is not yet the state that we describe. Such a movement of attention still jumps between two or more different points of compression. The temporal intuition of the flow is not something perceptual that we can find in the space where our focused attention can jump around. Instead, the center and the intuitive imploding flow are felt as a monolithic whole. The intuitive flow is the meaningful intent of our activity realized in the act of concentration. It elucidates what we are doing without the need to break the concentration and look for explanation in some other point in space, which in itself would mean that quite different temporal curvature has taken over the playback.
Whether we want it or not, we’ll soon begin to feel how the World flow tends to modify our ‘string’. Not because the World flow acts from a distance and somehow influences our flow through speculative forces or bombarding it with particles, but because our flow is already modulated over the World flow and thus we can imagine that by trying to augment it, we experience elastic tensions that tend to return it to the freefalling state just like a tensed spring tends to return to its natural position. Thus, by trying to tighten our flow as a string, the elastic restoring forces begin to be intuitively felt as they impinge meaningful ‘vibrations’ of different ‘wavelengths’, which ultimately provoke meso-scale inner images. The Tetris pieces that thus condense already reflect something about how our intended inner flow is resisted. In this way, at these first stages of meditation, we begin to experience the World flow not as a thing that we perceptually see laid down before us but instead, the contents of inner experience are rather like a negative impression (in the sense of wax and seal) of the way in which the wider flow impinges on our concentrative effort.
Some may say that they are able to sustain this perfectly laminar flow and concentration, yet don’t feel any World flow impinging. However, if we introspect carefully, we’ll certainly recognize that the flow-sphere that we sustain is actually quite small, comparable to our head scale. In a sense, we have learned to instill certain order at our meso scale, yet this state can be compared to being calm and serene in the eye of the hurricane. When our temporal horizon is stretched further, and our point of concentration gets correspondingly sharper, we’ll inevitably sense that our existence can’t be comprehended in isolation but only as modulations over the World flow.
To put that into an analogy, imagine that we are doing pottery on a turntable.
Imagine that we don’t see our hands but only intuitively will their movements and observe the resulting changes in the clay. The latter is an image for the condensing Tetris pieces – the concretizing phenomena of our inner life. Normally we accept the pot for what it is, no matter how sloppy it may be. We say “my pot” just like we say “my thoughts, my feelings”. In reality, however, what is being impressed in the clay is an interference of many forces. We can only know them if we try to focus and sustain a perfect shape through time. Only then do we begin to recognize all the forces that bend the movements of our hands. Initially, we feel the forces only dimly but we certainly recognize how they modify the impressions in the clay since the impressions differ from what we intend. As an analogy, if we suffer from shaky hands, we may be used to the fact that our pots turn out wobbly. Maybe we consider this to be our unique style and even take pride in it. Yet if we attempt to make a smoothly shaped pot, we quickly recognize that the wobbly shape does not reflect our intents and thus there must be other forces interfering that are barely moved by our intended intuitive curvature. It is in this sense that we speak of a ‘negative’ image – we don’t see the forces as things in themselves but recognize how they modify our intents and this is perceptible in the impressions of the total interference. And in fact, we will never find the reality neither of our own, nor of other forces, as contained in the clay Tetris pieces. What happens is that gradually we begin to resonate with and comprehend the intuitive intents that work through the forces, just like we intimately know the intuitive intents of our own hand movements. Initially, we can conceive of such intuitive intents only as far as we feel how the human world impinges on our flow. For example, we can hardly conceive of bodily sensed pressure or heat as having anything to do with intuitive intents. Initially, we can only find such intents in relation to other human beings because we are familiar with the scales of their intuitive activity by virtue of the fact that we experience a human condition too. When we resist the World flow, we begin to grasp in images how our existence is shaped and constrained by the inner activity of other human beings, starting from our closest family and friends, going through acquaintances, colleagues, our nation, and ultimately the whole Earthly humanity. As said, we should by no means imagine that we’re striving for asceticism here, as if we try to extricate ourselves from human life. On the contrary, our meditative resistance to the World flow only serves to make us more conscious of it, and then we can use these insights to seek even greater harmony in our life’s conduct. This meditative resistance attains to a whole new level when we begin to recognize that even the flow bent within the ever greater spheres of our sympathies, antipathies, opinions, temperament, religious sentiments, and so on, can also be considered to be an intrinsic part of the World flow, instead of imagining all these factors as unquestionable and atomic attributes of our ‘self’.
This analogy should be understood very clearly because what we describe is very different from mere visionary states. In the latter, we are flooded with condensing imaginative Tetris pieces and then in retrospect we try to interpret them through more intellectual mental imagining. This would be like passive contemplating of a morphing pot which we overlay with mental images of the most varied theories about what forces cause the clay to change shape. In the end, only our perception of the clay is a certain fact of experience. All our theorizing remains as floating mental images that we mechanically stitch over the perceptions and call it ‘explanation’. This is radically different from the experience of trying to consciously and effortfully give shape to the clay. Then the resistance that we experience is an undeniable fact of experience. We may not yet have clear intuition about these forces' true nature and potential intuitive origin but their effects are direct inner experience, impinging into the most intimate strata of our inner life. Now our mental images are not floating speculations but confessions about the fact that something with which we are intermingled is modulating our intended flow.
When we consider our fully conscious intents, it is clear that we do give direction to the incoming flow. For example, returning to the city and bus metaphor, if we decide to visit a museum, all our actions in the ‘now’ begin to converge toward the goal. This doesn’t mean that we somehow reach into speculative time dimensions of reality and create the future there with some absolute authority. It may turn out that the museum is closed, midway we may decide that we’ll visit something else, and so on. But the fact remains that our conscious intent, from within the ‘now’, tries to bend the flow of the existential movie toward the specific goal. Even if we become engrossed in other thoughts on our way, this intent may still hover in the background and guide the unfolding of our bodily will. We then see the museum and awaken: “Oh, I’ve arrived.”
What about other inner factors? For example, why have we chosen to visit a museum instead of a shopping center? Maybe we simply like museums more. When we put on a scale the inner movie scenes of walking through a museum and walking through a shopping center, the former feels more sympathetic to us. Thus we encounter a deeper stratum of our inner life where sympathies and antipathies rule. We are used to thinking about sympathies and antipathies only in their meso-scale expressions as feelings of pleasure and displeasure which are present in the ‘now’. Seen more broadly, however, sympathies and antipathies are dynamic aspects of our inner life that actively curve our existential flow. For our inner life it is not enough that we simply feel a desire as a timeless feeling in the present. It matters that this desire is capable of bending our flow such that it can be resolved.
Most of the time we are barely conscious of how almost all aspects of our existential flow are ruled by such secret sympathies and antipathies. And even when we think rationally and try to snap together mental puzzle pieces, we are usually secretly steered so that we condense such puzzle configurations that fit the curvatures of our desires, preferences, opinions, and so on. For example, if we decide to go to the shopping center we may do that simply because it feels the most natural thing to do. It may even never cross our mind that there could be other things to do, such as visiting a museum. If we are asked why we chose the shopping center, we would rarely doubt the decision itself but instead, we begin to condense mental puzzle pieces that align well with the curvature of the desire. In other words, we seek ways to justify our unquestioned sympathy for shopping centers.
Inner activity at deeper scales
The characteristic feature of our human nature, however, is that as soon as we become conscious of a desire, we also feel that it lies within the degrees of freedom of our inner activity, to modulate it. This is not something that we’ll readily do. The last thing that the person going to the shopping center wants to hear is that they can bend the flow of condensation in a different direction. That would be difficult because one needs to resist the usual curvatures. Yet, hardly anyone will deny that such bending is possible. Most people would say “Yes, of course it is possible, but I don’t want to do it because I don’t want to experience the discomfort of resisting my usual inclinations.” Nevertheless, whether we want to do it or not, we can surely recognize that in this way we approach a deeper way of guiding the flow of condensation. There’s no denying that if we could modulate our sympathies and antipathies we would be able to explore paths of experience that would otherwise be completely beyond our spacetime sphere.
Now one may ask “Why would I want to change anything in my sympathies and antipathies? This is what defines me as a unique personality!” The need for such a change may only come in the right way as a result of our expanding cognitive horizon. When we begin to recognize the hidden curvatures of our inner life, new kinds of scaled mental images start to flow in our consciousness. For example, we may experience certain scenes of our life and clearly recognize how they have flown through the curvature of a specific desire or uncontrollable emotion. By gaining intuitive orientation within these curvatures (and this orientation manifests in our ability to scale down the intuition into mental images and concepts), we obtain a more panoramic comprehension of our general flow and may recognize how this curvature may be in conflict with others. As a simple example, let’s imagine that we like gossiping. We may have never questioned this tendency, maybe we don’t even recognize that we do that. We simply freefall through its curvature. One day, in inner reflection we experience panoramic recollections of our own life and realize how it has been unknowingly flowing within the curvature. Now that we have gained intuitive orientation within this aspect of the flow, and are capable of condensing our intuition into mental images, we may recognize how this tendency has got us into trouble many times, how friendships were ruined, and so on. From this perspective, a clear conscious intent may take form: “I need to transform this habit.”
Obviously, it is not enough to simply recognize the curvature of the habit and conceive of another curvature that can potentially transform our flow. Through our mental skills we can surely scale it down and symbolize it in mental words but to support it in place and make it the effective curvature of our future incoming flow we need to gather much deeper forces of our inner life, which we may have never even suspected exist (if we have never tried to resist a desire before).
This brings us to an important principle – to modulate the curvature of the incoming flow at different scales, we need correspondingly different scales of our inner activity. Resisting a fleeting whim may not be too hard. These are curvatures that only sporadically impinge on our flow. Changing a trait of our character, like gossiping, is harder because this curvature is much more deeply ingrained. It is even more difficult to change something like our handwriting, and it may be almost impossible to alter our temperament, not to mention altering certain biological processes in our body and the condensing physical structure.
In all cases, to willfully modulate the incoming flow, we need to first gain consciousness at the corresponding scales. If we observe closely, we can see that the deeper the level of modulation, the more we need to consider everything in its manifold relations. If we are simply freefalling through existence, flowing completely unconsciously through the curvatures of our character, then we’ll behold the outcomes of whatever that character is. If we easily get angry, we’ll continuously witness scenes of our inner movie where we get into conflict and all kinds of trouble. There are many curvatures that we might be willing to augment only for our own sake, for example, transforming an unhealthy habit. Yet as the horizon of our intuitive life widens, we begin to grasp in mental images how our flow affects everything around us, and vice versa. Thus we now consider also the perspectives of other beings, our impact on the Natural environment, and so on. Even deeper transformations can proceed when we gain intuitive orientation within much greater-scale curvatures, many of which have already been condensed into images by the various religious traditions. Thus, it becomes obvious that the greater the horizon of our intuitive orientation, the more we naturally reach the depth of moral life. In the true sense, moral life is not simply forcing ourselves to follow certain rules devised by religious or secular institutions but growing into an ever more encompassing intuition of the holistic World flow, and from within this intuitive orientation being able to modulate the flow’s curvatures at various scales by employing the corresponding scales of inner activity.
Ideally, our intuitive grasp should expand toward such a spacetime sphere that far exceeds the sphere that begins with our physical birth and terminates at the end of our Earthly life. As long as we can only envision this sphere as filled with purely bodily experiences of seeing this, tasting that – that is, as mere concatenation of such experiences – it will be difficult to recognize the higher-order curvature of the flow. If we return to our caricature, when we envision the sphere with images of ‘chopping wood’, we may say “There’s so much chopping yet to experiences in my future.” This, however, doesn’t recognize all the sympathies, antipathies, specifics of our temperament, and all other factors that secretly bend the incoming flow and largely determine the kinds of Tetris pieces we’ll witness manifesting at our conscious horizon. Then one may say “Then, to avoid being one-sided, I’ll do everything in my power to conceive of many other bodily experiences that fill the spacetime sphere, not only chopping wood.” This, however, still tackles the question in a mechanical way. We still live entirely at the horizon of condensation and lack deeper intuition of the World flow. As indicated, such intuition can only be gained by gradually recognizing the hidden curvatures of our inner life and together with that, the corresponding degrees of freedom of our inner activity, through which we can modulate the curvatures according to our ever-expanding moral intuition of the World flow.
With risk of being repetitive, we need to make it crystal clear that when we speak of flow-bending at greater spacetime scales, we still do not imply that our activity somehow travels into the future and makes modifications there. Not in the least! All flow-bending happens in the here and now, and it is only here that its reality can be intuitively known. The difference of scale refers to the extent of our temporal intuition and the strength and determinacy to support it in place.
Stretching intuition along the spacetime scale
Now one may object that by seeking such an expanded consciousness of our inner life, and ways to lucidly modulate it at different scales, we by no means gain any useful knowledge of the World flow. As said, this is a valid concern if we indeed remain isolated in our inner images. However, when we follow everything into the full spectrum of our experience, such one-sidedness can most certainly be avoided.
To make this clearer let’s consider another meditative exercise. We should always start with general relaxation of our body, mind, and feelings. The ignition of our physical kernel is a great way to start. Then we can continue wiggling out our imaginative being and proceed with inner space stretching (scaling and turning spheres), striving for the state where we are grounded in our physical kernel, yet the wrinkles of our inner space are expanded and ‘combed’, so to speak. In this context we have fertile conditions to continue with the meditation. There are two aspects to it, which are related to activity and receptivity. To clarify the first aspect consider again the song example. As said, if we concentrate on the title of a song, we have a mental image at the focus of our conscious experience, which anchors our overall intuition for the sphere of potential experiences that can manifest were we to start singing the song. In a way, we have some intuitive sense for the time span of the song and the rhythmic transformations our inner voice would have to go through. We can approach a similar sense even if we simply try to feel what a minute or an hour is, not by abstractly philosophizing about it or imagining a clock, but by trying to stretch our inner life in all directions as if to feel how our present ‘ticking’ of thinking is embedded in a greater flow. We can’t simply encompass this flow – we need to traverse it in all its details – yet we have an intuitive feeling for it and can symbolize this intuition with a scaled-down mental symbol that can be comfortably handled at our mental ticking scale.
We should calmly accept the fact that our intellect struggles with such an exercise. When we try to feel the time span of the song, we can’t grasp its totality as something sharp and concrete. What we grasp concretely is either the words of the title or the perceptual musical and lyrical fragments that need to be experienced individually at the ticking scale. The overarching ideal curvature of the whole song remains something elusive yet factual since we do have intuitive orientation within the song’s progression (without this ideal curvature the song would be experienced like randomly popping up sounds). We are facing a peculiar dichotomy. If we concentrate on the title of the song, it is as if we try to anchor the totality of this elusive temporal intuition in a symbol at our mental ticking scale. When, however, we begin to sing the song in our mind, the phenomena at our ticking scale are now the moment-by-moment lyrics, now we experience the playback as it were. Thus we have something like a bi-stable condition, where we focus either on the title or engage in the playback, but the two activities feel more or less mutually exclusive. When we concentrate on the title anchoring the total intuition of the song, we feel that we know what this title-symbol signifies. To feel the contrast, imagine that we think of the title of a song that we don’t know. The thought of the title would be merely a floating word. Thus when we focus on the title of a song that we do know, we feel that our conscious context contains everything needed to guide our singing through it (and this implicit knowledge and skills are what the title symbolizes). When we start singing, however, the intuitive totality tends to recede even further in the background of our conscious context and instead, we experience the moment-by-moment words, invisibly guided by a hidden curvature.
Now we can take the song example and morph it into a meditative exercise, as if by ‘straightening’ it. Imagine a song that consists of a single pure tone that is sustained for the whole duration. There’s no need to stay with auditory phenomena only. We can imagine a ‘song’ that plays back a visual, tactile, or whatever sensation. Even a single point works (the point is not defined by its visual content but by acting as a sink for our focused attention). Now we sustain our concentration on this point. Even though we are holding on to a seemingly static image, we should still feel that we need to continuously ‘sing’ it into existence, just like an infinite tone seems unchanging but needs to be continuously sustained with our voice. This is a very simple (and not particularly exciting) song but it is precisely because of this that we can also have a much clearer intuition of the potential that we are condensing. Our temporal intuition of the song feels as if the sphere of possibilities around us is shaped as a quite unremarkable laminar flow that continually collapses into the center (as if by gravity) where our focused attention is anchored. This focal point should feel like buoyantly resting within the physical kernel.
In this way we achieve something very interesting. We conceive of a way to bring the poles of the bi-stable dichotomy closer and closer into unity. The point of our focused activity can be grasped as both the playback of the meditative song and its symbol. In other words, the meditative song consists of the continuous singing of the title, which is both the element of playback and also the symbol for the totality of the temporal activity. In a sense, our meditative activity becomes self-reflective (or recursive) – the momentary playback of the image is at the same time a symbolic image of the whole activity through time.
We can only engage in this meditative song because the temporal structure is simple. The point at our singing focus doesn’t change from moment to moment. In a regular song the image of the title cannot possibly capture the whole richness of the melody and lyrics, but here, the focus point at any time very well anchors the intuition of the full meditative song. By focusing on the point, which is like the title of the meditation, we don’t feel that we miss something from its full playback (as is the case with a regular song). On the contrary – the point at the same time realizes the playback of the greater intuition.
Even though the above is conceptually very clear, it turns out that it is not that easy to achieve. The moment we try to sustain this laminar meditative song, we become immediately aware of all the factors that pull our activity in all directions. This leads us to the second aspect – receptivity. By trying to sustain our meditative song, in a sense we aim to artificially impose a perfectly laminar flow to the perspective of the World flow that we experience. This intended flow, however, conflicts with the World flow. It is as if so far we have been freefalling together with certain aspects of the World flow (and thus they didn’t evoke any conscious recognition) but now, at the moment we try to maintain a flow on our own, the World flow begins to drag against us and immediately a whole spectrum of phenomena becomes apparent. Here ‘World flow’ doesn’t mean only things outside us. For example, the processes in our body and brain, randomly popping up thoughts and feelings, are also an inseparable part of the total World flow. In other words, we can conceive that our personal condensation flow is only a limited ‘aperture’ of the condensing World flow, within which our whole existence is embedded. In a way, our inner activity and the intuitive curvatures that we aim to impose on our flow are not something that exists in isolation but are like modulations over the first-person experience of the World flow.
With this we have the basic principles in meditation. On the one hand (activity), we aim to artificially sustain a perfectly laminar flow compressing into a focal point, but on the other (receptivity), this activity delineates how the intended flow conflicts with the wider flow within which our individually intended flow is concentrically embedded and modulated. The deeper our concentration is, and reciprocally, the greater the time span of the sphere of our meditative song, the greater the spectrum of scales we can intuitively grasp. As a simple example, imagine that we begin our meditation and try to feel our meditative song extending into an one-month time span. Our immediate reaction would be “One month? But this is impossible!” But why is it impossible? Because such an artificially sustained one-month laminar flow would be severely resisted by the World flow. We say: “My body will ache, I’ll fall asleep, my wife will kick me out, I have other things to do too”, and so on. Yet this already shows in a rudimentary way how even at the purely intellectual prospect of this meditation, we begin to gain awareness of many patterns of the World flow, within which our existence is normally embedded. Most of them are completely trivial but we can only notice them if we resist them. Of course, we are by no means suggesting that meditation could or should last so long. Neither we are saying that our goal should be to rebel against the World flow and aim to replace it with one of our liking. What matters is that even if the meditation itself lasts only five minutes, when the intuitive sphere is expanded into greater scales, we prepare ourselves to sense inner movements that correspond to these scales. Ideally, we should asymptotically strive for temporal intuition stretching into an infinitely large spacetime sphere, while the point of compression within the physical kernel tends toward the infinitely small, which as it were has imploded the whole past flow. The proof that we are successful in maintaining the intended laminar flow through time is that we can sustain its fully continuous playback – that is, we maintain full and unbroken concentration. The result is that we feel anchored at an infinitesimal point sinking into the physical kernel, yet our imaginative space is greatly expanded and laminar. This expanded space doesn’t feel only as spatially large but as encompassing the great duration of our meditative song.
Interference of flow-bending intuitive intents
In a sense, the continuous laminar flow between the expanded (yet very simple and easily intuited) temporal potential and the point of compression, becomes like a ‘taut string’. Here, however, ‘string’ shouldn’t evoke in us the sense of a geometric line that our attention can trace in space. If we feel that we seek the temporal intuition of the flow by moving our attention, as if seeking to find it at some point in space other than the point of concentration, this is not yet the state that we describe. Such a movement of attention still jumps between two or more different points of compression. The temporal intuition of the flow is not something perceptual that we can find in the space where our focused attention can jump around. Instead, the center and the intuitive imploding flow are felt as a monolithic whole. The intuitive flow is the meaningful intent of our activity realized in the act of concentration. It elucidates what we are doing without the need to break the concentration and look for explanation in some other point in space, which in itself would mean that quite different temporal curvature has taken over the playback.
Whether we want it or not, we’ll soon begin to feel how the World flow tends to modify our ‘string’. Not because the World flow acts from a distance and somehow influences our flow through speculative forces or bombarding it with particles, but because our flow is already modulated over the World flow and thus we can imagine that by trying to augment it, we experience elastic tensions that tend to return it to the freefalling state just like a tensed spring tends to return to its natural position. Thus, by trying to tighten our flow as a string, the elastic restoring forces begin to be intuitively felt as they impinge meaningful ‘vibrations’ of different ‘wavelengths’, which ultimately provoke meso-scale inner images. The Tetris pieces that thus condense already reflect something about how our intended inner flow is resisted. In this way, at these first stages of meditation, we begin to experience the World flow not as a thing that we perceptually see laid down before us but instead, the contents of inner experience are rather like a negative impression (in the sense of wax and seal) of the way in which the wider flow impinges on our concentrative effort.
Some may say that they are able to sustain this perfectly laminar flow and concentration, yet don’t feel any World flow impinging. However, if we introspect carefully, we’ll certainly recognize that the flow-sphere that we sustain is actually quite small, comparable to our head scale. In a sense, we have learned to instill certain order at our meso scale, yet this state can be compared to being calm and serene in the eye of the hurricane. When our temporal horizon is stretched further, and our point of concentration gets correspondingly sharper, we’ll inevitably sense that our existence can’t be comprehended in isolation but only as modulations over the World flow.
To put that into an analogy, imagine that we are doing pottery on a turntable.
Imagine that we don’t see our hands but only intuitively will their movements and observe the resulting changes in the clay. The latter is an image for the condensing Tetris pieces – the concretizing phenomena of our inner life. Normally we accept the pot for what it is, no matter how sloppy it may be. We say “my pot” just like we say “my thoughts, my feelings”. In reality, however, what is being impressed in the clay is an interference of many forces. We can only know them if we try to focus and sustain a perfect shape through time. Only then do we begin to recognize all the forces that bend the movements of our hands. Initially, we feel the forces only dimly but we certainly recognize how they modify the impressions in the clay since the impressions differ from what we intend. As an analogy, if we suffer from shaky hands, we may be used to the fact that our pots turn out wobbly. Maybe we consider this to be our unique style and even take pride in it. Yet if we attempt to make a smoothly shaped pot, we quickly recognize that the wobbly shape does not reflect our intents and thus there must be other forces interfering that are barely moved by our intended intuitive curvature. It is in this sense that we speak of a ‘negative’ image – we don’t see the forces as things in themselves but recognize how they modify our intents and this is perceptible in the impressions of the total interference. And in fact, we will never find the reality neither of our own, nor of other forces, as contained in the clay Tetris pieces. What happens is that gradually we begin to resonate with and comprehend the intuitive intents that work through the forces, just like we intimately know the intuitive intents of our own hand movements. Initially, we can conceive of such intuitive intents only as far as we feel how the human world impinges on our flow. For example, we can hardly conceive of bodily sensed pressure or heat as having anything to do with intuitive intents. Initially, we can only find such intents in relation to other human beings because we are familiar with the scales of their intuitive activity by virtue of the fact that we experience a human condition too. When we resist the World flow, we begin to grasp in images how our existence is shaped and constrained by the inner activity of other human beings, starting from our closest family and friends, going through acquaintances, colleagues, our nation, and ultimately the whole Earthly humanity. As said, we should by no means imagine that we’re striving for asceticism here, as if we try to extricate ourselves from human life. On the contrary, our meditative resistance to the World flow only serves to make us more conscious of it, and then we can use these insights to seek even greater harmony in our life’s conduct. This meditative resistance attains to a whole new level when we begin to recognize that even the flow bent within the ever greater spheres of our sympathies, antipathies, opinions, temperament, religious sentiments, and so on, can also be considered to be an intrinsic part of the World flow, instead of imagining all these factors as unquestionable and atomic attributes of our ‘self’.
This analogy should be understood very clearly because what we describe is very different from mere visionary states. In the latter, we are flooded with condensing imaginative Tetris pieces and then in retrospect we try to interpret them through more intellectual mental imagining. This would be like passive contemplating of a morphing pot which we overlay with mental images of the most varied theories about what forces cause the clay to change shape. In the end, only our perception of the clay is a certain fact of experience. All our theorizing remains as floating mental images that we mechanically stitch over the perceptions and call it ‘explanation’. This is radically different from the experience of trying to consciously and effortfully give shape to the clay. Then the resistance that we experience is an undeniable fact of experience. We may not yet have clear intuition about these forces' true nature and potential intuitive origin but their effects are direct inner experience, impinging into the most intimate strata of our inner life. Now our mental images are not floating speculations but confessions about the fact that something with which we are intermingled is modulating our intended flow.