Essay: On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part III)
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 7:50 pm
The Habit of ‘Explaining’ our Experience
With the body scanning exercise in Part II, we hopefully became more sensitive to how often we lapse from being centered within the first-person flow of experience to entertaining third-person mental pictures which are supposed to ‘represent’ or ‘explain’ that experience in some way. For attaining spiritual sight, it is of critical importance that we feel this inner rhythm clearly. There is nothing inherently problematic with this rhythm of our imaginative life, and in fact, it is unavoidable that we alternate between being merged with the flow of meaningful experience and ‘stepping back’ onto perceptual supports, so to speak, such that we can anchor the experience in mental images that encode the meaning. In the body scanning example, we may anchor the meaning in doll-sized pictures of our body parts or the words, “head, neck, chest, arms, etc.”, or a combination of both. That is a perfectly natural part of our modern human condition and it neither can nor should be eliminated. We should simply make it more and more conscious.
In ancient times, such inner dynamics were known instinctively and wouldn’t need to be discussed explicitly as we are doing now. It was known that two polar opposite moods of soul were needed to be fully human between birth and death. One mood corresponded with the anchoring function and was characterized by self-confidence, sharp focus, analysis, manipulation of conscious contents, etc., and was adopted when various psycho-physical tasks needed to be accomplished (such as building the pyramids). The other corresponded with centering within the meaningful flow and was characterized by a mood of self-surrender, humility, devotion, and prayer, in which the soul sought higher-order intuitions and inspirations which were also necessary for organizing the worldly tasks but which it knew could never be encompassed and analyzed as clear conscious contents. Today we can restore this rhythmic alternation in full consciousness, which means we first understand, from within, why and how it exists.
We can begin to become more conscious of this rhythm by anchoring it with a symbolic image:
(take a moment to appreciate the recursiveness here - we are making the meaning of our anchoring rhythm more conscious by utilizing the anchoring function of that very rhythm!)
When we are able to keep our spiritual activity fully present in its experiential flow, it is as if the expanded intellect, with its peripheral network of linkages between mental pictures, is compressed (or breathed) into the central kernel of intuitive meaning. That is the meaning we are always living in when steering our spiritual activity in one way or another, but this intense meaningful experience is normally dispersed into the peripheral linkages of mental pictures. Upon living in this meaning for some time (which has now become almost entirely unconscious in ordinary circumstances), the meaningful kernel is expanded or breathed out into the mental linkages which symbolize the meaning we were living in. Again, that is a perfectly natural rhythm, but the problems for attaining spiritual sight always arise when we remain unconscious of the alternating rhythm and therefore begin to imagine our linked mental pictures ‘explain’ the meaningful kernel and, eventually, can be substituted for the kernel. Unfortunately, that has been the slumbering state of philosophic, religious, and scientific thinking across their various fields of inquiry over the last few centuries.
The classic illustration of this distinction between remaining conscious of the contracting-expanding rhythm and losing consciousness of it, which also foreshadowed the next few centuries of scientific thinking, was the ‘battle’ between Goethe’s phenomenology of color experience and Newton’s color theory (as we know, the latter won out as the dominant framework for ‘understanding’ light and color). These two figures stand as the harbingers of what modern scientific thinking experience could have become if its imaginative rhythm remained somewhat conscious (Goethe), and what it actually cemented into over the 19th century as consciousness of the rhythm evaporated (Newton). Even now in the 21st century, we are still living with the reverberations of Newton’s approach to habitually overlaying theoretical explanations on phenomenal experience, although Goethe’s more pure phenomenological method has slowly trickled back into various thinking pursuits over the last 100 or so years.
Goethe explored the meaning of the sensory observations of color phenomena that fed back on his act of setting up the experiments. He noticed how they arise primarily through the interplay of light and darkness, and then expanded that meaning into linkages of mental pictures which allowed him to anchor and refine the meaning, and express it more clearly to himself and others. He lived with these mental pictures patiently and allowed them to elaborate themselves within his soul. Thus he developed his penetrating understanding of color phenomena, which is an immanently practical understanding for anyone who works with colors. Newton, on the other hand, forgot his own role of setting up the experiment and therefore began to form new mental linkages which, not only symbolized the meaning of the sensory transformations he experienced, but also speculated about the ‘nature’ of those experiences. He speculated that light is an independent ‘entity’ in which the colors are already contained, and he imagined that would remain true even if there was no experimenter to observe the sensory transformations that fed back on his now forgotten spiritual activity.
This ingrained habit of trying to ‘explain’ first-person experience by mental pictures that point to some other imagined reality is not limited to scientists and academics, but is something most of us are subtly doing whenever we think about our existence. Let’s say we are steering through some meaning and condense that meaning into mental pictures. Then we notice how these mental pictures also modulate our bodily life, whether that is the movement of our limbs, our breathing, our blood circulation, our glandular processes, and so on. The strong effect on our inner bodily processes is experienced when we condense mental pictures concerning food, highly emotional interactions, or lustful passions, for example. It is the habitual response, in this case, to then begin forming new mental pictures which are contorted into the meaning of various ‘mind-body mechanisms’ by which we try to ‘explain’ how our mental pictures of the food interact with our mental pictures of the salivary glands. Alternatively, we may form new mystical mental pictures imbued with the meaning, “the explanation for the interaction is obvious - it is simply mental pictures affecting other mental pictures”.
In the latter case, all first-person experience has been flattened onto the plane of our mental pictures even though there are clearly important experiential differences between our ghostly pictures and the concrete bodily rhythms that feedback on those pictures. Our terrifying mental pictures can make our heart race, but it’s not so simple to stop the heart from racing with more soothing mental pictures. In all such cases, we fail to stay with the first-person experience of the interaction and to trace the phenomenal connections further within the meaning of the imaginative process, i.e. within the very process by which the mental pictures were originally formed. Instead, we instinctively feel like the phenomena are only ‘understood’ when we can pinpoint certain entities, mechanisms, imagined beings and activities, etc., that seem to ‘make sense’ of the experiences. In these new ‘explanatory’ mental pictures, there is indeed a faint glimmer of intuition present about the imaginative process itself, which is what provides the feeling of ‘making sense’. Yet that intuition is so convoluted in assumptions, beliefs, preferences, sympathies and antipathies, that we can hardly sense its relation to our inner activity anymore.
We start to feel like it would be the height of absurdity to relate the meaning of our mental pictures, especially those about biological and physical processes, to our spiritual activity and its inner structure, just as Newton would have felt about relating the spectrum of colors to his activity of setting up the prism. Through this habit of contorting mental pictures to ‘explain’ our experience, we have ended up imagining a reality of physical and psychic entities and mechanisms, divorced from our intimate spiritual activity, which simply don’t exist. All of our daily experiences are tyrannized by these conjured entities and mechanisms which we imagine to comprise and govern the natural world, our relationships with other human souls, and the general flow of life and human history. These mental images eventually end up functioning like a sort of scarecrow that fends off higher insights from incarnating in our field of consciousness. They function like Dante's imagination when encountering the Inferno - "abandon all hope ye who enter here". We start to feel like we are hopelessly searching for some reality that will forever remain on the ‘other side’ of our intimate experience, i.e. trapped behind the sensory appearances, lost in the voids of time, confined to another soul’s inner ‘bubble’ of experience, or beyond the threshold of death.
When things ‘go wrong’, when our state is permeated with the meaning of pain, suffering, and malevolence, this habit reveals its most pernicious side. We have lost hope that we can locate the reasons for our experience within the real-time flow of that experience itself, so we naturally start searching for others who we imagine to be controlling the ‘levers’ of the imaginary mechanisms that have victimized us. It is no overstatement to say countless violent conflicts in the modern era have been rooted in the outsized effects of this underlying soul habit. If we were to remain conscious of the imaginative rhythm and search for answers while remaining within the first-person meaningful flow, on the other hand, then we would begin taking responsibility for the ‘sins of the world’ upon ourselves, not necessarily out of a pure heart (to begin with), but because our spiritual sight reveals it is the only honest thing to do. We start to realize just how much our wayward spiritual activity contributes to the choppy waters of soul and physical life, including illnesses, conflicts, and disasters.
When we contemplate devastating wildfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or hurricanes, for example, it is usually not too difficult to trace how human spiritual activity has contributed to the inability to anticipate, control, and mitigate the destruction and suffering involved. If we manage to trace the threads far enough, we can even discern how, not just some hypothetical ‘human’, but our spiritual activity has been complicit in these failures, i.e. in the various social, economic, and political circumstances and habits that lead to poor planning and emergency response. When we approach the threshold of the natural event itself, however, we immediately recoil from any such responsibility and expand mental linkages to attribute it elsewhere. Could it be that our spiritual activity also contributed to the occurrence of the ‘natural’ disaster as well? That must remain an open question on the path to attaining spiritual sight, as a riddle that we are not eager to explain away. As long as we succumb to the external explanatory habit, we will block our ability to trace the phenomenal threads deeper within the real-time flow of meaningful experience.
Turning Attention Toward our Invisible Activity
We began discussing in Part I how our thoughts can become more artistically recursive so they no longer point to some theoretical reality ‘out there’, but right back to the immanent and temporally thick process which birthed them within our present state. This process is unseen but no less immanent and verifiable in any given present state. For example, when we try to tell a story from our life, we don’t physically or imaginatively see from where or when we draw the memory images and corresponding words that we articulate. Nevertheless, we somehow know ‘where’ to find the memories. We know how to pull out the story we intend to tell and not the one we would rather keep private. So even though we don't see anything concrete before our memory pictures and voice manifest, we have a certain intuitive orientation to the intended story within our conscious state. This intended orientation can't be seen as something existing in front of our physical eye or our mind’s eye, yet our entire inner life flows through its ‘curvature’ in the act of telling the story. Here we have a part of the World evolutionary process where we feel to be creatively involved in its unfoldment.
We need to remain conscious of the fact that, the moment we direct attention to finished mental pictures about our experience, we are like a snake that has just shed its skin and now we observe the dead skin husks. The living snake that we are begins to assemble these husks into various ideas and models, but it is never able to observe its own present snaking and coiling through the content of those ideas. In that present snaking activity, we truly live in the Center of all existence, albeit in a dim and momentary way, which is the only Center we will ever experience. It is the Center from which we will always feel like a coherent perspective that unites phenomenal ‘frames’ of experience such that they all feel like they “happened to me”, “were produced by me”, “will happen to me”, or “will be produced by me”. No matter ‘where we go’ in space or time, or could possibly go, we will continue to inhabit this Center in our ever-present “I AM” state of being. (3) In that sense, we experience our eternality at the Center of our snaking activity, which means we also experience our Divinity there. This fact is profoundly conveyed in the opening verses of Genesis.
“And God [Elohim] saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good…” (4)
This verse hints that the very planetary matrix in which our states presently feel embedded is like the shed husks of the Elohim’s spiritual activity. Just like humans, and all other be-ings, the Elohim could only ‘see’ this activity and judge it as Good (not analytically like we do) once it had been shed. That does not mean, however, that they were acting according to random whims and hoping the Creation would work out. When we tell a story, we don’t know exactly how faithfully and artistically we will render it from the outset, but we certainly feel like we are drawing upon intuitive skills and life experiences in an intelligent way. We trust that our inner gestures will paint the intuitive narrative in a more or less coherent way by providing the ‘curvature’ that lead the condensation of our mental pictures. Likewise, the Elohim willed their intuitive activity through the higher-order meaning in which they partake, trusting in the skills and experiences which emanate from the Absolute Center, and thus instilled the curvature that leads what we now experience as the temporally extended states of Earthly evolution.
We can also orient to this leading aspect of our spiritual activity using a metaphor to the presently fictional warp drive. Here it is imagined that the spacecraft somehow warps spacetime and causes itself to fall forward. It’s like a fancier version of the donkey with a carrot on a stick. Instead of a carrot, we hold a blob of concentrated mass/energy (like a small planet) just in front of our spaceship. The mass/energy curves spacetime and our spaceship falls forward in its gravity well. As we move forward, however, the blob also moves forward (as if attached to the stick) and thus keeps accelerating us. We can imagine that our intention activity IS the morphing spacetime curvature (the intuitive essence of our conscious space), while the spacecraft is, for example, the audial images of our inner voice. Such images are not meant to build some speculative model, but are only used to anchor our intuitive feeling for how the 'curvature' of our spiritual activity leads the condensation of its receding representations.
Yet we only come to first know this Center we share with the Elohim as its meaning comes to expression at the ‘periphery’ where our imaginative and intellectual gestures weave mental pictures into their various linkages. That is, after the common Center of activity has been ‘coiled’ several times over through the inner constraints and reflected into various complex rhythms and spatial content anchoring those rhythms. Thus, to become more intimately conscious of the Center that we always inhabit, that we always are, we must work back from the periphery by prolonging, purifying, and intensifying the experience of our imaginative rhythm, our eternal story-telling activity. We cannot start this work from the Elohim-scale of planetary processes, which are quite out of phase with our present activity, but rather from our intimate scale of imaginative processes. These are the imaginative ‘movements’ that we are continually making to give some direction to our experiential flow as we evaluate experiences, make plans, communicate meaning, etc. throughout the day, but normally we make these movements habitually and instinctively.
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (5)
We should also be clear why we are using so many concepts and examples to point toward these invisible curvatures of daily life. For the recursive reorientation of perspective on our symbolic thoughts to become second nature, we cannot simply conceptualize its possibility in a nebulous way, but we need to take active and concrete steps toward loosening the soul constraints which continually obstruct that higher potential from manifesting. That is, as discussed in Part II and above, we need to loosen the constraints of our sensory-conditioned habits, desires, and expectations. Such an effort requires a deeper scale of spiritual activity than we are accustomed to when exploring intellectual questions. We can’t simply memorize facts, explore spiritual aphorisms, and build theological models. One way of gradually entering this deeper scale of activity is by exploring the core intuition of the inner realities from many different angles in a relatively continuous and concentrated way. Consider an analogy to playing chess.
Chess is considered one of the most intellectually demanding sports. Like other sports, players become both mentally and physically exhausted in chess tournaments. The early game is generally based on routine opening ‘gambits’ and ‘defenses’, but once the basic pieces have been brought out, one gets into the ‘middle game’ and now every single move requires the player to imagine a branching tree-like scenario of what series of potential moves will unfold if any particular move is made. The more this expansive temporal intuition of potential moves can be focused into the present decision state, the stronger a player will be in the middle game. To begin with, the only choice is for a player to imaginatively think through various scenarios that will unfold if her pawn takes the opponent’s pawn in the center of the board, for example. After many games, some of that intuition will arrive more immediately since the same relative positions have been experienced many times before. For example, a player may intuit that as long as the king is positioned on a diagonal with the knight and with one space in between, the knight cannot deliver a check. Since there are usually time constraints, especially in rapid chess, this process of embedding temporal intuition into the present state should become more and more smooth and efficient.
That is perhaps more than just an analogy to what we attain by phenomenological exploration of our invisible intuitive activity through many different symbolic concepts and illustrations. We gradually bring more temporal intuition for the patterned rhythms of that activity into our present thought-states, and eventually even single images or phrases can anchor great depth of intuition for how our existence unfolds. There are no arbitrary time constraints for this endeavor, of course, except the ones we freely set for ourselves based on our goals for inner development. Unlike chess, we don’t have any ‘opponents’ except our own inner soul constraints that remain hidden from view. As we increasingly expose ourselves to the experience of these ‘relative positions’ of our symbolic concepts, the hidden intuition of the symbolized constraints begins to reveal itself more smoothly and efficiently within our flow of experience (whereas otherwise we can only attain that intuition ‘line by line’ with the CRT intellect, and perhaps drive ourselves insane in the process). In chess, our imaginative states are only constrained along the curvature of the game’s rules, whereas in broader life, our states are constrained by a complex overlapping of mental, soul, life, and physical curvatures.
When we engage the symbolic concepts with deeper scale gestures as much as possible, we feel our way through the constraints and start to see our inner structure, not as another sensory or mental object, but in a way analogous to how we see the white triangle in the above image (I stress analogous because the white triangle above is still technically seen as a sensory object). We begin to sense an invisible yet immanent structure that is active ‘between the spaces’ of our concrete perceptions and thoughts, so to speak. The latter perceptions continually testify to this invisible meaningful structure, they critically support our movements through its dynamic flux, but they don’t contain the structure within their content. As another metaphor, the perceptual contents are like the movements of celestial objects that testify to the existence of a black hole which constrains and steers them through its gravitational force. The black hole itself is never seen, neither is it known by combining the celestial objects together into various combinations, but its existence is intuited through the way it steers the relative positions of those objects.
As discussed before, this invisible structure is first reflected in everything we normally conceive of as our stream of thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and desires, and at a slightly deeper scale, as sympathies and antipathies which steer our soul states in one direction or another, toward pleasure and away from displeasure (physical and psychological). We need to remember, that in our ordinary consciousness, we only have mental pictures of these soul constraints and those pictures cannot be confused for the constraints themselves. The latter are rather the invisible ‘geodesics’ along which our entire lives are normally dragged into various ‘gravity wells’, as individuals and collectives. At this inner scale, the intellectually sharp distinctions between what is ‘personal’ and what is ‘transpersonal’ begin to blur together. We no longer feel to be weaving in only the self-enclosed sphere of ‘private’ experiences which is characteristic of the CRT intellect. Let’s imagine a giant lake where the water is loosely partitioned into segments via different color lightings.
If we are sympathetically drawn to a particular ideology like socialism, for example, it is like our feelings and thoughts have been immersed in an area of the lake glowing mostly red, where the feelings and thoughts of many other souls are also immersed. In our ordinary consciousness we think, “the best society is one where the state takes resources from each according to ability and redistributes to each according to need”, experiencing these as our private and originally expressed thoughts. Yet the reality is our soul is simply wading in common ‘red-tinted’ meaning and has thus become the vehicle for certain shared impulses. We often say things like, “I don’t believe in that outlook”, “I don’t feel that resentment”, “I don’t have a problem with this expectation”, “I don’t really desire those sensuous things”, and so on. Such comments reflect how we so often confuse our mental pictures floating at the surface of our consciousness for the more encompassing yet invisible curvatures which steer them from within the shadowy depths.
This tendency is so bad that we often convince ourselves at the surface of the exact opposite of what is stirring within the soul depths. Hence the saying, “the lady doth protest too much”. At a more analytical level, psychologists have intuited the intellectual ‘mechanisms’ of projection and compensation as effects of this ubiquitous modern tendency, i.e. we continuously project our unconscious soul tendencies onto the content of our experience and try to ‘compensate’ for those tendencies by disclaiming them at the intellectual scale. It is like we are continually building things up with one arm and then tearing them down with the other - we instinctively feel motivated to transform some shadowy tendencies but continually self-sabotage our efforts with intellectual convictions. These are indeed mechanisms insofar as they happen automatically without our creative involvement, but we can also bring new life and creativity into these mechanisms by reaching the deeper scales and making the invisible soul curvatures more conscious.
Restoring Intuitive Sensitivity Through the Experiential Gradient
As discussed in Part II, to become more conscious of the invisible curvatures we need to begin ‘delaminating’ and distinguishing the ways in which they come to expression. For example, we can distinguish a gradient of experience between sensations, feelings, thoughts, and imaginations. We feel that the sensations tied to our physical body are relatively ‘more real’ than the ephemeral mental images that we weave somewhat independently of the bodily senses (as imaginative replicas). This sense of ‘more real’ comes not out of some deep insight into the mystery of reality but simply because the sense impressions seem more consistent and intense compared to our volatile mental images. If we bump into something and experience physical pain, the quality of this experience will differ in intensity and persistence from simply remembering the painful experience in our memory pictures, no matter how faithful we strive for the latter to be. The concrete pain of a flame motivates our will to move our body away from it, whereas we can dwell quite comfortably in our memory pictures of the pain.
In that sense, our flow of ghostly thoughts lack concrete intensity but, for that very reason, we can more easily manipulate them to kindle intuitive insights into the experiential flow. These thoughts have been somewhat liberated from the rigid physical constraints and thus float more freely within our imaginative life. We can have a direct intuitive sense for the direction and lawful transformations of our ghostly thoughts, unlike the flock of birds, the alternating periods of day and night, the burning of wildfires, etc. For example, if we observe a fly whizzing erratically, every frame of our visual field manifests as something that we can hardly anticipate. On the other hand, if we set out to slowly count down from 10 to 1 in our mind, we have a very clear intuitive sense for how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like the erratic movements of the fly but as orderly condensation guided by our general meaningful intent to count.
It should help our inner sensitivity to the spiritual gestures if we do this counting exercise slowly and smoothly. We can even picture the numbers as they gradually fade and morph into the new numbers, like in the image above. We can also vary the time interval between the morphing numbers as a way to more clearly sense that the morphing isn’t happening automatically, but as a result of our underlying gestures. Perhaps we intend to pause on one number for five seconds, while on the next number we only wait two seconds, and so on. Another variation is to picture Roman numerals like “X”, “IX”, “VIII”, and so on, or to picture the numbers as colored and shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, etc. It is usually helpful to resist voicing out the numbers as much as possible, since that can ‘drown out’ sensitivity to the inner gestures. We don’t want to make the exercise too perceptually complex, so it’s best to start with the plain numbers and then gradually add in one or two more elements. The point of adding these additional elements is to provide more refined sensitivity for the ‘texture’ of our inner gestures.
Try, for a few seconds, to move your hand from side to side, up and down, front to back, and diagonally, and feel the meaningful difference in the gestures. That meaning will remain very dim and nebulous, which is fine, but we can still sense distinct meaningful qualities if we do it smoothly and attentively. We should get to the point where we can also make similar meaningful distinctions between our invisible imaginative gestures as we move between our audial and visual pictures, between ordinary numbers and roman numerals, between different colors, etc. We don’t need to abstractly reflect on and interpret the differentiated meaning of this perceptual feedback, just like we don’t need to reflect on the meaning of the physical hand gestures, rather it is intuitively felt. The perceptual feedback is the near-instantaneous manifestation of our intentional (spiritual) activity and that is the primary flow of meaning we are always seeking in our intellectual inquiries, even if we are unaware of that aim. These exercises put us into contact with that primary flow we are always seeking in a much more intimate and conscious way.
Some may wonder how imaginative perceptions are any different from our sensory perceptions, for example our visual sensations that seem to change immediately based on where we intend to point our vision. The difference is that the visual field is still constrained by many factors that feel independent of our activity and constellate the spatial area that we happen to be in. If we imagine a red surface on a white wall, the sensory color will clearly feel to ‘outweigh’ the imagined color, it will feel much more stable, intense, and resistant to our inner gestures. Moreover, we can easily imagine aspects of the bodily-sensory constraint that will prevent the feedback of perceptions that reflect our intent. That may be easier to imagine if we think about playing an instrument. We may have perfected the process of playing the notes of a certain song on the piano, practicing it over and over again, but if our fingers are really sore, the audial feedback may sound like a cacophony of tones and hardly reflect our intent.
That is not the case with our imaginative activity in the same way - even if we get distracted from what we intend to think, the new distracted thoughts are still near-instantaneous reflections of our new ‘intent’. Moreover, at any given time, we can awaken from the distracted train of thoughts, whereas we cannot simply override our sore fingers. Indeed whenever we are distracted and awaken to that fact, it is helpful to trace back our thoughts to the point of distraction and try to sense the inner constraint at work. The more we can sensitize to the presence of this inner gradient in our daily activities, the easier it will be to orient toward the various phases of attaining spiritual sight. Let’s use a brief experiment to get a better sense of this gradient between the bodily will which feeds back as concrete sensations that lack intuitive clarity, and the imaginative will which feeds back as ghostly thoughts imbued with such clarity.
When we hear the sound of the feedback from her intent to move the arm, it highlights how we are normally asleep in our will when conducted through the body - the feedback we receive is literally static noise (the presenter’s comments are a great example of trying to ‘explain’ the experience with theoretical linkages). We may feel this ‘static noise’ if we try to pour our will through our facial muscles right to the brink of smiling, but without any noticeable movement of the face. If we can prolong that concentrated pouring of the will for some time, our inner gestures may feedback as a dim tingling sensation in that area. Again, we should now be resisting the habit of trying to explain this experience away with imagined mechanisms in our facial muscles, but simply paying attention to the experience itself and letting our mental pictures of that experience elaborate their meaning within our soul. It will then dawn on us that, because we are asleep to this bodily willing activity, the meaning of the feedback won’t elaborate itself much further to give us any insight about the inner constraints at work.
Compare that dim tingling sensation, the static noise, to the experience of conducting our will through our imaginative ‘muscles’ such that we produce mental pictures. Here we feel much more awake to the process - the feedback we receive is mental pictures imbued with intuitive clarity, such as the sounds of our inner voice when reading through this essay. It is through this inner voice that we gain a foundation for insight into the dynamics of the inner constraints. For example, our imaginative activity expressed through the inner voice is now constrained by the words of the essay, which reflect the intuitive meaning experienced by the author of those words. Thus we can sense that the palette of potential meaning we could be steering through has been narrowed into only that meaning which aligns with the intuitive curvatures of ideas about ‘attaining spiritual sight’ and ‘knowing the constraints on our spiritual activity’. That is, as long as we remain present and concentrated within the experience of the essay.
Yet the perceptions and thoughts embodied in an essay such as this one are a unique constraint, insofar as we allow them to steer our spiritual activity, not toward expanded linkages of various mental pictures that ‘explain’ our experience, but back toward the very process by which our spiritual activity gives birth to those mental pictures. Through this constraint, we come to know that spiritual activity and potentially expand its degrees of freedom. Mysteriously, the more we try to unite our spiritual activity with such a constraint, the more we voluntarily imitate its intuitive essence, the freer our activity becomes. We can begin to orient toward this mystery by considering how this constraint is synonymous with gaining self-knowledge. By deciding that our personal will should stream along its curvature, by devoting that will to its more wise and encompassing aims, we are graced with the truth of our own nature.
If we imagine the ordinary constraints on our ‘flowing’ spiritual activity as the shape, length, material, etc. of a water hose, this unique constraint is like we have tied a knot near the end of the hose where the water streams out. The depth of the water flowing through the hose seeks to untangle the knot and bring the end back into its normal position as a passive outlet for the chaotic thought-sprays, but we consciously resist that as we remain concentrated within the meaning of the recursive symbols we are contemplating. The longer we can maintain that resistance without letting the recursive knot untangle, the more sensitive we become to the ordinary constraints which format our spiritual activity throughout the depths. Even if we are unsuccessful in our resistance for many iterations, as we undoubtedly will be, that fact can also provide insights into the contextual depth of the hose where our habitual thoughts, feelings, and impulses seek to bring the flow back to its ordinary state of gushing outer expressions.
The outlet of the hose is the ‘event horizon’ at which the infinite potential of invisible intuitive meaning condenses into ghostly mental pictures which recede into memory intuition, i.e. it is immanent overlap between the inner constraints and the perceptible experiences they are constraining. When we begin our concentrated resistance, we gain a firm point from which we can begin to spiral together the concreteness of sensory life with the intuitive clarity of our thoughts, and thus increase our intuitive sensitivity to the inner constraints while deconditioning from old habits, desires, and expectations to ‘see’ that continually try to reassert themselves. We cannot see the Elohim’s activity before we see our own opinions, beliefs, habits, desires, inclinations, sympathies, temperament, and so on, in the truthful light of how these inner curvatures lead our mental content and steer them in one direction or another, toward certain domains of intuitive meaning and away from others, toward certain ways of understanding that intuitive meaning and other ways of misunderstanding it. We will explore how to intensify that spiritual sight in the next part.
CITATIONS:
(1) Rudolf Steiner, GA 1 (16)
(2) Carl Jung, “Alchemical Studies” (CW 13)
(3) John 8:12
“Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
(4) Genesis 1:31
(5) John 3:3
With the body scanning exercise in Part II, we hopefully became more sensitive to how often we lapse from being centered within the first-person flow of experience to entertaining third-person mental pictures which are supposed to ‘represent’ or ‘explain’ that experience in some way. For attaining spiritual sight, it is of critical importance that we feel this inner rhythm clearly. There is nothing inherently problematic with this rhythm of our imaginative life, and in fact, it is unavoidable that we alternate between being merged with the flow of meaningful experience and ‘stepping back’ onto perceptual supports, so to speak, such that we can anchor the experience in mental images that encode the meaning. In the body scanning example, we may anchor the meaning in doll-sized pictures of our body parts or the words, “head, neck, chest, arms, etc.”, or a combination of both. That is a perfectly natural part of our modern human condition and it neither can nor should be eliminated. We should simply make it more and more conscious.
In ancient times, such inner dynamics were known instinctively and wouldn’t need to be discussed explicitly as we are doing now. It was known that two polar opposite moods of soul were needed to be fully human between birth and death. One mood corresponded with the anchoring function and was characterized by self-confidence, sharp focus, analysis, manipulation of conscious contents, etc., and was adopted when various psycho-physical tasks needed to be accomplished (such as building the pyramids). The other corresponded with centering within the meaningful flow and was characterized by a mood of self-surrender, humility, devotion, and prayer, in which the soul sought higher-order intuitions and inspirations which were also necessary for organizing the worldly tasks but which it knew could never be encompassed and analyzed as clear conscious contents. Today we can restore this rhythmic alternation in full consciousness, which means we first understand, from within, why and how it exists.
We can begin to become more conscious of this rhythm by anchoring it with a symbolic image:
(take a moment to appreciate the recursiveness here - we are making the meaning of our anchoring rhythm more conscious by utilizing the anchoring function of that very rhythm!)
When we are able to keep our spiritual activity fully present in its experiential flow, it is as if the expanded intellect, with its peripheral network of linkages between mental pictures, is compressed (or breathed) into the central kernel of intuitive meaning. That is the meaning we are always living in when steering our spiritual activity in one way or another, but this intense meaningful experience is normally dispersed into the peripheral linkages of mental pictures. Upon living in this meaning for some time (which has now become almost entirely unconscious in ordinary circumstances), the meaningful kernel is expanded or breathed out into the mental linkages which symbolize the meaning we were living in. Again, that is a perfectly natural rhythm, but the problems for attaining spiritual sight always arise when we remain unconscious of the alternating rhythm and therefore begin to imagine our linked mental pictures ‘explain’ the meaningful kernel and, eventually, can be substituted for the kernel. Unfortunately, that has been the slumbering state of philosophic, religious, and scientific thinking across their various fields of inquiry over the last few centuries.
The classic illustration of this distinction between remaining conscious of the contracting-expanding rhythm and losing consciousness of it, which also foreshadowed the next few centuries of scientific thinking, was the ‘battle’ between Goethe’s phenomenology of color experience and Newton’s color theory (as we know, the latter won out as the dominant framework for ‘understanding’ light and color). These two figures stand as the harbingers of what modern scientific thinking experience could have become if its imaginative rhythm remained somewhat conscious (Goethe), and what it actually cemented into over the 19th century as consciousness of the rhythm evaporated (Newton). Even now in the 21st century, we are still living with the reverberations of Newton’s approach to habitually overlaying theoretical explanations on phenomenal experience, although Goethe’s more pure phenomenological method has slowly trickled back into various thinking pursuits over the last 100 or so years.
(1)Any reflection about what a perception like light or colour might be in addition to the entity as which it manifests was completely foreign to Goethe's nature. For he knew what the powers of intellectual thinking were. Light was given to him as sensation. When he then wanted to explain the connection between light and colour, that could not occur through speculation, but only through an archetypal phenomenon, by his seeking out the necessary determining factor that must join light in order for colour to arise. Newton also saw colour arise in connection with light, but he then only thought speculatively about how colour arises out of light. It lay in his speculative way of thinking to do so; but not in Goethe's way of thinking, which was objective and rightly understood itself. Therefore, Newton's assumption that “light is composed of colored lights” had to appear to Goethe as the result of unrightful speculation. He considered himself justified only in expressing something about the connection between light and colour when some determining factor joins in, and not in expressing something about the light itself by bringing in a speculative concept. Therefore his statement: “Light is the simplest, most undivided, most homogeneous being that we know. It is not a composite.” Any statements about the composition of light are, indeed, only statements of the intellect about one phenomenon. The powers of the intellect, however, extend only to statements about the connection of phenomena.
This reveals the deeper reason why Goethe, as he looked through the prism, could not accept Newton's theory. The prism would have had to be the first determining factor for the coming about of colour. But another determining factor, the presence of something dark, proved to be more primary to its coming about; the prism proved to be only the second determining factor.
Goethe explored the meaning of the sensory observations of color phenomena that fed back on his act of setting up the experiments. He noticed how they arise primarily through the interplay of light and darkness, and then expanded that meaning into linkages of mental pictures which allowed him to anchor and refine the meaning, and express it more clearly to himself and others. He lived with these mental pictures patiently and allowed them to elaborate themselves within his soul. Thus he developed his penetrating understanding of color phenomena, which is an immanently practical understanding for anyone who works with colors. Newton, on the other hand, forgot his own role of setting up the experiment and therefore began to form new mental linkages which, not only symbolized the meaning of the sensory transformations he experienced, but also speculated about the ‘nature’ of those experiences. He speculated that light is an independent ‘entity’ in which the colors are already contained, and he imagined that would remain true even if there was no experimenter to observe the sensory transformations that fed back on his now forgotten spiritual activity.
This ingrained habit of trying to ‘explain’ first-person experience by mental pictures that point to some other imagined reality is not limited to scientists and academics, but is something most of us are subtly doing whenever we think about our existence. Let’s say we are steering through some meaning and condense that meaning into mental pictures. Then we notice how these mental pictures also modulate our bodily life, whether that is the movement of our limbs, our breathing, our blood circulation, our glandular processes, and so on. The strong effect on our inner bodily processes is experienced when we condense mental pictures concerning food, highly emotional interactions, or lustful passions, for example. It is the habitual response, in this case, to then begin forming new mental pictures which are contorted into the meaning of various ‘mind-body mechanisms’ by which we try to ‘explain’ how our mental pictures of the food interact with our mental pictures of the salivary glands. Alternatively, we may form new mystical mental pictures imbued with the meaning, “the explanation for the interaction is obvious - it is simply mental pictures affecting other mental pictures”.
In the latter case, all first-person experience has been flattened onto the plane of our mental pictures even though there are clearly important experiential differences between our ghostly pictures and the concrete bodily rhythms that feedback on those pictures. Our terrifying mental pictures can make our heart race, but it’s not so simple to stop the heart from racing with more soothing mental pictures. In all such cases, we fail to stay with the first-person experience of the interaction and to trace the phenomenal connections further within the meaning of the imaginative process, i.e. within the very process by which the mental pictures were originally formed. Instead, we instinctively feel like the phenomena are only ‘understood’ when we can pinpoint certain entities, mechanisms, imagined beings and activities, etc., that seem to ‘make sense’ of the experiences. In these new ‘explanatory’ mental pictures, there is indeed a faint glimmer of intuition present about the imaginative process itself, which is what provides the feeling of ‘making sense’. Yet that intuition is so convoluted in assumptions, beliefs, preferences, sympathies and antipathies, that we can hardly sense its relation to our inner activity anymore.
We start to feel like it would be the height of absurdity to relate the meaning of our mental pictures, especially those about biological and physical processes, to our spiritual activity and its inner structure, just as Newton would have felt about relating the spectrum of colors to his activity of setting up the prism. Through this habit of contorting mental pictures to ‘explain’ our experience, we have ended up imagining a reality of physical and psychic entities and mechanisms, divorced from our intimate spiritual activity, which simply don’t exist. All of our daily experiences are tyrannized by these conjured entities and mechanisms which we imagine to comprise and govern the natural world, our relationships with other human souls, and the general flow of life and human history. These mental images eventually end up functioning like a sort of scarecrow that fends off higher insights from incarnating in our field of consciousness. They function like Dante's imagination when encountering the Inferno - "abandon all hope ye who enter here". We start to feel like we are hopelessly searching for some reality that will forever remain on the ‘other side’ of our intimate experience, i.e. trapped behind the sensory appearances, lost in the voids of time, confined to another soul’s inner ‘bubble’ of experience, or beyond the threshold of death.
(2)If we deny the existence of the autonomous systems, imagining that we have got rid of them by a mere critique of the name, then the effect which they still continue to exert can no longer be understood, nor can they be assimilated to consciousness. They become an inexplicable source of disturbance which we finally assume must exist somewhere outside ourselves. The resultant projection creates a dangerous situation in that the disturbing effects are now attributed to a wicked will outside ourselves, which is naturally not to be found anywhere but with our neighbour de l'autre cote de la riviere. This leads to collective delusions, ‘incidents,’ revolutions, war—in a word, to destructive mass psychoses.
When things ‘go wrong’, when our state is permeated with the meaning of pain, suffering, and malevolence, this habit reveals its most pernicious side. We have lost hope that we can locate the reasons for our experience within the real-time flow of that experience itself, so we naturally start searching for others who we imagine to be controlling the ‘levers’ of the imaginary mechanisms that have victimized us. It is no overstatement to say countless violent conflicts in the modern era have been rooted in the outsized effects of this underlying soul habit. If we were to remain conscious of the imaginative rhythm and search for answers while remaining within the first-person meaningful flow, on the other hand, then we would begin taking responsibility for the ‘sins of the world’ upon ourselves, not necessarily out of a pure heart (to begin with), but because our spiritual sight reveals it is the only honest thing to do. We start to realize just how much our wayward spiritual activity contributes to the choppy waters of soul and physical life, including illnesses, conflicts, and disasters.
When we contemplate devastating wildfires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or hurricanes, for example, it is usually not too difficult to trace how human spiritual activity has contributed to the inability to anticipate, control, and mitigate the destruction and suffering involved. If we manage to trace the threads far enough, we can even discern how, not just some hypothetical ‘human’, but our spiritual activity has been complicit in these failures, i.e. in the various social, economic, and political circumstances and habits that lead to poor planning and emergency response. When we approach the threshold of the natural event itself, however, we immediately recoil from any such responsibility and expand mental linkages to attribute it elsewhere. Could it be that our spiritual activity also contributed to the occurrence of the ‘natural’ disaster as well? That must remain an open question on the path to attaining spiritual sight, as a riddle that we are not eager to explain away. As long as we succumb to the external explanatory habit, we will block our ability to trace the phenomenal threads deeper within the real-time flow of meaningful experience.
Turning Attention Toward our Invisible Activity
We began discussing in Part I how our thoughts can become more artistically recursive so they no longer point to some theoretical reality ‘out there’, but right back to the immanent and temporally thick process which birthed them within our present state. This process is unseen but no less immanent and verifiable in any given present state. For example, when we try to tell a story from our life, we don’t physically or imaginatively see from where or when we draw the memory images and corresponding words that we articulate. Nevertheless, we somehow know ‘where’ to find the memories. We know how to pull out the story we intend to tell and not the one we would rather keep private. So even though we don't see anything concrete before our memory pictures and voice manifest, we have a certain intuitive orientation to the intended story within our conscious state. This intended orientation can't be seen as something existing in front of our physical eye or our mind’s eye, yet our entire inner life flows through its ‘curvature’ in the act of telling the story. Here we have a part of the World evolutionary process where we feel to be creatively involved in its unfoldment.
We need to remain conscious of the fact that, the moment we direct attention to finished mental pictures about our experience, we are like a snake that has just shed its skin and now we observe the dead skin husks. The living snake that we are begins to assemble these husks into various ideas and models, but it is never able to observe its own present snaking and coiling through the content of those ideas. In that present snaking activity, we truly live in the Center of all existence, albeit in a dim and momentary way, which is the only Center we will ever experience. It is the Center from which we will always feel like a coherent perspective that unites phenomenal ‘frames’ of experience such that they all feel like they “happened to me”, “were produced by me”, “will happen to me”, or “will be produced by me”. No matter ‘where we go’ in space or time, or could possibly go, we will continue to inhabit this Center in our ever-present “I AM” state of being. (3) In that sense, we experience our eternality at the Center of our snaking activity, which means we also experience our Divinity there. This fact is profoundly conveyed in the opening verses of Genesis.
“And God [Elohim] saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good…” (4)
This verse hints that the very planetary matrix in which our states presently feel embedded is like the shed husks of the Elohim’s spiritual activity. Just like humans, and all other be-ings, the Elohim could only ‘see’ this activity and judge it as Good (not analytically like we do) once it had been shed. That does not mean, however, that they were acting according to random whims and hoping the Creation would work out. When we tell a story, we don’t know exactly how faithfully and artistically we will render it from the outset, but we certainly feel like we are drawing upon intuitive skills and life experiences in an intelligent way. We trust that our inner gestures will paint the intuitive narrative in a more or less coherent way by providing the ‘curvature’ that lead the condensation of our mental pictures. Likewise, the Elohim willed their intuitive activity through the higher-order meaning in which they partake, trusting in the skills and experiences which emanate from the Absolute Center, and thus instilled the curvature that leads what we now experience as the temporally extended states of Earthly evolution.
We can also orient to this leading aspect of our spiritual activity using a metaphor to the presently fictional warp drive. Here it is imagined that the spacecraft somehow warps spacetime and causes itself to fall forward. It’s like a fancier version of the donkey with a carrot on a stick. Instead of a carrot, we hold a blob of concentrated mass/energy (like a small planet) just in front of our spaceship. The mass/energy curves spacetime and our spaceship falls forward in its gravity well. As we move forward, however, the blob also moves forward (as if attached to the stick) and thus keeps accelerating us. We can imagine that our intention activity IS the morphing spacetime curvature (the intuitive essence of our conscious space), while the spacecraft is, for example, the audial images of our inner voice. Such images are not meant to build some speculative model, but are only used to anchor our intuitive feeling for how the 'curvature' of our spiritual activity leads the condensation of its receding representations.
Yet we only come to first know this Center we share with the Elohim as its meaning comes to expression at the ‘periphery’ where our imaginative and intellectual gestures weave mental pictures into their various linkages. That is, after the common Center of activity has been ‘coiled’ several times over through the inner constraints and reflected into various complex rhythms and spatial content anchoring those rhythms. Thus, to become more intimately conscious of the Center that we always inhabit, that we always are, we must work back from the periphery by prolonging, purifying, and intensifying the experience of our imaginative rhythm, our eternal story-telling activity. We cannot start this work from the Elohim-scale of planetary processes, which are quite out of phase with our present activity, but rather from our intimate scale of imaginative processes. These are the imaginative ‘movements’ that we are continually making to give some direction to our experiential flow as we evaluate experiences, make plans, communicate meaning, etc. throughout the day, but normally we make these movements habitually and instinctively.
“Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (5)
We should also be clear why we are using so many concepts and examples to point toward these invisible curvatures of daily life. For the recursive reorientation of perspective on our symbolic thoughts to become second nature, we cannot simply conceptualize its possibility in a nebulous way, but we need to take active and concrete steps toward loosening the soul constraints which continually obstruct that higher potential from manifesting. That is, as discussed in Part II and above, we need to loosen the constraints of our sensory-conditioned habits, desires, and expectations. Such an effort requires a deeper scale of spiritual activity than we are accustomed to when exploring intellectual questions. We can’t simply memorize facts, explore spiritual aphorisms, and build theological models. One way of gradually entering this deeper scale of activity is by exploring the core intuition of the inner realities from many different angles in a relatively continuous and concentrated way. Consider an analogy to playing chess.
Chess is considered one of the most intellectually demanding sports. Like other sports, players become both mentally and physically exhausted in chess tournaments. The early game is generally based on routine opening ‘gambits’ and ‘defenses’, but once the basic pieces have been brought out, one gets into the ‘middle game’ and now every single move requires the player to imagine a branching tree-like scenario of what series of potential moves will unfold if any particular move is made. The more this expansive temporal intuition of potential moves can be focused into the present decision state, the stronger a player will be in the middle game. To begin with, the only choice is for a player to imaginatively think through various scenarios that will unfold if her pawn takes the opponent’s pawn in the center of the board, for example. After many games, some of that intuition will arrive more immediately since the same relative positions have been experienced many times before. For example, a player may intuit that as long as the king is positioned on a diagonal with the knight and with one space in between, the knight cannot deliver a check. Since there are usually time constraints, especially in rapid chess, this process of embedding temporal intuition into the present state should become more and more smooth and efficient.
That is perhaps more than just an analogy to what we attain by phenomenological exploration of our invisible intuitive activity through many different symbolic concepts and illustrations. We gradually bring more temporal intuition for the patterned rhythms of that activity into our present thought-states, and eventually even single images or phrases can anchor great depth of intuition for how our existence unfolds. There are no arbitrary time constraints for this endeavor, of course, except the ones we freely set for ourselves based on our goals for inner development. Unlike chess, we don’t have any ‘opponents’ except our own inner soul constraints that remain hidden from view. As we increasingly expose ourselves to the experience of these ‘relative positions’ of our symbolic concepts, the hidden intuition of the symbolized constraints begins to reveal itself more smoothly and efficiently within our flow of experience (whereas otherwise we can only attain that intuition ‘line by line’ with the CRT intellect, and perhaps drive ourselves insane in the process). In chess, our imaginative states are only constrained along the curvature of the game’s rules, whereas in broader life, our states are constrained by a complex overlapping of mental, soul, life, and physical curvatures.
When we engage the symbolic concepts with deeper scale gestures as much as possible, we feel our way through the constraints and start to see our inner structure, not as another sensory or mental object, but in a way analogous to how we see the white triangle in the above image (I stress analogous because the white triangle above is still technically seen as a sensory object). We begin to sense an invisible yet immanent structure that is active ‘between the spaces’ of our concrete perceptions and thoughts, so to speak. The latter perceptions continually testify to this invisible meaningful structure, they critically support our movements through its dynamic flux, but they don’t contain the structure within their content. As another metaphor, the perceptual contents are like the movements of celestial objects that testify to the existence of a black hole which constrains and steers them through its gravitational force. The black hole itself is never seen, neither is it known by combining the celestial objects together into various combinations, but its existence is intuited through the way it steers the relative positions of those objects.
As discussed before, this invisible structure is first reflected in everything we normally conceive of as our stream of thoughts, beliefs, expectations, and desires, and at a slightly deeper scale, as sympathies and antipathies which steer our soul states in one direction or another, toward pleasure and away from displeasure (physical and psychological). We need to remember, that in our ordinary consciousness, we only have mental pictures of these soul constraints and those pictures cannot be confused for the constraints themselves. The latter are rather the invisible ‘geodesics’ along which our entire lives are normally dragged into various ‘gravity wells’, as individuals and collectives. At this inner scale, the intellectually sharp distinctions between what is ‘personal’ and what is ‘transpersonal’ begin to blur together. We no longer feel to be weaving in only the self-enclosed sphere of ‘private’ experiences which is characteristic of the CRT intellect. Let’s imagine a giant lake where the water is loosely partitioned into segments via different color lightings.
If we are sympathetically drawn to a particular ideology like socialism, for example, it is like our feelings and thoughts have been immersed in an area of the lake glowing mostly red, where the feelings and thoughts of many other souls are also immersed. In our ordinary consciousness we think, “the best society is one where the state takes resources from each according to ability and redistributes to each according to need”, experiencing these as our private and originally expressed thoughts. Yet the reality is our soul is simply wading in common ‘red-tinted’ meaning and has thus become the vehicle for certain shared impulses. We often say things like, “I don’t believe in that outlook”, “I don’t feel that resentment”, “I don’t have a problem with this expectation”, “I don’t really desire those sensuous things”, and so on. Such comments reflect how we so often confuse our mental pictures floating at the surface of our consciousness for the more encompassing yet invisible curvatures which steer them from within the shadowy depths.
This tendency is so bad that we often convince ourselves at the surface of the exact opposite of what is stirring within the soul depths. Hence the saying, “the lady doth protest too much”. At a more analytical level, psychologists have intuited the intellectual ‘mechanisms’ of projection and compensation as effects of this ubiquitous modern tendency, i.e. we continuously project our unconscious soul tendencies onto the content of our experience and try to ‘compensate’ for those tendencies by disclaiming them at the intellectual scale. It is like we are continually building things up with one arm and then tearing them down with the other - we instinctively feel motivated to transform some shadowy tendencies but continually self-sabotage our efforts with intellectual convictions. These are indeed mechanisms insofar as they happen automatically without our creative involvement, but we can also bring new life and creativity into these mechanisms by reaching the deeper scales and making the invisible soul curvatures more conscious.
Restoring Intuitive Sensitivity Through the Experiential Gradient
As discussed in Part II, to become more conscious of the invisible curvatures we need to begin ‘delaminating’ and distinguishing the ways in which they come to expression. For example, we can distinguish a gradient of experience between sensations, feelings, thoughts, and imaginations. We feel that the sensations tied to our physical body are relatively ‘more real’ than the ephemeral mental images that we weave somewhat independently of the bodily senses (as imaginative replicas). This sense of ‘more real’ comes not out of some deep insight into the mystery of reality but simply because the sense impressions seem more consistent and intense compared to our volatile mental images. If we bump into something and experience physical pain, the quality of this experience will differ in intensity and persistence from simply remembering the painful experience in our memory pictures, no matter how faithful we strive for the latter to be. The concrete pain of a flame motivates our will to move our body away from it, whereas we can dwell quite comfortably in our memory pictures of the pain.
In that sense, our flow of ghostly thoughts lack concrete intensity but, for that very reason, we can more easily manipulate them to kindle intuitive insights into the experiential flow. These thoughts have been somewhat liberated from the rigid physical constraints and thus float more freely within our imaginative life. We can have a direct intuitive sense for the direction and lawful transformations of our ghostly thoughts, unlike the flock of birds, the alternating periods of day and night, the burning of wildfires, etc. For example, if we observe a fly whizzing erratically, every frame of our visual field manifests as something that we can hardly anticipate. On the other hand, if we set out to slowly count down from 10 to 1 in our mind, we have a very clear intuitive sense for how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like the erratic movements of the fly but as orderly condensation guided by our general meaningful intent to count.
It should help our inner sensitivity to the spiritual gestures if we do this counting exercise slowly and smoothly. We can even picture the numbers as they gradually fade and morph into the new numbers, like in the image above. We can also vary the time interval between the morphing numbers as a way to more clearly sense that the morphing isn’t happening automatically, but as a result of our underlying gestures. Perhaps we intend to pause on one number for five seconds, while on the next number we only wait two seconds, and so on. Another variation is to picture Roman numerals like “X”, “IX”, “VIII”, and so on, or to picture the numbers as colored and shifting from red to orange to yellow to green, etc. It is usually helpful to resist voicing out the numbers as much as possible, since that can ‘drown out’ sensitivity to the inner gestures. We don’t want to make the exercise too perceptually complex, so it’s best to start with the plain numbers and then gradually add in one or two more elements. The point of adding these additional elements is to provide more refined sensitivity for the ‘texture’ of our inner gestures.
Try, for a few seconds, to move your hand from side to side, up and down, front to back, and diagonally, and feel the meaningful difference in the gestures. That meaning will remain very dim and nebulous, which is fine, but we can still sense distinct meaningful qualities if we do it smoothly and attentively. We should get to the point where we can also make similar meaningful distinctions between our invisible imaginative gestures as we move between our audial and visual pictures, between ordinary numbers and roman numerals, between different colors, etc. We don’t need to abstractly reflect on and interpret the differentiated meaning of this perceptual feedback, just like we don’t need to reflect on the meaning of the physical hand gestures, rather it is intuitively felt. The perceptual feedback is the near-instantaneous manifestation of our intentional (spiritual) activity and that is the primary flow of meaning we are always seeking in our intellectual inquiries, even if we are unaware of that aim. These exercises put us into contact with that primary flow we are always seeking in a much more intimate and conscious way.
Some may wonder how imaginative perceptions are any different from our sensory perceptions, for example our visual sensations that seem to change immediately based on where we intend to point our vision. The difference is that the visual field is still constrained by many factors that feel independent of our activity and constellate the spatial area that we happen to be in. If we imagine a red surface on a white wall, the sensory color will clearly feel to ‘outweigh’ the imagined color, it will feel much more stable, intense, and resistant to our inner gestures. Moreover, we can easily imagine aspects of the bodily-sensory constraint that will prevent the feedback of perceptions that reflect our intent. That may be easier to imagine if we think about playing an instrument. We may have perfected the process of playing the notes of a certain song on the piano, practicing it over and over again, but if our fingers are really sore, the audial feedback may sound like a cacophony of tones and hardly reflect our intent.
That is not the case with our imaginative activity in the same way - even if we get distracted from what we intend to think, the new distracted thoughts are still near-instantaneous reflections of our new ‘intent’. Moreover, at any given time, we can awaken from the distracted train of thoughts, whereas we cannot simply override our sore fingers. Indeed whenever we are distracted and awaken to that fact, it is helpful to trace back our thoughts to the point of distraction and try to sense the inner constraint at work. The more we can sensitize to the presence of this inner gradient in our daily activities, the easier it will be to orient toward the various phases of attaining spiritual sight. Let’s use a brief experiment to get a better sense of this gradient between the bodily will which feeds back as concrete sensations that lack intuitive clarity, and the imaginative will which feeds back as ghostly thoughts imbued with such clarity.
When we hear the sound of the feedback from her intent to move the arm, it highlights how we are normally asleep in our will when conducted through the body - the feedback we receive is literally static noise (the presenter’s comments are a great example of trying to ‘explain’ the experience with theoretical linkages). We may feel this ‘static noise’ if we try to pour our will through our facial muscles right to the brink of smiling, but without any noticeable movement of the face. If we can prolong that concentrated pouring of the will for some time, our inner gestures may feedback as a dim tingling sensation in that area. Again, we should now be resisting the habit of trying to explain this experience away with imagined mechanisms in our facial muscles, but simply paying attention to the experience itself and letting our mental pictures of that experience elaborate their meaning within our soul. It will then dawn on us that, because we are asleep to this bodily willing activity, the meaning of the feedback won’t elaborate itself much further to give us any insight about the inner constraints at work.
Compare that dim tingling sensation, the static noise, to the experience of conducting our will through our imaginative ‘muscles’ such that we produce mental pictures. Here we feel much more awake to the process - the feedback we receive is mental pictures imbued with intuitive clarity, such as the sounds of our inner voice when reading through this essay. It is through this inner voice that we gain a foundation for insight into the dynamics of the inner constraints. For example, our imaginative activity expressed through the inner voice is now constrained by the words of the essay, which reflect the intuitive meaning experienced by the author of those words. Thus we can sense that the palette of potential meaning we could be steering through has been narrowed into only that meaning which aligns with the intuitive curvatures of ideas about ‘attaining spiritual sight’ and ‘knowing the constraints on our spiritual activity’. That is, as long as we remain present and concentrated within the experience of the essay.
Yet the perceptions and thoughts embodied in an essay such as this one are a unique constraint, insofar as we allow them to steer our spiritual activity, not toward expanded linkages of various mental pictures that ‘explain’ our experience, but back toward the very process by which our spiritual activity gives birth to those mental pictures. Through this constraint, we come to know that spiritual activity and potentially expand its degrees of freedom. Mysteriously, the more we try to unite our spiritual activity with such a constraint, the more we voluntarily imitate its intuitive essence, the freer our activity becomes. We can begin to orient toward this mystery by considering how this constraint is synonymous with gaining self-knowledge. By deciding that our personal will should stream along its curvature, by devoting that will to its more wise and encompassing aims, we are graced with the truth of our own nature.
If we imagine the ordinary constraints on our ‘flowing’ spiritual activity as the shape, length, material, etc. of a water hose, this unique constraint is like we have tied a knot near the end of the hose where the water streams out. The depth of the water flowing through the hose seeks to untangle the knot and bring the end back into its normal position as a passive outlet for the chaotic thought-sprays, but we consciously resist that as we remain concentrated within the meaning of the recursive symbols we are contemplating. The longer we can maintain that resistance without letting the recursive knot untangle, the more sensitive we become to the ordinary constraints which format our spiritual activity throughout the depths. Even if we are unsuccessful in our resistance for many iterations, as we undoubtedly will be, that fact can also provide insights into the contextual depth of the hose where our habitual thoughts, feelings, and impulses seek to bring the flow back to its ordinary state of gushing outer expressions.
The outlet of the hose is the ‘event horizon’ at which the infinite potential of invisible intuitive meaning condenses into ghostly mental pictures which recede into memory intuition, i.e. it is immanent overlap between the inner constraints and the perceptible experiences they are constraining. When we begin our concentrated resistance, we gain a firm point from which we can begin to spiral together the concreteness of sensory life with the intuitive clarity of our thoughts, and thus increase our intuitive sensitivity to the inner constraints while deconditioning from old habits, desires, and expectations to ‘see’ that continually try to reassert themselves. We cannot see the Elohim’s activity before we see our own opinions, beliefs, habits, desires, inclinations, sympathies, temperament, and so on, in the truthful light of how these inner curvatures lead our mental content and steer them in one direction or another, toward certain domains of intuitive meaning and away from others, toward certain ways of understanding that intuitive meaning and other ways of misunderstanding it. We will explore how to intensify that spiritual sight in the next part.
CITATIONS:
(1) Rudolf Steiner, GA 1 (16)
(2) Carl Jung, “Alchemical Studies” (CW 13)
(3) John 8:12
“Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
(4) Genesis 1:31
(5) John 3:3
