Essay: On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part IV)
Posted: Fri Jan 31, 2025 6:15 pm
Directly Perceiving ‘Other Minds’
"The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities." - Gilles Deleuze
Related to the habit we discussed in Part III of ‘explaining’ our experience with theoretical thoughts that point somewhere else, there is the ubiquitous modern habit of assuming we cannot directly perceive ‘other minds’. We only feel we need to rely on the former habit because we have assumed the latter to be the case without question. When conditioned by sensory experience of clearly bounded objects separated from one another in space, we come to feel that each soul has a circumscribed ‘field of experience’ (including sensations, thoughts, impulses, feelings, etc.) contained somewhere within the bounds of their skin, cut off from prying eyes and minds. The reasons we maintain this sensory-conditioned assumption reside in deeper curvatures of our soul life, which we will touch on later. With this assumption dangling our intellect like a marionette, we then start weaving theories about how we only know another soul’s first-person inner states by inferring them from sensory impressions (such as speech and gestures), analogizing to them based on our own first-person states, or simply speculating into the void and living with the illusion of ‘other minds’ for practical reasons (solipsism).
A good way to loosen the slack on this constraining assumption, to begin with, is to reveal the flawed logic of various objections to the idea that we know ‘other minds’ directly through observation and cognitive discrimination of perceptions, just as we can objectively know various aspects of our spatial-sensory environment in the same way. We don’t need to infer from or analogize to anything when we notice that a flame is burning us before we attain knowledge of that painful experience. Yet somehow we have convinced ourselves in modern times we must make such inferences and analogies when we feel empathy, when we ‘vibrate in resonance’ with another soul’s pain or grief, at the sight of their expressions. It seems ‘self-evident’ that I cannot know another perspective’s pain when I see them on fire like I know my own pain when I am burned. Thus it is supposed that there must exist some sort of experiential boundary between perspectives and then the philosophers and scientists get to work theorizing ‘explanations’ for this assumed boundary and why it can or cannot be overcome.
Many conundrums arise when we remain rigidly attached to such a conviction. Since it forces our thinking to imagine it is relying on speculative inferences, we begin to feel dreadfully uncertain about many things we would have intuitively known a few centuries ago. For example, how do we know that our inferences are correct, and that we are not simply interacting with a very cleverly designed robot, a ‘nonplayer character’ (NPC), that only seems to be experiencing inner states of pain, grief, joy, etc.? How many ‘p-zombies’ are actually out there trying to pass themselves off as humans while we remain none the wiser? These are the kinds of questions modern thinkers occupy themselves with, since everyone feels like we can only observe and know the mere outer surfaces of people and events in a direct way, while knowledge of inner states is ‘up for grabs’ depending on what we desire or prefer to be true. Indeed, modern humans have proven all too liable to make erroneous inferences from mere outer expressions (i.e. behavioralist thinking) when they feel like there is no other alternative.
The now famous biologist Michael Levin makes a similar erroneous inference in this experiment when concluding that his hybrid sorting algorithms are exhibiting ‘delayed gratification’ (sacrifice). After all, the behaviorist tendency of jumping to the conclusion, ‘if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck’, is only relied upon so much in scientific inquiry because it is assumed the ‘actual inner states’ are imperceptible and cut off from direct knowledge. Therefore, speculative inferences are the best we can do to approximate the inner experience. Such issues have significant consequences for how we think through experience and, ultimately, for how we relate to and treat our environment and other souls. The moral consequences of how we understand our ability to perceive the inner states of other souls run deep and wide. These issues all stem from the unexamined assumption that we exist as a private bubble of experience interacting with other private bubbles through some outer mechanism or another, exchanging ‘packets of information’ through some sort of spatial medium.
Instead, we can imagine that we always have direct perception of inner temporal states which feel to belong to other first-person perspectives, only there are various inner constraints on our psycho-physical organization that make this perception more or less fragmented, more or less lucid, more or less precise (which is also the case for spatial perception). These inner constraints on our perception are the very same ones we began exploring in the previous parts, and as we saw, they are flexible and capable of being loosened as we grow more intimately conscious of their existence and their influences on our spiritual activity. When we orient properly to this reality of direct inner perception, we don’t need to postulate any mechanisms or mediums through which information packets travel between souls, but can instead recognize how the inner states of many first-person perspectives are superimposed on one another. Let’s look at a few of the common objections to the direct perception of inner states.
One seemingly obvious objection is that we don’t “see” inner states like we do sensory impressions and therefore the former can only be inferred from sensory impressions. In the previous essays, we have already discussed the reasons why such an objection rests on an erroneous understanding of what it means “to see”. To see is precisely to perceive and discriminate perceptions such that we harmonize their unfolding into a musical whole, attaining a meaningful orientation to their lawful significance within our present state. We looked at how a person who undergoes a sight-restoring operation will initially only experience a chaotic flux of color impressions until they learn to properly discriminate and organize the experiences. It is no different than a person who undergoes a traumatic event and experiences a chaotic flux of emotions and thoughts. In both cases, we only attain sight when the impressions are harmonically related and their functions in our experience shine forth.
There is no experiential reason to artificially divide our perceptions into one bucket of colors, sounds, smells, etc., and into another bucket of emotions, thoughts, impulses, etc., and then claim that, in relation to other souls, we directly perceive the impressions from the first bucket (like the frowning or smiling facial countenance) but only infer impressions from the second bucket (like the inner state of sadness or joy). Yet that is exactly what modern empiricists and rationalists have been claiming for the last few centuries. Those who tried to move beyond empiricism and rationalism, like the ‘critical philosophers’, did not fare any better in overcoming this division. They simply imported it into their philosophical framework without question and then declared the inner states to be inaccessible ‘things-themselves’. Such an arbitrary division initially smuggles into our thinking what we seek to conclude, i.e. that we cannot directly perceive and know the inner states of other minds like we directly perceive and know spatially extended objects.
Another objection is that, when we interact with other souls, we don’t know how they are experiencing their own sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses. In other words, we only “live through” our own states and not the states of other minds. This observation is merely pointing to the fact that we don’t have complete perception of inner states at any given time. This fact is just as true for our own inner states as it is for others. Most of the time I am not sensitive to the blood coursing through my body, however if I receive a frightening scare and my heart starts racing, and I can discriminate this experience (through thinking) from other sensory experiences, I then know the existence of inner states that were previously unknown. The same principle applies to emotional and ideal states that either I or another soul are experiencing. Just because I do not happen to be consciously perceiving such states at the moment, it does not follow that they cannot be perceived under the right circumstances.
To better appreciate the flaw in this objection, we can imagine two people who are viewing the same tree from different angles. Under the logic of the objection, we imagine that there are inflexible ‘light cones’ into which their vision has been channeled and they can only continue perceiving those aspects of the tree which fit into their respective cones. Of course, in this illustration it is easy to discern the error in reasoning - there is no rigid light cone fixing a perspective’s vision in place. If one perspective were to get up and move, he or she could perceive practically the same aspects of the tree as the other (albeit from a unique spatiotemporal perspective). Now we simply need to translate that to our spiritual experience of thoughts, feelings, and impulses. The only thing preventing perspectives from directly perceiving the spiritual experiences of others is the failure to ‘get up and move’, i.e. to take an active and loving interest in the ideas, goals, feelings, and impulses which animate these other perspectives.
Another important consideration here is that ‘living through’ an experience does not equate to perceiving and knowing that experience. After all, the question is precisely whether we can perceive and know the inner states of other perspectives, not simply whether we can live through them in the exact same way. An animal which lives through the waves of pain, joy, hunger, etc. cannot be said to have knowledge of those inner states, rather it reactively moves from state to state like a fish in water. We only have knowledge of inner states, whether they feel to belong to our perspective or another perspective, when such experiences are actively attended to and discriminated. We can attend to and discriminate the experiences of grief and pain in another perspective just as we can do with our own experiences of those states, and without such attendance and discrimination, we will remain oblivious to the functions of the inner states in both cases.
In both cases, the knowledge of the inner states will only be dim and incomplete, but that is due to our psycho-physical organization and our cognitive skills, not due to some inherent ‘mental cone’ that partitions relative perspectives of the Whole into separate domains. To imagine the latter is the equivalent of imagining that the mental states of algebraic relations exist in some partitioned realm before I have learned algebra, or that the Eiffel Tower exists in an alternate dimension before I go to Paris and visit it. It would be convenient for young students if that were true, since they could then blame their math illiteracy on the structure of reality rather than their lack of inner effort, but what is convenient does not equal what is true. It is similarly convenient if we can avoid understanding or loving our neighbors because reality says “no dice”, but the fact is that there is much more room for expanding both by allowing our perspective to more directly coincide with theirs.
Orienting to the Superposition of Inner States
A major intellectual obstacle to this reality is that we habitually imagine these as-of-yet unexperienced ‘inner states’ of other perspectives as self-contained objects existing in some ‘other world’, on the ‘other side’ of our first-person present state. We need to resist that habit and rather stick with the given facts of our inner experience. To use a simple metaphor, if we imagine our mental state transforms from “1”, “2”, “4”, to “5”, does this mean that the state of “3” doesn't exist until it is experienced or exists in some world orthogonal to our numerical thinking? We can see that the relation between 2 and 4 is such that they can only be what they are if there is 3 in between. When I discover 3, nothing really changes for 1,2,4, or 5 - they are only complemented, the intuition of my present state becomes more complete. Even if 3 was never discovered, the relation between the above numbers would be as if 3 exists. Thus, the state of 3 exists as if superimposed on our first-person states of 1, 2, 4, and 5, and only needs to be brought into focus through inner effort.
When we translate that to our living experience of other perspectives, it means the inner states of those perspectives are implicit in our own and can be brought into greater focus through inner effort. When we truthfully survey our memory life, we cannot deny that our entire sense of ‘me’ has been shaped through the spiritual activity of others - parents, teachers, peers, leading thinkers, and so on. Likewise, the ideas, language, institutions, technologies, and so on that shape our lives would not exist without the spiritual activity of collective humanity. Our physical environment, bodily organs and parts, etc. would not exist but for the aeons of activity proceeding through the natural kingdoms and the planetary spheres. All of these transpersonal influences on the ‘architecture’ of our present state are also confirmed by the empirical findings of natural science and psychology. That is the sense in which the inner states of other souls (human or otherwise) are always superimposed on our own.
To his credit, the aforementioned Michael Levin has also done some pioneering work in discovering the ‘multiplicities’ of goal-directed agents concealed within the seeming unity of the individual human soul, i.e. the molecular, cellular, and organic systems that all contribute to the architecture of our self- experience. He has also intuited, based on the stimulation of his empirical research, that this human self-experience could take part in a ‘multiplicity’ that comprises higher-order agents, which, from their perspective, could be experienced as higher-order unities of selfhood. These multiplicities should not be imagined as atomic units existing ‘side by side’ and combining with each other, but rather as the ‘interference pattern’ that emerges from overlapping streams of spiritual activity. The self-experience of agents could be imagined as ‘nodes’ that arise within this interconnected and holistic constellation, as the ancients imagined with the symbol of Indra’s Net.
https://thoughtforms.life/are-we-too-pa ... d-we-know/
Just because we are not fully conscious of these superimposed inner states does not mean they cease to exist and shape our conscious experience. Indeed, as we become more sensitive to what is influencing that experience, we may discover that, when in public, our mental pictures are often modulating our behavior and speech based on how we feel to be perceived from another individual or group’s perspective. Similarly, we can ask ourselves how often is it that we are the best judge of our own flaws, limitations, and weaknesses, or our own virtues and positive qualities? We often only come to recognize those negative and positive qualities in the light of Truth when we seek out the perspective of others, when we bring our perspective into greater 'resonance' with such perspectives and heed the meaningful feedback that they offer. That is why the pursuit of spiritual sight and self-knowledge is not other than the pursuit of World-knowledge, i.e. the knowledge of the superimposed perspectives that are implicitly shaping our own.
Once we have created more slack in this assumptive constraint on our spiritual activity, there will be much less troublesome overgrowth on the path to attaining spiritual sight. That is because what we aim to attain sight of is precisely a more expansive sphere of the inner states of ‘other minds’, not because we are curious to peep into their momentary thoughts and perceptions, but because these inner states are always implicit in the meaning of our present state, shaping and constraining that meaning. Thus we desire insight into how to transform our present state through these lawful constraints toward the common Good (which is the unconscious desire of all human striving in science, philosophy, art, etc.). We can only truly know how our thoughts, speech, and actions influence other souls, and vice versa, when we are able to resonate with their inner states more lucidly. Once we become more sensitive to this reality, we realize that so far we have been like a person who is asked whether they speak Spanish and then goes off on a monologue, in Spanish, about how they don’t speak the language.
The fact that we directly perceive ‘other minds’ is implicit in practically everything we think, feel, and do, and it is only our modern intellectual convictions, born of shadowy soul habits, which obscure this reality from our present state of perception and thought. We can imagine living for a day in a state where we only understand the meaning of the speech, expressions, or gestures of the people around us after we ‘infer’ these inner states from sensory perceptions. We will quickly realize how erroneous this idea of private inferential bubbles must be if we deeply live into the experience of such an imagination. Even if we deny our ability to directly perceive another perspective’s thoughts, and thereby maintain the inference, analogy, or solipsistic theories, we can do that only when we are not interacting with this other perspective. When we are, expressing such a theory becomes a blatant performative contradiction. We are then making use of our direct perception of inner states in order to deny that we are doing so.
The Desire to Maintain a ‘Private’ Thinking Space
The temptation to maintain the inference, analogical, or solipsistic frameworks despite their obvious logical flaws can be traced to deeper soul constraints. Particularly, it can be traced to the desire for modern humans to carve out an island of ‘private experience’ for themselves and rule over this imaginary kingdom at all costs. It was necessary for humanity to develop this feeling for a private inner space because only then could we begin directing our thoughts in freedom. As long as our mental pictures feel like they belong to the wider World flow and are steered along its powerful currents, we cannot attain a sense of being actively involved in the production and organization of those pictures we call ‘thoughts’. Yet the prospect for attaining spiritual sight depends entirely on us recognizing how the current extent of our creative responsibility for thoughts within the World flow is akin to an infant who has only learned how to walk a few steps at a time before falling over. We can manipulate a few thought-fragments within the deeper currents here and there, but those currents continue to transform and drag our inner states in complex ways, of which we are initially helpless to control.
In that sense, the desire for a private thinking space certainly serves us well in ordinary life circumstances at our infant stage of cognitive development, when we have hardly developed any fine control over our chaotic thought-sprays (recall the water hose metaphor). We can imagine the experience of living in a society where these thought-sprays were immediately expressed outwardly as soon as they were conceived, like a pandemic of Tourette’s syndrome had broken loose. In that scenario, everyone would be drenched in the most bitter, hateful, insulting, and degrading commentary from others. Ordinary life would start to resemble the worst parts of our social media platforms (where such comments are often sprayed due to the relative anonymity afforded). Instead of that, we utilize our ‘pre-speaking’ space to evaluate our thoughts and mental pictures, to simulate how the speech would influence the course of events if voiced out loud, and then decide whether to voice them or not. That gives us a ‘sneak preview’ of how quickly we would trip over ourselves if we attempted to walk with our thoughts (of course, this pre-speaking and pre-acting space also works in the other direction, hence the existence of premeditated crimes).
This infant-level luxury becomes a huge obstacle when we are pursuing spiritual development, however. It acts as a crutch that our imaginative being can continuously lean on and thereby avoid taking finer control of its thought-sprays. As long as we feel like we can indefinitely evaluate our spraying thoughts in privacy, there is little incentive to work on channeling the sprays into an artistically recursive and morally saturated stream. Attaining spiritual sight is synonymous with taking more creative responsibility for our thought-sprays and becoming more improvisational in our thinking, i.e. gradually closing the gap between our real-time spiritual activity, the resulting mental pictures, and their outer expression. We should start to feel like anything we think and feel is immediately worn on our outer physiognomy such that the whole World can see. (2) Only in this way do we feel motivated to learn how to craft and wield our sprays more wisely. We are not forced to do so but we are made painfully aware of what can result if we choose not to, like we are diagnosed with a cancerous tumor and are informed of how it will grow and wreak havoc on our organs if we do nothing.
It’s easy to see why so many souls would resist transforming this desire for a private thinking space and would rather keep the relative anonymity of their thought-sprays for as long as possible. What better way to justify maintaining this space than to philosophically postulate that such spaces are inherent aspects of reality and each soul space is inaccessible to other souls (at least until death)? So we see all of these inner soul constraints - these assumptions, desires, habits, expectations, etc. - are interrelated and feed off of each other in various ways. The more we desire to rule over the private thinking space, the more attached we become to our intellectual convictions that justify this space, the more we identify with those convictions, and the more we feel they need to be defended like we would defend our physical body from harm. Defending such convictions against sound logic then becomes a habit like getting up and drinking coffee in the morning and we can hardly imagine how our life could unfold without it. Yet unlike the coffee habit, relying on a private thinking space is fundamentally an illusion.
Just because we desire our inner states to be private and feel them to be private, doesn’t make it so. We only feel that way because we can no longer trace the effects of our inner states like we can trace the effects of most physical actions in the sensory spectrum. Imagine that you throw a stone and it falls on your head. You make the connection that throwing a stone such that it returns to your head causes pain. Now imagine that you throw it so hard that it makes a full orbit around the Earth. By the time it returns from behind, you have already forgotten that you threw the stone. Then it hits you and you shout, "Hey, who did that?!" You see some people nearby and assume it was them. You throw a stone at them, but you throw it too hard again and it makes a full orbit and then hits someone else. Soon everyone all over the Earth is throwing stones and is being hit by stones, but they remain clueless as to why and start speculating about external ‘laws’ that are producing and catapulting the stones. We can no longer make the connection between how the stones we have thrown have come back around to hit us or other people.
That is analogous to the modern condition where spiritual activity, the resulting inner states, and their effects in the sensory spectrum have grown extremely out-of-phase. As we discussed in the previous essay, we can only restore sensitivity to this connection by starting our investigation from where the activity and its perceptible effects are fully in-phase, precisely in the seemingly ‘private’ thinking space where we experience our inner gestures producing mental pictures and the inner voice. All other sensory and psychic perceptions meet our activity as something foreign, which is why our meaningful concepts seem so orthogonal to them, but in the experience of our mental pictures, perceptions and concepts coincide. For example, when we think about the transformation of a plant, our thoughts which relate together the various perceptions feel like they arrive from within us, from the ‘opposite direction’ of the plant perceptions. When we think with our inner voice, on the other hand, the thoughts and the audial perceptions feel united and to be coming from the same inner direction.
What we do to stimulate the mental pictures is initially unclear, i.e. we don’t perceive the inner process of drawing memory images of what we had for breakfast, for example, in the way we can see a book being taken off the library shelf. All we initially know is that we instinctively will our invisible imaginative gestures through a mysterious domain of memory intuition and that leads to the ‘condensation’ of memory images that feel like they dimly reflect the intuition. It is that insensitivity to the inner process which makes us feel isolated in our private thinking space, weaving in ‘personal’ memories or thoughts that we simply try to ‘correspond’ with and ‘explain’ historical events or external perceptions. Nevertheless, we can gradually develop a more concrete orientation to this inner process through our concentrated efforts and, by doing so, we begin to sense the transpersonal life that we have always been leading in the deeper strata of our soul being.
To help avoid the habit of seeking this inner process in the same way we seek other encompassed perceptions, it is important to get a feel for how elusive it is. We know how it feels to simulate speech and actions in our mental pictures, to rehearse the words we want to speak with our inner voice or the physical movements in our imagination before deciding whether to speak or act them out. But what should we do if we want to ‘rehearse’ the inner voice itself, i.e. to think before we think? In that case, we may try to cheat by thinking in a soft whispering inner voice and, after we approve our words, to repeat them in our mind with a louder voice. The problem, however, remains exactly the same, we have only shifted it a little – our softer inner voice still manifests as something that we hear for the first time at the moment of thinking. These words are only the final testimonies of a deeper inner process which, however, unfolds imperceptibly across the ‘event horizon’ of our simulation space. Let’s try to further orient to this inner process with a metaphor to cymatics.
We discussed in Part II how our ancestors experienced a state of ‘original participation’, i.e. a state where the soul’s inner states were felt to overlap with a wider spectrum of inner states involving the souls of their tribes and ancestors, which in turn felt to overlap with the inner states of Divine beings. The cymatics image above can help us symbolically orient to how our mental states can once again be felt as shaped and structured by relatively autonomous spiritual activity working invisibly from ‘behind’ our perspective, i.e. not contained within the explicit content of our mental states. The sound in the cymatics demonstration is still explicit mental content, so that is why it’s only a metaphor for the purely inner experience. We should try to sense the invisible movements which precede the audible sound, which are the same invisible movements by which we perceive and discriminate the perceptions in the video (try to feel the recursiveness here). The thoughts we experience when contemplating the demonstration are harmonically structured by those invisible movements and their varying ‘pitches’ much like the sand patterns that we perceive, as ‘standing waves’ reflecting the meaning we are experiencing.
Another way to approach this participatory state is to consider the tingling sensation we experience when a limb ‘goes to sleep’, the so-called pins and needles. This sensation does not feel like it pops into existence from a void, or floats around our body randomly, but rather it feels loosely structured and localized within the bodily matrix. Our thoughts can be experienced similarly as such ‘tingling’ sensations, loosely structured and localized within an ideal matrix, except these sensations are imbued with more intuitive clarity that those sensations, indeed with even more clarity than our inner voice. When our limb goes to sleep, it dawns on us that we don’t have such complete control over it as we have become accustomed to feeling in ordinary life. We can’t simply will the pins and needles away. It is a similar realization for our tingling thoughts that feel to have a life of their own. We can only begin to gain control over these thoughts once the intellect is disabused of its default feeling of being a sovereign ruler over its private thought-island.
Renouncing the Soul Constraints
The soul constraints we have been exploring can be compared to a balloon that has been inflated through a hole, as pictured above. What inflates this balloon are the habits, desires, expectations, and tendencies we have been discussing so far. The partition symbolizes the threshold distinction between the clearly encompassed contents of our imaginative perspective, the side on which the balloon is being inflated, and the invisible intuitive curvatures ‘behind our perspective’ through which those contents flow (to begin with, those very same soul habits and tendencies). As the balloon grows bigger and bigger, i.e. our intellectual speculations and models grow toward ‘theories of everything’ and our pride in that theoretical ‘knowledge’ inflates, it becomes more and more difficult to invert our perspective through the ‘pinhole of cognition’ and restore conscious sensitivity to the invisible gestures that inflate the balloon. We have thus inflated the balloon on the wrong side of the threshold, so to speak.
It’s not that the intellectual models themselves act as a fundamental blockage, but rather our soul life grows more attached to their support and starts to cling to them like a person who feels like he is drowning clings to a buoyant life preserver (even if the ‘drowning’ is only a realistic simulation). In other words, we can no longer imagine what intellectual life, which often coincides with life in general, would be like without the supporting models. In that sense, pride and fear are intimately related as one stimulates the other and vice versa. The more we take pride in the already encompassed contents of our perspective, the more we also fear from letting them fade out of focus and turning attention toward the invisible realms where humbling mystery reigns supreme. And the more we let such currents of fear stream through our souls without consciousness, the more we feel impelled to turn back toward inflating our current imaginative perspective and encompassing more contents.
We should sense how, the longer and more intensely we cling to such supports, the more difficult it is to sacrifice them, just as it is in the case of an unhealthy diet, a drug addiction, and so on. Often we tell ourselves we will give these things up ‘starting tomorrow’, but tomorrow never comes. As discussed in the previous essays, we need a deeper scale of activity than our intellectual combinatorial gestures to make what we continually dream of doing tomorrow into what we are consciously doing today. That deeper activity is at the heart of the art of renunciation. We renounce our default focus on the objects of perception, i.e. our desire to encompass everything as clearly outlined perceptions that we can enjoy, understand and manipulate in some way, and our habit of searching for clear-cut ‘explanations’ for everything we experience by contorting mental pictures into various configurations. It is precisely when we renounce such habits and the desire or expectation to "see" in the ordinary way, that we begin to see in the higher cognitive sense.
What does it mean to renounce our soul constraints, in practice? We can no longer wander into the desert and simply deprive ourselves of sensuous pleasures and worldly pursuits. Renunciation has become a completely free act for the modern soul, which means it should be done with full consciousness of how our sacrifices are planting the seeds of the spiritual sight which will help us both locate and attain our freely adopted ideals. That is why renunciation is now the art and science of transforming thinking such that it can livingly probe the inner constraints, as we have already begun to do through our concentrated work so far. This recursive and concentrated thinking is the portal through which all deeper scales of activity will be reached to renounce the soul constraints. Before our thinking can be transformed, however, it should rightly perceive its relationship to the invisible curvatures of meaning in which it weaves.
The great masters in painting would lay down the main brushstrokes and then let their apprentices fill in the details. Likewise, our intellectual scale activity, to begin with, paints its mental pictures on the canvas and with the brushes provided by mysterious higher-order scales of activity. We are normally like apprentices who have no awareness of the canvas on which we are painting, the master strokes that have already been laid down, and simply throw up paint splotches according to our momentary whims, desires, and preferences. To renounce these careless splotches, we need to develop a concrete sense of the context in which we are painting the intuitive meaning we steer through via our thoughts. That way we can see how our splotches either throw off or complement the already present harmony of colors on the canvas and feel motivated to align our brushstrokes with that harmony in a more consonant way. That sensitivity for the intuitive canvas can only be attained in the spirit of humility.
In the modern age, the default feeling is like our knowledge about the flow of sensory life is a water tank that is 99% full, with only a few more thoughts needed to refine that knowledge and get a complete understanding of practically everything that can be known before death. Of course, most people would never say that out loud, but that is an experience we can have once we view our soul constitution more objectively. We normally feel like we know why we go through various psychological or physical experiences on a daily basis, like why we do the work that we do, why we perform a certain routine, why we interact with certain people, and so on. Moreover, we don’t even stop to question how we accomplish such things through our spiritual activity, let alone suspect that the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ might coincide. Renouncing the soul constraints is the process of inverting this situation such that we file like our knowledge tank is only .01% full (in the experience of our immanent thought-flow), and that the daily flow of experience is mostly a riddle that needs to be intuitively and imaginatively worked out.
To get a feel for that inversion, we can imagine our life moving in reverse, such that all of our current knowledge, skills, relationships, and so on are ‘hollowed out’. Everything we learned through our career experience, through university, and through various life circumstances should evaporate. Even our ability to think, speak, and walk should disappear from our intuitive orientation to existence. Now we can imagine our present state stands in relation to a higher self in the same way as our hollowed out state stands in relation to our present state. It is a similar relation between the state of our dream self to the state of our waking self who has gained a much more lucid orientation to why the dreamscape was shaped the way it was and unfolded the way it did. If we can concretely feel that our present sense of ‘who I am’, ‘what I know’, ‘what I can do’, etc. is only a hollowed out shell of our future potential state, like an apple that has been cored, then we have a firm foundation for inverting through the pinhole of cognition toward spiritual sight.
Most importantly for renouncing the soul constraints, we should cultivate the feeling of gratitude for our daily sensory and psychic experiences, as if they are delectable gifts that have precipitated through the depth of our spiritual activity and we are experiencing them for the first time. Permeating our soul with this feeling of gratitude and encountering our daily experiences with awe and wonder will naturally lead to new kinds of inner movements, new kinds of questions and insights about the inner constraints that are shaping those questions. We will need such soul forces of gratitude, prayer, and devotion to the outer world at our backs, so to speak, as we pursue spiritual sight. The current symbolic path we are traversing, and even more so the intensified meditative approach that we will soon explore, will be fraught with inner obstacles that instill panic, fear, anxiety, restlessness, loneliness, and so forth along the way. There should be no illusions about that and we should be prepared to do ‘battle’ with such obstacles.
Unlike sensory seeing, where the objects we seek to perceive and know don’t seem to care whether or how we see or know them, spiritual seeing and knowledge is met with living forces of the soul that have a stake in whether or not they are perceived. The very preferences we seek to objectively perceive prefer not to be seen, the desires desire not to be known, the opinions opine that they need not be investigated, the habits habitually avoid becoming conscious, and so on. These inner obstacles can manifest in many subtle and sneaky ways, so we may not even realize how we are sabotaging our own progress. The only reliable way to navigate this inner minefield of the soul is through dispassionate (and symbolic) logical reasoning, on the one hand, and the moods of gratitude and prayer, on the other. We should be grateful for our new, fully conscious opportunities for conducting our spiritual activity and prayer for guidance on realizing the full potential of those opportunities. In the next part, we will explore the opportunity of concentrated meditation as a means of reaching deeper scales of inner activity.
CITATIONS:
(1) Rudolf Steiner, GA 349, XI
(2) Matthew 5:27-28
“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
(3) Isaiah 14:12-14
(4) Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot
(5) Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
(6) Ephesians 6:12-18
"The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities." - Gilles Deleuze
Related to the habit we discussed in Part III of ‘explaining’ our experience with theoretical thoughts that point somewhere else, there is the ubiquitous modern habit of assuming we cannot directly perceive ‘other minds’. We only feel we need to rely on the former habit because we have assumed the latter to be the case without question. When conditioned by sensory experience of clearly bounded objects separated from one another in space, we come to feel that each soul has a circumscribed ‘field of experience’ (including sensations, thoughts, impulses, feelings, etc.) contained somewhere within the bounds of their skin, cut off from prying eyes and minds. The reasons we maintain this sensory-conditioned assumption reside in deeper curvatures of our soul life, which we will touch on later. With this assumption dangling our intellect like a marionette, we then start weaving theories about how we only know another soul’s first-person inner states by inferring them from sensory impressions (such as speech and gestures), analogizing to them based on our own first-person states, or simply speculating into the void and living with the illusion of ‘other minds’ for practical reasons (solipsism).
A good way to loosen the slack on this constraining assumption, to begin with, is to reveal the flawed logic of various objections to the idea that we know ‘other minds’ directly through observation and cognitive discrimination of perceptions, just as we can objectively know various aspects of our spatial-sensory environment in the same way. We don’t need to infer from or analogize to anything when we notice that a flame is burning us before we attain knowledge of that painful experience. Yet somehow we have convinced ourselves in modern times we must make such inferences and analogies when we feel empathy, when we ‘vibrate in resonance’ with another soul’s pain or grief, at the sight of their expressions. It seems ‘self-evident’ that I cannot know another perspective’s pain when I see them on fire like I know my own pain when I am burned. Thus it is supposed that there must exist some sort of experiential boundary between perspectives and then the philosophers and scientists get to work theorizing ‘explanations’ for this assumed boundary and why it can or cannot be overcome.
Many conundrums arise when we remain rigidly attached to such a conviction. Since it forces our thinking to imagine it is relying on speculative inferences, we begin to feel dreadfully uncertain about many things we would have intuitively known a few centuries ago. For example, how do we know that our inferences are correct, and that we are not simply interacting with a very cleverly designed robot, a ‘nonplayer character’ (NPC), that only seems to be experiencing inner states of pain, grief, joy, etc.? How many ‘p-zombies’ are actually out there trying to pass themselves off as humans while we remain none the wiser? These are the kinds of questions modern thinkers occupy themselves with, since everyone feels like we can only observe and know the mere outer surfaces of people and events in a direct way, while knowledge of inner states is ‘up for grabs’ depending on what we desire or prefer to be true. Indeed, modern humans have proven all too liable to make erroneous inferences from mere outer expressions (i.e. behavioralist thinking) when they feel like there is no other alternative.
(1)People who talk superficially of the soul and do not know anything about it will say: 'A plant has a soul just as human beings have a soul.' I always have only one thing to say to such people: 'I know a small device; you put some fat bacon into it, having browned it a little first — a mousetrap. And when a mouse nibbles on the bacon the trap will close of its own accord. Someone who concludes from such things as the Venus's fly-trap that there has to be a soul in there would also have to say that the mousetrap has a soul, for it closes of its own accord.' It always is a matter of how we take the background of anything.
You see… we always consider the background. Others who do think there is a soul but know nothing of the soul will say a plant also has a soul if it acts in a similar way to a mousetrap when an insect comes close… it is not outer appearances that lead to conclusions but true insight into the soul element.
The now famous biologist Michael Levin makes a similar erroneous inference in this experiment when concluding that his hybrid sorting algorithms are exhibiting ‘delayed gratification’ (sacrifice). After all, the behaviorist tendency of jumping to the conclusion, ‘if it quacks like a duck, it is a duck’, is only relied upon so much in scientific inquiry because it is assumed the ‘actual inner states’ are imperceptible and cut off from direct knowledge. Therefore, speculative inferences are the best we can do to approximate the inner experience. Such issues have significant consequences for how we think through experience and, ultimately, for how we relate to and treat our environment and other souls. The moral consequences of how we understand our ability to perceive the inner states of other souls run deep and wide. These issues all stem from the unexamined assumption that we exist as a private bubble of experience interacting with other private bubbles through some outer mechanism or another, exchanging ‘packets of information’ through some sort of spatial medium.
Instead, we can imagine that we always have direct perception of inner temporal states which feel to belong to other first-person perspectives, only there are various inner constraints on our psycho-physical organization that make this perception more or less fragmented, more or less lucid, more or less precise (which is also the case for spatial perception). These inner constraints on our perception are the very same ones we began exploring in the previous parts, and as we saw, they are flexible and capable of being loosened as we grow more intimately conscious of their existence and their influences on our spiritual activity. When we orient properly to this reality of direct inner perception, we don’t need to postulate any mechanisms or mediums through which information packets travel between souls, but can instead recognize how the inner states of many first-person perspectives are superimposed on one another. Let’s look at a few of the common objections to the direct perception of inner states.
One seemingly obvious objection is that we don’t “see” inner states like we do sensory impressions and therefore the former can only be inferred from sensory impressions. In the previous essays, we have already discussed the reasons why such an objection rests on an erroneous understanding of what it means “to see”. To see is precisely to perceive and discriminate perceptions such that we harmonize their unfolding into a musical whole, attaining a meaningful orientation to their lawful significance within our present state. We looked at how a person who undergoes a sight-restoring operation will initially only experience a chaotic flux of color impressions until they learn to properly discriminate and organize the experiences. It is no different than a person who undergoes a traumatic event and experiences a chaotic flux of emotions and thoughts. In both cases, we only attain sight when the impressions are harmonically related and their functions in our experience shine forth.
There is no experiential reason to artificially divide our perceptions into one bucket of colors, sounds, smells, etc., and into another bucket of emotions, thoughts, impulses, etc., and then claim that, in relation to other souls, we directly perceive the impressions from the first bucket (like the frowning or smiling facial countenance) but only infer impressions from the second bucket (like the inner state of sadness or joy). Yet that is exactly what modern empiricists and rationalists have been claiming for the last few centuries. Those who tried to move beyond empiricism and rationalism, like the ‘critical philosophers’, did not fare any better in overcoming this division. They simply imported it into their philosophical framework without question and then declared the inner states to be inaccessible ‘things-themselves’. Such an arbitrary division initially smuggles into our thinking what we seek to conclude, i.e. that we cannot directly perceive and know the inner states of other minds like we directly perceive and know spatially extended objects.
Another objection is that, when we interact with other souls, we don’t know how they are experiencing their own sensations, thoughts, feelings, and impulses. In other words, we only “live through” our own states and not the states of other minds. This observation is merely pointing to the fact that we don’t have complete perception of inner states at any given time. This fact is just as true for our own inner states as it is for others. Most of the time I am not sensitive to the blood coursing through my body, however if I receive a frightening scare and my heart starts racing, and I can discriminate this experience (through thinking) from other sensory experiences, I then know the existence of inner states that were previously unknown. The same principle applies to emotional and ideal states that either I or another soul are experiencing. Just because I do not happen to be consciously perceiving such states at the moment, it does not follow that they cannot be perceived under the right circumstances.
To better appreciate the flaw in this objection, we can imagine two people who are viewing the same tree from different angles. Under the logic of the objection, we imagine that there are inflexible ‘light cones’ into which their vision has been channeled and they can only continue perceiving those aspects of the tree which fit into their respective cones. Of course, in this illustration it is easy to discern the error in reasoning - there is no rigid light cone fixing a perspective’s vision in place. If one perspective were to get up and move, he or she could perceive practically the same aspects of the tree as the other (albeit from a unique spatiotemporal perspective). Now we simply need to translate that to our spiritual experience of thoughts, feelings, and impulses. The only thing preventing perspectives from directly perceiving the spiritual experiences of others is the failure to ‘get up and move’, i.e. to take an active and loving interest in the ideas, goals, feelings, and impulses which animate these other perspectives.
Another important consideration here is that ‘living through’ an experience does not equate to perceiving and knowing that experience. After all, the question is precisely whether we can perceive and know the inner states of other perspectives, not simply whether we can live through them in the exact same way. An animal which lives through the waves of pain, joy, hunger, etc. cannot be said to have knowledge of those inner states, rather it reactively moves from state to state like a fish in water. We only have knowledge of inner states, whether they feel to belong to our perspective or another perspective, when such experiences are actively attended to and discriminated. We can attend to and discriminate the experiences of grief and pain in another perspective just as we can do with our own experiences of those states, and without such attendance and discrimination, we will remain oblivious to the functions of the inner states in both cases.
In both cases, the knowledge of the inner states will only be dim and incomplete, but that is due to our psycho-physical organization and our cognitive skills, not due to some inherent ‘mental cone’ that partitions relative perspectives of the Whole into separate domains. To imagine the latter is the equivalent of imagining that the mental states of algebraic relations exist in some partitioned realm before I have learned algebra, or that the Eiffel Tower exists in an alternate dimension before I go to Paris and visit it. It would be convenient for young students if that were true, since they could then blame their math illiteracy on the structure of reality rather than their lack of inner effort, but what is convenient does not equal what is true. It is similarly convenient if we can avoid understanding or loving our neighbors because reality says “no dice”, but the fact is that there is much more room for expanding both by allowing our perspective to more directly coincide with theirs.
Orienting to the Superposition of Inner States
A major intellectual obstacle to this reality is that we habitually imagine these as-of-yet unexperienced ‘inner states’ of other perspectives as self-contained objects existing in some ‘other world’, on the ‘other side’ of our first-person present state. We need to resist that habit and rather stick with the given facts of our inner experience. To use a simple metaphor, if we imagine our mental state transforms from “1”, “2”, “4”, to “5”, does this mean that the state of “3” doesn't exist until it is experienced or exists in some world orthogonal to our numerical thinking? We can see that the relation between 2 and 4 is such that they can only be what they are if there is 3 in between. When I discover 3, nothing really changes for 1,2,4, or 5 - they are only complemented, the intuition of my present state becomes more complete. Even if 3 was never discovered, the relation between the above numbers would be as if 3 exists. Thus, the state of 3 exists as if superimposed on our first-person states of 1, 2, 4, and 5, and only needs to be brought into focus through inner effort.
When we translate that to our living experience of other perspectives, it means the inner states of those perspectives are implicit in our own and can be brought into greater focus through inner effort. When we truthfully survey our memory life, we cannot deny that our entire sense of ‘me’ has been shaped through the spiritual activity of others - parents, teachers, peers, leading thinkers, and so on. Likewise, the ideas, language, institutions, technologies, and so on that shape our lives would not exist without the spiritual activity of collective humanity. Our physical environment, bodily organs and parts, etc. would not exist but for the aeons of activity proceeding through the natural kingdoms and the planetary spheres. All of these transpersonal influences on the ‘architecture’ of our present state are also confirmed by the empirical findings of natural science and psychology. That is the sense in which the inner states of other souls (human or otherwise) are always superimposed on our own.
To his credit, the aforementioned Michael Levin has also done some pioneering work in discovering the ‘multiplicities’ of goal-directed agents concealed within the seeming unity of the individual human soul, i.e. the molecular, cellular, and organic systems that all contribute to the architecture of our self- experience. He has also intuited, based on the stimulation of his empirical research, that this human self-experience could take part in a ‘multiplicity’ that comprises higher-order agents, which, from their perspective, could be experienced as higher-order unities of selfhood. These multiplicities should not be imagined as atomic units existing ‘side by side’ and combining with each other, but rather as the ‘interference pattern’ that emerges from overlapping streams of spiritual activity. The self-experience of agents could be imagined as ‘nodes’ that arise within this interconnected and holistic constellation, as the ancients imagined with the symbol of Indra’s Net.
https://thoughtforms.life/are-we-too-pa ... d-we-know/
Around 2016, a major effort took place too find a mate for a rare snail. Scientists studying left-right asymmetry named, & tried to find a mate for, Jeremy. Imagine how far these issues were above anything Jeremy could comprehend. He was the star of an immense, inscrutable, alien drama giving meaning to his life that he could not begin to understand. The results of this research, involving Jeremy’s love life, anatomy, and genetics, will be part of the scientific record in perpetuity, and could lead to very important advances that affect many human patients. Jeremy lived and died having no inkling about the broader patterns and concepts involved.
Those of us who like to outpaint ideas - extending concepts to see where they lead - inevitably asked: could this mean that we too, are part of an even larger collective? Not everyone asks this; some people are tied to a specific level as privileged, and while they can agree that we are made of parts, they can’t imagine what is like to be those parts or how we could possibly be such a part ourselves. Kind of like in the brilliant Flatland, when the Sphere, a 3-dimensional being, never tires of amazing the 2-dimensional Square with the tales of a greater world, but balks when Square hypothesizes that the Sphere could himself be a low-dimensional projection of an even higher-dimensional object. Preposterous, Sphere says.
Just because we are not fully conscious of these superimposed inner states does not mean they cease to exist and shape our conscious experience. Indeed, as we become more sensitive to what is influencing that experience, we may discover that, when in public, our mental pictures are often modulating our behavior and speech based on how we feel to be perceived from another individual or group’s perspective. Similarly, we can ask ourselves how often is it that we are the best judge of our own flaws, limitations, and weaknesses, or our own virtues and positive qualities? We often only come to recognize those negative and positive qualities in the light of Truth when we seek out the perspective of others, when we bring our perspective into greater 'resonance' with such perspectives and heed the meaningful feedback that they offer. That is why the pursuit of spiritual sight and self-knowledge is not other than the pursuit of World-knowledge, i.e. the knowledge of the superimposed perspectives that are implicitly shaping our own.
Once we have created more slack in this assumptive constraint on our spiritual activity, there will be much less troublesome overgrowth on the path to attaining spiritual sight. That is because what we aim to attain sight of is precisely a more expansive sphere of the inner states of ‘other minds’, not because we are curious to peep into their momentary thoughts and perceptions, but because these inner states are always implicit in the meaning of our present state, shaping and constraining that meaning. Thus we desire insight into how to transform our present state through these lawful constraints toward the common Good (which is the unconscious desire of all human striving in science, philosophy, art, etc.). We can only truly know how our thoughts, speech, and actions influence other souls, and vice versa, when we are able to resonate with their inner states more lucidly. Once we become more sensitive to this reality, we realize that so far we have been like a person who is asked whether they speak Spanish and then goes off on a monologue, in Spanish, about how they don’t speak the language.
The fact that we directly perceive ‘other minds’ is implicit in practically everything we think, feel, and do, and it is only our modern intellectual convictions, born of shadowy soul habits, which obscure this reality from our present state of perception and thought. We can imagine living for a day in a state where we only understand the meaning of the speech, expressions, or gestures of the people around us after we ‘infer’ these inner states from sensory perceptions. We will quickly realize how erroneous this idea of private inferential bubbles must be if we deeply live into the experience of such an imagination. Even if we deny our ability to directly perceive another perspective’s thoughts, and thereby maintain the inference, analogy, or solipsistic theories, we can do that only when we are not interacting with this other perspective. When we are, expressing such a theory becomes a blatant performative contradiction. We are then making use of our direct perception of inner states in order to deny that we are doing so.
The Desire to Maintain a ‘Private’ Thinking Space
The temptation to maintain the inference, analogical, or solipsistic frameworks despite their obvious logical flaws can be traced to deeper soul constraints. Particularly, it can be traced to the desire for modern humans to carve out an island of ‘private experience’ for themselves and rule over this imaginary kingdom at all costs. It was necessary for humanity to develop this feeling for a private inner space because only then could we begin directing our thoughts in freedom. As long as our mental pictures feel like they belong to the wider World flow and are steered along its powerful currents, we cannot attain a sense of being actively involved in the production and organization of those pictures we call ‘thoughts’. Yet the prospect for attaining spiritual sight depends entirely on us recognizing how the current extent of our creative responsibility for thoughts within the World flow is akin to an infant who has only learned how to walk a few steps at a time before falling over. We can manipulate a few thought-fragments within the deeper currents here and there, but those currents continue to transform and drag our inner states in complex ways, of which we are initially helpless to control.
In that sense, the desire for a private thinking space certainly serves us well in ordinary life circumstances at our infant stage of cognitive development, when we have hardly developed any fine control over our chaotic thought-sprays (recall the water hose metaphor). We can imagine the experience of living in a society where these thought-sprays were immediately expressed outwardly as soon as they were conceived, like a pandemic of Tourette’s syndrome had broken loose. In that scenario, everyone would be drenched in the most bitter, hateful, insulting, and degrading commentary from others. Ordinary life would start to resemble the worst parts of our social media platforms (where such comments are often sprayed due to the relative anonymity afforded). Instead of that, we utilize our ‘pre-speaking’ space to evaluate our thoughts and mental pictures, to simulate how the speech would influence the course of events if voiced out loud, and then decide whether to voice them or not. That gives us a ‘sneak preview’ of how quickly we would trip over ourselves if we attempted to walk with our thoughts (of course, this pre-speaking and pre-acting space also works in the other direction, hence the existence of premeditated crimes).
This infant-level luxury becomes a huge obstacle when we are pursuing spiritual development, however. It acts as a crutch that our imaginative being can continuously lean on and thereby avoid taking finer control of its thought-sprays. As long as we feel like we can indefinitely evaluate our spraying thoughts in privacy, there is little incentive to work on channeling the sprays into an artistically recursive and morally saturated stream. Attaining spiritual sight is synonymous with taking more creative responsibility for our thought-sprays and becoming more improvisational in our thinking, i.e. gradually closing the gap between our real-time spiritual activity, the resulting mental pictures, and their outer expression. We should start to feel like anything we think and feel is immediately worn on our outer physiognomy such that the whole World can see. (2) Only in this way do we feel motivated to learn how to craft and wield our sprays more wisely. We are not forced to do so but we are made painfully aware of what can result if we choose not to, like we are diagnosed with a cancerous tumor and are informed of how it will grow and wreak havoc on our organs if we do nothing.
It’s easy to see why so many souls would resist transforming this desire for a private thinking space and would rather keep the relative anonymity of their thought-sprays for as long as possible. What better way to justify maintaining this space than to philosophically postulate that such spaces are inherent aspects of reality and each soul space is inaccessible to other souls (at least until death)? So we see all of these inner soul constraints - these assumptions, desires, habits, expectations, etc. - are interrelated and feed off of each other in various ways. The more we desire to rule over the private thinking space, the more attached we become to our intellectual convictions that justify this space, the more we identify with those convictions, and the more we feel they need to be defended like we would defend our physical body from harm. Defending such convictions against sound logic then becomes a habit like getting up and drinking coffee in the morning and we can hardly imagine how our life could unfold without it. Yet unlike the coffee habit, relying on a private thinking space is fundamentally an illusion.
Just because we desire our inner states to be private and feel them to be private, doesn’t make it so. We only feel that way because we can no longer trace the effects of our inner states like we can trace the effects of most physical actions in the sensory spectrum. Imagine that you throw a stone and it falls on your head. You make the connection that throwing a stone such that it returns to your head causes pain. Now imagine that you throw it so hard that it makes a full orbit around the Earth. By the time it returns from behind, you have already forgotten that you threw the stone. Then it hits you and you shout, "Hey, who did that?!" You see some people nearby and assume it was them. You throw a stone at them, but you throw it too hard again and it makes a full orbit and then hits someone else. Soon everyone all over the Earth is throwing stones and is being hit by stones, but they remain clueless as to why and start speculating about external ‘laws’ that are producing and catapulting the stones. We can no longer make the connection between how the stones we have thrown have come back around to hit us or other people.
That is analogous to the modern condition where spiritual activity, the resulting inner states, and their effects in the sensory spectrum have grown extremely out-of-phase. As we discussed in the previous essay, we can only restore sensitivity to this connection by starting our investigation from where the activity and its perceptible effects are fully in-phase, precisely in the seemingly ‘private’ thinking space where we experience our inner gestures producing mental pictures and the inner voice. All other sensory and psychic perceptions meet our activity as something foreign, which is why our meaningful concepts seem so orthogonal to them, but in the experience of our mental pictures, perceptions and concepts coincide. For example, when we think about the transformation of a plant, our thoughts which relate together the various perceptions feel like they arrive from within us, from the ‘opposite direction’ of the plant perceptions. When we think with our inner voice, on the other hand, the thoughts and the audial perceptions feel united and to be coming from the same inner direction.
What we do to stimulate the mental pictures is initially unclear, i.e. we don’t perceive the inner process of drawing memory images of what we had for breakfast, for example, in the way we can see a book being taken off the library shelf. All we initially know is that we instinctively will our invisible imaginative gestures through a mysterious domain of memory intuition and that leads to the ‘condensation’ of memory images that feel like they dimly reflect the intuition. It is that insensitivity to the inner process which makes us feel isolated in our private thinking space, weaving in ‘personal’ memories or thoughts that we simply try to ‘correspond’ with and ‘explain’ historical events or external perceptions. Nevertheless, we can gradually develop a more concrete orientation to this inner process through our concentrated efforts and, by doing so, we begin to sense the transpersonal life that we have always been leading in the deeper strata of our soul being.
To help avoid the habit of seeking this inner process in the same way we seek other encompassed perceptions, it is important to get a feel for how elusive it is. We know how it feels to simulate speech and actions in our mental pictures, to rehearse the words we want to speak with our inner voice or the physical movements in our imagination before deciding whether to speak or act them out. But what should we do if we want to ‘rehearse’ the inner voice itself, i.e. to think before we think? In that case, we may try to cheat by thinking in a soft whispering inner voice and, after we approve our words, to repeat them in our mind with a louder voice. The problem, however, remains exactly the same, we have only shifted it a little – our softer inner voice still manifests as something that we hear for the first time at the moment of thinking. These words are only the final testimonies of a deeper inner process which, however, unfolds imperceptibly across the ‘event horizon’ of our simulation space. Let’s try to further orient to this inner process with a metaphor to cymatics.
We discussed in Part II how our ancestors experienced a state of ‘original participation’, i.e. a state where the soul’s inner states were felt to overlap with a wider spectrum of inner states involving the souls of their tribes and ancestors, which in turn felt to overlap with the inner states of Divine beings. The cymatics image above can help us symbolically orient to how our mental states can once again be felt as shaped and structured by relatively autonomous spiritual activity working invisibly from ‘behind’ our perspective, i.e. not contained within the explicit content of our mental states. The sound in the cymatics demonstration is still explicit mental content, so that is why it’s only a metaphor for the purely inner experience. We should try to sense the invisible movements which precede the audible sound, which are the same invisible movements by which we perceive and discriminate the perceptions in the video (try to feel the recursiveness here). The thoughts we experience when contemplating the demonstration are harmonically structured by those invisible movements and their varying ‘pitches’ much like the sand patterns that we perceive, as ‘standing waves’ reflecting the meaning we are experiencing.
Another way to approach this participatory state is to consider the tingling sensation we experience when a limb ‘goes to sleep’, the so-called pins and needles. This sensation does not feel like it pops into existence from a void, or floats around our body randomly, but rather it feels loosely structured and localized within the bodily matrix. Our thoughts can be experienced similarly as such ‘tingling’ sensations, loosely structured and localized within an ideal matrix, except these sensations are imbued with more intuitive clarity that those sensations, indeed with even more clarity than our inner voice. When our limb goes to sleep, it dawns on us that we don’t have such complete control over it as we have become accustomed to feeling in ordinary life. We can’t simply will the pins and needles away. It is a similar realization for our tingling thoughts that feel to have a life of their own. We can only begin to gain control over these thoughts once the intellect is disabused of its default feeling of being a sovereign ruler over its private thought-island.
Renouncing the Soul Constraints
The soul constraints we have been exploring can be compared to a balloon that has been inflated through a hole, as pictured above. What inflates this balloon are the habits, desires, expectations, and tendencies we have been discussing so far. The partition symbolizes the threshold distinction between the clearly encompassed contents of our imaginative perspective, the side on which the balloon is being inflated, and the invisible intuitive curvatures ‘behind our perspective’ through which those contents flow (to begin with, those very same soul habits and tendencies). As the balloon grows bigger and bigger, i.e. our intellectual speculations and models grow toward ‘theories of everything’ and our pride in that theoretical ‘knowledge’ inflates, it becomes more and more difficult to invert our perspective through the ‘pinhole of cognition’ and restore conscious sensitivity to the invisible gestures that inflate the balloon. We have thus inflated the balloon on the wrong side of the threshold, so to speak.
It’s not that the intellectual models themselves act as a fundamental blockage, but rather our soul life grows more attached to their support and starts to cling to them like a person who feels like he is drowning clings to a buoyant life preserver (even if the ‘drowning’ is only a realistic simulation). In other words, we can no longer imagine what intellectual life, which often coincides with life in general, would be like without the supporting models. In that sense, pride and fear are intimately related as one stimulates the other and vice versa. The more we take pride in the already encompassed contents of our perspective, the more we also fear from letting them fade out of focus and turning attention toward the invisible realms where humbling mystery reigns supreme. And the more we let such currents of fear stream through our souls without consciousness, the more we feel impelled to turn back toward inflating our current imaginative perspective and encompassing more contents.
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations!
For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”
(3)For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.”
We should sense how, the longer and more intensely we cling to such supports, the more difficult it is to sacrifice them, just as it is in the case of an unhealthy diet, a drug addiction, and so on. Often we tell ourselves we will give these things up ‘starting tomorrow’, but tomorrow never comes. As discussed in the previous essays, we need a deeper scale of activity than our intellectual combinatorial gestures to make what we continually dream of doing tomorrow into what we are consciously doing today. That deeper activity is at the heart of the art of renunciation. We renounce our default focus on the objects of perception, i.e. our desire to encompass everything as clearly outlined perceptions that we can enjoy, understand and manipulate in some way, and our habit of searching for clear-cut ‘explanations’ for everything we experience by contorting mental pictures into various configurations. It is precisely when we renounce such habits and the desire or expectation to "see" in the ordinary way, that we begin to see in the higher cognitive sense.
(4)Here, again, is a fundamental law of sacred magic. One could formulate it in the following way: That which is above being as that which is below, renunciation below sets in motion forces of accomplishment above and the renunciation of that which is above sets in motion forces of accomplishment below. What is the practical meaning of this law?
It is the following. When you resist a temptation or renounce something desired below, you set in motion by this very fact forces of realisation of that which corresponds above to that which you come to renounce below. It is this that the Master designates by the word "reward" when he says, for example, that it is necessary to guard against practising righteousness before other people in order to gain their regard, "for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven" (Matthew vi, 1). Reward is therefore the action that one sets in motion above by the renunciation of desire for things below. It is the "yes" from above corresponding to the "no" from below.
What does it mean to renounce our soul constraints, in practice? We can no longer wander into the desert and simply deprive ourselves of sensuous pleasures and worldly pursuits. Renunciation has become a completely free act for the modern soul, which means it should be done with full consciousness of how our sacrifices are planting the seeds of the spiritual sight which will help us both locate and attain our freely adopted ideals. That is why renunciation is now the art and science of transforming thinking such that it can livingly probe the inner constraints, as we have already begun to do through our concentrated work so far. This recursive and concentrated thinking is the portal through which all deeper scales of activity will be reached to renounce the soul constraints. Before our thinking can be transformed, however, it should rightly perceive its relationship to the invisible curvatures of meaning in which it weaves.
The great masters in painting would lay down the main brushstrokes and then let their apprentices fill in the details. Likewise, our intellectual scale activity, to begin with, paints its mental pictures on the canvas and with the brushes provided by mysterious higher-order scales of activity. We are normally like apprentices who have no awareness of the canvas on which we are painting, the master strokes that have already been laid down, and simply throw up paint splotches according to our momentary whims, desires, and preferences. To renounce these careless splotches, we need to develop a concrete sense of the context in which we are painting the intuitive meaning we steer through via our thoughts. That way we can see how our splotches either throw off or complement the already present harmony of colors on the canvas and feel motivated to align our brushstrokes with that harmony in a more consonant way. That sensitivity for the intuitive canvas can only be attained in the spirit of humility.
In the modern age, the default feeling is like our knowledge about the flow of sensory life is a water tank that is 99% full, with only a few more thoughts needed to refine that knowledge and get a complete understanding of practically everything that can be known before death. Of course, most people would never say that out loud, but that is an experience we can have once we view our soul constitution more objectively. We normally feel like we know why we go through various psychological or physical experiences on a daily basis, like why we do the work that we do, why we perform a certain routine, why we interact with certain people, and so on. Moreover, we don’t even stop to question how we accomplish such things through our spiritual activity, let alone suspect that the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ might coincide. Renouncing the soul constraints is the process of inverting this situation such that we file like our knowledge tank is only .01% full (in the experience of our immanent thought-flow), and that the daily flow of experience is mostly a riddle that needs to be intuitively and imaginatively worked out.
To get a feel for that inversion, we can imagine our life moving in reverse, such that all of our current knowledge, skills, relationships, and so on are ‘hollowed out’. Everything we learned through our career experience, through university, and through various life circumstances should evaporate. Even our ability to think, speak, and walk should disappear from our intuitive orientation to existence. Now we can imagine our present state stands in relation to a higher self in the same way as our hollowed out state stands in relation to our present state. It is a similar relation between the state of our dream self to the state of our waking self who has gained a much more lucid orientation to why the dreamscape was shaped the way it was and unfolded the way it did. If we can concretely feel that our present sense of ‘who I am’, ‘what I know’, ‘what I can do’, etc. is only a hollowed out shell of our future potential state, like an apple that has been cored, then we have a firm foundation for inverting through the pinhole of cognition toward spiritual sight.
(5)A man who doesn't thank with his mind, a man who doesn't thank with his heart, a man who doesn't thank with his soul, he can not be in connection with the Universe - there can be no renewal and thought can not grow. With gratitude in the mind, with gratitude in the heart, with gratitude in the soul begins mental development, soul and heart development, or spiritual development.
Most importantly for renouncing the soul constraints, we should cultivate the feeling of gratitude for our daily sensory and psychic experiences, as if they are delectable gifts that have precipitated through the depth of our spiritual activity and we are experiencing them for the first time. Permeating our soul with this feeling of gratitude and encountering our daily experiences with awe and wonder will naturally lead to new kinds of inner movements, new kinds of questions and insights about the inner constraints that are shaping those questions. We will need such soul forces of gratitude, prayer, and devotion to the outer world at our backs, so to speak, as we pursue spiritual sight. The current symbolic path we are traversing, and even more so the intensified meditative approach that we will soon explore, will be fraught with inner obstacles that instill panic, fear, anxiety, restlessness, loneliness, and so forth along the way. There should be no illusions about that and we should be prepared to do ‘battle’ with such obstacles.
(6)For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this world’s darkness, and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.
Therefore take up the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you will be able to stand your ground, and having done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness arrayed, and with your feet fitted with the readiness of the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Pray in the Spirit at all times, with every kind of prayer and petition. To this end, stay alert with all perseverance in your prayers for all the saints.
Unlike sensory seeing, where the objects we seek to perceive and know don’t seem to care whether or how we see or know them, spiritual seeing and knowledge is met with living forces of the soul that have a stake in whether or not they are perceived. The very preferences we seek to objectively perceive prefer not to be seen, the desires desire not to be known, the opinions opine that they need not be investigated, the habits habitually avoid becoming conscious, and so on. These inner obstacles can manifest in many subtle and sneaky ways, so we may not even realize how we are sabotaging our own progress. The only reliable way to navigate this inner minefield of the soul is through dispassionate (and symbolic) logical reasoning, on the one hand, and the moods of gratitude and prayer, on the other. We should be grateful for our new, fully conscious opportunities for conducting our spiritual activity and prayer for guidance on realizing the full potential of those opportunities. In the next part, we will explore the opportunity of concentrated meditation as a means of reaching deeper scales of inner activity.
CITATIONS:
(1) Rudolf Steiner, GA 349, XI
(2) Matthew 5:27-28
“Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.”
(3) Isaiah 14:12-14
(4) Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot
(5) Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov
(6) Ephesians 6:12-18
