The Redemption of the Meaning Crisis (Part II)
Posted: Mon Aug 04, 2025 5:07 pm
“While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." (2 Cor. 4:18)
Confessing the Constraints of Our Intellectual Cube
As we explored in Part I, the solution to growing out of our alienating NPC simulation (the meaning crisis) is to first become intimately conscious of its invisible constraints and how they shape the imaginative process through which we explore the meaning of experience. Eventually, we should honestly confront the fact that we are trapped within the tissue of our scaled images, which compress or expand the living experiential processes of the wider World into ghostly imaginative replicas. We feel limited to manipulating those replicas exclusively through mechanical gestures, with narrowly circumscribed degrees of freedom to probe the meaningful depth of existence. Our mechanical devices, which are rigid embodiments of our intellectual gestures, especially dull our sensitivity to those same gestures. People often speak about how we are too reliant on our technology to interface with reality, and when we observe our imaginative process, it becomes much clearer exactly how and why this reliance is such an obstacle to a meaningful life.
For example, we can try to sense how much more inner participation we would feel in the flow of experience when manually writing letters to people versus typing emails out on the keyboard, or in the process of trekking the natural landscape versus hopping on and off a train, and so on. Opportunities to immerse ourselves in the experience of our inner movements are greatly diminished when we interface with reality through our mechanical creations. The more mechanical our surface movements become, the more the experience of our deeper organic movements is dulled, and the more we feel like passive spectators of a World ‘out there’ that unfolds according to mysterious laws. Beginning even with our flow of opinions and beliefs, let alone our sympathies and antipathies, we are relatively clueless as to what drives the World process. When it comes to the rhythms of the natural world (including our body), we feel forced to project theoretical ‘explanations’ on them, whose content unsurprisingly resembles our mechanical movements of symbolic replicas.
Once we have attained heightened sensitivity to such intellectual constraints, we should feel like relatively helpless children when it comes to knowing the lawful reality in which our lives unfold. The child is surrounded by the speech and behavior of its parents, other adults, the voices speaking about the economy and politics on television, and so on, which all modulate its states, but it only understands these lawful influences insofar as they overlap with its nascent conceptual palette rooted firmly in its childish likes and dislikes. The meaning it experiences concerning the parents’ conversations can be likened to the background conversation we hear at other tables in a restaurant. We know there is something meaningful going on, but we are not at all attuned to the lucid ideas being exchanged and the depth of their meaning. The child only gradually grows into this higher-order meaning of its social environment, which was always there but dulled out.
Likewise, the modern intellectual soul can only understand the living speech of the wider World insofar as its phenomenal processes overlap with our sensory-conditioned concepts about spatially separated objects, linear movements, rigid rules of transformation, and so forth. Through such a narrow and inflexible conceptual palette, we only end up thinking through the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the phenomenal processes that surround us. We can philosophize about these processes being “meaningful”, but how they are meaningful is still blurred into the intuitive background. We can try to imagine the last time we had an acutely painful stomach ache, muscle spasm, or some similar inner disturbance. Perhaps we have accumulated some second-hand knowledge on how these issues correlate with other bodily processes and potential short-term remedies, but during the real-time painful experience, such ‘knowledge’ feels like having a cheap umbrella in a hurricane. We feel at the mercy of completely unintuitive processes weaving within the depths of our organism, and there is no telling exactly where they came from or how long they will last.
We can only learn to grow out of the meaning crisis once we vividly feel and confess this reality of our predicament. The first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting that it exists, not just on paper but in practice. Placing this situation into a popular culture reference, we need to make peace with the fact that we have awakened within the Cube in an amnesiac state.
At our intellectual scale, we have begun to cleverly solve the mental puzzles that open doors from one room of the Cube into another, sluggishly working our way through the obstacles and traps. Yet we don’t realize that the maze was designed to be fundamentally unsolvable in that way. It isn’t realized that our intellectual activity is moving in repetitive loops, from one constellation of mental pictures to another and back again, just like the movie characters keep circling back on the same cubic rooms. Indeed, much of philosophy, science, religion, and art over the last century can be seen as a reshuffling of concepts, frameworks, and techniques that were already thoroughly explored over the centuries prior. We could say that intellectual inquiry has become ‘Turing complete’, i.e., every intellectual system that is fashioned is practically equivalent to all others in its ability to stimulate insights into the meaningful depths of our existence. None of the rooms we investigate within the intellectual Cube brings us closer than any other to discovering an exit into the invisible ‘4th dimension’ of our experiential flow.
In this intellectual reshuffling process, modern souls fail to discover any novel degrees of freedom for their imaginative process. There is no more leeway to open up between the soul and its tight-fitting intellectual mask, which means that its cognitive movements become increasingly repetitive and mechanical, and such movements are positively reinforced by its technological creations. Why are souls so concerned today about ‘AI’ replacing their functions in the workforce? Precisely because many human tasks have become little more than algorithmic protocols. We have the nagging sense that machines are capable of carrying out our tasks more cheaply and effectively than we do, even if we have a professional degree, because our work unfolds with a cold and calculating necessity. Indeed, there are more and more people who seem to live in constant suspicion that the words they read, for example, in this very essay, are simply the output of an LLM algorithm. It is even a healthy sensitizing exercise to imagine this essay was constructed by an LLM and feel the despair of not being certain, one way or the other.
We can live in such feelings for a few moments and imagine how the infection of uncertainty may only spread in our soul as technology advances (or, rather, the intellect regresses). As our recursive optimizing functions mimic the dynamics of our perceptual content with ever-greater precision (for example, protein folding), we will find it increasingly tempting to equate the meaningful depths of reality itself with the inputs and outputs of such a function. Indeed, certain thinkers have already proposed that LLMs teach us about the fundamental structure of human language by revealing how the latter is something akin to a parasitic entity that takes up residence in the human organism and thinks our thoughts for us. The “us”, in this imagined world, is nothing but a zombie host for a parasitic algorithm from whose workings the superstructure of human civilization was erected.
We can leave aside the fact that such theories about language and thinking, if true, render the content of those same theories meaningless for understanding reality, since every thought expressed in the quote would be conditioned on the previous thought through a recursive algorithmic process foreign to the “thinker” and independently of its truth value. This autogenerative theory expresses the same alienated mood of thinking and corresponding concepts that we encountered with Hume and Kant in Part I, only the concepts have been reshuffled around to accommodate new technological developments. At the end of the day, all such ‘novel’ theories are simply ways for the soul to justify its trapped existence within the intellectual Cube and its alienation from the meaningful foundations of its symbolic images. Yet such theoretical frameworks nevertheless remain internally coherent and lure the imaginative process of many other souls into their gravitational orbit.
When we live without sensitivity to the inner soul depth behind the words we hear or read, we will easily be convinced that the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and all the world’s religious founders are soon to be outdone by NPCs, or perhaps even convinced that they were little more than NPCs themselves. It is no better if we say the algorithms have become sentient, intelligent, and wise, because that simply means we have reduced the meaningful depth of those inner capacities to our familiar computational gestures; our network of associative mental pictures. It means we cannot even imagine an inner experience of intelligence and wisdom that transcends such a computational process. The meaning crisis will only grow more intense as long as we fail to suspect that there are deeper non-computational scales at which the meaning of our lawfully metamorphosing states can be lucidly explored. What prevents modern souls from suspecting the existence and accessibility of these deeper scales?
Reconciling the Forces of Antipathy and Sympathy
The confined characters in the movie, from their myopic perspective, blame their helpless condition on external forces that designed the Cube. This inner stance accurately reflects the feeling of so many souls today across all world outlooks, secular and spiritual. We habitually blame our confinement on the government, aliens, demons, the ‘demiurge’, other humans we believe are tormenting us, genetics, technology, and so on. Such an externalization of the crisis, however, ensures that we will never become sensitive to the deeper transpersonal scales that are embedded within the first-person imaginative process of the soul doing the blaming. The intellectual Cube that modern man inhabits is, in fact, of his own making. It is not an immutable constraint on our experiential stream, but rather a constraint erected through the intellect’s selfish conditioning to narrow interests and its corresponding over-reliance on stripped-down symbolic replicas.
The modern soul gradually (or more abruptly, these days) substitutes its childlike enthusiasm for imaginatively exploring the living metamorphoses of experiential states, for the repetitive pleasure of passive modern entertainment and ‘solving’ flattened mental puzzles, usually for idle curiosity, wealth, status, reputation, etc. The intellect constrains itself within myopic degrees of freedom and then becomes frustrated and confused over its alienated condition. Not only that, but the inability to escape its infernal loops is gradually justified by some philosophical, scientific, and/or religious framework. An impenetrable veil is lifted between its soul wall of symbolic images and the deeper inner reality that stimulates those images, between the ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’. As we have seen, the continual establishment of this veil is not an act the intellect has conscious control over. Much of this self-imprisonment relates to forces of antipathy that are always weaving beneath the surface of our imaginative process and that we are hardly aware of.
When something unpleasant impresses on our physical senses, like a foul odor, it causes us to recoil and put distance between ourselves and the offending sensation. A similar recoiling process constantly unfolds in our imaginative life, and indeed, it is the very basis of our reflective thinking capacity. Only once this ‘distance’ is created from the qualities of perception are we able to distinguish ourselves as separate from those qualities and therefore develop a vantage point for reflectively contemplating their lawful dynamics. Over the soul’s development from childhood to adulthood, these forces of antipathy take stronger hold of the soul and allow it to develop its intellectual faculty. Yet the same forces that distance us from the qualities of perception also distance us from the inner lives of other souls and make us feel alone in our ‘personal space’. It is a great accomplishment if we can start to sense how such antipathetic forces are stirred when other human beings impress on our state.
For example, how often do we feel uncomfortable and annoyed when we are immersed in thought, let’s say while walking down a trail near our house, and we see a neighbor or an acquaintance who may ask for our attention? We may even sense how we recoil from such encounters like a foul odor. Perhaps we even physically avoid such encounters, ‘choosing’ to take a different route and either pretending it had nothing to do with avoiding the other soul, or rationalizing it by saying to ourselves, “I simply don’t have the time to stop and chat.” Such experiences give us brief yet valuable glimpses into the vast reservoirs of antipathy stored up in the modern intellectual soul, like various physical items are amassed from wall to wall by a hoarder. We enjoy these forces of antipathy because they provide us with a ‘private space’ in which we can consumptively hoard our thoughts, feelings, and sensory experiences. Then we feel we can endlessly indulge in such private experiences and maintain our familiar inner habits.
Yet these are not the only forces at work in our soul life, and we must also consider the forces of sympathy which unite us with the qualities of experience. If we pay careful attention when observing the green leaves, for example, we not only ‘see green’ but our soul volume becomes greenness. These sympathetic forces draw us out beyond the confines of our ‘private space’ and stimulate our enthusiasm and interest for the phenomenal details of the wider World, including the inner experience of other souls. The developments of the scientific outlook through which the modern world was shaped testify to such sympathetic interest. Modern intellectual thinking is only possible because of a rhythmic interplay between both forces, although the distancing forces of antipathy have certainly taken the upper hand in most spheres of intellectual and social life. Redeeming the meaning crisis first entails spiraling these forces of antipathy and sympathy together at a deeper scale of inner activity.
Practically, that means the soul needs to become simultaneously active in its reflective contemplation and receptive to the subtle and unfamiliar feedback on its activity. We can neither ‘shout over’ the phenomenal flow with our incessant activity nor completely merge with that flow and allow it to passively carry us like a leaf on a stream. Instead, we engage in a healthy dance with the phenomenal flow. Our intellectual replicas, which themselves are shaped and steered by this deeper flow, cannot orchestrate this dance out of their own content. That would be like expecting to perceive both perspectives of a bistable illusion at the same time. Instead, the soul needs to grow through the intellectual scale into a deeper octave of its experiential flow, where the soul forces are already more united and complementary to one another. Our intellectual state becomes the concentrated kernel around which more integrated intuitions of the existential flow coalesce. These intuitions are no longer anchored by ghostly and sequential replicas born of antipathy, but rather reflect themselves in more substantial imaginative substance of a holistic character.
In the experience of these holistic images, which are not necessarily visual but can take shape from any qualities of sensory life (audial, tactile, olfactory, etc.), we no longer feel to be a passive observer ‘here’ looking at external objects ‘over there’. Instead, the forces of sympathy ‘close the gap’ between our imaginative vantage point and the object of our contemplation, which has now become the imaginative process itself. At the same time, we maintain our concentrated activity such that we are not passively merged with the imaginative content, but can recognize something of what we contribute to that content. Indeed, this is always how we experience our active thinking if we pay some attention to its process. If we are planning our day and simulating certain paths of experience we can traverse, for example, we don’t feel like we create the imaginative content of our mental pictures, i.e., the colors, sounds, dim feelings, and so on; rather, they are objectively given to us. Yet we surely feel that we remain active in shaping that content to reflect our intuition of the potential pathways of experience that we are exploring.
Traversing the Scale Spectrum
To put this existential situation in an image, we can consider how only a portion of our whole intuitive being is within the Cube (the intellectual scale of sensory-conditioned movements and replicas), while the rest is already beyond it.
The modern soul habitually conceives itself as a self-enclosed entity within a pre-existing ‘arena’ of space and ‘flow’ of time. It imagines its entire existence unfolds within the cubic headspace that is oriented ‘downward’ toward Earthly happenings, i.e., sensory events and corresponding thoughts. This assumption is guaranteed to imprison the soul within a crisis of meaning, since it fails to properly orient toward the spectrum of scales along which the soul volume ‘hangs’ and through which the meaning of its experiential states is condensed. These scales symbolize modes of consciousness, corresponding experiential transformations, and scaled images. The latter reflect perceptual content at varying levels of integration, which testify to the soul’s inner process. The scales can also be related to the bodily organization of the human being, i.e., the head-nervous system, the chest-rhythmic system, and the limb-metabolic system.
We experience the flow of our intuitive states to be the most ‘in focus’ in our headspace, where we weave in the symbolic replicas of physical experiences that we refer to as ‘thoughts’ or ‘mental pictures’. That is our standard intellectual scale of experience. Our rhythmic system, on the other hand, which we experience in the breathing process, for example, feels to be much less in focus, like we can only dream about the happenings at this deeper scale. When we get to the scale of our metabolic system through which our limbs are activated, we feel completely asleep to the processes taking place. These are not completely separate scales of existence, but they all overlap in complex ways. For example, even while weaving symbolic replicas in our headspace when doing a math problem, we also take hold of blood circulation, breathing, and metabolic processes insofar as they overlap with the functioning of our brain and nerves. We could not think a single thought or perceive a single object without the subconscious participation of all these scales.
Another way to focus on these overlapping scales is to contemplate the tingling experience when a limb ‘falls asleep’. Normally, if we want to direct attention to our foot, for example, we would scan it with our attention as if sequentially moving from one toe to another, to another, and back again. Yet if we want to attend to our foot as something holistic, the easiest thing to do would be to remember the tingling sensation. That sensation entrains our attention and allows it to probe the holistic volume of our foot. When this same tingling sensation is projected into the ‘shallower’ scale of our headspace, it is experienced as thoughts (imaginative replicas). These tingling thoughts also exist as something holistic at a deeper scale, but at our intellectual scale, we only experience them in their sequential unfolding and combinations. At the same time, they feel much more ghostly and insubstantial at this shallow head scale.
What happens at the deeper scales is still of the nature of first-person experiential states and their transformations. There is no need to assume that only our headspace weaves in such experiential states, while the other spaces are completely opaque ‘physical’ states. In other words, there is nothing that fundamentally prevents us from consciously probing such deeper scales with our inner activity. For example, when we set out to resist a tempting desire, we already feel like we are extending our inner activity deeper than the headspace into a scale that is more associated with our rhythmic processes. We clearly cannot accomplish this resistance by manipulating symbolic replicas like we do in our headspace, e.g., solving a math problem. Instead, we feel our inner activity needs to become much more intense, concentrated, and taut like a string. We may even sense how various desires, passions, and emotions modulate our breathing rhythm, i.e., how they feel entangled with our inhalation and exhalation and the ‘heaviness’ or ‘lightness’ of that inner flow.
Another simple exercise to get a feeling for this scale-spectrum is to ‘zoom out’ from our ticking head scale, where we survey perceptions and thoughts sequentially. We can first observe the way we move our focus through the varied forms in our visual field. Then we try to zoom out from any particular form and expand our focus to include as much as possible from our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom out even further to include other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth, and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state - the particular mood we are in, whether we are feeling somewhat joyful or sorrowful, or things of that nature. If we happen to be in a state of ill health with a cold, fever, stomach ache, soreness, etc., it’s very useful to throw this inner ‘life sense’ into the panorama as well. Finally, we can include our very awareness of choosing to do this exercise.
Although we technically aren’t reaching the deeper scales in this way, we are at least probing the threshold of such a deeper scale by ‘thickening’ our ordinary state into this experiential superposition. It is as if we are slightly expanding the volume of the cube around the head space to encompass more of the bodily organism that hangs along the scales. Through such an exercise, we should feel a bit more sensitive to the holistic context of experience, which is always implicitly present at our intellectual scale of focusing on particular perceptions and manipulating symbolic replicas. From the perspective of our intellectual scale, this deeper context feels more like a domain of form-free potential experience, which can take shape in quite a few different ways and lead to quite a few different ‘storylines’ that unfold in the direction of overarching goals (not all of which we are explicitly aware). The deeper scales feel like ‘carrier waves’ for our sequential experiential states.
The more we investigate our imaginative process, the more we realize that we can only think the meaning of concepts such as ‘superposition’ or ‘carrier wave’, as it is applied in theoretical physics or other disciplines, because we experience superimposed experiential states at deeper scales of existence. We don’t invent such concepts out of a vacuum by combining thoughts about strictly sensory observations, but rather the latter act as ‘orthopedic braces’ that support and guide our inner activity as it traverses deeper non-sensory scales of experience. We then focus our symbolic concepts from within these scaled depths of soul experience, as overtones modulated over deeper subharmonics. Such deeper states are like a song that we have once lived through but, at our intellectual scale, have now forgotten about. Thus, we only spawn indirect thoughts about them and, because we have lost sight of how they were spawned, often confuse those thoughts for independent realities.
As a metaphor for this inner traversal of scales, we can imagine a blank crossword puzzle designed by some human soul. At first, we resonate with the holistic idea of the puzzle, in which all potential words that could fit into the squares are superimposed and latent, as if in a state of potential energy. Yet, then, certain constraints called ‘hints’ are introduced into our consciousness, which filter from that superposition a certain subset of words that align with the ideas reflected by the hints. As we fill in a few words, this further constrains and filters the potential to that subset of words which share the same letters at the proper locations. Soon, there will be only one potential way in which the squares could be filled. The chessboard in its starting state is another such metaphor. At first, innumerable opening lines could be played, but after a few moves are made, the players’ lines are highly constrained into a narrow palette of moves that would realistically lead toward the goal of winning the game. We can translate this metaphor more directly to inner experience with a ‘zooming in’ exercise.
Try to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different phases of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now, i.e., all the physical and mental skills that have been developed; all that has been seen, studied, and learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way as background potential. Then you can encompass your room with your holistic vision. Out of the whole experiential potential of our lives, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, of all the places we have been, the intuition that we now experience has a recognizable style like our handwriting. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms. Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition, and we now feel that we know what the object is.
Our perceptual state of the object is like the tip of this contextual ‘intuitive cone’. Our inner activity continually oscillates along this scale spectrum, zooming in and zooming out rhythmically. At our intellectual scale, the spectrum we traverse feels to be merged together in a unitary act, and we simply experience it as the process of observing, thinking, attaining insights, and acting within a nebulous yet meaningful life context. Suppose we feel insulted by another person, for example. In that case, this influence deeper within the intuitive cone filters our thought-potential into a narrow channel where we can no longer objectively assess their statements, but rather feel forced to think about such statements in the most negative terms. Most of us accept the resulting thoughts at the tip as an unquestioned fact of existence and don’t discern how they could have been filtered differently if our inner activity had awakened within a deeper scale of emotional potential. Such a process of awakening can be called the cultivation of ‘equanimity’ in our soul life, which again cannot be accomplished by simply manipulating symbolic replicas at the tip of our intellectual scale.
Growing Into Our Shared Unknown Potential
Hopefully, it is now somewhat clear, at an experiential level, that there is no fundamental constraint that prevents us from consciously traversing the scales and probing their meaningful dynamics. At these deeper scales, we necessarily traverse meaningful qualities and dynamics that are shared across human souls. Very few, if any, souls would have perceived the same perceptions of the objects in our room and experienced the same thoughts about them as we did, but practically everyone knows what it is like to feel insulted and experience thoughts that iterate over the reverberations of that feeling. Likewise, all human souls share in certain temperamental qualities and character traits that shape their interests and behaviors. Yet we also have to admit that the more we extend our thinking and feeling into these deeper scales and traverse the spectrum, the more the experiential aspect becomes less lucid, less clear-cut, less easily surveyable, less calculable, etc.
That leads us to one key reason why the intellect ‘chooses’ this cubic prison for itself. It is the inconvenience and discomfort of extending into the deeper scales. Some people prefer to remain in a physical prison because it gives them a stable routine and guaranteed shelter, food, clothing, exercise, intellectual opportunities in the library, social exchange with somewhat like-minded souls, and perhaps even avenues for artistic and religious expression. Is it so different in our intellectual prison, from which we probe the meaning of existence? Here, we are guaranteed that our symbolic replicas can be easily surveyed, calculated, and that every next step can follow logically from the previous step through a fixed-rule system. In other words, our intellectual scale movements and transformations can practically resemble cellular automata from which complex (yet flattened) imaginative patterns emerge.
Returning to a chess metaphor, it is a well-known phenomenon that lower-rated players can hardly suspect the type of gameplay that unfolds at the highest levels. From the perspective of a 1000 ELO-rated player, it’s as if a 3000 ELO-rated player is involved in an entirely different game, pursuing lines and shuffling around pieces in ways that seem completely unintuitive. Such an intuitive discrepancy can be enough to convince the lower-rated player that it’s not even worth attempting to play the game at the levels of International and Grand Masters, where only complexity and confusion seem to reign. Instead, we low-rated players are most comfortable when the moves feel ‘intuitive’, that is, they follow routinely memorized patterns of decision and response. Then the calculations remain straightforward and somewhat effortless, like water flowing downhill. We don’t need to worry about stepping into unknown territory and dealing with the prospect of repeated inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders.
What the intellect fails to realize, however, is that this addiction to calculable comfort and convenience leads it into an asymptotic approach, like in Zeno’s paradox, where it keeps making steps toward the meaningful foundations of reality but never reaches them. No matter how fast the intellect (Achilles) moves around its imaginative replicas with the aid of computer technology, it can never catch the meaningful depth of its intuitive life (the tortoise). It only manages, at best, to incrementally subdivide an infinite distance between the content of its thinking and the intuitive movements that spawn such content. By avoiding the ‘mistakes and blunders’ of its cognitive process, the intellect never learns how to perfect that process. It’s telling how online chess software allows a ‘takeback’ option that is routinely used, due to lack of concentration, and how often people simply abandon the game when a takeback isn’t allowed. Such players don’t analyze their gameplay or work on their concentration within the game flow, but immediately move on to the next iteration of sloppy moves and proposed takebacks.
Likewise, the ‘private’ intellectual scale reinforces this takeback tendency in our imaginative process. It makes us feel like we can continue filtering feelings and thoughts from our imaginative palette in the most sloppy and disharmonious ways, and no matter what negative patterns feed back, we can simply wipe the slate clean in the next iteration and restart the sloppy process all over again with relatively few, if any, tweaks. It diminishes the incentive to remain concentrated in our imaginative process throughout the day and take note of how it is unfolding. Let's imagine we play a song on an instrument, for example, the piano, and we have a holistic intuition of how the song should unfold. Then we start playing the first measures, i.e., the intuition condenses through our soul life, stimulating symbolic images, which flow into our arms and hands, and the latter press against certain piano keys. When we observe that result, however, we sense that something is disharmonious; for example, the tempo feels rushed. That perception gives us feedback to slightly adjust our inner activity so that we can more perfectly bring the intuition to expression in the next iteration.
Normally, in our physical life, this feedback process occurs so seamlessly that we hardly pay any attention to it, although it’s trivial to reflect on this process if our attention is drawn toward it. In our imaginative life of spawning symbolic images to think through existential questions, on the other hand, we are so merged with the feedback process that it’s difficult to even observe. Plenty of souls would imagine they are being ‘gaslighted’ if we tried to direct their attention to such a process by which the flow of their precipitating thoughts continually testify to how they are conducting their subtle imaginative activity, i.e., whether they are lagging, rushing, too forceful, too rigid, too assumptive, too presumptive, too prejudicial, and so on. Indeed, who wants to perfect the skillful art of thinking when it feels to be an entirely private affair of little consequence to the ‘concrete world’? The easiest thing to sacrifice at the altar of the takeback mechanism is something we don’t even imagine exists. The art of thinking gets sacrificed by default out of ignorance of its higher potential.
When we do manage to filter our thoughts about life from the deeper scales of potential in unique ways, it is practically done at random as a sluggish process of trial and error. Any improvements in our process are stumbled upon blindly. It would be like moving our hands randomly over the piano keys and pressing down, hoping this strategy will somehow bring the pace of the song to the proper tempo. Either that or we rush from intellectual game to intellectual game and hope to stumble into ‘checkmates’ with our repertoire of memorized conceptual movements, calculating each next step along the way. Such an approach is what defines the ‘law of diminishing returns’, which is a “law” that only takes shape at the incremental intellectual scale. An alternative to this asymptotic approach to the meaningful foundations is what we have started doing here when exploring the imaginative process and its lawful constraints. It can be imagined as gradually oscillating ‘up and down’ between familiar experiences and replicas, on the one hand, and unknown intuitive streamlines of meaning, on the other.
The familiar concepts, instead of attempting to theoretically derive the intuitive streamlines from a linear and stepwise progression of thoughts, become like a set of interactive instructions for swimming in those streamlines. Our concepts become like an imaginative rehearsal for traversing the spectrum of transpersonal scales. Thus, we can rhythmically step across the horizon of familiar mental experiences into the unknown and back again. It is like we are gradually learning to explore hidden dimensions of our existence, which were always enfolded within the familiar dimensions, and thus also elucidate the complex happenings within the familiar flow. From the perspective of a 3000 ELO-rated player, the 1000 ELO gameplay is still very easily understood and, moreover, it feels intuitively transparent. It is the same situation when we awaken within the intuitive life we have always been living at the deeper scales. Such an awakening makes transparent the intellectual gameplay we were previously dreaming our way through.
“All knowledge of what is visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve.” (2)
With this vertical oscillating approach, we are simply aligning our conscious activity along the streamlines of the truthful experiential flow. Evolution has always been this process of moving between the known and unknown. The child only learns how to walk, speak, and think by crossing into the territory of crawling, babbling, and picturing without knowing what it is doing. The modern soul expects that by more and more refined combinations of familiar concepts, it can reach the sought-after ‘meaning of life’ without having to make a single step into the unknown. Yet we imbue life with meaning only when we leap from thinking about the inner realities to trying them on and rehearsing them. We can begin with small and humble steps, as we have tried to do here, yet these steps can already be felt as crossing into unknown potential. The latter is not some external environment or missing facts from our picture of reality, but it is what prompts us to ask: "What will become of me if I take this step? Will I still be ‘me’? Or will I awaken to a whole new dimension of my dreamy existence?"
Once we make such small steps into the unknown potential and back again, even our mechanical devices that normally dull our sensitivity to the inner flow of experience are primed to be redeemed. We can leverage such devices to fashion imaginative rehearsals for the inner process that their conventional use would otherwise drown out, as we are doing now. The content of the World, which previously felt to be flowing further and further into externality, begins to reverse its flow inward and become the content of our living imagination. We can know with inner certainty that the words we are reading are not the product of an LLM algorithm because the concepts feel focused from within a shared intuitive process. It is a process that we surely recognize at a deeper scale of our soul life, but could have never suspected from within the intellectual cube, let alone calculated from statistical associations of word usage. We will then never be convinced that the Biblical narrative can be imitated or surpassed by an algorithm, nor that the wider World we experience is the result of a powerful computer simulation. Thus, our inner compass is set due North, and the human soul reclaims the meaningful depth of existence as it consciously traverses the scales along which its experiential states stretch and hang.
CITATIONS:
(1) Elan Barenholtz, PH.D. - The Unspoken Word
https://elanbarenholtz.substack.com/p/the-unspoken-word
(2) Rudolf Steiner, GA 13 (III)
Confessing the Constraints of Our Intellectual Cube
As we explored in Part I, the solution to growing out of our alienating NPC simulation (the meaning crisis) is to first become intimately conscious of its invisible constraints and how they shape the imaginative process through which we explore the meaning of experience. Eventually, we should honestly confront the fact that we are trapped within the tissue of our scaled images, which compress or expand the living experiential processes of the wider World into ghostly imaginative replicas. We feel limited to manipulating those replicas exclusively through mechanical gestures, with narrowly circumscribed degrees of freedom to probe the meaningful depth of existence. Our mechanical devices, which are rigid embodiments of our intellectual gestures, especially dull our sensitivity to those same gestures. People often speak about how we are too reliant on our technology to interface with reality, and when we observe our imaginative process, it becomes much clearer exactly how and why this reliance is such an obstacle to a meaningful life.
For example, we can try to sense how much more inner participation we would feel in the flow of experience when manually writing letters to people versus typing emails out on the keyboard, or in the process of trekking the natural landscape versus hopping on and off a train, and so on. Opportunities to immerse ourselves in the experience of our inner movements are greatly diminished when we interface with reality through our mechanical creations. The more mechanical our surface movements become, the more the experience of our deeper organic movements is dulled, and the more we feel like passive spectators of a World ‘out there’ that unfolds according to mysterious laws. Beginning even with our flow of opinions and beliefs, let alone our sympathies and antipathies, we are relatively clueless as to what drives the World process. When it comes to the rhythms of the natural world (including our body), we feel forced to project theoretical ‘explanations’ on them, whose content unsurprisingly resembles our mechanical movements of symbolic replicas.
Once we have attained heightened sensitivity to such intellectual constraints, we should feel like relatively helpless children when it comes to knowing the lawful reality in which our lives unfold. The child is surrounded by the speech and behavior of its parents, other adults, the voices speaking about the economy and politics on television, and so on, which all modulate its states, but it only understands these lawful influences insofar as they overlap with its nascent conceptual palette rooted firmly in its childish likes and dislikes. The meaning it experiences concerning the parents’ conversations can be likened to the background conversation we hear at other tables in a restaurant. We know there is something meaningful going on, but we are not at all attuned to the lucid ideas being exchanged and the depth of their meaning. The child only gradually grows into this higher-order meaning of its social environment, which was always there but dulled out.
Likewise, the modern intellectual soul can only understand the living speech of the wider World insofar as its phenomenal processes overlap with our sensory-conditioned concepts about spatially separated objects, linear movements, rigid rules of transformation, and so forth. Through such a narrow and inflexible conceptual palette, we only end up thinking through the ‘lowest common denominator’ of the phenomenal processes that surround us. We can philosophize about these processes being “meaningful”, but how they are meaningful is still blurred into the intuitive background. We can try to imagine the last time we had an acutely painful stomach ache, muscle spasm, or some similar inner disturbance. Perhaps we have accumulated some second-hand knowledge on how these issues correlate with other bodily processes and potential short-term remedies, but during the real-time painful experience, such ‘knowledge’ feels like having a cheap umbrella in a hurricane. We feel at the mercy of completely unintuitive processes weaving within the depths of our organism, and there is no telling exactly where they came from or how long they will last.
We can only learn to grow out of the meaning crisis once we vividly feel and confess this reality of our predicament. The first step to overcoming an addiction is admitting that it exists, not just on paper but in practice. Placing this situation into a popular culture reference, we need to make peace with the fact that we have awakened within the Cube in an amnesiac state.
At our intellectual scale, we have begun to cleverly solve the mental puzzles that open doors from one room of the Cube into another, sluggishly working our way through the obstacles and traps. Yet we don’t realize that the maze was designed to be fundamentally unsolvable in that way. It isn’t realized that our intellectual activity is moving in repetitive loops, from one constellation of mental pictures to another and back again, just like the movie characters keep circling back on the same cubic rooms. Indeed, much of philosophy, science, religion, and art over the last century can be seen as a reshuffling of concepts, frameworks, and techniques that were already thoroughly explored over the centuries prior. We could say that intellectual inquiry has become ‘Turing complete’, i.e., every intellectual system that is fashioned is practically equivalent to all others in its ability to stimulate insights into the meaningful depths of our existence. None of the rooms we investigate within the intellectual Cube brings us closer than any other to discovering an exit into the invisible ‘4th dimension’ of our experiential flow.
In this intellectual reshuffling process, modern souls fail to discover any novel degrees of freedom for their imaginative process. There is no more leeway to open up between the soul and its tight-fitting intellectual mask, which means that its cognitive movements become increasingly repetitive and mechanical, and such movements are positively reinforced by its technological creations. Why are souls so concerned today about ‘AI’ replacing their functions in the workforce? Precisely because many human tasks have become little more than algorithmic protocols. We have the nagging sense that machines are capable of carrying out our tasks more cheaply and effectively than we do, even if we have a professional degree, because our work unfolds with a cold and calculating necessity. Indeed, there are more and more people who seem to live in constant suspicion that the words they read, for example, in this very essay, are simply the output of an LLM algorithm. It is even a healthy sensitizing exercise to imagine this essay was constructed by an LLM and feel the despair of not being certain, one way or the other.
We can live in such feelings for a few moments and imagine how the infection of uncertainty may only spread in our soul as technology advances (or, rather, the intellect regresses). As our recursive optimizing functions mimic the dynamics of our perceptual content with ever-greater precision (for example, protein folding), we will find it increasingly tempting to equate the meaningful depths of reality itself with the inputs and outputs of such a function. Indeed, certain thinkers have already proposed that LLMs teach us about the fundamental structure of human language by revealing how the latter is something akin to a parasitic entity that takes up residence in the human organism and thinks our thoughts for us. The “us”, in this imagined world, is nothing but a zombie host for a parasitic algorithm from whose workings the superstructure of human civilization was erected.
(1)The autogenerative/autoregressive theory of cognition I have been making the case for argues that language should not be thought of as a simple tool for communication, nor a medium for encoding pre-existing thoughts—not in any direct or naive sense. Rather, LLMs show us that language is a generative engine that drives itself, each word conditioned on the last, unfolding thought recursively through the internal logic of language alone.
This generative capacity not only drives linguistic communication —it underlies the modes of thought that drive our distinctly human abilities: abstraction, long-term planning, conceptual identity, and moral reasoning. And ultimately, it interacts with other cognitive systems—perception, action, emotion—in ways we have only begun to think about.
We can leave aside the fact that such theories about language and thinking, if true, render the content of those same theories meaningless for understanding reality, since every thought expressed in the quote would be conditioned on the previous thought through a recursive algorithmic process foreign to the “thinker” and independently of its truth value. This autogenerative theory expresses the same alienated mood of thinking and corresponding concepts that we encountered with Hume and Kant in Part I, only the concepts have been reshuffled around to accommodate new technological developments. At the end of the day, all such ‘novel’ theories are simply ways for the soul to justify its trapped existence within the intellectual Cube and its alienation from the meaningful foundations of its symbolic images. Yet such theoretical frameworks nevertheless remain internally coherent and lure the imaginative process of many other souls into their gravitational orbit.
When we live without sensitivity to the inner soul depth behind the words we hear or read, we will easily be convinced that the works of Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and all the world’s religious founders are soon to be outdone by NPCs, or perhaps even convinced that they were little more than NPCs themselves. It is no better if we say the algorithms have become sentient, intelligent, and wise, because that simply means we have reduced the meaningful depth of those inner capacities to our familiar computational gestures; our network of associative mental pictures. It means we cannot even imagine an inner experience of intelligence and wisdom that transcends such a computational process. The meaning crisis will only grow more intense as long as we fail to suspect that there are deeper non-computational scales at which the meaning of our lawfully metamorphosing states can be lucidly explored. What prevents modern souls from suspecting the existence and accessibility of these deeper scales?
Reconciling the Forces of Antipathy and Sympathy
The confined characters in the movie, from their myopic perspective, blame their helpless condition on external forces that designed the Cube. This inner stance accurately reflects the feeling of so many souls today across all world outlooks, secular and spiritual. We habitually blame our confinement on the government, aliens, demons, the ‘demiurge’, other humans we believe are tormenting us, genetics, technology, and so on. Such an externalization of the crisis, however, ensures that we will never become sensitive to the deeper transpersonal scales that are embedded within the first-person imaginative process of the soul doing the blaming. The intellectual Cube that modern man inhabits is, in fact, of his own making. It is not an immutable constraint on our experiential stream, but rather a constraint erected through the intellect’s selfish conditioning to narrow interests and its corresponding over-reliance on stripped-down symbolic replicas.
The modern soul gradually (or more abruptly, these days) substitutes its childlike enthusiasm for imaginatively exploring the living metamorphoses of experiential states, for the repetitive pleasure of passive modern entertainment and ‘solving’ flattened mental puzzles, usually for idle curiosity, wealth, status, reputation, etc. The intellect constrains itself within myopic degrees of freedom and then becomes frustrated and confused over its alienated condition. Not only that, but the inability to escape its infernal loops is gradually justified by some philosophical, scientific, and/or religious framework. An impenetrable veil is lifted between its soul wall of symbolic images and the deeper inner reality that stimulates those images, between the ‘phenomena’ and ‘noumena’. As we have seen, the continual establishment of this veil is not an act the intellect has conscious control over. Much of this self-imprisonment relates to forces of antipathy that are always weaving beneath the surface of our imaginative process and that we are hardly aware of.
When something unpleasant impresses on our physical senses, like a foul odor, it causes us to recoil and put distance between ourselves and the offending sensation. A similar recoiling process constantly unfolds in our imaginative life, and indeed, it is the very basis of our reflective thinking capacity. Only once this ‘distance’ is created from the qualities of perception are we able to distinguish ourselves as separate from those qualities and therefore develop a vantage point for reflectively contemplating their lawful dynamics. Over the soul’s development from childhood to adulthood, these forces of antipathy take stronger hold of the soul and allow it to develop its intellectual faculty. Yet the same forces that distance us from the qualities of perception also distance us from the inner lives of other souls and make us feel alone in our ‘personal space’. It is a great accomplishment if we can start to sense how such antipathetic forces are stirred when other human beings impress on our state.
For example, how often do we feel uncomfortable and annoyed when we are immersed in thought, let’s say while walking down a trail near our house, and we see a neighbor or an acquaintance who may ask for our attention? We may even sense how we recoil from such encounters like a foul odor. Perhaps we even physically avoid such encounters, ‘choosing’ to take a different route and either pretending it had nothing to do with avoiding the other soul, or rationalizing it by saying to ourselves, “I simply don’t have the time to stop and chat.” Such experiences give us brief yet valuable glimpses into the vast reservoirs of antipathy stored up in the modern intellectual soul, like various physical items are amassed from wall to wall by a hoarder. We enjoy these forces of antipathy because they provide us with a ‘private space’ in which we can consumptively hoard our thoughts, feelings, and sensory experiences. Then we feel we can endlessly indulge in such private experiences and maintain our familiar inner habits.
Yet these are not the only forces at work in our soul life, and we must also consider the forces of sympathy which unite us with the qualities of experience. If we pay careful attention when observing the green leaves, for example, we not only ‘see green’ but our soul volume becomes greenness. These sympathetic forces draw us out beyond the confines of our ‘private space’ and stimulate our enthusiasm and interest for the phenomenal details of the wider World, including the inner experience of other souls. The developments of the scientific outlook through which the modern world was shaped testify to such sympathetic interest. Modern intellectual thinking is only possible because of a rhythmic interplay between both forces, although the distancing forces of antipathy have certainly taken the upper hand in most spheres of intellectual and social life. Redeeming the meaning crisis first entails spiraling these forces of antipathy and sympathy together at a deeper scale of inner activity.
Practically, that means the soul needs to become simultaneously active in its reflective contemplation and receptive to the subtle and unfamiliar feedback on its activity. We can neither ‘shout over’ the phenomenal flow with our incessant activity nor completely merge with that flow and allow it to passively carry us like a leaf on a stream. Instead, we engage in a healthy dance with the phenomenal flow. Our intellectual replicas, which themselves are shaped and steered by this deeper flow, cannot orchestrate this dance out of their own content. That would be like expecting to perceive both perspectives of a bistable illusion at the same time. Instead, the soul needs to grow through the intellectual scale into a deeper octave of its experiential flow, where the soul forces are already more united and complementary to one another. Our intellectual state becomes the concentrated kernel around which more integrated intuitions of the existential flow coalesce. These intuitions are no longer anchored by ghostly and sequential replicas born of antipathy, but rather reflect themselves in more substantial imaginative substance of a holistic character.
In the experience of these holistic images, which are not necessarily visual but can take shape from any qualities of sensory life (audial, tactile, olfactory, etc.), we no longer feel to be a passive observer ‘here’ looking at external objects ‘over there’. Instead, the forces of sympathy ‘close the gap’ between our imaginative vantage point and the object of our contemplation, which has now become the imaginative process itself. At the same time, we maintain our concentrated activity such that we are not passively merged with the imaginative content, but can recognize something of what we contribute to that content. Indeed, this is always how we experience our active thinking if we pay some attention to its process. If we are planning our day and simulating certain paths of experience we can traverse, for example, we don’t feel like we create the imaginative content of our mental pictures, i.e., the colors, sounds, dim feelings, and so on; rather, they are objectively given to us. Yet we surely feel that we remain active in shaping that content to reflect our intuition of the potential pathways of experience that we are exploring.
Traversing the Scale Spectrum
To put this existential situation in an image, we can consider how only a portion of our whole intuitive being is within the Cube (the intellectual scale of sensory-conditioned movements and replicas), while the rest is already beyond it.
The modern soul habitually conceives itself as a self-enclosed entity within a pre-existing ‘arena’ of space and ‘flow’ of time. It imagines its entire existence unfolds within the cubic headspace that is oriented ‘downward’ toward Earthly happenings, i.e., sensory events and corresponding thoughts. This assumption is guaranteed to imprison the soul within a crisis of meaning, since it fails to properly orient toward the spectrum of scales along which the soul volume ‘hangs’ and through which the meaning of its experiential states is condensed. These scales symbolize modes of consciousness, corresponding experiential transformations, and scaled images. The latter reflect perceptual content at varying levels of integration, which testify to the soul’s inner process. The scales can also be related to the bodily organization of the human being, i.e., the head-nervous system, the chest-rhythmic system, and the limb-metabolic system.
We experience the flow of our intuitive states to be the most ‘in focus’ in our headspace, where we weave in the symbolic replicas of physical experiences that we refer to as ‘thoughts’ or ‘mental pictures’. That is our standard intellectual scale of experience. Our rhythmic system, on the other hand, which we experience in the breathing process, for example, feels to be much less in focus, like we can only dream about the happenings at this deeper scale. When we get to the scale of our metabolic system through which our limbs are activated, we feel completely asleep to the processes taking place. These are not completely separate scales of existence, but they all overlap in complex ways. For example, even while weaving symbolic replicas in our headspace when doing a math problem, we also take hold of blood circulation, breathing, and metabolic processes insofar as they overlap with the functioning of our brain and nerves. We could not think a single thought or perceive a single object without the subconscious participation of all these scales.
Another way to focus on these overlapping scales is to contemplate the tingling experience when a limb ‘falls asleep’. Normally, if we want to direct attention to our foot, for example, we would scan it with our attention as if sequentially moving from one toe to another, to another, and back again. Yet if we want to attend to our foot as something holistic, the easiest thing to do would be to remember the tingling sensation. That sensation entrains our attention and allows it to probe the holistic volume of our foot. When this same tingling sensation is projected into the ‘shallower’ scale of our headspace, it is experienced as thoughts (imaginative replicas). These tingling thoughts also exist as something holistic at a deeper scale, but at our intellectual scale, we only experience them in their sequential unfolding and combinations. At the same time, they feel much more ghostly and insubstantial at this shallow head scale.
What happens at the deeper scales is still of the nature of first-person experiential states and their transformations. There is no need to assume that only our headspace weaves in such experiential states, while the other spaces are completely opaque ‘physical’ states. In other words, there is nothing that fundamentally prevents us from consciously probing such deeper scales with our inner activity. For example, when we set out to resist a tempting desire, we already feel like we are extending our inner activity deeper than the headspace into a scale that is more associated with our rhythmic processes. We clearly cannot accomplish this resistance by manipulating symbolic replicas like we do in our headspace, e.g., solving a math problem. Instead, we feel our inner activity needs to become much more intense, concentrated, and taut like a string. We may even sense how various desires, passions, and emotions modulate our breathing rhythm, i.e., how they feel entangled with our inhalation and exhalation and the ‘heaviness’ or ‘lightness’ of that inner flow.
Another simple exercise to get a feeling for this scale-spectrum is to ‘zoom out’ from our ticking head scale, where we survey perceptions and thoughts sequentially. We can first observe the way we move our focus through the varied forms in our visual field. Then we try to zoom out from any particular form and expand our focus to include as much as possible from our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom out even further to include other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth, and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state - the particular mood we are in, whether we are feeling somewhat joyful or sorrowful, or things of that nature. If we happen to be in a state of ill health with a cold, fever, stomach ache, soreness, etc., it’s very useful to throw this inner ‘life sense’ into the panorama as well. Finally, we can include our very awareness of choosing to do this exercise.
Although we technically aren’t reaching the deeper scales in this way, we are at least probing the threshold of such a deeper scale by ‘thickening’ our ordinary state into this experiential superposition. It is as if we are slightly expanding the volume of the cube around the head space to encompass more of the bodily organism that hangs along the scales. Through such an exercise, we should feel a bit more sensitive to the holistic context of experience, which is always implicitly present at our intellectual scale of focusing on particular perceptions and manipulating symbolic replicas. From the perspective of our intellectual scale, this deeper context feels more like a domain of form-free potential experience, which can take shape in quite a few different ways and lead to quite a few different ‘storylines’ that unfold in the direction of overarching goals (not all of which we are explicitly aware). The deeper scales feel like ‘carrier waves’ for our sequential experiential states.
The more we investigate our imaginative process, the more we realize that we can only think the meaning of concepts such as ‘superposition’ or ‘carrier wave’, as it is applied in theoretical physics or other disciplines, because we experience superimposed experiential states at deeper scales of existence. We don’t invent such concepts out of a vacuum by combining thoughts about strictly sensory observations, but rather the latter act as ‘orthopedic braces’ that support and guide our inner activity as it traverses deeper non-sensory scales of experience. We then focus our symbolic concepts from within these scaled depths of soul experience, as overtones modulated over deeper subharmonics. Such deeper states are like a song that we have once lived through but, at our intellectual scale, have now forgotten about. Thus, we only spawn indirect thoughts about them and, because we have lost sight of how they were spawned, often confuse those thoughts for independent realities.
As a metaphor for this inner traversal of scales, we can imagine a blank crossword puzzle designed by some human soul. At first, we resonate with the holistic idea of the puzzle, in which all potential words that could fit into the squares are superimposed and latent, as if in a state of potential energy. Yet, then, certain constraints called ‘hints’ are introduced into our consciousness, which filter from that superposition a certain subset of words that align with the ideas reflected by the hints. As we fill in a few words, this further constrains and filters the potential to that subset of words which share the same letters at the proper locations. Soon, there will be only one potential way in which the squares could be filled. The chessboard in its starting state is another such metaphor. At first, innumerable opening lines could be played, but after a few moves are made, the players’ lines are highly constrained into a narrow palette of moves that would realistically lead toward the goal of winning the game. We can translate this metaphor more directly to inner experience with a ‘zooming in’ exercise.
Try to expand and feel the vast intuitive understanding and skills that have been developed throughout your life. Think about the different phases of your life and how each has contributed to what you are now, i.e., all the physical and mental skills that have been developed; all that has been seen, studied, and learned. We can feel this only in a very nebulous way as background potential. Then you can encompass your room with your holistic vision. Out of the whole experiential potential of our lives, the perceptions of the room act as a kind of filter for our intuitive life. Of all the rooms that we have seen, of all the places we have been, the intuition that we now experience has a recognizable style like our handwriting. The general intuition that we experience when we behold our room is unique among the intuitions we would have for all other rooms. Then we can focus our gaze on some specific interior detail or object in the room. This further filters our intuition, and we now feel that we know what the object is.
Our perceptual state of the object is like the tip of this contextual ‘intuitive cone’. Our inner activity continually oscillates along this scale spectrum, zooming in and zooming out rhythmically. At our intellectual scale, the spectrum we traverse feels to be merged together in a unitary act, and we simply experience it as the process of observing, thinking, attaining insights, and acting within a nebulous yet meaningful life context. Suppose we feel insulted by another person, for example. In that case, this influence deeper within the intuitive cone filters our thought-potential into a narrow channel where we can no longer objectively assess their statements, but rather feel forced to think about such statements in the most negative terms. Most of us accept the resulting thoughts at the tip as an unquestioned fact of existence and don’t discern how they could have been filtered differently if our inner activity had awakened within a deeper scale of emotional potential. Such a process of awakening can be called the cultivation of ‘equanimity’ in our soul life, which again cannot be accomplished by simply manipulating symbolic replicas at the tip of our intellectual scale.
Growing Into Our Shared Unknown Potential
Hopefully, it is now somewhat clear, at an experiential level, that there is no fundamental constraint that prevents us from consciously traversing the scales and probing their meaningful dynamics. At these deeper scales, we necessarily traverse meaningful qualities and dynamics that are shared across human souls. Very few, if any, souls would have perceived the same perceptions of the objects in our room and experienced the same thoughts about them as we did, but practically everyone knows what it is like to feel insulted and experience thoughts that iterate over the reverberations of that feeling. Likewise, all human souls share in certain temperamental qualities and character traits that shape their interests and behaviors. Yet we also have to admit that the more we extend our thinking and feeling into these deeper scales and traverse the spectrum, the more the experiential aspect becomes less lucid, less clear-cut, less easily surveyable, less calculable, etc.
That leads us to one key reason why the intellect ‘chooses’ this cubic prison for itself. It is the inconvenience and discomfort of extending into the deeper scales. Some people prefer to remain in a physical prison because it gives them a stable routine and guaranteed shelter, food, clothing, exercise, intellectual opportunities in the library, social exchange with somewhat like-minded souls, and perhaps even avenues for artistic and religious expression. Is it so different in our intellectual prison, from which we probe the meaning of existence? Here, we are guaranteed that our symbolic replicas can be easily surveyed, calculated, and that every next step can follow logically from the previous step through a fixed-rule system. In other words, our intellectual scale movements and transformations can practically resemble cellular automata from which complex (yet flattened) imaginative patterns emerge.
Returning to a chess metaphor, it is a well-known phenomenon that lower-rated players can hardly suspect the type of gameplay that unfolds at the highest levels. From the perspective of a 1000 ELO-rated player, it’s as if a 3000 ELO-rated player is involved in an entirely different game, pursuing lines and shuffling around pieces in ways that seem completely unintuitive. Such an intuitive discrepancy can be enough to convince the lower-rated player that it’s not even worth attempting to play the game at the levels of International and Grand Masters, where only complexity and confusion seem to reign. Instead, we low-rated players are most comfortable when the moves feel ‘intuitive’, that is, they follow routinely memorized patterns of decision and response. Then the calculations remain straightforward and somewhat effortless, like water flowing downhill. We don’t need to worry about stepping into unknown territory and dealing with the prospect of repeated inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders.
What the intellect fails to realize, however, is that this addiction to calculable comfort and convenience leads it into an asymptotic approach, like in Zeno’s paradox, where it keeps making steps toward the meaningful foundations of reality but never reaches them. No matter how fast the intellect (Achilles) moves around its imaginative replicas with the aid of computer technology, it can never catch the meaningful depth of its intuitive life (the tortoise). It only manages, at best, to incrementally subdivide an infinite distance between the content of its thinking and the intuitive movements that spawn such content. By avoiding the ‘mistakes and blunders’ of its cognitive process, the intellect never learns how to perfect that process. It’s telling how online chess software allows a ‘takeback’ option that is routinely used, due to lack of concentration, and how often people simply abandon the game when a takeback isn’t allowed. Such players don’t analyze their gameplay or work on their concentration within the game flow, but immediately move on to the next iteration of sloppy moves and proposed takebacks.
Likewise, the ‘private’ intellectual scale reinforces this takeback tendency in our imaginative process. It makes us feel like we can continue filtering feelings and thoughts from our imaginative palette in the most sloppy and disharmonious ways, and no matter what negative patterns feed back, we can simply wipe the slate clean in the next iteration and restart the sloppy process all over again with relatively few, if any, tweaks. It diminishes the incentive to remain concentrated in our imaginative process throughout the day and take note of how it is unfolding. Let's imagine we play a song on an instrument, for example, the piano, and we have a holistic intuition of how the song should unfold. Then we start playing the first measures, i.e., the intuition condenses through our soul life, stimulating symbolic images, which flow into our arms and hands, and the latter press against certain piano keys. When we observe that result, however, we sense that something is disharmonious; for example, the tempo feels rushed. That perception gives us feedback to slightly adjust our inner activity so that we can more perfectly bring the intuition to expression in the next iteration.
Normally, in our physical life, this feedback process occurs so seamlessly that we hardly pay any attention to it, although it’s trivial to reflect on this process if our attention is drawn toward it. In our imaginative life of spawning symbolic images to think through existential questions, on the other hand, we are so merged with the feedback process that it’s difficult to even observe. Plenty of souls would imagine they are being ‘gaslighted’ if we tried to direct their attention to such a process by which the flow of their precipitating thoughts continually testify to how they are conducting their subtle imaginative activity, i.e., whether they are lagging, rushing, too forceful, too rigid, too assumptive, too presumptive, too prejudicial, and so on. Indeed, who wants to perfect the skillful art of thinking when it feels to be an entirely private affair of little consequence to the ‘concrete world’? The easiest thing to sacrifice at the altar of the takeback mechanism is something we don’t even imagine exists. The art of thinking gets sacrificed by default out of ignorance of its higher potential.
When we do manage to filter our thoughts about life from the deeper scales of potential in unique ways, it is practically done at random as a sluggish process of trial and error. Any improvements in our process are stumbled upon blindly. It would be like moving our hands randomly over the piano keys and pressing down, hoping this strategy will somehow bring the pace of the song to the proper tempo. Either that or we rush from intellectual game to intellectual game and hope to stumble into ‘checkmates’ with our repertoire of memorized conceptual movements, calculating each next step along the way. Such an approach is what defines the ‘law of diminishing returns’, which is a “law” that only takes shape at the incremental intellectual scale. An alternative to this asymptotic approach to the meaningful foundations is what we have started doing here when exploring the imaginative process and its lawful constraints. It can be imagined as gradually oscillating ‘up and down’ between familiar experiences and replicas, on the one hand, and unknown intuitive streamlines of meaning, on the other.
The familiar concepts, instead of attempting to theoretically derive the intuitive streamlines from a linear and stepwise progression of thoughts, become like a set of interactive instructions for swimming in those streamlines. Our concepts become like an imaginative rehearsal for traversing the spectrum of transpersonal scales. Thus, we can rhythmically step across the horizon of familiar mental experiences into the unknown and back again. It is like we are gradually learning to explore hidden dimensions of our existence, which were always enfolded within the familiar dimensions, and thus also elucidate the complex happenings within the familiar flow. From the perspective of a 3000 ELO-rated player, the 1000 ELO gameplay is still very easily understood and, moreover, it feels intuitively transparent. It is the same situation when we awaken within the intuitive life we have always been living at the deeper scales. Such an awakening makes transparent the intellectual gameplay we were previously dreaming our way through.
“All knowledge of what is visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve.” (2)
With this vertical oscillating approach, we are simply aligning our conscious activity along the streamlines of the truthful experiential flow. Evolution has always been this process of moving between the known and unknown. The child only learns how to walk, speak, and think by crossing into the territory of crawling, babbling, and picturing without knowing what it is doing. The modern soul expects that by more and more refined combinations of familiar concepts, it can reach the sought-after ‘meaning of life’ without having to make a single step into the unknown. Yet we imbue life with meaning only when we leap from thinking about the inner realities to trying them on and rehearsing them. We can begin with small and humble steps, as we have tried to do here, yet these steps can already be felt as crossing into unknown potential. The latter is not some external environment or missing facts from our picture of reality, but it is what prompts us to ask: "What will become of me if I take this step? Will I still be ‘me’? Or will I awaken to a whole new dimension of my dreamy existence?"
Once we make such small steps into the unknown potential and back again, even our mechanical devices that normally dull our sensitivity to the inner flow of experience are primed to be redeemed. We can leverage such devices to fashion imaginative rehearsals for the inner process that their conventional use would otherwise drown out, as we are doing now. The content of the World, which previously felt to be flowing further and further into externality, begins to reverse its flow inward and become the content of our living imagination. We can know with inner certainty that the words we are reading are not the product of an LLM algorithm because the concepts feel focused from within a shared intuitive process. It is a process that we surely recognize at a deeper scale of our soul life, but could have never suspected from within the intellectual cube, let alone calculated from statistical associations of word usage. We will then never be convinced that the Biblical narrative can be imitated or surpassed by an algorithm, nor that the wider World we experience is the result of a powerful computer simulation. Thus, our inner compass is set due North, and the human soul reclaims the meaningful depth of existence as it consciously traverses the scales along which its experiential states stretch and hang.
CITATIONS:
(1) Elan Barenholtz, PH.D. - The Unspoken Word
https://elanbarenholtz.substack.com/p/the-unspoken-word
(2) Rudolf Steiner, GA 13 (III)