The Game Loop: Part 7 Meditation
Posted: Sat Feb 28, 2026 1:31 pm
The Game Loop
Part 7
Meditation
Part 7
Meditation
Google Doc version (easier to follow footnotes)
Part 1 Mental Pipelines
Part 2 Interleaved IO Flows I
Part 3 Interleaved IO Flows II
Part 4 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs I
Part 5 In Search of the Fundamental Inputs II
Part 6 Concentration
Part 7 Meditation
Previously, we saw how, through concentration of our input activity, it is possible to gain consciousness of inner factors of our existential flow that normally evade our awareness. These factors are present all the time; they shape the riverbed of our existential stream, but we flow through them dreamily until we attempt to resist their compulsions.
On the surface, it may look like concentration leads to a kind of paralysis of inner life. It is as if we press a single button on the gamepad and freeze in that posture for a prolonged time. Seen like this, it seems that we one-sidedly limit the manifoldness of our inner life and voluntarily stagnate into a single input. This analogy, however, implicitly assumes that we are already familiar with all available IO activities, which we forsake in exchange for keeping a single button pressed. Imagine that from the beginning of our life our hands have been fused to a game controller. The IO flows of our hands and the controller are entangled together, and we implicitly take the constraints of the controller elements to be the natural constraints of our will inputs. It would take some special effort if we are to differentiate the two flows. In this analogy, we should imagine that we can know our hands only through the sense of touch at our fingertips. If we simply let go of the controller, we ‘fall asleep’ – we lose consciousness of both the gamepad and our hand movements, since we can feel our hands only when touching something. In other words, maintaining the point of contact is crucial – it is only in this way that we have the conscious tactile feedback of what we are doing with our hands. So, we should imagine that we need to loosen our grip on the gamepad such that we subtly feel our finger touching the button, yet without losing contact altogether. Now we gradually develop finer sensitivity in our fingers. We try to experience the button-press so gently and attentively as if we try to feelingly differentiate to what extent the sensation is shaped by the geometry of the gamepad, and to what degree by our dim inputs. By not pressing the button habitually but gently gliding our finger over its surface, we become aware of the more intimate hand-flow, which has hitherto been forced to stream entirely within the riverbed of the controller.
It is difficult to grasp the weight of this analogy because it is difficult to imagine what it could be like not to know the palette of our hands IO. However, if we consider our thinking life – for example, our thinking in words – we can recognize that we are also operating through a kind of palette. We think in one or more languages, we have limited vocabulary, we utilize certain templated phrases, our thought stream funnels through the riverbed shaped by our opinions, ideas, preferences, likes and dislikes, hopes and fears, and so on. It is easy to understand that our intuitive life is formatted through the constraints of these factors. What is not so easy to understand, however, is what our intuitive existence could be like if we were to start unfusing from the constraints.
This unfusing can be attempted through many questionable methods, which constitute the above-mentioned letting go of the controls. Alas, the end result is that we either fall asleep (since we lose the conscious feedback to our dim intuitive inputs) or we surrender to the controller IO and only contemplate our free fall as a kind of pure observer. The latter approach splits our inner life into our ordinary cognitive experience sieved through the thinking IO palette on one hand, and a completely inexplicable dream-like experience on the other. Then, it is not surprising that one cannot find a bridge between these two flow-states, and the intellectual flow is always gnawed by the doubt whether the other flow is real or just an abnormal dream-like state. Instead, we should recognize that in the button-press there’s already something concealed of the hand IO, even though we may not yet know it in its fullness. By the same token, when we sustain a mental image, even though this concentrative activity operates through a constrained imaginative and conceptual palette, we should nevertheless feel that there’s something concealed in this experience: an unfamiliar1 aspect of our intuitive existence that presently manifests only through the well-trodden riverbed patterns of our everyday thinking and imagination.
Seen in this way, we’re hinted that a kind of balancing act is needed. We need to balance two seemingly opposite aspects of our inner life. Just as we cannot know the full spectrum of hands IO gestures by habitually pressing the gamepad buttons in the most varied rhythms and patterns (although this is a necessary preliminary step), so we cannot awaken within the more intimate intuitive flow through endless stacking of our familiar mental images within the picture-in-picture sub-flow – that is, by merely philosophizing about this deeper intuitive life. However, we cannot know that life by completely letting go of the controls either. We need the point of contact with the gamepad IO, because this is where the more intimate IO flow, even if in a constrained form, intersects with it. If we ignore the experience of the gamepad IO flow on the pretext that we’re seeking our freer hands IO, we’ll be looking in vain. We may dream about this hands IO flow, but we’ll never discover it as a tangible reality. Thus, we can only start from the point of contact. We should resist being consumed by the familiar constrained flow-patterns of the gamepad IO, but at the same time, we should not allow ourselves to lose the contact sensation and drift into a dream-like free fall.
Concentration is the act of sustaining a stable input through time and resisting the deterring forces that become known in the process. When this act is performed with an inner attitude seeking to liberate something of our inner life that has been hitherto known only through its constrained expressions, we can call it meditation. We immediately see that this inner attitude demands something that is not in the least popular in our modern culture. The person of our age lives with the conviction that they know themselves pretty well based on the bodily sensations and the uncontrollable torrents of mental images, steered by dim desires and compulsions. Yet, we can only attempt to discover a deeper aspect of our inner life if we cultivate the humility and openness that the self-reflection we have within the constrained IO flows may not be giving us proper intuition of such a deeper intuitive life, nor can this life be built out of mechanical combinations of our already constrained intuitive gestures. For example, regarding what was said above, one may say, “It’s conceivable that the language I think in and my vocabulary constitute a constrained palette through which my intuitive life is formatted, but my opinions, my likes and dislikes – these are not constraints – that’s me!” Yet, we can only approach the deeper intuitive experiences if we are willing to loosen from the grip of even such aspects of the existential flow. Even such intimate aspects of our character need to be resisted and differentiated from if we are to become aware of their riverbeds and how they ordinarily shape our free fall through existence.
It is not surprising that such a prospect makes us feel vulnerable and insecure. Our established sense of what existence is and what we are is threatened by the idea that this sense might reflect only a loose patchwork within a heavily constrained, as if stroboscopically aliased, flow-state. Logically speaking, it is obvious that when our inner flow is loosened from the heavy constraints, we should gain a more comprehensive intuitive orientation within the greater flow. Claiming otherwise would be like arguing that we know our hands-flow better while they are still rigidly fused to the gamepad. The sense of insecurity comes when we are worried that we may ‘lose ourselves’, and this is precisely why, in a healthy approach to the deeper aspects of our existential flow, our intuitive orientation should grow through the point of contact. Yes, we’ll inevitably have to make small steps into the unknown; we are bound to discover new aspects of our being while reworking old ones, but this holds for everything. We cannot know what bicycle riding feels like unless we push into the unknown. We cannot know what solving a math problem feels like if we are not willing to push into unfamiliar mental flow patterns. We cannot overcome a bad habit that has been shaping much of what we consider to constitute ‘me’, and expect to feel like the exact same person. So, our sense of being continuously transforms, whether we like it or not, except that in general this transformation is forced upon us by life’s stream. If it were up to us to decide, we might rather prefer that nothing ever changes about our sense of self and reality. In meditation, however, we need to take a completely conscious attitude about this transformation. We are fully aware that we cannot depend on chance for our inner metamorphosis to take a meaningful direction, and thus we seek to consciously accommodate it. We should continuously peel the layers of entanglement, yet not with the intent to simply ‘fly away’ into the void, but to awaken within a deeper intuitive IO flow that has so far been concealed in our constrained expressions in a kind of muted, or germinal condition. When meditation is sought with this attitude, we have the experience – which may look paradoxical at first – that even though it seems peeling the layers of constraints entails losing ourselves, by awakening within the deeper hitherto constrained aspect of our inner life we in fact find ourselves – we grow into a more comprehensive flow of existence that has so far experienced itself only in a kind of a more limited special case.
When we’re learning to ride a bicycle, we cannot put our finger on the dynamic flow state that we strive to achieve. We do not see that balance as something that we can simply ‘take’ and ‘put on’, but rather, it is a dynamic input activity that continuously corrects itself based on the stacking feedback-sensations. We try to apply the instructions as best as we can, yet in the beginning, we completely overshoot in one direction – we lean too much – then we lean too much in the other by overcompensating, and so on. In a similar way, even though meditative activity begins with concentration, this doesn’t mean that the mental image at our focus is the point of balance. This balance is a dynamic flow-state, just like bicycle riding. It is not a point in space that we settle in, as if in a static equilibrium. We need to gain sensitivity for the ways in which we are nudged in one direction or another and gently ‘lean’ our concentrated flow to compensate. When we fail to resist the nudges or we overcompensate, our inner flow metamorphoses through oscillatory patterns. We can illustrate this through our familiar octant space.
When we focus on a point within our phenomenal volume2, it should feel as if it is placed within the full spectrum of the primary flow – that is, we’re not aiming to drift into fantasy (octants III, IV, VII, VIII) and lose all bearings of the bodily spectrum of the flow. We surely need to resist being sucked into the distracting sensory and somatic IO flows (octants I, II, V, VI), but we nevertheless have to feel the point of contact with their overall spectrum. In a sense, the point of concentration should feel ‘cerebral’, as if it rests within bodily head space3.
The activity-receptivity axis has to be balanced in such a way that all our activity should be focused on supporting the point of concentration, while at the same time, we relax the surrounding phenomenal volume. This is needed if we are to be receptive to the imaginative and intuitive nudges. Excessive force applied throughout our whole inner volume leads to rigidity. We become paralyzed in our inner flow because we want all phenomena to feel under our control. However, the goal of the meditative concentration is precisely to become aware of such factors that are beyond our control, and through which we have hitherto been free-falling. So we are not to simply override the totality of the primary flow, but assume a centered and stabilized flow-stance. It is against this stabilized flow that the periphery of the total primary flow impresses and becomes known.
Regarding the axis of temporal integration, it seems that concentration leads us ‘down’ into shorter and shorter operational intuitive spans (splitting the now moment), yet the fact that we try to maintain this concentration through time means that we also support a longer-term, strategic intuitive curvature, within which the former must be musically embedded.
Thus, in this balancing act, we focus on a point at the threshold of somatic and mental sensations4; we actively sustain the point of concentration, yet we relax the peripheral phenomenal volume; we aim to ‘split the now moment’ into higher and higher strobing rates, such that our inner flow feel smooth and free of interruptions, yet we feel how this act is musically embedded in our ongoing meditative effort through time. Stated like this, everything might still feel very abstract and complicated. It is like being given a whole bunch of instructions on how to ride a bicycle: hold on to the handlebars, lean your body to keep balance, and so on. For the ‘uninitiated’ in bicycle riding, it seems like the experience is one of constant intellectual calculations and erratic supervision of the most varied rules. Yet we know that once we ‘get it’, it no longer feels that complicated. We are now flowing through a holistic experience. We also understand that we cannot simply impose this dynamic flow-balance on another person. We can only convey certain indications of it, yet it is up to them to ‘get it’.
So, granted it is clear that we’re not speaking here of some abstract metaphysical theories but of completely practical experiential guidelines, let’s try to look more closely at some of the details, while, of course, remembering at all times that ‘getting it’ does not consist of being satisfied by the contemplation of some clever arrangement of philosophical mental images, but in approaching a specific dynamic flow-state. Let’s consider the way in which we can move our focus among the color sensations in our visual field. I can gaze at my keyboard, then switch to my desk lamp, and so on. But we can also ‘zoom out’ and try to encompass the totality of our visual field as a panorama, without trying to focus on anything in particular. We should resist any movement of the eyes and our gaze snapping into this or that partial sensation. Our gaze is relaxed and unmoving, and we try to encompass as much as possible of our peripheral vision. This feels like our ray of attention expands into a spotlight, striving to illuminate and feel the whole field of visual sensations. We should not expect that this expanded attention should feel like the sum total of the crisp, focused experiences that we may have by focusing individually on the sensations. Rather, our visual field may now feel a little defocused, as if we look through the color sensations. With this experiment we get the first hint that concentration can be understood in a wider sense. If we attempt to sustain this monolithic encompassing of the visual field, at least for a few seconds, without any movement of the eyes, jumping of attention, and interruptions, we can still call it concentration, even though it doesn’t feel like looking into a single point in phenomenal space. The feeling of being concentrated now comes from the fact that we experience a certain stability in our inner flow. It is as if we have assumed an experiential vantage point in the here and now, that feels like a barycenter5 of potential visual experiences that we normally go through by jumping from one to another.
The holistically beheld visual field now feels like a palette of anchor points against which we can stack mental and memory images. For example, from my expanded visual field, I can gradually contract toward the visual sensation of the keyboard and guide the stacking of the most varied mental and memory images that are intuitively compatible with the perception. I can stack the frames of scenes (or their verbal descriptions) exemplifying how the keyboard can be used, how it got on my desk, and so on.
We can also experiment with other sensory phenomena. For example, we can try to gradually expand the spotlight of tactile sensations until we feel our whole body from head to toe simultaneously, without focusing on any particular region. Even further, we can try to feel all sensory (sight, hearing, etc.) and somatic phenomena simultaneously. We shouldn’t be worried that this totality feels somewhat blurry. What we are after is to reach this specific intuitive sensation of beholding our phenomenal flow from within a deeper barycenter, such that, from within this hub-like inner stance, all bodily phenomena feel simultaneously present within our monolithic spotlight of attention (there should be no jumping of our attention), which has now further expanded into more like a sphere. Sensations in front and behind, left or right, should be felt simultaneously in this sphere of attention, without the need to switch from one to the other. Even if we cannot get this perfect and stop our attention from twitching around, we should at least feel the momentary passing through the state of balance, just like an oscillating pendulum regularly passes, even if only momentarily, through its point of balance.
We should not be trying to see this barycenter as some specific point in phenomenal space and stare at it. This would simply break our holistic immersion, and we would be zooming into a very particular region of imaginative sensations. The barycenter is only an artistic expression for the intuitive sense of inner stability and centeredness in the here and now that our experiential flow assumes in relation to all the sensations that fill our phenomenal volume and ‘fight for attention’.
Now we can ask whether something similar can also be achieved for our thinking life. Instead of being dragged through a specific tunnel of mental image stacking and jumping helplessly from one to another, can we find a more stable vantage point from within which we can resist the nudges and even grasp them in a more encompassing way? The answer is yes; however, there are also certain differences compared to centering ourselves within the sphere of bodily phenomena. Bodily and sensory phenomena precipitate across the horizon with little regard for our inputs. They are part of the stacking existential frames of the total flow, while our inputs seem to modulate only some aspects of it (such as the picture-in-picture sub-flow). It is this sense of consistency and independence (from our inputs) of the primary flow that makes it feel like we are dealing with something tangible that is simply ‘there’ (in contrast to our volatile mental images). The sensations are there on their own, lighting up and fading as CRT pixels. When zooming into this or that sensation, we modulate what feels in focus within the stacking frames of existence – that is, the images of the keyboard and the lamp are part of my frames with little regard to my inputs (except if I close my eyes or look away) but I can use my inputs to feel one or the other as the center of my experience in the next frame.
By moving the focus, zooming in and out, in the course of our life we have gradually developed a certain intuitive orientation for navigating the spectrum of bodily sensations. To illustrate this, we can make two experiments. First, we may focus on a toe (not visually but on its innerly experienced bodily ‘pixels’), then zoom out to feel our whole bodily space, and then zoom in our attention toward the sensation at the top of our head. In this case, the zoomed-out sensation contextualizes and relates the two more localized ones6. In the second experiment, we move our zoomed-in ray of attention gradually and continuously (without ‘lifting the pen’ and skipping ahead) along our body – we start from the toe, move along the ankle, the calf, the thigh, and so on, until we reach the top of our head. We should notice that even though we are myopically focused on a point-like volume of sensations, we nevertheless also feel the zoomed-out intuition as if hovering in the background context. It serves as a kind of compass which gives us the sense of North – we know that by moving up our leg we are getting closer to the target, and not farther away. Without this contextual intuition we would be as if lost in a forest – we would have to steer our point of attention randomly in hope of stumbling upon the head sensations.
In this way, we can get a much more intimate feeling for what we call space. Unlike the completely abstract definitions of space (like “three axes orthogonal to each other”), we can feel that what we call space is really our intuition for the volume of bodily phenomena and how we can move our focus within it, zoom in and out. When we speak of outer space, even without noticing it, we simply extend this intuition of bodily pixels beyond our skin. Just like we can feel the forms of our face with our hands, and have intuition about where the nose is, where the ear is, and how we can move from the sensations of one to the other, so we grasp the wider space as a kind of extension of our bodily-space intuition. To have spatial intuition about the chair and the table is like feeling them as part of our expanded bodily-space, except that we do not feel tactile pixels in that region but only imaginative, as if our imagined hands can stretch infinitely and expand to fill the forms of wider space or touch them from all sides7.
When we consider our psychic life, however, we have far less intuitive orientation. We are stacking mental images all the time – whether against sensory phenomena or entirely in our imagination when we build scenes of past experiences or rehearse future ones – but most of the time we free fall completely myopically through these tunnels, with very little orientation about where we are and in what direction we are moving. If we stop and introspect at any moment throughout the day, and ask, “How did I reach the thoughts I’ve just been thinking?” we’ll often see that we can barely tell. We have simply been free-falling through a tunnel of stacking mental images. Similarly, we can hardly tell what images we will be beholding in a minute from now. Through meditative concentration we aim to gradually increase this orientation. We need to resist our random walk in the forest and discover a compass sense. Yet, if we expect that we can do that by simply extrapolating our spatial intuition of bodily phenomena, we’ll encounter endless confusion. It is not difficult to understand why this is so. When I transition from my thoughts on politics to thinking about a math problem, do I move up, down, left, right? Of course, we can draw mind maps or even the octant space, but these are only symbolic images representing our intuitions for affinity and relations of different IO flows. Thus, one of the greatest challenges is to overcome our desire to navigate the flow of becoming by using our picture-in-picture sub-flow as its literal mini-map. Such a thing could indeed be possible when, for example, we use GPS navigation (this is similar in nature to the recursive gallery in the previous part if taken in its literal aspect).
Here, when we follow the contours of a road on the map with our attention, we perform essentially the same inner movements as when we glide our focus along the actual road in the greater volume of space, except they differ in scale. We can indeed navigate without ever lifting our gaze off the screen (assuming the map is up-to-date). This illustrates the general mood of the intellectual life in our age. Most of our thinking manipulates such mini-maps in the picture-in-picture flow. It is simply assumed that anything can be understood in this way because the greater reality is believed to be only a scaled version of our symbolic mini-map intuition. This is very convenient because we can feel the wider space as compressed into a smaller volume that we can easily encompass, zoom, and traverse in our imagination. We believe that even if we never look beyond the mini-map, we can know practically everything about the greater flow, only up to a scale factor. This approach, however, is a great obstacle when we try to enter more intimately into the experience at the horizon. There are two main reasons for this.
First, we can no longer separate the usage of the mini-map from the process of map-making. In a way, every map is already obsolete by the moment it is printed. It represents a past snapshot that no longer reflects new changes. Many of us have used GPS navigation only to find ourselves in road conditions that do not correspond to what is depicted on the map. Thus, even for this trivial case, we can see that navigating by only looking at a map can easily lead us into conflict with the wider flow. This problem becomes even more significant if we expect that we can navigate the inner flow by only gazing at a mental map – that is, by proxying our inputs and outputs through a theoretical model of reality within the picture-in-picture flow. Our total inner flow is in constant metamorphosis, and all mental images that precipitate across the horizon are already obsolete maps – they are already memory images of past states of existence. So, if we insist on navigating the inner flow by staring at a map, we’ll always be a few steps behind the real-time reality, and any input activity that we base entirely on the map may no longer be relevant.
Second, the mental map images can no longer be thought of as mere scaled replicas of the map-making process. If we try to do that, we end up precisely trying to find our inputs as part of the output (hands trying to draw themselves, etc.). Habitually, we look upon the map as a kind of mirror reflection of the greater process of reality. This makes us believe that we do not miss anything essential while we gaze only at the map, just like we do not miss anything essential if we look at everything in a mirror – the sensations are the same, only flipped. Such is the general attitude in today’s scientific thinking. We seek the mental pipeline through which we can generate and animate the map, and then only check it against the territory. Any discrepancies are only feedback for refining the generation rules and their parameters, such that the error is reduced. Thus, it is believed that there’s nothing about the metamorphic process of reality that cannot be mirrored and known as a scaled pipeline of stacking mental images. If we transfer this attitude to our meditative experience, we unknowingly try to navigate the flow of metamorphosis by keeping our gaze glued to the picture-in-picture flow, as we do with the GPS. We try to build a map of reality within our imagination by using concrete pipeline rules, and then only refine it in case it clashes with the territory. We want to see there the arrow-marker and think, “So this is me – my process of existence. When I provide such and such input, the me-marker moves through the map. By looking at that marker I know everything there is to know about my existence. Everything is faithfully contained there.” Clearly, such an approach remains completely blind to the real-time intuitive process that speaks these words and tries to locate a faithful up-to-a-scale-factor image of itself. Through bursts of mental images, we may remember our own past states, or try to simulate on the map what this real-time process could be for someone else, but our own real-time remembering or simulating activity remains in the blind spot.
To overcome this indirection, we need to gain more intimate awareness of the actual process of map-making and simulation. We need to gradually overcome the conviction that only the maps we can instinctively paint within the picture-in-picture flow through mathematical and philosophical pipelines count as knowledge. This is what we have attempted with the vowel exercise and the movement of the ray of attention. It is easy to feel that our sound-morphing inputs have a much more in-phase relation with the output mental sound compared to the relation of our walking inputs and the GPS marker. This still doesn’t mean that our inner voice inputs ‘look like’ the mental sound outputs. We never reach a point where the essential nature of our intuitive input activity can be found in the output field of receding phenomena, but we asymptotically strive to move into a deeper barycenter, where the phenomenal metamorphoses of our existential flow feel more and more in-phase with intuitive movements. Meditative concentration is our attempt to always move in that asymptotic direction. Just like resisting being dragged by sensory perceptions leads us to the holistic sense of bodily space and the innumerable ways in which we may zoom into particular sensory experiences, so resisting our flow being drawn into this or that tunnel of picture-in-picture stacking begins to build a holistic intuitive sense for the ways in which our psychic flow can stream. Just like the way refocusing our attention through bodily sensations compounds into our intuition of space, so the growing psychic intuitive orientation results in a space-like feeling, except that we no longer try to decompose everything along three cardinal axes. In both the psychic and the bodily case, this space-like intuition comes not from abstract ideas about how reality works and how many dimensions it has, but directly from our ‘thickening’ contextual intuition for the way our stream of becoming can metamorphose from state to state. For example, if we introspect, we may find that in our daily life we have a handful of general topics that attract the tunnels of our mental imaging. These could be things like work, family, a relationship with a friend, a hobby, a philosophical or scientific interest, and so on. In our ordinary life we tunnel through these topics by freefalling thought them and switching context without much awareness. When we begin to pay attention, however, we do begin to develop a certain intuitive orientation. We cannot say that one topic-attractor is here or there in space, but we certainly can feel, “I’m now under the influence of this topic. Yet I feel the potential also for the others. I know ‘where’ they are, how I can consciously ‘move’ into one of their attractors, and stack mental images within the corresponding riverbed.”
Even though we can express aspects of that space-like intuition through mind maps or octant spaces, there’s still a great degree of indirectness there; we should not imagine that we can navigate by staring at the mini-map. Left on the mini-map may no longer correspond to left in phenomenal space. If we are tempted to take our mind maps as spatial realities, we’re sucked into a very particular picture-in-picture stacking process, our immersion breaks, and we lose the holistic intuitive sense of the primary flow. This doesn’t mean that any symbolic mapping of our inner process is useless. It is only that our focus should always be on the map-making process – what the maps artistically express about our intuitive orientation within the flow of being – instead of believing that the map images in the picture-in-picture flow represent how the full reality ‘looks like’. If we keep these caveats in mind, we can metaphorically illustrate the meditative process with the octant space:
When we begin our meditative effort, we usually proceed from a rather chaotic daily rhythm. When we turn attention to our inner flow, we quickly see how we’re within a storm of memory and mental images, bodily sensations, and feelings. We cannot instill order within this turbulent environment by fighting the diverse IO flows head-on. This leads to exhaustion in no time. We capitulate and fall asleep. Instead, we should contract toward a deeper barycenter. In a metaphorical sense, we need to become ‘smaller’ than all the deterring streams, as if to ‘pass between their drops’. To clarify this, let’s approach it gradually. Consider how the production of our bodily voice is achieved by passing our breath through the larynx. We can start by producing a continuous vowel sound. Then we can try to only whisper the sound. Now the vocal cords are not vibrating, but we only hear our breath as it is modulated through the rest of the vocal tract. Then we can imagine that we are very tired, and even whispering feels like an insurmountable task. We speak the words in our mind as if we intend to sound them aloud, but feel the parts of the vocal tract only barely reaching the threshold of physical movement. Next, we can try to feel that even our mental words are very heavy and require too much effort to produce. Now our inner voice maybe only hums the first sounds of the words, unable to complete them. What we reach in this way is a kind of inner, intuitive ‘breathing’ – a subtler input activity, comparable to the quiet movement of attention, through which we ordinarily animate our inner voice, but now barely reaches the threshold of mental audibility. We should be careful not seek this subtle intuitive movement as some animating process that lies flat in the output field. If we do that, we’re bound to soon mumble from the background, “I don’t see any such intuitive movement; that’s just an abstract speculation.” The reality of what we speak of can only be found if we are willing to awaken to precisely this mumbling activity and find ourselves able to modulate it. For example, we can try to mentally sing that objection in different intonations, then sing it slower, then whisper it, then make it barely audible. If we do that conscientiously, we cannot fail to realize what the reality of the inner animating movements is. Clearly, if we immediately object also to the just-proposed experiment, we once again return to instinctive background mumbling, which remains completely in the blind spot of our intuitive life.
This is an example of how a more intimate aspect of our input activity can be unfused from the palette of verbal mental patterns. Even though conceptually it is very simple, this can be a very powerful experience when we experiment with it for the first time. For the longest time, we may have been living as if our hammering inner words are the ‘fundamental atoms’ of psychic life. But now we awaken at a level where we can animate the same words in different ways or even only feel the nudges of meaningful impulses bursting to express something of our intuitive contextual flow, but not going as far as becoming mentally audible. This can be seen as an extension to the vowel exercise, where we try to live with the intent to produce a continuous inner sound, yet allowing it to reach only the threshold of mental audibility. One way we can do this is by modulating the ‘volume knob’ of our inner voice. We produce the mental sound audibly and then gradually soften it until we no longer produce any inner sound but only feel the intent to do so. Then we can increase the volume again, and so on. Here too, it is important to maintain the point of contact. We cannot know our innermost intuitive movements ‘in themselves’. Instead, we make them subtler and subtler, yet even when the volume is ‘all the way down’, we still feel we contribute some ‘buzzing’ phenomena down the receding imaginative flow. In fact, we may feel that in this state we awaken to a whole new stratum of subtle inner activity that is normally deafened by its fusion with the audible mental sounds. With this we do not suggest that verbal thinking is obsolete and should be abandoned. It is only that the way we grasp it gradually shifts. We come to see it as a kind of intuitive symbolic art through which we give expression to a stratum of inner life that we become more and more conscious of, and which our ordinary thinking normally describes in an instinctive and dream-like way.
In this way, we see that our approach to meditation is somewhat different compared to many popular views. Most people see meditation as intractable because they cannot stop their thinking. Here, however, we see that we do not try to stop our thinking in the trivial sense. This thinking is like a heavy train with great inertia. If we try to stop it head-on, we’re simply run over. So, we do not fight the inertia but start by playing along with it. We gradually modulate it. For example, instead of fighting our inner flow, we can start by speaking to ourselves, “Alright, I won’t fight my inner stream, but I’ll flow along with it. I want to clearly behold the galleries that the inner process, which I barely have control over, leads me through. I’ll attend to my inner voice as it describes the intuitive and feeling galleries that I traverse.” Then, after flowing along with our usual stream for a while, we can say, “I won’t stop thinking of what I feel compelled to think about, but I’ll modulate the thoughts into a melody, I’ll sing them. Or I’ll turn the volume down and still flow along the same riverbed but by only feeling the barely audible mental hum, while trying to be more aware of the stratum of inner life that the words would ordinarily depict.” Thus, we do not try to control the inner process right away, but gradually loosen it from the rigid riverbed constraints. Our skills to consciously direct the stream will also come, but we start with small steps.
Once we become more familiar and comfortable with this more intimate, and now increasingly liberated, intuitive movement, we can focus it into a point. We can imagine the screen of our mind’s eye as a membrane with a small pinhole in it. Then we try to feel how the ‘sound waves’ of our inner speech can be focused and pass through the pinhole. It’s like there’s a listener (or a microphone) at the pinhole and we want to communicate all our inner sound to them, without dissipating any in the periphery (like a magnifying glass focusing sunrays, but for sound). Next, we should loosen the speech forms, turn the volume knob down, and feel how it is the subtler intuitive movement that is funneled through the pinhole. It is as if we breathe out through the pinhole. Conversely, when we breathe in, it is as if we draw the air through the pinhole. However, the image of the air, the membrane, and the pinhole are all only ‘crutches’ that help us assume a specific ‘flow-shape’ of our most intimate intuitive activity (which animates all those images). Thus, it is not so much about what we imagine, but becoming aware of what we do with our innermost intuitive movements in order to imagine.
Although, ideally, our physical breath should be synchronized with our inner movements, we should not be trying to use the former as a tool for inducing some altered state of consciousness, as is done in various breathwork techniques (many of them based on some form of hyperventilation). Our whole being is invested in the subtle inner movement. Physical breath is brought into harmony with it, yet feels relaxed within the environment. A simple way to check if we make the distinction is that we should be able to perform the intuitive breathing through the pinhole even when our physical breath is held.
At this point, it still feels as if we are ‘here’ and funneling our attention through a point ‘over there’ on the screen of our mind’s eye. The next step would be to become more and more focused on the movement of attention as it sieves through the pinhole, while relaxing our grip on whatever happens in the phenomenal space in front, behind, and around the pinhole. It is as if we can have tight, conscious feedback, with cerebral-like intensity, only at the point where our attention is squeezed through the pinhole. Everything else is still there in the periphery, but we resist being sucked into the corresponding riverbeds. The more we are able to sustain this concentration and relax the periphery – including our bodily sensations and the implicit sense of our body form, except at the point of contact – the more the sense that we are ‘looking’ at something dissolves. What remains at the center of our experience is the flow-shape of our intuitive becoming in the here and now. If we try to see the pinhole, we immediately polarize and feel as if we are looking at a point within phenomenal space from within a secret vantage point (we basically replicate the way looking through our eyes feels). With our intuitive breathing of attention through the pinhole, it is as if with every inbreath we strive to sink in an even deeper barycentrically focused state, gradually coming to feel not as squeezing through a distinct point in front of us, but through the unseen barycenter of our being (the vantage point) in the here and now. With every outbreath, we relax and let go of all the entanglements that nudge us away from the barycentric flow.
We cannot see this strived-for barycentric state as some output phenomena and reach for it, as we can reach for food. Instead, we feel a certain openness and trust that if we yearn to sacrifice our present oscillatory flow-state, we are ‘making room’ for the anticipated future state. This state doesn’t approach us from left or right. It’s rather like gradual attunement to a flow-state of different ‘frequencies’. In both the inbreath and the outbreath, our whole focus of existence strives to deepen within the infinitesimal threshold-point where the unknown future that we push toward becomes a past image – a point that is approached asymptotically (splitting the now moment), yet cannot be stared at as some point in phenomenal space, with ‘the past’ on one side and ‘the future’ on the other. As long as we try to picture the anticipated state within the picture-in-picture flow as something that we can simply overlay on top of our present sense of being, or we simply chase phenomena as they sink into the past, we stay oscillating around the infinitely thin threshold between what has not yet become and what has.
As previously noted, such concentrative effort may seem like leading in a completely myopic state, where we experience the flow through a high strobing rate, but completely lose any sense of extension in time. The facts of experience, however, show quite the opposite. To understand this, we only need to realize that all sense of extension in time is present in the here and now. When we think intellectually about the past or the future, we still experience a picture-in-picture flow in the present. When I slowly count to ten, and I’m currently at five, I experience only the sound of ‘five’ in the here and now, but I nevertheless have a clear temporal intuition about how I have reached my present state and where I am going. Thus, the sense of temporal extension comes not because we reach beyond the here and now into speculative dimensions of time, but because we become much more aware of the intuitive curvature of the flow as it sieves through the pinhole. For this reason, within the meditative state, we gradually gain consciousness not only of chaotic momentary nudges but of various IO flows that have their stable expression through time, such as a trait of character, a goal, a desire, and so on. At this stage we do not yet know the true essence of these IO flows (the concepts for them are still only intellectual handles), but a negative-like impression within our flow of becoming. We grasp them through the way they modify our concentrative intent, like the clay artist may not directly see someone pushing their hand, but feel the push and recognize how the intended shape is modified. Thus, the temporally extended IO flows are recognized through the consistency and persistence of the elastic pushes and pulls they exercise. The musical intersection of these IO flows is depicted in the octant space animation above as the gradual expansion of our stabilized flow. The key, however, is that this expansion does not simply give us a greater palette of sensations that we jump about with our attention. Our focus remains unbroken, and from within this barycentric state, the metamorphoses of our inner flow start to make greater sense. In the centered and expanding phenomenal volume we begin to intuitively recognize the impressions of the most varied flow-lines within which our ordinary free fall is normally embedded.
When we reach such a stabilized flow-state for the first time, so that we no longer feel helplessly dragged by the manifold IO flows, we can recognize a kind of a tipping point. In our ordinary thinking life, we always need the support of bodily sensations and hammering mental and memory images. Our sense of being gravitates around them and needs their support, just like a book needs the support of the table, the table the support of the Earth. But what is the Earth supported on? This depicts the kind of inner transformation that we experience as we pass the tipping point. Now we no longer seek certainty by chasing and grabbing at the stacking sensory and mental phenomena as if trying to erect our existence on their foundation, but feel buoyantly supported within the immediately given flow of becoming. The receding flow now becomes a tight feedback depicting the consequences of our innermost intuitive activity, the way it is embedded in the contextual flow, and how they interfere. As such, the mental sub-flow now feels organically one with the wider primary flow. They are still distinguishable, yet they are now grasped as ‘spectral bands’ of the total phenomenal flow.
This is not surprising. Even according to physical science, there’s one World process and our inner process can only be a part of it. It is only that now we can experience it as such, instead of feeling as a distinct mind standing with its thinking process outside of reality and philosophizing about it. Unlike mystical contemplation, however, we do not remain passive within this flow process. Our intuitive becoming no longer feels like hammering discontinuous mental words and symbols, but rather, our gentle intuitive movements are akin to the smooth movements of aircraft control surfaces (imagine sticking your hand out of a moving car window and tilting it, thus feeling the air resistance and deflection). By gently leaning our concentrated attention into this or that intuitive direction we transform the way our becoming is embedded in the contextual flow, which results in the experience of corresponding deflecting forces. Reciprocally, our intuitive activity deflects something of the general flow. All of this finds its phenomenal consequences in the stacking frames of the total flow of existence. We can again make an analogy with the video feedback metaphor:
Our inner leaning is like moving the camera. The actual camera and its movements cannot be found on the screen, but the consequences of these movements immediately impress in the compounding image flow. However, our inputs do not single-handedly shape the entirety of the receding phenomenal flow. Rather, they produce a kind of modulation over the wider contextual stream. Just like with the seismograph, the trace (which is a symbol for our total compounding phenomenal volume) is an image not only of our own modulating inputs but of the total complicated inertial interference. As such, what is of value is not so much the concrete perceptual consequences of these modulations but how they symbolically convey something of the inertial riverbed within which our intuitive movements are embedded and elastically constrained (just like the seismograph trace can be thought of as symbolically conveying something about the inertial interference).
Even though through this subtle leaning we are no longer thinking verbally (rather, we gently steer the intuitive stream, which otherwise animates our inner voice, and tightly feel for the resulting deflections), the experience is nevertheless completely meaningful. It can be said that by leaning in this or that intuitive direction, we feel the condensed meaning of what we could have thought in words, were we to allow our inner flow be immersed in the corresponding riverbed where the word sounds would be produced sequentially. Our goal, however, is not simply to think the same old ideas, only faster and more efficiently, by skipping the inner verbalization (like how the various methods of speed-reading increase performance by resisting the slow inner verbalization of the text and instead grasping it in the way we ‘read’ paintings). The value comes from the fact that by resisting the linear thinking riverbeds for a while, we can gain deeper intuition of the wider, subtler riverbed within which our inner metamorphoses unfold. The attention that is otherwise consumed by the free fall through mental images of bodily existence is now liberated, unfused, and capable of grasping subtler aspects of the contextual flow.
These kinds of experiences are fairly accessible to anyone in our age. Some readers may discover this flow-state very soon after they start experimenting in that direction. For others, it may take longer. However, when we reach that experience, we may find that it becomes difficult to replicate it later on. We continue meditating, yet somehow we cannot reach the same intensity and revelatory wonder that we experienced the first time. It is as if we had a stroke of ‘beginner’s luck’, and now we wonder how we achieved that. The reason for this is precisely because we secretly try to replicate the experience. Influenced by our well-established cognitive habits, our meditations become a subtle attempt to remember the original experience. In other words, we once again try to support our inner flow on the receding phenomena, instead of seeking the deeper nature of the flow that we are modulating and within which our existence is embedded.
The barycentric flow-state is not something that we can put our finger on and summon on demand. In a way, we need to discover it afresh each time, in new and deeper forms. This, in fact, holds for everything in our flow of becoming. Just because I rode a bicycle yesterday, it is not absolutely guaranteed that I’ll be able to do so tomorrow. However, since we are able to re-modulate most daily activities quite easily, we’re left with the impression that we can manifest them on demand. The nature of the barycentric flow is such that there’s no ‘final version’ of it. We do not ‘get it’ once and then have it for all time. Even if in meditation we feel to be in such a flow-state, there are always other, deeper aspects of the flow of becoming that even our present meditative experience is still free-falling through, and which can be differentiated and known. Thus, we always need to approach the meditative experience anew, as if we’re always looking for a new stage of bicycle riding, a new ‘aha!’ moment of ‘getting it’. Yet we also shouldn’t quickly assume that just because we had an imaginative flash reflecting an intuitive insight about the dynamics of a certain IO flow, we have now ‘left it behind’. The recognition of the various IO effects compounding in the receding phenomenal flow is certainly the first, and absolutely necessary step, but this doesn’t mean that we are now free from their inertial dynamics. This would be like believing that just because we recognize a certain pattern in the seismograph’s trace, the corresponding inertial forces have been completely overcome and now lie down in the paper. Our mastery over the deterring forces is proven not by casting them into images and believing that we stand ‘above’ them, but by developing the intuitive orientation and the strength of will, such that we can adequately navigate them whenever we encounter their inertial deflections.
Hopefully, we should now have a better grasp on the way concentration grows into meditation. In concentration, we stabilize our inner flow by focusing on a mental image or sensation that we are more or less familiar with. Concentration becomes meditation when we assume a specific mood and attitude – one of humility, openness, and trust. Only through such an attitude we can consciously seek a state that we do not yet know from experience. As long as we approach the exercises with the attitude that we already know all the puzzle pieces and what intuitive inputs are needed to move them around, we’ll be expecting only some new arrangement that we hope would be the ‘true’ one. The proper inner stance, however, is one in which we continuously strive to outgrow ourselves, to loosen our present rigidity and accommodate a deeper barycentric flow-state from the unknown future.
Even if we understand all of this, there could be something that feels out of place, especially for those who have developed some scientific intuition. The concern can be expressed in the following way: “I don’t deny that it is possible to resist the usual existential free fall and gain awareness of unsuspected ‘input muscles’, allowing the navigation of the inner flow in novel ways. What I want to understand, however, is how reality works. The meditative experience leads to a state with more and more input degrees of freedom since we emerge from the fusion with the rigid channels of our ordinary free fall. Metaphorically speaking, if we need a button or a stick for all these inputs, we’ll end up with an exceedingly complex gamepad.”
“Such a complex gamepad would need correspondingly complex intelligence to operate. I don’t deny that such an intelligence and the accompanying inner experience could be possible, but this certainly cannot be considered to lead us closer to the essence of the World process. According to my scientific intuition, the grounds of reality should be simple and elegant. A highly complex intelligence can only be the emergent result of the simple foundations. Thus, developing the finer means of inner navigation may be valuable in certain psychological ways, but it leads in the opposite direction from the foundations of reality. We gain the intelligence and degrees of freedom only in expense of growing in complexity, and thus farther and farther away from the foundations of reality.”
Even though such a concern is justified, it only arises while we’re still busy philosophizing about what we describe here. As we enter the actual experiences, we discover that the contradiction has its very natural resolution, which allows us to comprehend what intelligence is in a very different way compared to the dominant computational view. We’ll attempt to illustrate this through another metaphor in the next part.
Keynotes:
Meditation entails an inner attitude of humility, openness, and trust – even faith – that we can not only technically resist the elastic inertial forces of our contextual flow (as if to prove how strong we are), but discover an unsuspected deeper existential flow-stance.Such a new inner flow-stance cannot be reached by brute force or mechanically applying our familiar flow-deflecting gestures in certain patterns and combinations. Instead, we patiently concentrate our input forces, such that the intuitive life constrained within them can be liberated, and we can awaken within their native stratum of inner dynamics.The liberation of this deeper intuitive flow proceeds through the point of contact. We do not drift into fantastic dream states, nor do we simply surrender to our constrained perspective of the primary flow. Every step into the deeper intuitive life symmetrically elucidates something of our everyday constrained flow that we unfuse from.Once we begin to tame down our fragmentary pipelining of intellectual mental images, we begin to experience our intuitive life as a kind of continuous steering. We intuitively lean in a meaningful direction, and this immediately has some effect on the receding phenomenal flow.We pass a tipping point, and now our thirst for knowledge of existence grows beyond the narrow confines of modelling a scaled replica of the World process within the picture-in-picture sub-flow. Instead, our knowing life is now organically one with the experience of the primary flow. Our knowledge now becomes experiential and practical – the growing intuition of the primary flow is now of the nature of a life-skill that can only be developed by practice and experience. We silently comprehend how our inner movements ripple through the receding phenomenal flow, how they are resisted or assisted by the contextual flow, and how we can meaningfully navigate this flow-scape, without getting stuck in onscillatory patterns, or being sucked in by attractors, where we helplessly witness the stacking of topical mental images.The deeper intuitive steering is not something that we master once and have for all time. We need to win it over and over again with the same humility and openness. As soon as we are possessed by the secret pride that we are now a master of the flow, we resemble someone resting on ‘old laurels’. We only invoke the memory images of past inner states. It is even more dangerous if we imagine that we have overcome certain weaknesses only because we have recognized the receding impressions of their specific IO flows within the imaginative stream.-----
1 The experience is unfamiliar not because it is particularly inaccessible, but because there’s practically nothing in our everyday life and culture that hints at it or motivates us to seek it. The focus of modern life is mainly on instinctively utilizing our well-established input gestures, in any way we can, to achieve our goals and desires.
2 Remember that a point in the abstractly imagined octant space does not correspond to a point within our spatial experience of phenomenal space. A point in the former is only a symbol for a specific full-spectrum phenomenal flow, within which we have the sense of all space and points in it.
3 A simple way to grasp what such bodily head-space sensations could be is if we remember the feeling of a headache. This is certainly only a memory image of the painful experience, but the more vividly we try to remember it (as if it happens in the moment), the more we try to coincide our memory image with the actual bodily sensations in our head region. In a way, we try to ‘densify’ the memory image as if to feel almost as the physical sensation that it echoes. Similarly, when we focus on a mental image or simply a point, it shouldn’t feel fleeting and ghostly but intense and, in a sense, ‘intersecting’ the spectrum of cerebral sensations, yet not being dragged and shaped by them.
4 Remember that this differentiation does not imply any kind of mind-matter dualism. We only highlight the recognizable aspects of the unitary phenomenal spectrum.
5 Center of mass. See Barycenter (astronomy) - Wikipedia
6 While we focus on the whole body, it should feel that we encompass the defocused sensations of both the toe and the head top, without switching from one to the other. A simple exercise that can help us develop this sense is touching our index fingers together and focusing on their tips as a single sensation. Then we separate them and spread our arms in opposite directions while we still try to maintain the holistic sense for both fingertips simultaneously, without zooming in and switching our attention from one to another. To make this easier, we can do it with eyes closed, because seeing our fingers makes it more difficult to resist looking at one or the other finger, especially when they move farther apart.
7 This is an excellent exercise for helping us ‘stretch’ our phenomenal volume. We can not only look visually at objects but also imagine that we reach out with our hands and feel their contours. This can be done with spatial forms of any size, even an atom, a skyscraper, or Cosmic bodies. In this case, however, we can recognize that we’re touching imagined models of these spatial forms, as if scaled to our everyday size of balls and chairs, or alternatively, our human form must feel scaled up or down, like a tiny being moving between atoms or a giant holding a planet in their hand.