A Phenomenology of Truthfulness

How we can participate in the esoteric nature of truthfulness by making the spheres of inner life more concentric.

This essay is intended to explore the ideas of truth and truthfulness from their inner dimension, through the first-person phenomenological method. To begin with, all we can know for certain is that we experience a 'now' state of being from the first-person perspective. This state includes our ideas, emotions, desires, sensations, and an intuitive sense of all these being temporally extended in memory of past states and in anticipation of future states. Imagine that you stretch your arm out to grasp a pen on the desk. There is a whole spectrum of conscious phenomena that are correlated in the most complicated, yet consistent ways. Physically, the motion of your arm, the nerve impulses, and the brain activity are all correlated and consistent. But these are only part of the spectrum of conscious phenomena. You also experience some emotions in relation to the act, although these will hardly be pronounced in the routine case of grasping a pen. Your idea or intention that you need to take the pen for some purpose, which you experience as activating your will, is also fully correlated with all the other perceptions and is no less valid of a conscious experience than the others. In fact, from your perspective, it is the most important one because it is what brings into harmony all the separate ‘frames’ of perceiving your arm movement.

Before we codify the lawful transformation of the sensory, emotional, and ideal perceptions in relation to our intended activity, we experience a certain intuition of that transformation. When we form the intention to take the pen, there is the memory intuition of all previous instances in which we extended our hand to grasp an object and anticipatory intuition of the intermediate states we will experience such that the pen will be grasped. All of this intuition is nebulous and dim - it is not experienced as clear pictures or concepts, but only as a background context of our activity. After intuition is refined through enough perceptual encounters with sensory, emotional, and ideal objects, we can condense that intuition into our concepts of ‘natural laws’, ‘psychic mechanisms’, ‘rules of logic’, and so forth. If we want to orient toward the truth, it is important to always keep in mind that the concepts which build the diverse array of philosophical and scientific models and theories about reality are originally rooted in our intuition of the first-person perceptual flow. As soon as we start working with only the concepts and forget their intuitive foundation, we have strayed from truthfulness - we have discarded a core element of the experiential flow that we cannot recover in any other way.

Returning to the first-person phenomenology, we can say that how our state of being will transform from the ‘now’ state is a result of both of our own intent, such as grasping the pen, and factors seemingly beyond our control, such as an arthritic condition that makes it difficult to grasp the pen. The latter serve as resistance to our intents so that our ideas can only manifest themselves in the flow of perceptual experience in certain ways and not others. For example, we may have an artistic imagination to compose an elaborate symphony, which we have even worked out theoretically in detail, but if financial constraints have made it so we can only afford one instrument, or physical constraints make it so we can’t fit enough musicians in our small apartment, then we can't fully manifest that intended idea in the perceptual flow. Our nearly infinite potential of imaginative activity is continually narrowed down by various psychic, organic, and physical constraints, in that sense, until it finally manifests within the perceptual flow of experience and recedes into memory.

We know that the transformation of our state meets varied degrees of resistance within these distinct domains of experience. In the layer of pure thinking intents or ideal objects, we meet the least resistance. We can summon the mental image of a 'triangle' and transform it in various ways. The perceptual flow we experience will synchronize very closely with our intuitive intent; the creative activity and resulting perceptions will be entirely ‘in-phase’. In the layer of feeling, on the other hand, there is more resistance - if we want to summon a state of intense joy, this will be more difficult than summoning a mental image of 'triangle'. The state of intense joy will not enter into our perceptual experience in such close synchronization with our intent, if at all. We meet even more resistance in the transforming layer of sensations – our perceptual experience of sunlight and warmth on a hot summer day won’t budge even if we intend to observe the starry skies on a cool winter night. Likewise, if we intend to move our leg but it has been paralyzed by an accident, nothing will happen.

In a similar way, we know there are varied sorts of lawfulness when we investigate the environment around us through science. The lawfulness that we intuit from the transformation of billiard balls in motion, which we codify as ‘mechanical laws’, is not exactly the same as that which we intuit from the growth, decay, and rebirth of plant matter, which we codify as ‘biological laws’. Likewise, the latter is not the same as that which we intuit from the transformations of our soul life, the rhythms of sympathies, emotions, impulses, etc. that we share in common with animals, codified as ‘psychic laws’. And none of those are the same as our intuition for the transformations of our thought-life which we generally codify as ‘rules of logic’. We could describe these as the physical (mechanical), vital (biological), emotional (psychic), and mental spaces of perceptual transformations, respectively. None of these domains of lawful phenomena are reducible to the others, yet we know they overlap in various ways and influence one another.

Related to the above, there is also an interesting asymmetry between the spaces. We can imagine experiencing the mental space in the absence of the others (even if this does not actually happen in the flow of life), but we can't imagine the lower spaces in the absence of the mental space. For example, we can imagine ourselves in a sensory deprivation chamber, dosed with medication that numbs our feelings. Yet it doesn’t work the other way - the very act of 'imagining' implicates the mental space and its unique lawfulness. This points us to the fact that there is something fundamental about the logical lawfulness of thinking space, even if we don't have a clear idea of what that something is. It is only from within this space that we can extend our intimate insight to the other spaces.

For example, if we add two numbers together, like 84 and 167, we can sense that we are doing something, making certain 'thinking gestures' to move around the mathematical puzzle pieces in various ways, bumping them into each other and eventually fitting them together (if we have already developed our mathematical intuition to encompass the additive relations of numbers). People may carry this operation out in slightly different ways, but we all perform the underlying thinking gestures. What we are inwardly doing to make those gestures nevertheless remains mysterious. Normally we are preoccupied with the results of the operation and don't try to observe the gestures themselves.

Here is even more simplified example of that same principle:

Do we see a vase or two faces? We can start to play around with the above image and, with a bit of practice, switch between the meaning of vase and the meaning of ‘two faces’. Then we will notice we are once again making certain mysterious thinking gestures, like we did with the mathematical addition, which alternate our cognitive focus and the corresponding meaning. It is as if we are using invisible hands to slightly adjust our cognitive activity in one direction or another. By working with such examples, we can begin to ‘delaminate’ our inner life a bit and dimly sense its living structure. It also helps highlight how little we know about the workings of our own cognitive life. These examples simply bring to awareness the sort of thinking gestures we are constantly making during the normal flow of daily experience. Because we have ingrained most of them as habits and become so accustomed to their routine expression, however, we normally have no inner sensitivity to them.

So we don't know the lawfulness of the lower spaces directly but only through the prism of the mental space, and even with the latter there is some mystery as to how exactly our mathematical thoughts, for example, transform through mental space. Yet, within the mental space, we at least have some lucid sense of being creatively involved in the gestures that are responsible for the transformation. We don’t know exactly what we are doing to add the numbers together, but we know that nothing would happen without our inner effort. We can't say the same for any of the other spaces. We don’t feel like we are constantly choosing our sympathies and preferences, for example our favorite type of food, but rather we experience them as ready-made. Even if we did nothing, feelings and sensations would continue to approach us. Just because we can follow the transformations of mineral-mechanical elements, organic phenomena, and soul phenomena with our thoughts, and notice their distinctions, that doesn't mean we understand why those transformations occur at any deep level. We don't normally feel creatively involved in the perceptual flow of the physical, organic, and psychic spaces, but only in the mental space where our thoughts transform. 

In that sense, there is an implicit contextual hierarchy of creative involvement through which our state transforms just as a word is meaningfully embedded within a phrase, which is embedded within a sentence, which is embedded within a paragraph, and so forth. As discussed above, the space of our thinking intents (I) is most transparent to our intuition of creative agency, while the sensory space is most opaque to that intuition. Our creative intents (I) are normally felt to be embedded within the context of our thoughts (T), feelings/desires (F), and sensations (S). We can only manifest those intents for which we have previously explored with thoughts - if we have never explored the space of mathematical intuition, we won’t even know it is possible to intend the transformation of our thinking state within that space. The deeper contextual layers (F and S) likewise modulate what sort of intents and thoughts can be concretely realized from the infinite potential of possibilities. If I intend to transform my state from the context of ‘bed’ to ‘couch’, my thoughts, feelings, and sensations give me feedback on whether this intent can be fulfilled and how to effectively fulfill it. On the other hand, if I intend to transform my state from the context of ‘Earth’ to ‘Mars’, they give me feedback that the intent cannot be fulfilled. Such intents then naturally drop out of the palette of options that can transform my state and I don’t bother with them anymore.

This fact also introduces another potential source of straying from truthfulness that arises all too often. Between transforming my state to the couch and transforming it to Mars, there is a whole spectrum of states which may initially seem unfulfillable but which can actually be reached with the proper motivation and effort. The space of mathematical or musical states are examples - these may seem like a foreign and distant cognitive lands for many of us, yet we also understand that they can usually be reached with proper thinking effort and practice. If, instead, we were to simply assume that the mathematical space is forever beyond our first-person cognitive experience, perhaps even a fantasy of ‘numerical occultists’, our whole sense of reality would remain distorted and incomplete. That is a reason why we must remain continuously active with our thinking, extending it in the most varied directions without prior assumptions and prejudices, if we want to orient properly toward the truthful flow of experience.

Clearly, we cannot perceive our inner life from the side as circles like we do above – these are only symbols for our completely first-person flow of experience as we intend our activity in various ways and meet the resistance of thinking, emotional, and sensory spaces. Let's say we set an intention to accomplish a certain goal such as putting a new chair together. Now we start thinking about the goal and all our thoughts are concentric with the intention - we have thoughts about what the finished product will look like, what tools will be needed, what steps to follow, and so on. Since we are eagerly anticipating the finished chair (maybe it has excellent lumbar support), our feelings are also concentric with this goal - we are emotionally inspired to fulfill our intention. We set our bodily will in motion and start building the furniture, and now all our sensations become concentric with the goal as well.  The colors, sounds, smells, and textures that emerge as we read the instructions, lay out the pieces, put them together, tighten the screws, and so forth are all generally related to the core intention. In this way, our flow of experience is concentrically aligned across the contextual layers and, although our activity still meets resistance, the transformation of states from initial intent to fulfillment unfolds as a harmonious melody.

But things are rarely as idealized as the above scenario and, in modern life, we have gotten quite used to a lack of concentric alignment. For example, while doing daily tasks, our thinking often swings around to many unrelated topics. Working on the computer to finish some project while also browsing a dozen different open tabs is a prime example of this erratic activity in modern times. It is the same when we engage in most routine activities, like brushing our teeth, taking a shower, driving to work, etc. It may even get to the point where we play a musical instrument while also thinking about something completely unrelated to the musical experience. Generally, our feelings and sensations are more stable and aligned with the core task we are engaged in, although this can quickly stop being the case if extraneous events are introduced into our stream of experience. Perhaps we get a cramp in our arm or leg while working on the chair and now our sensations are out of alignment with the intent. Since we are rarely laser-focused on tasks, it is often the case that the 'circles' of our inner life lose their concentric alignment and oscillate wildly like a three-arm pendulum.

We experience a certain friction when these contextual layers are not aligned properly. For example, if we intend to build our chair but get distracted somewhere along the middle of the task, a level of indirection is introduced. Perhaps a family member calls us, and we get in a heated argument with them over the phone. Now we finish the phone call and return to the chair-building task but our feelings are swamped in the argument and our thoughts keep returning to what we said and what the other person said. Perhaps the argument was so bad that our blood pressure is up, our breathing has become jagged, and we are sweating a bit. Now even many of our sensations have lost their concentricity with the core task. That makes it harder to orient ourselves properly to the task and experience reality as a lawful experiential flow. If we imagine that our days are comprised of many such tasks, it is easy to see why these frequent misalignments can interfere with our ability to understand the living flow and structure of experiential reality. We constantly lose our ability to remain present and attentive within this living flow.

Modern thinking habits have conditioned many people to feel that 'truth' is when what we think or say corresponds to some objective set of facts 'out there' in the World state (the 'correspondence theory of truth'). In other words, understanding the truth means using our thoughts to model an objective World state that is independent of our thinking. However, if we stick to only the givens of phenomenological experience, there is no warrant for imposing this duality between our thinking state and the World state. Instead, our thinking state should be considered a 'curvature' within the World state along which our experience transforms as something whole. From that perspective, we only grasp the Truth in so far as we conduct our intents such that our thinking state becomes concentric with other layers of the World state which modulate its becoming, beginning with the most proximate layers of our emotional space. That is when the arms of the pendulum stabilize and move in harmonious rhythms, which we experience as 'insights' and ‘knowledge’ into the living flow of reality. 

In that sense, to approach the inner dimension of truth, we have to examine the reason why stating or misstating a set of facts about the World state is truthful or untruthful. In the former case, it is because our sensations, memories, feelings, thoughts, and intents are all aligned, whereas in the latter case, they have become misaligned. When we misstate a set of facts about the World state, our sensations and memories are out of alignment with our intent, feelings, and thoughts. For ex., we tell a police officer that a car involved in an accident was bright red, when in fact we remember it as being white. We intend to convey a different perceptual state of being than the one we remember experiencing, and the thoughts that we condense into words to communicate with the police offer align with that disharmonious intent. Moreover, the feeling of experiencing a bright red car doesn't align with our memory experience of the white car. So we see that the ‘correspondence theory of truth’ has simply taken a particular subset of Truth, as phenomenological misalignment, and decided to make that subset the exclusive means of attaining truth.

The idea of Truthfulness goes well beyond the specific instance of reporting objective facts about the World state, or put another way, the objective facts of the World state also encompass the states of our inner life. We can also be untruthful, for example, when our intent and feelings/desires become misaligned with our thoughts. Perhaps we have thoughts about becoming more organized and disciplined in our life, let's say by eating more healthily. Yet we may often find that we are still indulging in unhealthy foods, skipping steps in our diet, etc. In this way, it is revealed that we were merely thinking about eating more healthily but didn't sincerely intend it or feel motivated to carry through with the intent. This sort of untruthfulness speaks to our own inner organization which is embedded within the World state and contributes to the latter. If we are paying attention, it provides feedback as to what about that inner organization is out of alignment and what it may need for its contextual layers to become more finely attuned to one another. 

This also points to a core source of our untruthfulness in modern times. Our cone of concentric experiential layers is always extremely fragile, always teetering on the edge of collapse into misalignment when our intents are only related to personal aims. That is because the broader World state of sensory events, including our inner state of sense-based thoughts and feelings, wield lopsided influence over our intentional activity. These contextual layers continually get diverted into channels that are unrelated to our intents or even working at cross-purposes with them. How many people feel it is perfectly fine to think and speak forth thoughts out of alignment with their memory because it supports their myopic personal aims? Everything from telling a child Santa Claus is real because it is more convenient for us than explaining to them the nature of fairy tales and legends, to misleading representations in the world of business, news, and advertisement, has become commonplace and people rarely suspect this untruthful habit may have some broader significance for properly understanding the nature of experiential reality.

The sensory events and feelings that drag our personal agency hither and thither, convoluted even further by our unhealthy habits such as lying, can easily become so overwhelming that we don't experience ourselves as intentional beings who have creative input in the flow of experience anymore, only helpless bystanders witnessing a flow of events entirely beyond our agency. Then we lose sight of the intent-driven flow altogether. How many people feel like they are helpless victims of external circumstances, including their own soul tendencies? Their personality, character, preferences, and so forth are experienced as immutable parts of their being that were allotted to them from mindless nature or a remote deity. With the rise of modern virtual technology, there are plenty of avenues to become more and more passive in the face of these circumstances, more and more resigned to what nature/God/whatever has thrown our way. People may soon be able to stay in bed most of the day, with all necessities delivered to their doorstep and entertainment practically force-fed to them.

All of this results because more and more people are losing sight of the Truth, that is, the concentricity of their first-person thinking experiences with the intentional architecture of reality. What can we do to regain this concentricity in modern times? As we saw in the first section, our efforts must begin in the mental space where we have the most intuitive transparency for the causes of the perceptual flow, since our intentional activity is directly involved in that causal relationship. Our mental space must become more thoroughly imbued with the forces of logical thinking. As discussed at the beginning, logic is our intuition for the transformation of thinking states. It can be understood as our ability to perceive consonances and dissonances between processes within the more remote emotional and sensory spaces. By thinking logically, we dimly probe these spaces and extract thought-fragments from them, fitting those fragments together in ways that strike resonant chords and create consonance. When we think illogically, it is as if we are out of tune and out of sync with the deeper relations, leading to a potentially painful cacophony of tones. It helps to briefly visit how we arrived at this nexus of intuition and perception in our mental space.

Many insightful 20th-century thinkers have discerned the stages of humanity's evolution of consciousness from cultural epoch to cultural epoch. It roughly traces a development similar to what we individually experience from infancy to childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. To begin with, there was no sense of an individual agency or thinker, but rather consciousness was entirely merged with the environmental flow of events, much like the present animals who are dragged completely by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. Eventually consciousness began to enclose itself within a sphere of living images that reflected its environment, and thereby distinguish itself from that environment. In ancient Greek times, the mythic image-based consciousness had already started decohering into more sharply defined mental images which became somewhat similar to what we now know as ‘thoughts’, yet these were experienced as being naturally ordered by ideal 'lines of force' which were collectively referred to as the Logos.  There was still no individual thinker as such, rather the Logos thought through the individual personality. Gradually, during the Middle Ages, these mental images were further refined and abstracted into the clear-cut concepts that we are familiar with today.

Now the individual thinker feels causally responsible for its flow of thoughts. The intentional agency finds its direct reflection in thought-images, such as the stream of inner voice that is generated when we intend to think about something. In that process, however, our experience of the Logos that structures our thoughts faded away. We have managed to convince ourselves that our thoughts are 'private' to our personal bubble of consciousness and that they should simply be used to model a 'real world’ that is ‘out there'. We feel ourselves to be the original creators of concepts that we arbitrarily configure (according to the mysterious ‘rules of logic’) to mimic the perceptual dynamics of the World state. In other words, the archetypal Logos forces that structure the pictorial and conceptual life have been blotted out from modern consciousness. It is because we have lost cognitive sight of these powerful forces that our intentional cone has become so unstable, dragged around helplessly by the lower layers.

Humanity has now arrived at the stage where the archetypal forces structuring its thinking consciousness should become more transparent again - in other words, thinking must begin investigating its own living structure and dynamics to rediscover the Logos more inwardly and lucidly than the ancient Greeks. We could say this task, in contrast to our daily personal tasks, is a Cosmic level intent that structures the flow of human cultural history. It is intended that humanity transition from being mere end-users of thought to learning how the thinking process works ‘under the hood’. By extending our insight to resonate with such Cosmic level intents, we add a certain ‘top-heavy’ stability to our localized intent and our ‘cone’ of TFS experience. These TFS layers of the intuitive cone are, in a sense, personalized reflections or shadows of the Cosmic intents. By centering our local intents within the Cosmic intents and gaining intuitive insight into the latter, we also become more intimately familiar with the living perceptual flow of thoughts, feelings, and sensations.

When our intentional life expands its sphere of interest to such Cosmic level goals, the balance of power begins to shift from the sensory and impulsive life to the purely ideal and moral life. We begin to live more in currents of pure ideality. That is primarily because our patterns of thoughts start to become living symbols and testimonies for the ideal potential, the higher-order intents, from which they have condensed and crystallized. Simply by working through this phenomenology, we are already experiencing some of that concentricity. When the flow of our thoughts is consciously understood as such symbolic testimonies, we gain exponentially more opportunities to extract Cosmic-scale insight from them. At the same time, our feelings are continually inspired by these expansive Cosmic intents. We may even start to notice our sensations shift - colors and sounds begin to thicken out, so to speak, so they are experienced as not only flattened perceptual qualities, but also imbued with inner qualities. In this way, the feeling and sensory layers are gradually depersonalized and relocated within their truthful Cosmic context.

This is how the phenomenology of intentional activity not only helps us understand the nature of lies and Truth, as misalignments and alignments of the contextual layers embedded within our transforming first-person ‘now’ state, but also orient our intent-driven life within that pillar of Truth and extend it further and further into the realms of creative and moral freedom. This concentric orientation is greatly enriched when we take our phenomenological method through the portal of concentration. When we intensely direct our cognitive activity back toward the archetypal layers that structure its flow, we live in Spirit and in Truth. These meditative moments can then become the most truthful ones of our lives, when our inner stream that we normally flow along with is made objective and laid bare before our cognitive perception. We no longer try to hide our inner life behind layers of public-facing personas and think abstractly about ‘reality’ from a safe distance, but try to experience how our inner life is Intended from out of the depths of the shared Cosmic architecture.