"The essay doesn't allow for comments. So, I comment here.
I resonate very much with this “phenomenology of intentional activity.” Realigning our intent, feelings, and thoughts is something badly needed in our times. For sure we must learn to be aware of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations and how they work under the radar of our frenetic daily surface perceptions. I would add that realignment means also transformation and transmutation. You also refer to the Rubin figure. I do this frequently to illustrate the so-called 'binding problem.' However, it is not my experience that it is through forces of logical thinking that we rediscover the Logos. Because, at least for me, the Logos isn’t logical. Or to put it in other words, it has a completely different logic than the forces of logical thinking. Anyhow, if this is your experience, then that’s fine. I feel words are so poor here to debate on these things. I guess we feel the same, even though we might express it differently and come from different backgrounds. Aligning the local with the Cosmic higher-order intents and returning to the archetypal makes very much sense to me. 😊"
Thanks for the feedback, Marco.
I think that I understand what you mean by "the Logos isn't logical", although it sounds a bit paradoxical : ) It can't be reduced to discursive logic employed by intellectual reasoning, is what I take you to mean, and I agree. By "forces", I meant to point to the underlying essence of any possible logical structure, any possible lawfulness within the transformation of experiential states.
Yet it's most important in our time to discern the concrete *overlap* between intellectual reasoning and any higher-order mode of cognition or consciousness. We could say the former is an aliased aperture of more holistic consciousness. Through intellectual reasoning, we have to micromanage partial transformations through conceptual states that would otherwise transform more fluidly and effortlessly, like a sort of 'quantum tunneling'.
An interesting case of this is the panoramic life tableau that is often mentioned in the context of OBEs and NDEs. Normally we experience our life of memory as dim mental pictures that go back in a linear sequence to early childhood. Even at this level, memory provides a lawful structure of experience from which we can extract certain regularities and principles that helps us navigate the incoming flow of experience, at least to some extent that allows us to understand Earthly experience and fulfill Earthly tasks. That is the basis for our life of intellectual reasoning.
Yet through cognitive training, we can come to intentionally experience the holistic memory tableau that is otherwise stumbled into when someone accidentally drowns or what have you. It is a loosening of the vital body from the physical. Then what is normally experienced as dim mental pictures extending in linear time flow becomes more space-like, a vivid tableau through which our spirit reflects its existence and discerns the holistic threads running through its life destiny. Of course, this doesn't mean our memory has changed in any way from what we experience through intellectual memory - we aren't going back and altering that intellectual memory, only penetrating to its deeper and more living foundations. Put another way, we are consciously experiencing *how* it is that we are able to extract principles from memory intuition and reason intellectually.
Would you agree this is an example of Logos, of higher-order logical structure that is nevertheless continuous with our intellectual memory and reasoning faculty which relies on that memory?
Yes, it is a higher-order "logical" structure with a holistic apprehension and comprehension that is continuous with the ordinary intellect. But only in the sense that the reasoning faculty is the lower band of a continuous spectrum. The "overlap" isn't a complementarity. Holism is an inherent aspect of the supraconscious Logos and that that doesn't need the kind of "logic" that people associate to that word. There are also other aspects. For example, there are functions of the body that can't be dissected by human logical rules. There are psychological forces that act and behave according to rules that don’t allow us to cram them into a logical framework. As I wrote, world's history isn’t a rational or logical process, either. It is determined by forces and laws that go way beyond forces of logic. And the Logos–that is, the divine intelligence– can be pretty much illogical. Logic is a lower function of the supraconscious that projects itself into the forms of cognition of the dense planes of life and matter. As described in my essay, it is a pale reflection of it, and its main duty is to serve as a bridge to connect the lower with the higher planes—therefrom the “overlap.”
Again, I’m not saying that logic is something bad or negative. I use it all the time. We agree that it has its function and its place in the evolutionary history. The only danger we should be aware of is that it is a double-edged sword. It can help us to reach great goals but could also obstruct our evolution if we associate it powers it doesn’t have. Because if one takes that lower band of the spectrum for all the spectrum, then one hits a wall. Part of the reasons of the turmoil the world is going through is, among other things, caused by the logical mind. There comes a point in the evolutionary journey of consciousness that the great insight come through a “silenced logic” that doesn’t try to analyze everything. Only then can the higher intuitional, inspirational and trans-mental faculties manifest and, BTW, open us to the "logic of the heart."
This is why I had a reservation reading about "forces of logical thinking." I hope that has been clarified.
Sure, I resonate with all of the above. We can't reduce the experiential transformation within supra-rational spaces, which we could also distinguish as imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive spaces, to the intellectual logic that we are accustomed to in sensory life and apply as a default framework for understanding. Yet there is something else that needs to be clarified now - what is the ability of those higher 'forces' to *spiritualize* the space of intellectual logic? To resurrect the latter into a new imaginative life, so that it acquires new degrees of freedom to explore the higher spaces and transduce the higher experiences into clear-cut conceptual expressions? We may be speaking of similar things but we can flesh it out further to help synchronize our perspectives.
Let's try to make this a bit more concrete. For example, when we speak of the various 'spaces' or 'principles' of consciousness - sensory, vital, psychological, mental, imaginative, inspired, intuitive - as you and I have been doing in various places, I am sure you agree we are taking an intuition of our first-person transformation of inner activity as it meets varied degrees of resistance, as it takes on unique 'transformational signatures', and *focusing* that intuition into various concepts and their logical relations. It is like we are using a lens or prism to refract the pure white Light of this overall intuition into an array of colors and patterns. This helps us refine our intuition and also makes it so that anyone else can reason through the relations that are described, according to 'human logical rules', and resonate with something of the first-person intuitive gestures from which the concepts were focused. They can start to probe that intuitive space for themselves.
For a person who was not conscious of this relationship between the conceptual labels and the underlying intuitive orientation they symbolize, the whole discussion of 'spaces' and so forth would sound like we are analyzing and dissecting the sublime and ineffable Consciousness, trying to cram its essence into a mere logical framework. In fact, this is probably the biggest source of misunderstanding for mystics and idealists who confront the details of supersensible research. They simply don't realize that the conceptual relations have been focused from *within* the first-person intuitive context. It is similar to what we do when we want to remember what we experienced on a certain day last week, move our cognitive activity into a certain 'space' of memory intuition, and then focus various mental pictures and concepts from within the space that help orient our intuition. If the supersensible research is not understood in a similar way, perhaps because such research is assumed impossible to begin with, then it will understandably be looked upon with suspicion.
So we see that the very *same* logical framework can be experienced in completely different ways, depending on how it is approached and understood. Put another way, it depends on how intuitively sensitive the one approaching it is to the process by which mental pictures and concepts condense from the higher spaces in the first place. Even the most secular and rigid philosophical and scientific theories about reality have condensed in this same way, only the people holding on to those theories as 'explanations' of phenomenal processes don't realize it. They don't understand the conceptual frameworks as symbolic testimonies to the first-person intuitive context from which they were focused. If that was better understood, the logical relations between concepts would be *experienced* less like self-contained models, and more like protruding islands that are part of an invisible archipelago underwater, or the overtones modulated over deeper sub-harmonics.
In that sense, our experience of intellectual reasoning at the surface should not be confused for its deeper substructure, for what makes it appear and work, just as we shouldn't confuse the protruding islands above water for the underwater archipelago. As a simple visualization, we could refer to this overlay of Moiré patterns (developed by a friend). We can say the largest circle is the holistic intuitive space, moving towards the much more convoluted intellectual space at the center, what you referred to as the lower band of a continuous spectrum.
With each additional circle, there are increasingly complicated patterns as we approach the intellectual soul space where we have our relatively disorderly emotions, thought-arrangements, and perceptual structures. Periodically, however, the circles completely align - this corresponds to what was discussed in the essay as the 'concentric alignment'. Even at our intellectual stage of development, we periodically experience these conjunctions and they manifest as 'insights' into the flow of existence, as dim but powerful and inspiring understanding of the holistic context in which our thought-life is embedded. These are the sorts of insights by which we are inspired to write our essays here. Through the skillful technique of concentration, however, these conjunctions can be held open for longer durations and be experienced more intensely. More of the archetypal forces can gradually inflow the intellectual space and spiritualize its concepts.
This applies not only to the categorical distinctions we are making between the 'spaces' of Consciousness, but also to much finer-resolution details and distinctions that can be made in the spheres of culture and nature which reflect the living transformations within those experiential spaces. It is in this way that what was previously understood as a crude analytical dissection of spiritual reality can be redeemed as a means of orienting and refining intuition of the existential flow at ever-deeper levels. The space of intellectual logic is progressively spiritualized so that it serves much higher ideals of collective human existence. Eventually, even the deeper subconscious spaces can be spiritualized. Here we have the very process of evolution - the logical mind becomes not only a conceptual bridge between the below and the above, but a bridge that works right through the feeling and will impulses of humanity.
Yes, that's right. Wasn't this one of the central points of my essay? That of a superconscious dimension that, in humans, manifests as insights and inspirations. Something working by an evolutionary process in and through our life, mind and body. I didn't emphasize the techniques of concentration to open the mind (and more than the mind,) towards higher intuitive spheres, but pointed out how the cosmology reflects a simplified version of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. All his yoga is a technique of concentration aimed at the progressive spiritualization of the human existence.
So, finally, I don't feel there is any discrepancy. I only wonder how we got here! 😄
Yeah, although I am still not sure what is the role of developing the cognitive forces in Aurobindo's integral yoga. I have browsed some websites with summaries of the exercises but it still isn't clear to me.
I wonder if you can share an example of supersensible research that has been communicated through integral yoga? I know he speaks of the different principles of the human being, planes of existence, the involution and evolution, etc., but is there any finer resolution on the stages of involution and evolution, the sorts of experiences we go through during sleep or between death and rebirth, or anything similar?
I'm not asking because I think it is important to obsess over the details at an intellectual level, but because the revelation of such details reflects an ability to permeate the higher spaces with lucid cognition and transduce supersensible experiences into precise conceptual frameworks.
This is only a still superficial bird’s eye view of his metaphysics. If you want to know more, but something that is still condensed and contains also an outline of his spiritual practice, another starting point could be the book “Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching & Method of Practice”. However, if one would like to know really what his spiritual approach is about, I’m afraid the only way is the long one. His books “The Synthesis of Yoga” and “The Life Divine” are a must. His epic poem “Savitri” is less mandatory for the intellect but is ultimately his real testament, and only about the supersensible.
Thanks for the paper. The metaphysics and cosmology certainly make sense and align with what we also find through the path of Western esoteric science. But I am wondering more about details on, for example, how souls journey from incarnation to incarnation and these karmic threads advance the evolution of humanity and the Earth organism. Is there anything like that in his writings or those of anyone else who pursued the integral yoga path?
This was such a melodious read, at the end of which I felt as though I had just listened to a well played musical score. I’m in awe that you could describe these delicate inner processes of consciousness so precisely and understandably. I love Barfield and Steiner but being somewhat of a mental midget I struggle sometimes to follow the trails of lofty thinkers. You artfully employed some great metaphors to ground your thoughts for us layman. This one in particular- “It is intended that humanity transition from being mere end-users of thought to learning how the thinking process works ‘under the hood’. End users of thought! That is so perfectly stated. Thank you. I look forward reading more.
Thank you for this feedback, and I am glad it was helpful for you!
Hopefully you will also find value in the essays on "retracing spiritual activity". They are a bit more complex, I would say, perhaps more meandering. But if we keep the core phenomenological principles of spiritual activity and its contextual constraints in mind, my experience is that the rest of esoteric science is naturally illuminated over time (with our imaginative effort and participation, of course).
@Marco
"The essay doesn't allow for comments. So, I comment here.
I resonate very much with this “phenomenology of intentional activity.” Realigning our intent, feelings, and thoughts is something badly needed in our times. For sure we must learn to be aware of our thoughts, feelings, and sensations and how they work under the radar of our frenetic daily surface perceptions. I would add that realignment means also transformation and transmutation. You also refer to the Rubin figure. I do this frequently to illustrate the so-called 'binding problem.' However, it is not my experience that it is through forces of logical thinking that we rediscover the Logos. Because, at least for me, the Logos isn’t logical. Or to put it in other words, it has a completely different logic than the forces of logical thinking. Anyhow, if this is your experience, then that’s fine. I feel words are so poor here to debate on these things. I guess we feel the same, even though we might express it differently and come from different backgrounds. Aligning the local with the Cosmic higher-order intents and returning to the archetypal makes very much sense to me. 😊"
Thanks for the feedback, Marco.
I think that I understand what you mean by "the Logos isn't logical", although it sounds a bit paradoxical : ) It can't be reduced to discursive logic employed by intellectual reasoning, is what I take you to mean, and I agree. By "forces", I meant to point to the underlying essence of any possible logical structure, any possible lawfulness within the transformation of experiential states.
Yet it's most important in our time to discern the concrete *overlap* between intellectual reasoning and any higher-order mode of cognition or consciousness. We could say the former is an aliased aperture of more holistic consciousness. Through intellectual reasoning, we have to micromanage partial transformations through conceptual states that would otherwise transform more fluidly and effortlessly, like a sort of 'quantum tunneling'.
An interesting case of this is the panoramic life tableau that is often mentioned in the context of OBEs and NDEs. Normally we experience our life of memory as dim mental pictures that go back in a linear sequence to early childhood. Even at this level, memory provides a lawful structure of experience from which we can extract certain regularities and principles that helps us navigate the incoming flow of experience, at least to some extent that allows us to understand Earthly experience and fulfill Earthly tasks. That is the basis for our life of intellectual reasoning.
Yet through cognitive training, we can come to intentionally experience the holistic memory tableau that is otherwise stumbled into when someone accidentally drowns or what have you. It is a loosening of the vital body from the physical. Then what is normally experienced as dim mental pictures extending in linear time flow becomes more space-like, a vivid tableau through which our spirit reflects its existence and discerns the holistic threads running through its life destiny. Of course, this doesn't mean our memory has changed in any way from what we experience through intellectual memory - we aren't going back and altering that intellectual memory, only penetrating to its deeper and more living foundations. Put another way, we are consciously experiencing *how* it is that we are able to extract principles from memory intuition and reason intellectually.
Would you agree this is an example of Logos, of higher-order logical structure that is nevertheless continuous with our intellectual memory and reasoning faculty which relies on that memory?
Yes, it is a higher-order "logical" structure with a holistic apprehension and comprehension that is continuous with the ordinary intellect. But only in the sense that the reasoning faculty is the lower band of a continuous spectrum. The "overlap" isn't a complementarity. Holism is an inherent aspect of the supraconscious Logos and that that doesn't need the kind of "logic" that people associate to that word. There are also other aspects. For example, there are functions of the body that can't be dissected by human logical rules. There are psychological forces that act and behave according to rules that don’t allow us to cram them into a logical framework. As I wrote, world's history isn’t a rational or logical process, either. It is determined by forces and laws that go way beyond forces of logic. And the Logos–that is, the divine intelligence– can be pretty much illogical. Logic is a lower function of the supraconscious that projects itself into the forms of cognition of the dense planes of life and matter. As described in my essay, it is a pale reflection of it, and its main duty is to serve as a bridge to connect the lower with the higher planes—therefrom the “overlap.”
Again, I’m not saying that logic is something bad or negative. I use it all the time. We agree that it has its function and its place in the evolutionary history. The only danger we should be aware of is that it is a double-edged sword. It can help us to reach great goals but could also obstruct our evolution if we associate it powers it doesn’t have. Because if one takes that lower band of the spectrum for all the spectrum, then one hits a wall. Part of the reasons of the turmoil the world is going through is, among other things, caused by the logical mind. There comes a point in the evolutionary journey of consciousness that the great insight come through a “silenced logic” that doesn’t try to analyze everything. Only then can the higher intuitional, inspirational and trans-mental faculties manifest and, BTW, open us to the "logic of the heart."
This is why I had a reservation reading about "forces of logical thinking." I hope that has been clarified.
Sure, I resonate with all of the above. We can't reduce the experiential transformation within supra-rational spaces, which we could also distinguish as imaginative, inspirative, and intuitive spaces, to the intellectual logic that we are accustomed to in sensory life and apply as a default framework for understanding. Yet there is something else that needs to be clarified now - what is the ability of those higher 'forces' to *spiritualize* the space of intellectual logic? To resurrect the latter into a new imaginative life, so that it acquires new degrees of freedom to explore the higher spaces and transduce the higher experiences into clear-cut conceptual expressions? We may be speaking of similar things but we can flesh it out further to help synchronize our perspectives.
Let's try to make this a bit more concrete. For example, when we speak of the various 'spaces' or 'principles' of consciousness - sensory, vital, psychological, mental, imaginative, inspired, intuitive - as you and I have been doing in various places, I am sure you agree we are taking an intuition of our first-person transformation of inner activity as it meets varied degrees of resistance, as it takes on unique 'transformational signatures', and *focusing* that intuition into various concepts and their logical relations. It is like we are using a lens or prism to refract the pure white Light of this overall intuition into an array of colors and patterns. This helps us refine our intuition and also makes it so that anyone else can reason through the relations that are described, according to 'human logical rules', and resonate with something of the first-person intuitive gestures from which the concepts were focused. They can start to probe that intuitive space for themselves.
For a person who was not conscious of this relationship between the conceptual labels and the underlying intuitive orientation they symbolize, the whole discussion of 'spaces' and so forth would sound like we are analyzing and dissecting the sublime and ineffable Consciousness, trying to cram its essence into a mere logical framework. In fact, this is probably the biggest source of misunderstanding for mystics and idealists who confront the details of supersensible research. They simply don't realize that the conceptual relations have been focused from *within* the first-person intuitive context. It is similar to what we do when we want to remember what we experienced on a certain day last week, move our cognitive activity into a certain 'space' of memory intuition, and then focus various mental pictures and concepts from within the space that help orient our intuition. If the supersensible research is not understood in a similar way, perhaps because such research is assumed impossible to begin with, then it will understandably be looked upon with suspicion.
So we see that the very *same* logical framework can be experienced in completely different ways, depending on how it is approached and understood. Put another way, it depends on how intuitively sensitive the one approaching it is to the process by which mental pictures and concepts condense from the higher spaces in the first place. Even the most secular and rigid philosophical and scientific theories about reality have condensed in this same way, only the people holding on to those theories as 'explanations' of phenomenal processes don't realize it. They don't understand the conceptual frameworks as symbolic testimonies to the first-person intuitive context from which they were focused. If that was better understood, the logical relations between concepts would be *experienced* less like self-contained models, and more like protruding islands that are part of an invisible archipelago underwater, or the overtones modulated over deeper sub-harmonics.
In that sense, our experience of intellectual reasoning at the surface should not be confused for its deeper substructure, for what makes it appear and work, just as we shouldn't confuse the protruding islands above water for the underwater archipelago. As a simple visualization, we could refer to this overlay of Moiré patterns (developed by a friend). We can say the largest circle is the holistic intuitive space, moving towards the much more convoluted intellectual space at the center, what you referred to as the lower band of a continuous spectrum.
https://www.shadertoy.com/view/XfSXRG
With each additional circle, there are increasingly complicated patterns as we approach the intellectual soul space where we have our relatively disorderly emotions, thought-arrangements, and perceptual structures. Periodically, however, the circles completely align - this corresponds to what was discussed in the essay as the 'concentric alignment'. Even at our intellectual stage of development, we periodically experience these conjunctions and they manifest as 'insights' into the flow of existence, as dim but powerful and inspiring understanding of the holistic context in which our thought-life is embedded. These are the sorts of insights by which we are inspired to write our essays here. Through the skillful technique of concentration, however, these conjunctions can be held open for longer durations and be experienced more intensely. More of the archetypal forces can gradually inflow the intellectual space and spiritualize its concepts.
This applies not only to the categorical distinctions we are making between the 'spaces' of Consciousness, but also to much finer-resolution details and distinctions that can be made in the spheres of culture and nature which reflect the living transformations within those experiential spaces. It is in this way that what was previously understood as a crude analytical dissection of spiritual reality can be redeemed as a means of orienting and refining intuition of the existential flow at ever-deeper levels. The space of intellectual logic is progressively spiritualized so that it serves much higher ideals of collective human existence. Eventually, even the deeper subconscious spaces can be spiritualized. Here we have the very process of evolution - the logical mind becomes not only a conceptual bridge between the below and the above, but a bridge that works right through the feeling and will impulses of humanity.
Does this make sense?
Yes, that's right. Wasn't this one of the central points of my essay? That of a superconscious dimension that, in humans, manifests as insights and inspirations. Something working by an evolutionary process in and through our life, mind and body. I didn't emphasize the techniques of concentration to open the mind (and more than the mind,) towards higher intuitive spheres, but pointed out how the cosmology reflects a simplified version of Sri Aurobindo’s vision. All his yoga is a technique of concentration aimed at the progressive spiritualization of the human existence.
So, finally, I don't feel there is any discrepancy. I only wonder how we got here! 😄
Yeah, although I am still not sure what is the role of developing the cognitive forces in Aurobindo's integral yoga. I have browsed some websites with summaries of the exercises but it still isn't clear to me.
I wonder if you can share an example of supersensible research that has been communicated through integral yoga? I know he speaks of the different principles of the human being, planes of existence, the involution and evolution, etc., but is there any finer resolution on the stages of involution and evolution, the sorts of experiences we go through during sleep or between death and rebirth, or anything similar?
I'm not asking because I think it is important to obsess over the details at an intellectual level, but because the revelation of such details reflects an ability to permeate the higher spaces with lucid cognition and transduce supersensible experiences into precise conceptual frameworks.
Oh… but if you are looking for someone who described his teachings by being obsessed over the details at an intellectual level you might like to take a look at my paper here 😉 : https://integral-review.org/the-integral-cosmology-of-sri-aurobindo-an-introduction-from-the-perspective-of-consciousness-studies/
This is only a still superficial bird’s eye view of his metaphysics. If you want to know more, but something that is still condensed and contains also an outline of his spiritual practice, another starting point could be the book “Integral Yoga: Sri Aurobindo's Teaching & Method of Practice”. However, if one would like to know really what his spiritual approach is about, I’m afraid the only way is the long one. His books “The Synthesis of Yoga” and “The Life Divine” are a must. His epic poem “Savitri” is less mandatory for the intellect but is ultimately his real testament, and only about the supersensible.
I hope that will help.
Thanks for the paper. The metaphysics and cosmology certainly make sense and align with what we also find through the path of Western esoteric science. But I am wondering more about details on, for example, how souls journey from incarnation to incarnation and these karmic threads advance the evolution of humanity and the Earth organism. Is there anything like that in his writings or those of anyone else who pursued the integral yoga path?
This was such a melodious read, at the end of which I felt as though I had just listened to a well played musical score. I’m in awe that you could describe these delicate inner processes of consciousness so precisely and understandably. I love Barfield and Steiner but being somewhat of a mental midget I struggle sometimes to follow the trails of lofty thinkers. You artfully employed some great metaphors to ground your thoughts for us layman. This one in particular- “It is intended that humanity transition from being mere end-users of thought to learning how the thinking process works ‘under the hood’. End users of thought! That is so perfectly stated. Thank you. I look forward reading more.
Thank you for this feedback, and I am glad it was helpful for you!
Hopefully you will also find value in the essays on "retracing spiritual activity". They are a bit more complex, I would say, perhaps more meandering. But if we keep the core phenomenological principles of spiritual activity and its contextual constraints in mind, my experience is that the rest of esoteric science is naturally illuminated over time (with our imaginative effort and participation, of course).