On the Spiritual Essence of the Catch-22 (Part III)

Virtuously walking the labryinthian content of spiritual activity heightens attention to our knowing capacity.

We saw in the previous part that the capacity to know cannot be found in our concrete experience in the same way as we find fully finished thoughts about the inner life or sensory world. The former flashes into consciousness like a lightning bolt and cannot be frozen in theoretical thoughts or models while also retaining its life. The only reasonable approach, in that case, is what we have called the ‘inverted perspective’. It is a perspective from which we intuitively feel our knowing movements that unfold ‘behind’ our normal perspective on the manifest World and mysteriously contextualize its mental, emotional, and sensory content. We need to gradually approach this knowing medium with an entirely new inner disposition; a humble receptivity to being known. What the World’s development means for our personal knowledge and feelings should become less important than what our state of knowledge and feelings at any given time means for the World’s development. That is a shift from the me-centered ‘geocentric’ perspective to the Other-centered ‘Heliocentric’ perspective from which rhythmic patterns of being can be more easily discerned.

What is initially known through the inverted perspective is our psychic life - our patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting - which are increasingly objectified for our cognitive perception. In the pursuit of knowing the capacity to know, our entire sense of “me” is also known and transformed. Everything we imagine “we” are is called into question; our hardened inner forms are brought into a more fluid state like the caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis. It is an ongoing phase transition; a temporally extended encounter with the Guardian of the inner threshold of knowledge. When we engage in concentration exercises and symbolically explore the nature of inner experience, as we are doing now, discerning the inner obstacles we meet - or as Kühlewind put it before, "make significant discoveries about thinking itself and its hindrances—those factors that influence its flow, or distract or put it to a stop" - we are already forming our chrysalis, i.e. approaching and encountering the Guardian of the knowing capacity or ‘superconscious’.

It is exactly the superconscious that is interested in discerning what hinders, distracts, and generally prevents our spiritual activity from realizing its full human potential. It gently appeals to the morally conscious side of our nature, rather than ordinary knowing pursuits that brutishly engage our baser instincts. By pursuing these inner explorations with humility, persistence, and devotion, among other virtues, we are establishing resonance with the interests of the superconscious. That is, with the Other-centered perspectives who are interested in human souls reaching their full spiritual potential for the healthy and harmonious functioning of the Whole. These are the same intentional perspectives that incarnate in our soul lives, establishing our capacities to sense, think, feel, and act. In this way, we begin knowing the capacity to know through a state of intuitive resonance reached through our morally imaginative efforts. We are graced with knowledge of and through the superconscious precisely because we have renounced the impossible-to-satisfy desire to know the latter from the ordinary mind container perspective.

The first benediction we receive in response to our devoted efforts is the spiritualization of our conceptual life. As we discussed in Part I, spiritualizing our concepts means inhabiting a different perspective on them, analogous to calculating the planetary orbits from the Heliocentric rather than geocentric perspective. The content of the conceptual spectrum can also expand in many ways during our metamorphic phase transition, but most importantly, the content we have already experienced is reoriented as artistic symbols for the inner structure of our knowing capacity. It begins to dialogue with us on how our beliefs, preferences, sympathies and antipathies, temperament, language, nationality, gender, and mode of consciousness structure our perception and understanding of the World flow in which our spiritual activity participates. We likewise gain a better intuitive appreciation for how our spiritual activity, beginning with our thinking, harmonizes or clashes with that flow.

When we dreamily veer out of a highway lane and onto the bumpy part that vibrates the vehicle, we are given visceral feedback on how our inattentive activity clashes with the safety of other drivers. Likewise, we can begin to viscerally sense how the conceptual content of our mental experience intuitively ‘vibrates’ us, providing feedback on the quality of our thinking activity, which is no longer felt to be only a matter of personal significance. That recursive content reveals to us when our thinking has become too scattered, inattentive, myopic, inflexible, prejudiced, opinionated, judgmental, and so forth. Our knowing activity is then experienced as a continual emergence from cocoons of old restrictive patterns that have been ‘liquified’ and an awakening to previously slumbering domains of our psychic life. Everything we learn in this way has immediate practical relevance for the best ways to orchestrate our spiritual activity in harmony with the World flow. The more we work with knowledge in this artistic way, the more our conceptual life is imbued with spiritual vitality.

Life is made up of many different realms, and every one of them calls for a different kind of scientific approach. But life itself is a unity, and to the extent that science devotes itself to exploring separate areas it loses sight of the living oneness of the cosmos. We must have a science concerned with discovering in the separate scientific fields elements capable of leading us back again to that living wholeness.
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A similar situation exists in the art realm. A composer works according to the rules of composition. Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked, and in their hands scientific method became artistic technique. This endows abstract thinking with concrete individual life; ideas become living forces. When this happens, it means not merely knowing about things but transforming knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism, and our true, active consciousness lifts itself above the level of a merely passive taking-in of facts.¹

In Part I, we discussed how concepts can become living artistic symbols for the intuitive movements that gave birth to them, such as the recursive camera experiment when used as a metaphor for thinking’s enchantment with the receded perceptual models of its past activity. Then we are involved in a truly artistic method of philosophy and science that leads us, not into further enchantment with external models, but into greater resonance with real-time intuitive movements that ground our knowing capacity. Our concepts become like the finishing aesthetic touches on the canvas of deeper intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. We won’t conceptualize those deeper movements very clearly at first, but instead, we will sense them much more subtly, as an indistinct feeling that something is happening beneath the surface of consciousness from which our concepts ripple out.² A simple example can help strengthen this feeling. Try to intuitively experiment with the following sentence:

“A sentence is understood when intuitive thinking discerns the invisible connection between the words.”

Here we have a recursive sentence that explicitly directs attention to what we are doing with our thinking in the act of understanding the sentence’s meaning. The sentence can serve as a mini-experiment or exercise that allows us to test its meaning. Through the portal of the explicitly symbolic sentence, we become more sensitive to what we are doing to understand it. We may even sense a subtle shift in movement as we go between the spaces from the non-italicized word to the italicized word and back. The content of the sentence only matters insofar as it serves this sensitizing function. If we instead try to understand the sentence as a simple transmission of information to be grasped within the mind container, it will be practically useless. Then it would be a mere assertion about how ‘a sentence is understood’; the same sort of communication we are accustomed to when receiving information about dates, places, events, etc. That is what Steiner above called “a merely passive taking-in of facts” which is all too common in the pursuit of spiritual knowledge.

By instead utilizing the sentence as a symbolic portal through which we experience our mysterious inner movements, the message and the medium through which it is conveyed - the content of the sentence and the intuitive gestures through which that content is made sensible - are brought into closer alignment through our artistic engagement. We may even experience our activity transforming through novel mental states that were previously unimagined and therefore unsuspected. It is a profound feeling that, if put into words, may sound like, “I could not have possibly suspected that my consciousness could reach these inner experiences of its own movements!” What is illustrated linguistically here through a simple sentence can also become an experiential reality for the perceptual world more broadly; for our daily life of thoughts about the sensory world. We can learn to value the content of all those thoughts, in whatever form they take, only for their value in sensitizing our consciousness to intuitive gestures that we are participating in to make the content sensible.

Scientific models can also be experienced as recursive perceptions in this way. That is perhaps easiest to illustrate with the example of a quantum mechanical model:

In quantum mechanics, wave function collapse, also called reduction of the state vector, occurs when a wave function—initially in a superposition of several eigenstates—reduces to a single eigenstate due to interaction with the external world. This interaction is called an observation, and is the essence of a measurement in quantum mechanics, which connects the wave function with classical observables such as position and momentum.

When we understand the model described above as a recursive symbol, rather than an informational description of an “external world” interacting with some separate and strange “quantum world”, it points to how our conscious activity is always isolating and sequencing particular thought-perceptual elements from a more integrated storyboard of intuitive meaning that is also implicitly experienced (incidentally, Christopher Nolan is a recursive movie director who explored the psychological significance of the ‘quantum world’ through his film Oppenheimer). We realize that quantum mechanical experiments simply provide one possible way of heightening attention to this inner experiential process that is always present, which we can then follow up with our additional inner efforts to purify that state of heightened attention. Through that purification, we clear out the psychic ‘deadwood’ that continually diverts our attention from the pure inner flow and therefore adulterates the lucid inner experience of our activity.

We can let the image of the Orobouros serve as an example [of ‘musing’ over meditative sentences]. We imagine a snake, with a part of its tail in its mouth. As far as possible, the image should stand before the inner eye with the intensity of a perception. Once this has been achieved, we can ask, meaningfully: where is this image a reality? No snake does what the image shows it doing… If it is read abstractly, then it means: the caused brings forth the cause, or the caused suspends its cause, or caused and cause are one: on the level of the sense world, all this is a circulus vitiosus or a feat like the Baron Münchhausen's when he pulled himself up by his own pigtail. If we relate the image to consciousness, to our own lives, then the contradiction is transcended and also the necessity (not grounded in the image alone) of assuming a qualitative change. Consciousness brings something forth and “sees” it, and that which has been brought forth is consciousness… The image gives us self-consciousness as it realizes itself: at its start and then in its essence.³

Eventually, this same recursive quality becomes self-evident for us in all domains of perception, as if the scientific model, the theological dogma, the philosophical system, the ancient historical narrative, etc. are exactly like the sentence used as an example above or the Ouroboros symbol on which we muse - they couldn’t have possibly ever been pointing to anything other than the activity that conceived it. It dawns on us how we were previously like dream characters who were enchanted by the imagery of the quantum dreamscape, imagining a self-contained world that could never exist. Even the physicists who recognize that quantum phenomena have something to do with consciousness and our participatory activity only make the connection to some hypothetical “consciousness” that is “participating” abstractly. Meanwhile, the real-time consciousness that is reading the ‘words’ of the experimental models fails to discern itself participating as the invisible connection between the words. It fails to see how the practice of philosophy and science over millennia could only ever be the simultaneous inscription of an autobiography⁴; a revelatory testament to the evolving inner life of our intuitive activity.

Through this ongoing phase transition, we begin to experience the movements of our knowing capacity more consciously. They are brought into better focus within our daily acts of perceiving-knowing. These intuitive movements are discerned as unfolding through a rhythmic structure that is directly related to common cycles of experience, such as the cycles of sleeping to waking, Summer to Winter, adolescence to young adulthood, etc. These cycles are nested within each other and each pole of the rhythm performs a critical function for our capacity to know within this whole living architecture. That fact was also known by our ancestors in a more intimate yet dreamy way that we are now in a position to restore more lucidly. To better sensitize to this structure, let’s try moving our imaginative activity through a small portion of an ancient Greek myth and intuitively feeling its recursive meaning.

When the children of the tribute arrived at Crete, Theseus informed King Minos that he meant to kill the Minotaur. King Minos told the prince that if he could perform this task, he and all his friends might go free and that nothing more should ever be said about the tribute. The truth is, this horrible Minotaur was not at all a pleasant pet to keep, for there was always the possibility that he might get out of the labyrinth and do never-ending damage. Therefore, King Minos would really have been very glad to get rid of the Minotaur. Nevertheless, he was so hard-hearted that he would not permit Theseus to go armed to meet the monster; hence there was very little hope of the hero’s success.

That night the young Athenians were thrown into a dungeon under the palace of King Minos, one of them being destined for the Minotaur’s breakfast in the morning. Directly over this dungeon were the rooms of the two daughters of King Minos, Ariadne and Phaedra. As the two sisters stood on the wall, enjoying the moonlight, they heard the complaining of the prisoners. “What a pity it is,” said Ariadne, “that these youths will become food for the Minotaur. I pity young Prince Theseus most of all, because he is so brave. If you are willing, we should help him to slay the Minotaur.” Phaedra was as eager as Ariadne to help the young prince. So the two made a plan that they thought might succeed. They waited until all the king’s household were asleep, then tiptoed softly to the dungeon, and opened the door.

Worn out with lethargy and anxiety, all the prisoners but Theseus had fallen asleep. Theseus, however, was wide awake. Ariadne gestured to him to come out. Then she and Phaedra took him to the place where the famous labyrinth stood. Its white marble walls looked very high and strong in the moonlight. The night was very still, except for the sound of the waves crashing on the shore, and Theseus could clearly hear the heavy breathing of the sleeping Minotaur. “This is the best time to attack the creature; do not wait until morning,” Ariadne whispered, and Theseus knew that she was right. “The Minotaur’s den is in the very heart of the labyrinth,” Ariadne continued. “The sound of his breathing will show you in what direction you must go. Here is a sword, and here is a clew of yarn, by means of which, after you have killed the monster, you can find your way back.”

In this context, the Minotaur is a symbol of our selfish and half-animalistic knowing activity from the mind container perspective, the Guardian of the inner knowledge threshold. The innocent phenomena of virginal Nature are sacrificed to this beast who lives in our thinking, as we consume the meaning of sensory experience from our me-centered perspective for myopic aims. Our intuitive activity is externalized into labyrinthian thought arrangments about ‘reality’ and we take refuge in these theoretical models, claiming them as our private possessions, defending them against all those who threaten to awaken us from their enchantment. Yet a simple (but not effortless) shift in perspective is all that is needed to tame the Minotaur within us. When our desire for conceptual modeling has been renounced, when it has been put to sleep, we can enact the inversion of perspective on the conceptual content. Then we are able to retrace, with the thread of our living thinking, from the labyrinthian content to the intuitive movements that birthed the content.

Myths were the original recursive symbols of human civilization when the latter had already lost much experience of the recursive quality in the natural kingdoms. Those kingdoms had become more of an ‘external world’, although not to the extreme extent we have reached today. Such a falling away from ‘original participation’ in the perceptual world was necessary to cultivate the free intellectual life of thinking, where each individual could feel causally responsible for the arrangement of their thoughts. The myths, however, also spoke to an inner current of human civilization that maintained continuous contact with the participatory movements even while this new faculty of thinking emerged. This current was known as the Mysteries and the mythic heroes were the Initiates who drew on superconscious knowledge and dispersed its fruits into wider culture. Now we only have a dim remembrance of this ancient recursive function, yet it is once again only a shift in perspective needed to restore that function to its original glory.

Consider how walking the labyrinth evolved into a meditative exercise practiced in many places of worship:

The spiritual seeker takes a path that goes from the periphery quite close to the Center before returning toward the periphery. This pattern continues until the path eventually leads into the Center itself. There are no obstacles except mental ones that the seekers might create for themselves along the way. It is fundamentally a symbol of initiation, i.e. the rhythmic process by which a pupil attains knowledge of the superconscious capacity to know. Ariadne, a symbol for the purified soul, provides the thread of living thinking that allows seekers to always retrace their movements from the Center to the Periphery or vice versa, no matter how externalized and convoluted those movements have become in the form of perceptual ‘models’, i.e. macro- and micro- dreamscapes. It is interesting to note how the circular labyrinth also resembles the convoluted form of the brain and, if turned upside down, resembles the convoluted form of the metabolic-digestive system. These are recursive symbols for the two great poles of Thinking (neurosensory) and Will (metabolic-digestive), or Perception and Intuition.

It is through the rhythmic movements between them, symbolized by the functions of the breath and circulation, that the capacity to know the World arises. Through thinking, intuitions of the broader experiential flow are integrated from the World’s Periphery to the Center of our consciousness, and through the will, we act on those intuitions, conducting activity from the Center back to the Periphery. Any act of knowing perception, whether sensory or purely mental (e.g. mathematics), is already an inextricable union of both movements. Even when we sit still and think, we are acting subtly on the brain and nervous system to etch memory ‘engrams’.⁵ All such acts of knowing are embedded within self-similar rhythms over longer temporal scales. These provide a meaningful context for the act of knowing, like a word is embedded within a sentence, which is embedded within a paragraph, etc. What I perceive-know through this rhythmic movement at any given moment is only known by virtue of what is known through similar movements over the course of a whole day, a whole month, a whole lifetime, etc. Nothing is ever known without that whole implicit context being present.

Yet if this meditative walking of the labyrinth, i.e. the sensitizing of consciousness to our rhythmic knowing movements, was as simple as following a pre-defined path, there would be no need to explore it as we are doing now. Everyone who heard about the possibility of walking the path would already be consciously making their way to the Center. Why that doesn’t happen must be related to subconscious desires and interests supporting the domineering perspective of the mind container, as we discussed in Part II. Merely conceptualizing their existence cannot significantly modify their influences on our experiential flow, either, just as we cannot think our way into different favorite colors, foods, hobbies, etc. When we are enraged with someone, we can think to ourselves, “There’s no reason to be angry, it won’t do any good, so just stop it!” as many times as we want, but that won’t transform us out of our angered state. What we conceive as the emotion of ‘anger’ is a living force that transcends the abstract thoughts we manipulate within our mind container. The thoughts can marginally increase our sensitivity to the current of this underlying force but they can barely anticipate its flow, let alone redirect that flow.

“He hath blinded their eyes, and hardened their heart; that they should not see with their eyes, nor understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.”⁶

As with the caterpillar, the subconscious channels of these psychic forces must be gradually softened and made more pliable for the superconscious to work its mysterious metamorphic magic. The softening and corresponding healing of the mind and heart cannot come through conceptual knowledge alone, but must also involve the orchestration of virtuous cognitive forces that penetrate our whole being. In other words, the act of knowing becomes a collective effort, even if the living souls and activities we are coordinating with are imperceptible to us. A composer can work out the idea of a musical composition all on his own, including all the various instruments and dramatic narrative, but to transduce the idea into a concrete reality will require the orchestration of many other beings who can provide a concert hall, book the event, sell the tickets, play the instruments, etc. The beings who play the instrument of our soul lives, i.e. our knowing capacity, can only be attracted into our conscious life through our morally justified thoughts, feelings, and deeds working in harmony as One.

“The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light.”⁷

Life in the superconscious is the continual coordination of ideal impulses and insights between members of a collective organism, just as various members and systems of the living body coordinate to maintain the organism’s health and ability to pursue its aims.⁸ The kind of inspired cooperation for ideal aims that only happens on rare occasions during Earthly life is the very ‘substance’ in which more integrated spiritual activity weaves our capacities to perceive, know, and act. We can get a sense of this all-pervading coordinating activity of the superconscious by feeling our way into the underlying spirit that is expressed through the following clip:

Life in the superconscious is the continual accomplishment of what seems 'impossible’ and ‘paradoxical’ from ordinary sensory life. It continually transcends the Catch-22 because to perceive is to already know and to ask a question is to already be en route to the answer. Every act of knowing is experienced as a dialogue with many other beings who are working with and through us on the same noble project, and every productive idea only exists by virtue of our collective contributions. On rare occasions, the average Earthly ‘Jane’ or ‘Joe' gets a taste of this life when she or he decides to conduct their spiritual activity for something much bigger than their personal interests, for the benefit of other beings and humanity as a whole. Yet this thrilling cooperative experience can become much more consistent and clear in our normal knowing inquiries, even if conducted in a room ‘by ourselves’, once we purify our knowing perspective through the virtuous forces of cognition.

Modern people find it difficult to imagine how aesthetic and moral virtues could be associated with precise scientific knowledge, yet that was an instinctive reality for pre-modern thinkers. That is evident throughout the art, proto-philosophy, and proto-science of ancient India, China, Persia, Egypt, Judea, Greece-Rome, and early Christendom. Virtue, Beauty, and Wisdom were only sundered from one another completely around the 16th century to fully develop the forces of logical thinking and plant the seed of Virtue that arises wholly from within, as a free act. To accomplish the inversion of perspective, then, logical thinking should freely desire to reintegrate its process of accumulating knowledge with its active virtuous essence. These domains held artificially separate by the modern age should spiral back together; they should complement each other in a rhythmic flow of intuitive insight, conceptual artistry, and moral action.

To purify the state of heightened attention brought about through recursive thinking, we should work to reshape all the inner tendencies that continually collapse the attentive state and externalize intuitive movements into abstract concepts and convenient models. The situation is comparable to when we are listening to someone else speaking, for example, someone giving a lecture, and we are continuously overlaying our own opinions on the ideas expressed, perhaps even getting carried away by trains of thought completely unrelated to those ideas, only periodically returning to them before we are distracted by our opinions again. Instead, we need to offer our undivided attention and let the experience of recursive thinking speak to us with as little interruption as possible. That is why the cultivation of moral impulses in these artistic conceptual pursuits of knowledge is of utmost importance. The initial spiritualization of concepts will only go so far before we encounter another inner Guardian that asks us to look even more closely and objectively at our soul life, at all the factors that keep distracting and personalizing our attention.

As discussed in Part II, we can only resonate with the Other-centered perspectives that shape our knowing capacity when our interests become self-similar to theirs. Our inner soul configuration of thinking, feeling, and will impulses should become a fractal image of Divine Wisdom, Love, and Strength. Normally our interests and aims revolve around what to wear, what to eat, what to watch for entertainment, how to get somewhere, where to go for vacation, how to become more knowledgeable, happy, peace-filled, inwardly satisfied, and so forth. There is, in that case, little to no overlap with the sphere of Divine interests that transcend purely personal concerns and aims. We can try to vividly imagine the inner life of various nested spheres of beings extending out from our heart center - (1) ourselves, (2) our close family, (3) our extended relatives and friends, (4) our loose acquaintances over the years, (5) the souls who comprise our nation, and (6) humanity as a whole. As we move from (1) to (2) and to (2) to (3), we should feel the imagination becoming significantly more abstract, and by the time we get to (6), we are only left with a nebulous conceptual placeholder.

It is this myopic interest that resides at the core of the ‘dissociative boundary’ or ‘noumenal realm’ that philosophers abstractly postulate as the reason we can’t know the capacity to know and transcend the spiritual Catch-22. We surely like to imagine that we have an expanded and loving interest in the lives of our fellow human souls but the sobering reality is that we could care less about most of them, and in many cases, we harbor a good deal of antipathy and hate for them. Yet the Catch-22 suggests that we can only become inwardly aware of how little we are interested once we expand our sphere of interest through the virtuous forces of cognition. When we consistently devote attention to the symbolic investigation of inner activity, the cultivation of virtuous soul forces, and the perfection of morally creative spiritual capacities, then the sphere of resonance expands to the living movements by which we know.

It is of no matter in the laboratory whether a man has a strong or weak moral character. This is not the case, however, when one is concerned with etheric [life] forces. Then one's moral constitution affects one's results. For this reason, it is impossible for modern man to develop this ability if he remains as he is. The laboratory table must first become an altar, just as it was for Goethe who, as a child, kindled his small altar to nature with the rays of the rising sun… Man's inner being and his outer surroundings work into one another reciprocally; what is outside transforms itself for us, depending on whether our vision is clear or clouded.⁹

Until the late Middle Ages, there was still an instinctive union between moral impulses and the search for knowledge about reality. It was inconceivable that one could or should simply amass ‘facts’ about reality that are somehow independent of the intimate moral life. The latter provided the explicit context in which all fact-finding missions unfolded. Yet these moral virtues remain compulsive if we instinctively pursue them out of obedience to some external power or out of a vague sense of guilt or shame about our modern indulgent lifestyle. Those external and nebulous motivations strip them of virtuous character. Instead, we should understand the inner functions they serve in the evolutionary drama of human history and freely cultivate them when we discern how those functions concentrically align our highest ideals for ourselves, for humanity, and for the planetary organism.

Most generally, they all serve the following functions in attaining Self-knowledge through recursive perceptions:

• Disarming and relaxing the habitual mechanisms of the selfish mind container perspective.

• Rendering the inner knowledge threshold more porous and our thinking activity more sensitive to unperceived and unknown intuitive movements that are transpersonal.

• Reorienting from an exclusive interest in what we can know about the Whole to a continuously budding interest in how we are known from the perspective of the Whole.

We will aesthetically explore these and other functions of the virtues in the next part.

1. Rudolf Steiner, 1 Soziales Verständnis, Vol. IV, Lecture 2.

2. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception
“Phenomenology allows itself to be practiced and recognized as a manner or as a style, or that it exists as a movement, prior to having reached a full philosophical consciousness.”

3. Kuhlewind, Georg. From Normal to Healthy (p. 183). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown.”

5. Michael Levin, Self-Improvising Memory: A Perspective on Memories as Agential, Dynamically Reinterpreting Cognitive Glue
https://www.mdpi.com/2812606

6. John 12:40

7. Matthew 6:22

8. Romans 12:3-5
“For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office: So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”

9. Rudolf Steiner, GA 118 (L3)