Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part VI)

Spiraling the poles of existence together through the technique of imaginative concentration.

In the previous discussion, we explored how the integrating experiential flow of the purely intuitive Spirit folded in on upon itself, casting reflections within reflections, introducing new levels of indirection into the experiential flow with each new reflective ‘rung’. We can imagine the first rung as purely ‘Subjective’, the way we would experience only a first-person stream of activity imploding thought-memory pictures if our sensations, emotions, desires, and so forth were completely silenced. It is the pure inner meaning of what we dimly know as color, sound, smell, taste, warmth, etc., but expanded to the scale of the whole Cosmos. The imploding ‘thought-memory’ at this scale is like a superposition of all potential states of being, i.e. what we currently experience as our whole temporally extended evolutionary development, with all its fruits in the way of inner qualities and capacities, from beginning to end. On the second rung, a portion of that unitary intuitive stream becomes objectified within an ideal rhythmic process, akin to the pure inner meaning of in-breathing and out-breathing, but still with no experience of a ‘private inner life’.

On the third rung, a portion of the first-person ideal rhythmic process becomes further objectified through reflected images, by which the spirit experiences a dreamy distinction between ‘inside me’ and ‘outside me’, vacillating its experience between the two like the osmosis process of a semipermeable cell membrane. Finally, on the fourth rung, even a portion of the reflected images within the inner soul sphere is objectified and our primordial experience of ‘subjectivity’ is confined almost entirely within a stream of point-like encoded thoughts, rigidly enclosed within a skull, confronting the complex perceptual flow of an objectified World (see also Part II discussion on the conceptual encoding of soul imagery). By the fourth rung of this iterative reflective process, the spirit’s whole perceptual environment (‘perceptual’ means any experiences to which we can direct our activity, including thoughts and emotions) becomes a flattened and more or less externalized image of the previous three contextual rungs of spiritual activity.

Here we mean ‘externalized’ in the sense that the spirit no longer feels creatively responsible for the perceptual flow of passive thoughts and emotions (shadow of 3rd rung), life processes (shadow of 2nd rung), or physical-sensory processes (shadow of 1st rung). These meet the spirit as external rhythms of its inner and outer environments that it can only reflect upon. It is only in the experience of its actively willed thoughts that the spirit finally discovers a concrete overlap between its subjectivity and the World’s objectivity, since it feels creatively responsible for the perceptual flow of such thoughts (e.g. inner voice sounds and pictures) when it intends to think. These willed thoughts act as tiny probes that are ‘sent out’ into the contextual rungs and extract some aliased meaning of their significance within our existential flow. Every act of thinking can be imagined as a movement extending from the spirit’s experienced center to the periphery of the contextual rungs, which integrates intuition of existence from the periphery back to the center (an ideal movement that even comes to expression in the celestial form of the human head).

We can also imagine the contextual rungs described above as spheres within spheres. In fact, the ancient consciousness weaved in concrete imaginations of planetary spheres that were nested within one another from the Earthly perspective, the larger spheres (like Saturn) contextualizing the smaller ones (like the Moon). In other words, the meaning of everything that took its course on Earth, whether natural, cultural, or more personal events (to the extent anything could be ‘personal’ in those times), was felt as contextualized by Cosmic influences in a lawful and hierarchical way. The pure Light of intuitive potential was ‘stepped down’ with each level from the most expansive spheres towards the most contracted, its spiritual influences becoming more filtered through relative ideal perspectives, as if being refracted through a prism of lenses. Today, within the narrowest sphere, the spirit still experiences this same process in its thinking whenever it focuses its intuition of the Whole through the prism of various ideal relations into point-like concepts (see also ‘balancing point’ analogy in Part II).

For example, logical thinking can grasp the intuition that reality must be unified and continuous for its various ‘domains’ to relate lawfully to one another. This intuition can be focused through an ideal framework such as materialism, where the unity is sought in the ‘space-time fabric’, ‘quantum field’, or something similar, or through a framework such as idealism, where the unity is sought in the ‘Idea’, the ‘Ego’, the ‘Will’, or simply ‘Consciousness’. In the former, the holistic intuition is further focused into point-like concepts of atoms, particles, energy vibrations, and so forth, while in the latter it is focused into concepts of sensations, thoughts, feelings, will impulses, intents, etc. In that way, what was once an imaginatively shared sense of the nested Cosmic context has been contracted into a seemingly ‘private’ sphere of thinking for each relative perspective, where the spirit begins to explore itself through hierarchies of point-like concepts.

As we briefly mentioned in the previous part, by permeating the flattened perceptual frames of the stellar movements with these concepts, threading the frames together with the needle of ideas that elucidate their characteristic rhythms and influences, the spirit recovers some dim sense of how the stellar configurations symbolize spiritual influences that guide the course of events on Earth. This science of astrology can only make sense if the temporal relations that are within us have now been externalized and flattened through the perceptual environment of the fourth rung, placed ‘side by side’ as spatial images like the second, minute, and hour hands are flattened on the face of a clock. In other words, the physical planets (including Moon and Sun), stars, and their relational movements can be understood as the outer physiognomy of purely inner relations between Cosmic-scale intents, motivations, and ideas, like the gestures of a human hand are the outer physiognomy of that being’s inner life.¹ The stellar rhythms perceived must be speaking to deeply subconscious inner experiences that Earthly humanity shares in common and that weave its threads of destiny around a shared Central axis.

Yet it is important to always keep in mind that, if we desire to retrace these inner relations with more intimacy than we can gain through intellectual models, we should not start with the loftiest Cosmic rhythms, but rather with the more humble rhythm of our mental space, i.e. the exceptional point within the 4^th sphere where the spirit can create a concrete overlap between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ by actively willing its perceptual thought-flow. There is a lot of talk about ‘integration’ these days in the various philosophies, sciences, arts, and religions. People want to integrate many different fields of inquiry into an all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’, and there is no shortage of that mentality in spiritual pursuits as well. Before we can make any significant progress with that integration, however, we must become receptive to the Wisdom that integrates the various partitions of our own mental and psychic spaces. Otherwise, there is always the risk that psychic tendencies remain opaque to our cognitive perception and, because they remain unconscious, are projected into the stellar spheres. Then, the ‘destinies’ we discern to be written in the stars are little more than our preferred narratives for ourselves.

The first step is to discover, within ourselves, the crown of the whole creative process that unfolded through the nested spheres such that we can experience it intimately and leverage it for our ideal aims. That is the inner rhythm of thinking and perception through which the spirit continuously tries to understand the relation between the World’s mysterious experiential flow, on the one hand, and itself as a thinking agency that is mysteriously involved in that flow, on the other. It is the rhythm we have been using to think about the symbolic concepts of these essays and triangulate higher corresponding intuitions about our spiritual existence. When we become active in this rhythm, we re-create something of the fundamental axis of reality around which our spiritual kernel can be cultivated and grow, like a symbiotic vine spiraling around a tree (this is also connected with the human’s vertical spine, in contrast to the animal). It is from here that the spirit can gradually bring more and more of the perceptual flow in-phase with its activity; to feel itself creatively participating within the more expansive contextual spheres.

Even at the most superficial level, this rhythm stands at the threshold of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ experience. When we look at a table, for example, we experience it as being ‘outside’ us – we are ‘here’ looking at the table ‘over there’. If we turn away from the table and call up a memory picture to think about the table, on the other hand, the picture of the table is experienced ‘inside’ our head. Furthermore, even when we think about memory pictures inside our head, those pictures are felt to be at some distance ‘in front’ of our thinking perspective, i.e. from the center where our thinking-gestures emanate (usually around the root of the nose, slightly inside the forehead). Thus, there is still an external/internal divide present in our thinking about memory pictures. There is something within this rhythm that currently dualizes our experience into an external world of perceptions (including perceptions of emotions and thoughts) and a central thinking perspective; a “me” and “not me”.

We can represent this rhythm visually as follows:

Let’s try to solve a math problem, such as 2X + 15 - 40 = 75. When the spirit’s activity is immersed in its mathematical perceptions, solving for X, it is merged together with those perceptions and experiences that as the flow of time (represented by X axis above). The activity is entirely absorbed in the mathematical thought-content that entrains its movements and leads it toward the vicinity of a solution. If we try to also observe what we are doing to perform the calculation (Y axis), to observe the ‘thinking-gestures’ the spirit is making to move things around in the process of solving for X, then we objectify the thinking process and behold it as space-like pictures, superimposed in our imagination. By ‘pictures’ we don’t necessarily mean anything clearly visual, but simply the fact that we ‘stand back’ from the thinking process and try to remember its past movements. Whenever we try to recall some event in memory, we are in effect attempting to resonate with the intuitive movements that were performed at that time, through which we made sense of the perceptual experience. In other words, we are trying to imitate the thinking-gestures performed in the same way we do when reading the meaningful words of this essay to resonate with the past activity that conceived and crystallized them. However, we are normally too insensitive to these subtle gestures and simply take the whole memory process for granted (until it fails us).

Our spiritual activity normally oscillates between the poles of this rhythm – when it is polarized along the X axis, it can’t simultaneously attend to its own subtle activity, and when it is polarized along the Y axis, it can’t also attend to the perceptual content. That is the basis for all dualized experience, in so far as what we think about (X) and what we are doing with our thinking (Y) are kept separate from one another, spiraling around in a hysteresis-like fashion. It is from this inner hysteresis that all modern dualistic thinking experience, and therefore philosophy, science, theology, etc., was born. In the mathematical example, when we perform the calculation, we can’t also attend to our mathematical thinking-gestures, and when we attend to our thinking-gestures, performance of the calculation ceases. These two poles of the rhythm never seem to be able to catch up with each other, just as a dog chasing its tail. It is analogous to a bistable perception – when we see the image below from one perspective, we lose sight of the other perspective, and vice versa.

One face looking downward or two lovers kissing, but not both at the same time.

The mathematical example simply helps make clear the rhythm we are always experiencing but which we are normally insensitive to. Let’s imagine we are a ‘blank slate’ and trying to understand the phenomena of a thunderstorm. Such a storm generally catches us by surprise, and we can only try to understand its happenings in retrospect. We remember how the dark clouds gathered and approached in an ominous way. Then the rain began pouring and 2-dimensional bolts of light mysteriously manifested from the heavens in an entirely unpredictable way. Sometime after these enigmatic manifestations, deep and growling billows of sound approached us. If the bolt of light seemed far away from us, the billows of sound growled after a longer duration of time, whereas if they seemed closer, the billows growled sooner. On the other hand, we remember that there was no relationship between the growling sound and a subsequent bolt of light. In this way, we set our thinking in motion and begin permeating the phenomenal observations with concepts that elucidate their lawfulness. We discern how some aspects of the phenomenon are correlated with one another while others are not. That is practically how all natural sciences were originally pursued.

When we think intellectually about the events of such a phenomenon, the spirit surfs many superimposed images of experience and extracts verbal concepts that encode their meaning. Then we relate these concepts in various ways that feel ‘logical’, perhaps comparing those conceptual relations to those we have discerned in other phenomena (like those involving the dynamics of sound perception), to reach laws and principles that elucidate some aspects of the phenomena in question, and now we feel a bit less frightened by and alienated from the mysterious thunderstorm than we were before. But what is missing from these laws and principles is the fact of our own spiritual activity in observing, encoding, and relating the concepts together. In the process of conducting our activity such that certain observations and insights are fed back to our consciousness, we lose sight of the activity itself. The latter is conspicuously missing from the knowledge that was gained from the spirit’s energetic effort. In that sense, our spiritual activity is continually renouncing its own life so that we can perceive and make sense of the lawful relations that comprise our environment.

Moreover, we only feel to have intuitive certainty in this continually dying act of thinking while the contents of our thoughts are externalized and can be endlessly doubted (this came to famous expression in Descartes’ conclusion that he could not rule out the possibility his thoughts were being arranged by some deceptive demon, but it was impossible to doubt the very inner activity of doubting). Our retracing begins when we are able to resurrect the life of our spiritual activity by becoming conscious of its subtle movements. We must be able to reunite the fruits of spiritual activity through the first half of individual and collective life - objective thoughts about the World and the insights derived from them - with the life of that spiritual activity, and therefore with the latter’s intimacy and intuitive certainty. To lay hold of spiritual activity before it exhausts its life in the finished products of thoughts and perceptions, the poles of the hysteresis curve should spiral together and become more in-phase with one another.

Theoretically, this spiraling together could be attained at any time. Our attention is normally dragged around by the most diverse elements of sensations – a movement in the periphery, a sound here, an itch there, subtle odors, and so on. These all slightly entrain our attention even if we don’t notice them doing so. On top of that, our inner life of feelings and thoughts is chaotically reverberating from all these sensory impacts and memory pictures. All of these jagged influences act to drown out inner sensitivity to the subtle attentional activity and gestures, such that the hysteresis between what we are doing with our thinking and what we are thinking about remains oscillating without ever coinciding. The spirit is like a dog on a leash in this default situation - it can move around a limited perimeter of meaning but is constantly tugged around by the contextual constraints that feel external to it, altering its direction and leading it back to certain spots over and over again. Most of us have experienced this when a song gets 'stuck in our head' and our activity is forced to iterate over its meaning.

Yet that phenomenon is only the most surface-level expression of encrusted habits of thinking, feeling, and acting that are triggered by various sensory events and place the spirit’s activity at their mercy. That is because the spirit’s thinking movements are extremely weak and helpless within the context of these chaotic torrents on which it is tossed around, so it simply flows in whatever crisscrossing directions they lead it. That flow may advance us toward certain personal goals, but it leaves us with little idea of how we got there or how those personal goals fit within the context of wider transpersonal goals. We could also analogize these etched pathways of psychic life to the macro programs in computer software. These are a sequence of several actions that can be pre-recorded and executed with a single key. In that sense, our psychic nature is like living macros that we trigger with the impulses of our inner activity in tight correspondence with sensory events. Then we simply watch the ‘pre-recorded’ impulses unfold – feelings of insecurity, frustration, and anger follow a perceived insult like clockwork.

To gain sensitivity to the deeper nature of these torrential macros, we need to resist them. Think of a time when you were ravenously hungry and devoured the meal in front of you, barely stopping to chew the food (perhaps we eat like this even when not so hungry). In that case, our eating activity flowed right along with the ravenous impulse and put up no resistance. That is how our normal intellectual thinking approaches the meaningful context in which its activity is embedded. It doesn't slow down and deliberately masticate the meaning to gain sensitivity to the tastes and textures, the firmness, smoothness, sweetness, sourness, bitterness, spiciness, etc. Try to imagine the difference between these two paths of experience vividly. With these rushed intellectual habits, the spirit can never settle enough to find the conjunction points between the contextual spheres at which its subtle movements align with the conscious perceptual content of its experience.

We are in the same position if we simply start thinking about ‘what I am doing with my thinking’ through our concepts, i.e. trying to categorize and define our thinking activity in some way. That is akin to someone who tries to understand their intimate real-time thinking gestures by jumping into an MRI machine, jumping back out, reading the scanned results, jumping back into the machine, jumping back out, combining the new scanned results with the old results, ad infinitum. In both cases, we are simply adding more and more mental models by which we hope to capture thinking’s essence, but which instead distance us further and further from the present activity which is doing the modeling. Unfortunately, much of what comes under the heading of ‘phenomenology’ in modern philosophical discourse adopts this approach. There are certain insights that can be gained by studying phenomenal experiences in this way, but, at the same time, we can easily get lost in mental pictures and forget about the real-time activity that is steering and organizing those pictures through the contextual spheres.

Instead, we aim to experience our subtle present activity by concentrating its force into a unitary thought-image. Although it may seem like we are immobilizing our activity by focusing it into a ‘static’ image, that is not actually the case – it is more like a movie projector that maintains an image on the screen by flooding ever-new waves of light, or a waterfall that only appears somewhat static due to the concentrated force of the streaming water. When we place such an image at the center of our concentrated attentional activity, we don’t necessarily get rid of the diverse perceptual elements of the senses and inner life, but they take on a more holistic background texture. The subtle gestures and the perceptual content begin to synchronize with one another. Then our attentional activity is like a stable pillar within this holistic perceptual texture, no longer dragged across the separate elements yet still experiencing their rich meaning in a much more intensified way. One way to visualize what is attained through the concentration technique is as follows (recommended to watch in full screen):

With this visualization (crisper version at this link), we can imagine the spiritual activity within the nested and superimposed contextual spheres as interfering sheets that produce Moiré patterns. The most complex perceptual patterns occur where there are three overlapping sheets (corresponding to the 4th conceptual-sensory sphere). These rich and aesthetic patterns only arise because there is some continual misalignment between the oscillating sheets, which speaks to the fact that even the painful disharmony we experience within the 4th sphere serves critical aims of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness from the perspective of the Whole. Yet if we observe carefully, we can notice that, even within the most complexified domain of activity, there are times when all the sheets completely align. Whenever we experience insights into the experiential flow through normal thinking, we experience split-second alignments between the spheres that transduce holistic intuition from the primordial spheres into images and concepts. But then the alignments lose coherence again and we are lost in torrential pathways of conceptual-sensory experience. We grow impatient and, into these meandering pathways, we begin inserting all manner of personalized assumptions and preferences to explain away the experiential flow.

Through imaginative concentration, however, these split-second alignments can be maintained for longer and longer and thereby the inflow of insight is intensified. It is as if we hold open the conjunctions between the spiritual Moiré patterns to let a steady stream of holistic intuition flow more freely and abundantly², with less interruption. Then our cognitive consciousness can resonate with that flow of intuition before it is stepped down all the way to the level of fragmented concepts and perceptions that continually oscillate around the spirit’s activity. In this situation, we could still potentially inject our personalized preferences to build rigid models of reality, but why sneak old candies from the jar when we are given the keys to the candy store? When the tap of new insights and inspiration flows more freely, the spirit is more incentivized to wait patiently and explore the wondrous vistas of cognitive perception without looking back to old sclerotic habits.³ We can get a dim sense of what it means to stabilize the otherwise bistable poles of the activity-perceptual rhythm by trying the following exercise.

Reaching out with your hands in front of you and your index fingers pointed up. Put your fingers close together and focus your sight at the point in between the fingers. Then slowly try moving your straightened arms away from each other, tracing half circles going in the opposite directions. As you distance your fingers, try to keep them both in sight but without moving your eyes and jumping from one finger to the other. Of course, it is optically impossible to have both fingers in focus as they get further and further away, so the gaze should be straight ahead while you remain keenly aware of the whole periphery. At the same time, avoid allowing your gaze to be attracted to either one of the fingers. The half-arcs should continue widening until we can't sense our hands in the periphery anymore.

The result of this exercise is that we end up in a state where we have expanded our visual field such that we encompass its whole circumference and we're not focused on any perceptual object in particular. The exercise can be extended further by widening our attention of the other senses as well – try to encompass the whole auditory field, your kinesthetic bodily sensations, your intellectual thoughts, your emotions, etc. Our spiritual activity is now focused in supporting this holistic state. We shouldn't try to control the perceptions or try to feel them clearly. It's natural that the field of perceptions should feel blurry, and it is precisely that which allows us to find a point of concentration that is not attached to any particular perception but is nevertheless anchored within their holistic meaning. 

The above exercise simply gives us a sense of the initial state that we seek to attain through imaginative concentration. From that state, the meaning of the momentary experience can grow more and more densified as the spirit thickens the state through its concentrated activity. The thought-texture of its holistic perceptual state expands and grows richer in meaning as the temporal thickness of the ‘duration’ is revealed.⁴ This temporally thick state is not expanding into some entirely new domain of existence but rather into the meaningful constraints on the spirit’s activity that are always there, i.e. the contextual spheres through which the pure Subject became more and more objectified. To begin with, these are experienced as psychic constraints – beliefs, ideologies, desires, preferences, interests, antipathies, etc. The more the spirit can resist its instinctive tendency to grasp at the particular elements of that meaning and collapse the holistic ‘wavefunction’ into linear thought sequences, the more it can gain sensitivity for the configuration of its temporal soul ‘geometry’ that modulates its normal perceptual experience.

Let’s briefly comment here on how different this technique is from many modern ‘no-thought, no-self’ meditative approaches that seek to undress the buzzing thoughts, emotions, desires, and so forth until the spirit dwells passively in a state of ‘ego-death’ or ‘non-being’, contemplating a profound yet inexplicable perceptual flow. Such approaches practically seek the null hypothesis of creation and existence, dimming down consciousness until the spirit floats on the waves of unconscious sleep in a zombie state – not quite unconscious but certainly not alive and lucid. Everything we are effortfully investigating in these essays would be viewed as the ultimate foolishness from the perspective of such mystical meditators, as abstractions piled upon abstractions. The spirit in such a position would rather extricate from feeling creatively responsible for anything in its flow of experience because it conflates that feeling with the root of suffering. That is because it never seeks the degrees of freedom by which it can remain conscious within the higher contextual spheres and retrace the fragmented phenomenal shadows to the higher contextual activity that casts them. Without that inner freedom, the mystical spirit cannot grow through the point of overlap between Earthly and Cosmic existence.

When the spirit begins growing through the portal of concentration, our imaginative efforts can be compared to launching these toys. The longer we remain concentrated, the more altitude the spirit gains within the contextual spheres that give meaning to its intimate thinking-perceptual rhythm. It dwells within flashes of insight that embed the rich meaning of conceptual states that would otherwise be explored sequentially over long durations. Then, on the way down, it can unpack the dense meaning into thought-sequences that can refine its intuition of that meaning and convey it to others, which is instrumental in reinforcing and expanding its intuitive orientation. However, in its early imaginative explorations, as soon the thought-texture begins to expand around the point of concentration, the spirit must resist the temptation to prematurely unpack the meaning. We can learn to carry on an internal dialogue, a sort of wordless prayer, by which we grow patient and renounce the instinctive desire to grasp at the fruit of this meaningful ‘Tree of Knowledge’, knowing that the longer we resist this temptation, the more meaning will be available to unpack later.  

When we manage to retrace our activity into the imaginative space (3^rd sphere) from which it convoluted into fragmented conceptual-sensory states (4^th sphere), we are no longer dealing with the quantitative structure of perception that we are familiar with. Within this imaginative space, for example, an activity like ‘counting’ loses its meaning. Counting only has meaning when perceptual experience is segmented into separate parts, which is only possible within the conceptual-sensory space. It no longer makes sense to speak of spatial distances, either. What is the distance between our belief in ‘collectivism’ and our belief in ‘individualism’, or our emotion of ‘restlessness’ and our emotion of ‘serenity’? These inner soul currents become the substantial ‘medium’ through which our imaginative states unfold, just like ‘spacetime’ is the medium through which our conceptual-sensory states unfold. The spirit traverses this soul space through a sort of ‘quantum tunneling’ in which its states transform more fluidly, yet it still encounters the resistance of other relative perspectives involved in its soul flow.

None of the meaning from the spirit’s experience of spatial segmentation is lost but rather it is placed into a higher context. Even in normal spatial experience, we can think our way to the conclusion that seemingly isolated perceptions only have meaning by virtue of a mostly unobserved context in which they manifest. The shades of colors we perceive in one part of the landscape that is in view, for example, would be completely different if other parts of the landscape that are out of view were not shaded in their particular colors. Color phenomena always manifest their qualities in an interweaving way within a holistic environmental context, most of which we pay no attention to – the source of illumination, the material illuminated, shadowing, reflections, etc. Perhaps the most important factor in that context is our imaginative activity, which is continually adjusting the perceptual context such that more meaning can be discerned in the pursuit of various goals.  A fun way to explore this fact is through the following ‘optical illusions’ (we should try to disregard any theoretical assumptions placed on top of the given facts).

The above can only be called an ‘illusion’ when it is assumed there is a World with ‘real colors’ (or their equivalent in mathematical abstractions) that exists independently of the spirit perceiving it. The spirit abstracts its own activity out from the World state and then imagines it (or the brain it has identified with) arbitrarily changes the colors of that World state for ‘evolutionary’ reasons. Within the imaginative state, however, the spirit gains more sensitivity to the subtle thinking-gestures it is always making in order to accomplish these remarkable perceptual feats. For example, if we move a finger toward our nose while viewing it with only one eye, the finger will grow larger and larger in size according to the ‘laws’ of perspective, but when viewed with both eyes, the finger stays the same size as it moves closer. One would not call the latter an ‘illusion’ because it is known how each eye has a slightly different view of the finger and coordinates with the other. Although we are unlikely to forget the physical eyes’ creative coordination in such an exercise, we all too often forget the spirit’s imaginative coordination in perceptual experience.

In that sense, the perceptual modifications are only ‘illusions’ when the spirit fails to continue retracing the effect to other facts, including the fact of its own inner activity, but instead confuses the perceptual experience with some ‘final state’ of reality. Simply put, no phenomenon is something other than what it appears to be, neither is it only what it appears to be. When the spirit’s subtle activity is no longer in the blind spot, it no longer needs to chain itself to externalized mechanisms or theoretical models that purport to explain away the facts, but can instead retrace the deeper contextual layers of experience that harmonize those surface-level facts and remain free in the process. Similarly, we don’t forget the thinking activity of counting or measuring when we enter the imaginative state, as if they never existed, but we gain the unobserved temporal context that gives such activities their true meaning. The spirit can experience that overarching temporal context just as concretely as it experiences colors, sounds, shapes, etc. in sensory life (or dream life) but with the same lucidity and intuitive insight that it normally experiences in the flow of its sequential thoughts.

This context is effectively the holistic configuration of life experiences and corresponding intuitions that made the quantitative modality of thinking possible, for example, the childhood experience of things coming in pairs or triplets and the intuition that there is a qualitative distinction between these that can be ordered in some way. We usually feel like these experiences are all ‘in the past’, quickly receding away from us into a mysterious void of increasingly inaccessible memory, but the higher states reveal that we ‘carry around’ this temporal depth context at all times and subtly draw on its activity to accomplish our daily tasks. The specialized skills and capacities we utilize are not ‘stored’ in some genetic or neurological structure but are continually kindled anew through holistic spiritual gestures. In this way, a whole new perspective on the flow of life opens up through our retracing efforts. The spirit no longer feels to be at the mercy of external objects and forces, or the inexorable flow of linear time, but knows itself as a creative participant in all of its life experiences.

None of its sequentially explored tasks are rendered less meaningful by retracing into the deeper temporal context but, on the contrary, the spirit begins to realize that the meaning of every task, every feeling, every idea, and every single perception in its flow of experience will only thicken out more as it retraces further. The sequential exploration of the holistic states establishes the grounds of the human spirit’s relative freedom and the possibility of cultivating moral virtues. It provides a unique intuitive perspective on the Whole from which new relationships between its ideal content can be investigated and responded to. Yet now humanity must also transition from this infant’s milk and begin consuming the solid food of spiritual knowledge.⁵ With reverence and devotion, we can approach the living structure of the Spirit as it expresses its life most intimately within our rhythm of thinking and perception. Through the technique of concentration, the oscillations of the hysteresis can be stabilized and what we are doing with our thinking, i.e. the living gestures we are making, and what we are thinking about, i.e. the meaningful content of our thinking, can be made to coincide.

In the next part, we will further explore this technique of concentrated retracing into the higher contextual spheres of activity in which our conceptual-sensory life is nested.

1. 1 Corinthians 15:40-41
“There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory.”

2. Ephesians 3:20
“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us…”

3. Genesis 19:26
”But his wife looked back [to Sodom and Gomorrah] from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.”

4. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (p. 122)
“Thus I said that several conscious states are organized into a whole, permeate one another, gradually gain a richer content, and might thus give any one ignorant of space the feeling of pure duration…”

5. 1 Corinthians 3:2-3
“I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are you not carnal and behaving like mere men?”