Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part I)

An overview of the principles that contextualize the phenomenological retracing of spiritual activity.

The human biography in modern civilization undergoes characteristic phases of development. When we are born, the unexplored space of natural and cultural potential remains expansive and there are many paths of experience that can be traversed. The physiological systems of the young child unfold along a well-defined human path, yet within that space, there are quite a few different ways in which the inner being may ultimately come to outer expression in the child's height, weight, stature, gait, countenance, and so forth. There is even greater leeway in the spirit’s soul configuration, such as its temperament and character, more still in the educational and career paths the spirit may traverse, and the most in the beliefs it may adopt and the sort of thoughts it can think. The World begins as its oyster, as the saying goes.

By the late thirties or early forties, however, all of these domains of potential have contracted and become more or less set in stone. For example, the lens of the eye becomes less flexible and may necessitate the use of reading glasses. The audible range of hearing will have decreased substantially by this age. One’s circle of friends will generally remain constant or dwindle as time goes by, and most people over 40 who have become unemployed can attest that it is not easy to find gainful employment in a specialized field after this age. The soul will be significantly invested in its philosophical or religious framework by this time. The whole circumference of physical, cultural, social, and mental opportunities collapses quickly around the mature adult as what was once potential has already been actualized or, alternatively, the window of actualization has been missed.

A metaphor for this narrowing of potential is solving a crossword puzzle. At the outset, there are many possible ways to fill the empty boxes with letters such that they contain coherent words. As soon as we read the first hint across or down and fill in a word, however, the space of potential in that part of the puzzle is significantly narrowed and now only those words which share letters with the first word are possibilities. This narrowing continues at an exponential trajectory for each new hint that is solved. Let’s say each empty box represents a state of being that encompasses all sensations, thoughts, feelings, and willful intents. With each new word that is etched into the puzzle, corresponding to physical, soul, and mental qualities, the palette of new states to which our current state can transform is narrowed down exponentially.  By the middle of life, there are only a few boxes left and we may even be able to routinely fill them in without any hints.

A spirit that has etched a melancholic temperament to a high degree in its childhood and adolescence, for example, will generally be unable to transform to those emotional states that are lively, energetic, highly comfortable with its environment, and such. Likewise, a spirit that has etched a materialistic world outlook will find it difficult to transform to mental states that explore supersensible realities, i.e. the manifold relations of the inner life. These are not rigid rules and there is always some degree of flexibility, but with these examples, we are simply elucidating the underlying principle. As soon as we gain some sense of independent agency in childhood, we begin seeking ways to creatively transform our current state of being – embedding sensory, emotional, and mental qualities – to new states. This creative activity meets resistance in the instinctively etched pathways of the bodily, psychic, and mental life, such that the palette of states for transformation is narrowed down.

Certain technical and artistic skills that are developed in later life can open additional leeway for the spirit to transform into new states, yet there are also diminishing returns on such skills in the age of 21^st century technology. It is becoming evident that ‘intelligent’ machines can help the average non-skilled person explore these states just as easily. Moreover, the states themselves are simply reshufflings of those that have already been manifested in prior years and decades. Few of us go on YouTube or Netflix, or anticipate the new iPhone, expecting to be surprised by the content or design anymore.  It is becoming clear, therefore, that the spirit is quickly running out of novel ‘real estate’ to where it can transform its activity, for both individuals and collectives.

Another metaphorical illustration of this narrowing down of potential is John Wheeler's famous variant of the 20 questions game, which he called 'negative 20 questions':

In the normal version, someone leaves the room briefly while the remaining folks agree to choose a particular object that’s in the room. The returning person gets twenty questions to guess the agreed-upon object, with “Is it bigger than a breadbox?” being the classic opening gambit.

In Negative Twenty Questions, however, all the remaining folks privately pick their own objects, though the person returning doesn’t know this.  In fact, as Murch observes, “Nobody knows what anyone else is thinking.  The game proceeds regardless, which is where the fun begins.”

When returning Joe (let’s call him) asks the standard bigger-than-a-breadbox question, if the first person says No, then the other players, who may have selected objects that are bigger, now have to look around the room for something that fits the definition.  And if “Is it Hollow?” is Joe’s next question, then any of the players who chose new and unfortunately solid objects now have to search around for a new appropriate object.  As Murch says, “a complex vortex of decision making is set up, a logical but unpredictable chain of ifs and thens.”  Yet somehow this steady improvisation finally leads—though not always, there’s the tension—to a final answer everyone can agree with, despite the odds.

Here is also a brief video illustration:

In this sense, every natural quality, psychic tendency, and mental outlook etched during the first half of life narrows down the space of potential 'answers' to the question of an individual's life destiny. It is typically around the early forties that the mature adult faces a crisis of limitations. The individual now feels like the expansive space of potential has been narrowed down around it and there is very little room to let the soul breathe and grow anymore, for the soul to be revitalized by new paths and possibilities of experience. The soul has seemingly reached a 'final answer' to the question of its destiny. Yet this crisis would not be nearly as disheartening, and it would even become inspiring, if the contracting of the old spaces was met by the expanding of new ones, spaces of inner potential with corresponding inner experiences that are waiting to be explored. When one door closes, another door opens.

The natural-spiritual evolutionary process is such that the contracting space of natural potential (left) should transition into the expanding space of spiritual potential (right). The archetype of the ‘old wise man’ speaks to this process that was more akin to a natural law in ancient times. At a certain stage of life, mature adults simply began growing in spiritual wisdom such that other members of the community could place complete confidence in their guidance. In more technical language, we could say that, after the spirit instinctively impresses its qualities into the outer forms of the physical, psychic, and mental landscapes, the spirit draws on those forms to unveil their inner significance, beginning with mental forms and gradually expanding to the psychic and physical spaces. It is as if the spirit is undressing layers of clothing that it put on – we can’t take off our socks and shirt before we take off our shoes and coat.

The ‘LIFO’ principle (last in, first out) of computer programming is also a helpful symbol for this process by which the latest etched forms that were instinctively ‘pushed’ into our organization are the first ones to be ‘popped’ back out through inner work.

In the last few thousand years, this process has been exemplified not so much in the growth of tribal spiritual wisdom, but in the learning of new artistic or innovative skills or the exploration of existential questions through philosophy, theology, and science. In modern times, however, the average adult life has approached the stage where the instinctive pushing process exhausts its potential and then very little seems to happen, no conscious popping process seems to follow. In the late Middle Ages, for example, it seemed art, philosophy, and science could only become more innovative, reaching groundbreaking insights. One can hardly downplay the contributions of such thinkers as Newton, Galileo, Bacon, Rosseau, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling, among many others. Yet now we understandably expect very little of existential relevance to come from these fields.

That is because humanity has now been thrown back on its own resources in the mental space to the greatest possible extent, and it has been tasked with doing for itself what was once done for it as a part of natural development. It was only in this way that it could reach the grounds of inner freedom. The inspirations that previously flowed into consciousness as a matter of necessity must now be actively sought after, in accordance with each individual’s freely chosen ideals, but the motivation to do so is waning in our indolent times. It is no longer even suspected that the spirit can actively draw forth the potential of the formed World from within itself, especially because its environment is structured to incentivize resting comfortably at whatever stage it has reached, remaining dependent on external political, scientific, religious, and economic authorities. An ignorant and helpless consumptive spirit is good for profit!

How can the spirit open new spaces of potential despite all the environmental hindrances in these circumstances? In the context of the negative 20 questions metaphor, it would be as if the new game retraced the 'complex vortex' of reasoning, emotions, and motivations that led the participants into the original game and toward a final answer. Retracing the outer developmental process is, in short, recovering its intended function or meaning. What does it mean that the sensory world builds up the body and soul and orients the spirit to the physical flow of existence? Why does the rich heritage of culture orient the spirit to the moral fabric of society? What inner functions do these spaces of experience serve? We are not seeking abstract theoretical speculations about the ‘what’ and ‘why’, but answers that naturally arise from the flow of inner experience itself. The very exploration of the questions should naturally unite with the answers to those same questions.

Eventually one can start to sense that the whole first half of the journey was preparation for the next half. That, in some mysterious way, the resolution of our life story had been attracting the arc of its development all along, just as the author of a mystery novel must start with the resolution and gradually develop the characters, dialogue, plot twists, etc. such that the story approaches the intended ending. As another metaphor, we could say the resolution served as a magnetic field through which the ‘iron filings’ of our life story were organized in discernible patterns. That doesn’t mean everything was predetermined from the outset, only that the probabilities were ‘skewed’ such that certain paths of experience became much more likely than others. If our core spiritual agency is analogized to the magnetic field, the iron filings are all those events in which our spirit found its reflection and grew conscious of its outer and inner landscape.

Every sensation in the life story was a tiny impact by which spiritual activity became a bit more conscious of itself, just as a verb is anchored by its nouns. Try to imagine the meaning of ‘falling’ in the absence of any object. This will be experienced as very difficult, as if we are lost in a forest, trying to find due north, but our compass needle keeps swinging back and forth. On the other hand, when we imagine a definite object falling, let’s say an apple, the meaning of the verb is anchored for us – we gain a stable orientation within the flow of activity. We should vividly experiment with this example and all those that follow to get a concrete feel for the inner experience. Then we are not only contemplating the principle - 'the meaning of a verb is anchored by nouns' - but also putting it into practice and 'proving' its validity to ourselves at a deeper introspective level.

In this way, the spirit began by anchoring the meaning of its existence through the impacts of tactile sensations, a sense of balance, smells, tastes, sounds, colors, a feeling for illness and health, warmth and coldness, and so forth. It gained an intuitive orientation to the way sensory qualities transform in relation to its activity. That is how the first dim sparks of self-consciousness emerge, although the spirit’s existence can still only be reflected by the low-resolution meaning of sensory forms and corresponding feelings of pleasure or pain. Its meaningful activity is still driven entirely instinctively at this stage.

Imagine that somehow you have never seen or felt your hand and it is invisibly dangling in the air above a bucket of warm water. By an instinctive act of will, the hand plunges into the water, meets the resistance of the water and, for the first time, begins to know its shape and dimensions through the sensations of pressure and warmth on all sides. A dim and nebulous sense of consciousness sparks from within. Through these impacts, spiritual activity ‘erodes’ a ‘channel’ of experience through which it can flow, like water erodes grooves and channels in a canyon. One particular aspect of this sensory channel is that it sucks the spirit’s imaginative activity through the force of its ‘gravity’, educating its flow as to what is possible and not possible, what is healthy and unhealthy, what ‘makes sense’ and what doesn’t within the sensory landscape.

For example, at any time I can imagine my physical body jumping up, rotating 180 degrees, and doing a back flip, but my instinctive education through the sensory channel helps me realize this imagination should not be condensed through the bodily will or the results may be disastrous for my health. To do such a thing simply wouldn’t ‘make sense’. We can say that all possible imaginative states are being experienced at any given time, but the sensory channel continually sucks them into certain rigid slots which filter out those which are incompatible with our daily physical or intellectual existence. Only the remaining states are experienced consciously and remain in our ‘palette’ of options to think about or manifest objectively.  The rest remain unconscious and occasionally precipitate into our life of dreams and fantasy.

Likewise, the impacts of parents, teachers, peers, and public figures etched new channels into the canyon. These impacts educated the spirit’s orientation, ideally, so that it became an emotionally balanced social agency, interacting with others in a tempered and upright way, learning to work toward common goals. Now the imaginative states begin to be attracted around certain ideal ‘lines of force’, like social virtues, and the spirit is semi-conscious of its activity. Notice how something gained in the previous stage must be renounced or sacrificed for the spirit to flow into new channels. The spirit must resist the flow of the sensory channel, where seeking pleasure and avoiding pain takes exclusive priority, to gain emotional sensitivity to the soul life of other beings; to empathize with what gives them pleasure and what causes them pain. Even though this sacrifice is mostly imposed from the outside in childhood, it is always necessary that something old die away such that something new can be born.

The various existential ideas, world outlooks, and religious ideals the spirit encountered also impacted its flow to give it a stable ethical orientation and hopefully motivated it to distribute the fruits of its activity back to the community in some way, via philanthropy, teaching, artistic creation, innovation, etc. This channel directs the spirit’s activity such that it not only flows through the etched pathways of the canyon into the ocean, toward some personal goals, but also sacrificially flows back into the canyon to carry its sediments further. Here again, emotional sensitivities must be resisted and renounced to a certain extent such that the life of ideals can blossom. Our reasoned ideals hardly care about our personal sensations or feelings at any given time, but rather motivate us towards various aims despite those feelings. Our conceptual life puts aside what we express to also understand what others have to express. This fact hints at what is necessary for the spirit to begin retracing the previous spaces.

Consider what we do when we read these words to mine their meaning. If we were to focus on the black squiggly shapes, or on sounding out each letter individually with our inner voice, we would never attain the holistic meaning they convey. Instead, we have to ‘erase’ the mere perceptual characteristics from our attention, the particular shapes and sounds, so that we can see and hear through them to the holistic meaning of the words and sentences. In a similar way, when we begin retracing the mental space, we have to renounce the meaningful content of thought-perceptions such that we become sensitive to the inner gestures we are always making in the act of thinking (an exception to this is when the thought content itself points back to the conceptual activity, i.e. phenomenology). In other words, we renounce what we think about reality or what reality means to us and experience what we mean to reality; how the latter thinks us.

We already have some dim experiences with these inner gestures in daily life. For example, when we listen to a lecturer on some topic, our resonance with the ideas may be influenced more by the manner in which the lecture is given than the content. Likewise, we know that much of the deeper meaning in our interactions with other people takes place through subtle communicative gestures, facial expressions, postures, and so forth (which we have become much less sensitive to in the digital age). Young children are much more receptive to these gestures – they have little idea about the content of what their parents are communicating to each other, yet the manner in which that exchange happens, whether it is kind and respectful or harsh and antagonistic, will influence the child’s approach to life for many years to come. In that sense, through the spiritual retracing method, we see through the content of our conceptual life to the deeper gestures by which it is birthed into existence. It is no longer an instinctive resonance with the deeper gestures, as in childhood, but rather it is fully conscious. We will return to this topic in subsequent parts of the essay when we delve more deeply into the phenomenology of the retracing process.

What was expressed above is all assuming optimal circumstances, of course, and we know there is great variation in the course of any particular life, so these are not ‘black letter’ laws of development. Generally speaking, the spirit gradually learns to adjust the rhythms of its activity in relation to its living and sentient environment through all of this sensory, emotional, and ideal feedback. This same process of the spirit growing more and more self-conscious can also be discerned in the civilizational stages of humanity’s biography as a whole. We won’t discuss the details of the latter here, but only point to a chart derived from Oswald Spengler’s research in ‘The Decline of the West’. The reader can contemplate this chart and discern how the developmental phases of an individual biography also correspond with the life cycle of various civilizations which comprise the phases of the collective human biography.

After the preparatory phases or ‘seasons’ are complete, for both individual biographies and human history as a whole, the spirit arrives at the stage where it can dispense with the training wheels and balance itself within the stream of meaningful life. It can lift its feet off the seafloor and start to swim of its own accord. The spirit begins to meaningfully orient to existence more directly and independently of the conceptual, emotional, and sensory crutches. We can consider what we are doing now – the principled overview and phenomenological considerations to follow - to be an introductory phase of this new independent existence. It is not something we draw from the necessities of nature, religious traditions, or past thinkers, nor is it a set of intellectual facts that we memorize. If we follow the considerations carefully, exercising our imagination along the way in good faith, we should concretely sense that our spiritual activity is flexing its muscles, testing its limits, and traversing novel mental pathways of experience.

This newly expanding intuitive space can then be discovered as the ideal basis of the former physical, emotional, and mental spaces that were instinctively traversed during childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, or the spring, summer, and autumn of Earthly existence. What is the inner basis of the history, psychology, biology, and physics that we learned in school? What inner gestures weave beneath the meaningful color and sound qualities perceived through the eyes and ears which are now growing weaker by the day? Again, these are not questions to be speculated over or theorized about, but rather they can be intuitively explored independently of all past conceptual frameworks through the spiritual retracing process.

Through nature and nurture, we are educated from the 'outside' by the ideas embodied in sensory impressions and cultural institutions - we are provided a certain meaningful orientation and sense of understanding within the flow of life events. We learn to control our physical movements, engage in social relationships, and exercise our faculty of judgment in relation to various intellectual subjects. During the first period of life, we learn primarily through imitation of our environment, particularly other human beings. It is quite obvious that children are highly imitative, yet even as adults, we can observe how reluctant people are to think, say, or do anything that makes them stand out from the ‘herd’. We are conditioned by the fear that if we were to do so, to stand out as free-thinking individuals, we would be picked off by a predator just as the lion picks off the zebra that has strayed too far from its zeal.

By retracing the inner dimensions of culture and nature, we provide ourselves with a self-education that deepens and enriches the meaningful orientation within the experiential flow. We are no longer hopelessly dependent on external natural forces and cultural authorities that we simply imitate but draw this new education from our innermost intuitive core. The individual dies to old conditioning in the winter of its natural life and is born again in the spring of its spiritual life. It is freed from sensory limitations and can move its intuitive activity through a limitless palette and bottomless depth of existential meaning. The paths of experience we previously traversed are then revealed in their deeper archetypal significance, their significance for not only our personal interests, but the interests of the whole interdependent organism of living and sentient beings. Now we finally reach past the superficial correlations of sensory appearances to the true inner causes of our life experience and of human history in general.

“But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth…”¹

It should be evident now that the spiritual retracing cannot be accomplished through the same tools we etched instinctively into the mental space – we cannot simply conceptualize our way to the inner nature of the etched spaces, because that leaves us insensitive to the inner gestures we are making in the act of conceptualization. The conceptual models act as a bright light that overshines the more subtle hues of the spirit, drowning them out of our consciousness. It is these spiritual gestures that reveal the intended function and meaning of the instinctively developed spaces of experience in our life destiny. For those gestures to shine through, we must repurpose the conceptual crutches such that our spirit can begin swimming more boldly and freely through the ideal currents of existence. We will elaborate on the principles and practice of this spiritual retracing method further in the next part.

1. John 4:23