Spiritual Exposure Therapy

A phenomenology of the fear of inner activity.

“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”¹

Our modern time is marked by paralyzing fear. There is the fear of various apocalyptic scenarios, fear of nations and groups who want to harm us, fear of people with different perspectives on existence than us, fear of taking on more responsibility in our lives, fear of confronting our own weaknesses, fear of seeing ourselves in a different light than we are accustomed to, fear of encountering the inner lives of other beings, fear of our inner lives becoming more transparent to others, and many related ones. These fears always stem from ignorance of our own deeper nature in some respect, but it’s not easy to see in what direction the ‘sound mind’ and the relevant self-knowledge can be gained. More and more people are adopting the inner stance of a deer in the headlights - if we just freeze and stare straight ahead (keep doing what we’re doing), maybe we will remain safe. Others adopt the inner stance of the squirrel crossing traffic - maybe if we act erratically and continually second-guessing our decisions, things will work out for us. And yet others are simply resigned to their ‘fate’ like an animal conditioned to feel there is no alterative possibility (usually it’s a combination of these).

The concept of learned helplessness was discovered accidentally by psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier. They had initially observed helpless behavior in dogs that were classically conditioned to expect an electrical shock after hearing a tone.

Later, the dogs were placed in a shuttlebox that contained two chambers separated by a low barrier. The floor was electrified on one side, and not on the other. The dogs previously subjected to the classical conditioning made no attempts to escape, even though avoiding the shock simply involved jumping over a small barrier.²

On the Principles of Exposure Therapy

It is in these over-phobic and learned helpless circumstances that human thinking began to intuit and conceptually explore the benefits of ‘exposure therapy’. Clinical psychologists such as Jordan Peterson have implemented this therapeutic strategy and noticed remarkable results:

What does exposure have to do with anxiety? Fear. Exposure therapy is the use of voluntary confrontation with challenges. In an example Peterson shares, a woman who is experiencing an anxiety disorder and barely able to leave her house is additionally petrified of elevators. Through exposure therapy, as described by Peterson, she overcomes her fear — but it is fear at the core of her paralysis.

Though exposure therapy must be engaged carefully, Peterson knows it works “because it’s thinking, and thinking works.” Usually people come to the understanding they are less afraid than they thought, and Peterson further claims, “There’s no difference between exposure therapy and learning.”

It is of vital importance to recognize the participation of thinking in this therapy. Even at a superficial level, it is easy to see that our first reaction to unknown and mysterious circumstances, which generally evoke fear, is to begin permeating them with our thoughts so their fragmented appearances resolve into more coherent experience. That is what we naturally do in a dark area when we hear a sudden sound, for example. Yet we also know that such a merely intellectual strategy can backfire in our times - we can generate more fear and anxiety in certain circumstances by ‘overthinking’ them, by becoming too ‘self-conscious’ of our situation at the mere rational scale of analysis, for example in public speaking. This is why many people try to quell the fear by turning to mindless entertainment, alcohol, drugs, or “no thought” meditative practices. Perhaps some readers sensed a certain amount of dread when seeing the length of this essay and the degree of thoughtful attention it would invite.

Exposure therapy, on the other hand, does not forsake thinking but points to a deeper scale of thinking activity that does not merely float at the surface of the soul and spread its intellectual thoughts over the phenomenal circumstances. This essay is an attempt to describe the phenomenology of exposure therapy which is, simultaneously, the practice of its method for overcoming the fear of inner activity. The deeper scale of thinking that is invited attempts to modulate the soul’s reactive behavior to external content with a more penetrating kind of inner effort, mediated by more living and illustrative thoughts. In this effort, we need to renounce our intellectual chatter that tries to encompass everything in its familiar boundaries of thinking experience and, instead, courageously open up our imaginative and volitional life to live through new kinds of experiences.

To use an analogy, we can imagine we have placed our hand in a certain position and are drawing shapes on a piece of paper. Now someone suggests that we can move beyond our familiar perimeter of hand scribbles by moving our forearm and upper arm as well, and then we can draw new kinds of shapes. Habitually we do that by keeping our hand fixed in the same position, drawing pictures of our arms, and writing in the margin, “new kinds of shapes”. That is akin to what our intellectual chatter does when confronting its fear by maintaining its familiar position and theorizing about the attendant circumstances from a safe distance. The intellect remains ‘here’ and analyzes the events ‘over there’. In this situation, it simply never dawns on us that there are additional degrees of freedom that can be utilized, even when they are brought to our attention. The intellect says “yes yes, I already know these additional degrees of freedom, look at all the shapes of forearms that I drew!” That is an image of the intellect building its philosophical and scientific theories about “deeper scales of activity”.

The living strategy of exposure therapy, in contrast, helps us become more sensitive to the existence of our forearm and its degrees of freedom so we can begin to draw outside our familiar narrow perimeter of hand scribbles, i.e. not only theorizing about courageous inner movements with our intellectual chatter but actually engaging in them. That doesn’t mean we need to abandon the chatter, but rather we redirect its force from speculation about deeper inner movements to symbolically anchoring those movements. The intellect becomes more like the hand and foot holds on a rock climbing surface, helping us to get a firm grip as we embark on a journey of scaling the depths of inner experience. That is how all philosophical, scientific, religious, and artistic concepts used in this essay should be understood. We are not building theoretical frameworks or explanations for our inner experience, no universal rules or doctrines are being established.

Peterson always stresses that the exposure must be engaged voluntarily - the clinician cannot simply shove the patient in an elevator and expect that to work. Why? Because the person needs to experience their own inner movements weaving outside the imagined boundaries they have placed on those movements through years of conditioning, i.e. all the mental pictures and corresponding feelings accumulated during life which are imbued with the meaning, "you can't do this", "this can't be done", “this is too dangerous”, “these experiences can’t be reached”, and so on. In a cultural environment where people are increasingly taught that they are helpless victims of circumstances, either implicitly or explicitly, this fearful conditioning has become as deeply ingrained as a person’s character and temperament. We begin to identify with these fearful 'etched channels' of our soul life and take them for granted as unquestionable attributes of who we are.

When others simply appease that tendency and show compassion or pity toward our artificially bounded self, it only reinforces the identification more, just as one can reinforce a pet’s behavior by associating that behavior with treats and warm emotional gestures. For example, dogs have been conditioned to wag their tail with excitement about receiving a certain intensity of electrical shock when the shocks have been previously tied to food rewards. To overcome our fearful conditioning, on the other hand, we need to be prompted toward a voluntary process of de-identification with these elemental macros of our soul space, i.e. the classical conditioning of past experiences that reinforce our identifications and convince us there is no way out from our reactive tendencies even when the portal to liberation from them is in our immediate vicinity.

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. [or feelings of fear follow the mental picture of a going inside an enclosed space like clockwork]

It is not enough for the clinician to provide the patient with a dry list of facts about the safety of elevators and the possibilities of safely using them. In that scenario, the patient remains passive with their inner movements, mindlessly imitating the thoughts conveyed to them like we do when memorizing dates, places, names, etc. to perform well on a history test. That is still the fixed hand scribbling shapes of forearms. Instead, there must be an interactive experience - in response to thoughtful dialogue with the clinician, the patients stir their inner movements and guide those movements in novel directions, into domains of inner meaning they previously felt were beyond reach. In this way, they voluntarily undertake to gain cognitive distance on their usual fearful tendencies so they can perceive themselves transcending the confines of these elemental macros. What matters is not how well they have memorized facts or how ‘successful’ they are in getting on the elevator right away, but the inner experience of taking some portion of the flow of necessity (destiny), no matter how small to begin with, consciously in hand.

Research into the therapeutic uses of psychedelics also points to similar insights. It has been shown how they can lead to such benefits due to inner transformative (mystical) experiences, whereas the benefits are diminished when the mystical experience is lacking. That reveals the critical ingredient is not the chemical substance itself, but the experiences that are attained through its stimulation. Generally that is the experience of the subject confronting their patched-up personality as an objective reality, which is then understood as being distinct from “who I am”. They begin to discern this personality is a patchwork of elemental fragments that, until now, they had been merged with and therefore had no basis to become inwardly conscious of. Now they experience their inner activity weaving outside of its familiar constraints to some extent; that this activity is more than simply the sum of remembered life experiences that float at the surface and comprise the familiar sense of personality. For example:

A large body of evidence, including longitudinal analyses of personality change, suggests that core personality traits are predominantly stable after age 30. To our knowledge, no study has demonstrated changes in personality in healthy adults after an experimentally manipulated discrete event. Intriguingly, double-blind controlled studies have shown that the classic hallucinogen psilocybin occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values. In the present report we assessed the effect of psilocybin on changes in the five broad domains of personality - Neuroticism, Extroversion, Openness, Agreeableness, and Conscientiousness. Consistent with participant claims of hallucinogen-occasioned increases in aesthetic appreciation, imagination, and creativity, we found significant increases in Openness following a high-dose psilocybin session. In participants who had mystical experiences during their psilocybin session, Openness remained significantly higher than baseline more than one year after the session. The findings suggest a specific role for psilocybin and mystical-type experiences in adult personality change.³

We can appreciate this relationship even better if we consider that there are people now trying to develop psychedelic analogs without psychoactive properties, i.e. they want to make pills that people can take without feeling any profound inner experience but nevertheless still attaining the therapeutic benefits of overcoming addiction, trauma, depression, etc. Such efforts reflect materialism in its crudest form. It is no different than wanting to sedate the patient, open the skull, and excise the "faulty neurons" (if such a thing were possible). Then it is imagined the patient can wake up addiction-free, without moving a finger, thinking a thought, and, most importantly, without knowing how they got cured. In this materialistic fantasy, they would simply 'forget' about the addiction because the relevant memories are excised. That is essentially the superstition embraced by the “just pills, no experience” approach.

Yet, just like exposure therapy for phobias, the psychedelic therapy is effective exactly because the person goes through an inner experience in which they feel intimately and actively involved. The usual macros of soul life are shaken and the person begins to realize the downward trajectory they have been flowing along, also discerning that there are many other higher ideals to live and strive for which can potentially be reached, at least asymptotically in an upward spiraling movement. These experiences are rarely pleasant, but people usually agree that the so-called 'bad trips' turn out to be of the greatest value in hindsight. Facing our fears and seeing ourselves from new angles which we have been so far been oblivious to can be traumatizing, but at the same time this can motivate us to change the fundamental ‘tone’ of our inner disposition. We can shift from a bitter and depressed tone to a grateful and optimistic tone.

Here we see again how the modern cultural impulse to shield everyone from any and all negative experiences only reinforces their learned helplessness. It blocks the non-linear and spiraling experiential path that souls generally take to inwardly transform (metanoia) and to metamorphose into their more expanded potential. This sort of real lived experience cannot guarantee a path that is free from sacrifice and suffering and, in fact, the depth of transformative experience is often tightly correlated precisely with the extent of the former. Yet the sacrifices and the suffering are experienced in a much different way when they come through voluntary action based on intuitive (not theoretical) insight into why it is being experienced and what can result from it. By actively permeating the experiences with feeling-imbued and will-saturated thoughts, their significance is illuminated within a deeper context of existence.

To be clear, I am not suggesting that people should go out and start using psychedelics to overcome various fears, since that can be harmful for higher spiritual development in too many ways to count. I am simply using these examples to highlight the phenomenological foundations of exposure therapy. It always rests on inner transformative experience that leads to greater cognitive distance on our previous identifications, to begin with identifications with aspects of our conceptual outlooks, character, and personality. Yet even with psychedelics there is a good deal of passivity in the experience - after all, we are ingesting a physical substance and letting its chemical components flow into our blood without actively directing the process. To attain much more broadly transformative experiences that shift our very understanding of who we are and what reality is, we need to also let go of the physical crutches that we are still clinging to out of fear.

Extending Exposure Therapy into the Inner Depths

The principle of exposure therapy can be taken to a whole new level when we focus our attention, not on fears and habits associated with our strictly sensory and intellectual existence, but on fears associated with the depths of our supersensible soul and spiritual life. The phobias no longer deal with hypothetical people we can reflect on from a safe distance, but implicate the first-person and real-time activity of everyone reading these words here and now (and the writer as well). These are lurking fears that we normally don’t even suspect to exist within us. They steer our emotional and mental states from the dark background of soul existence. In this case, we are not dealing with the rare individual who has a fear of getting on an elevator, or the more common individual with a psychic disease like addiction, but with a phobia that is shared across all modern thinking individuals.

We have all inherited, for example, the foundational phobia of stretching our inner activity into the 'noumenal realm'; the domain of ‘things themselves’ that we imagine to exist on the ‘other side’ of our perceptions and thoughts. It is the fear of experiencing ourselves weaving with our inner activity in domains of meaning that are no longer tied to our bodily-sensory support (including ordinary memory impressions and feelings). As mentioned above, psychedelics, Eastern meditative practices, and many similar spiritual practices still rely on this latter support, only the bodily life and corresponding perceptions may express themselves in a more ethereal and transformed way. So these cannot be said to confront and overcome this foundational phobia either. The latter is best exemplified in the philosophical, scientific, and religious lines of thinking that emerged in the wake of Kant's 'critical philosophy'. Although there may be some disagreement as to what exactly Kant had concluded through his philosophy, there can be no question as to the epistemic ripple effects that spread out in its wake and conditioned philosophical, scientific, and religious-spiritual inquiries over the following centuries.

In short, this line of reasoning begins with the assumption that our immanent experiences and mental representations are stimulated and structured by some other reality that can never be found within them or in any way continuous with them. As soon as we become conscious of experience, we are imprisoned within a tissue of our own ‘subjective’ mental representations that create relations of space and time, quantity and quality, cause and effect, and so on. The unity of appearances does not belong to the appearances themselves, i.e. to the ‘objective world’, but is borrowed from our ‘subjective’ intellectual faculty that acts and imposes this structure before we even realize it. Then this perspective asks how we can access knowledge of this other reality of ‘things themselves’ by tracing through the mental representations and unsurprisingly concludes that we can’t; the former is forever beyond the orbit of the latter. At best, we can use the mental representations for practical aims in life, but we shouldn’t imagine this ‘knowledge’ sheds any light on the true foundations of our existence. Questions concerning God, immortality, and freedom, for example, are entirely beyond the purview of human reason.

In that sense, a mental representation imbued with the meaning of “transcendent noumenal reality” functions to confine our imaginative activity into its ordinary combinatorial pathways. It is simply assumed that it would be a waste of time and effort to expand this activity into spheres of meaning that have been declared off limits, beyond the potential reach of human cognition. It would be the greatest delusion to imagine we could awaken within the ‘a priori categories’ that structure experience and feel ourselves to be active in that domain. We could easily overcome this self-imposed constraint, however, if we courageously confronted what it is we are doing with our inner activity and mental images when we philosophize in this way. Our real-time thinking which philosophizes and discerns its own limitations must have already transcended those limitations, just like only a 3D being can discern the constraints of a 2D plane while a 2D being would be entirely merged with those constraints.

The ‘transcendental limit’ speaks to a valid intuition, which is that the intuitive meaning we are exploring at any given time cannot be found contained within our immanent mental representations which continually recede from our present perspective as thoughts and memory images, i.e. what we commonly think of as ‘the past’ where experiences have crystallized and can no longer be modified. To search for the intuitive meaning within our receding mental representations would be akin to searching for the reality of our inner life - emotions, impulses, hopes, dreams, goals, etc. - in the pixels of a ‘selfie’ photograph that we just took. In that sense, when we focus entirely on the receded images of inner activity, it is valid to conclude that the latter cannot be reached by mechanically stitching together the former. When we fix attention on those receded images, we only explore what has already come to be in the flow of experience and not what is still becoming.

We can heighten sensitivity to this distinction with a simple exercise. For example, let’s count backward from 10 and feel out the experience. We first live in a certain wordless intuition of this intent. It acts as a ‘curvature’ along which our momentary vocalizations of “10”, “9”, “8”, etc. will soon begin condensing and recede as memory. As we steer through the numbers, the intuitive intent remains in the background and unites the ‘frames’ of experience into a coherent whole. The receding frames anchor that intuitive intent to count backward, focusing the latter into clearly perceptible experiences. Yet the receding frames don’t contain the intuitive meaning of ‘counting backward’. The latter continually incarnates from the ‘opposite direction’, i.e. what we commonly think of as ‘the future’ of potential experience. The receded images can only kindle our inner activity and bring it into the ideal ‘vicinity’ where it is more or less likely for new intuitive meaning to incarnate against the continually imploding perceptual frames.

Now imagine that we try to form mental images that ‘capture’ this real-time intuitive intent to count. These images immediately recede from our new intent of “representing my real-time intent to count with mental images”. We can never catch our real-time intent in this way, just as the eye can never observe itself looking at an object while also keeping the object in view. This real-time intent always remains ‘out of focus’, in that sense, weaving in the background of our focused experience. The best we can do is use the receding mental images as anchor points that help us more intimately feel the background intuitive activity, provided that we remain very concentrated and present within this intentional flow of experience. We will return to the significance of remaining concentrated later, after seeing how this relationship between real-time intuitive intents and receding mental images helps elucidate the modern fear of stretching inner activity in new ways.

The tight correspondence between the intent and receding mental images generally makes it difficult for us to even sense the former exists - the whole process remains laminated and blurred together. The mental pictures (for example, the sound of our inner voice) is like the near instantly manifesting memory image of what we just did with our invisible intentional activity. With such little sensitivity to these invisible gestures, it’s easy to convince ourselves the latter are a mere hypothesis conjured out of our mental pictures, as is the case with many philosophers who speak of free will as an ‘illusion’. Practically speaking, all thinkers who feel the need to postulate a realm “beyond” our immanent experience in the sense described above, are implicitly denying the existence of their intentional gestures that serve as the foundation for the flow of all perceptual experience. Even when we are sitting still and staring at an object without reflectively thinking, we are continually making such gestures to scan the object with our eyes. There simply can be no perception without continual inner activity. On the basis of this insensitive experiential condition of modern humanity, the domain of intuitive gestures began to feel more and more like an inaccessible space of reality on the ‘other side’ of our mental images and the latter were felt to be the only viable objects of experience and reasoning.

To get a better feel for this, try to concentrate on the title of a familiar song. We have a mental image at the focus of our conscious experience which anchors our overall intuition for the sphere of potential experiences that can manifest if we were to start singing the song, i.e. we have some intuitive sense for the time span of the song and the rhythmic transformations our inner voice would have to go through to experience its playback. Yet this intuition generally remains very dim and nebulous compared to the mental image that is in focus at the horizon of consciousness, i.e. the song title. If we were to begin unpacking this intuition by singing the song, moving our inner activity through the mental images of its playback, the intuition would recede even further into the background as the inner singing voice comes into focus. In that sense, there is a bistable dynamic between the experience of intuitive intent and its playback in mental images - when we focus attention on one, we lose sight of the other.

Because of that bistable dynamic, the intuitive intents were exiled into a ‘noumenal realm’ and we began to feel that only the mental images can be directly experienced and investigated. Thus we formed philosophical mental pictures imbued with the meaning of “existing on the other side of our thinking” - like “noumena” or “things themselves”, “God”, “matter/waves”, “quantum fields”, “transcendent reality”, “pure consciousness”, and so on. These act as a continual numbing agent to our intentional gestures and as a straitjacket on our inner activity, preventing it from moving outside the constraints of its familiar philosophical and scientific mental pictures. It is like we have injected Novocain into our hands and started fashioning a pot of clay (the perceptual content of experience) - when no kinesthetic or tactile sensations feedback from our hand movements, we conclude the pot is simply fashioning itself. There's only clay that morphs in mysterious ways and all we know is that we don't feel to be creatively involved in the shape of the morphing pot that we see. At best, we unconsciously shape the clay with “a priori categories” that can never be experientially investigated.

The fact that we gradually built up this dissociated condition between inner activity and perceptual experience is lost in the convolutions of our receded intentional gestures - we can no longer trace the conceptual and emotional injections we gave ourselves. Then when we continue interacting with the morphing clay of the World content, it only further confirms our suspicion that we have no genuine agency within this flow of experience. That is how thinkers like Kant concluded human reasoning (“practical reason”) could only serve as a ‘regulative principle’ for the domain of mental representations and could never reach the inner realities which stimulated and structured these representations. This conclusion, which we hold as a mental picture, then squishes our inner activity into tight intellectual constraints and demotivates it from stretching its ‘feelers’ beyond its domain of presently accumulated intellectual mental pictures which, after all, seem to serve us well for our narrow practical aims.

Once we penetrate a little deeper into this whole way of thinking as we have started to do above, we can sense how it could only be born from the fear of extending our inner activity into novel domains of intuitive meaning. Instead, we rely on our mental images to build a picture of reality by combining them in the way it has become used to by analyzing the contents of the bodily-sensory experience. Yet the more we try to do that, the more we feel that we are doing nothing but a kind of abstract metaphysics, biding our time until the ‘true reality’ is found in some indefinite future age, after death, or not at all. We then begin to avoid the lived experience of reality altogether because we secretly prefer the comfortable configuration of our philosophical, religious, and scientific images, and we seek rationalized excuses for why it is “impossible” to encounter the concrete reality that is represented by these images.

At root, it is all quite similar to the person who is afraid to get on the elevator and, without the benefit of voluntary exposure therapy, uses the intellect to rationalize excuses for why the fear is justified or cannot be overcome. With respect to encountering the inner realities of phenomenal experience, these excuses come in all sorts of forms which are generally different ways of expressing the Kantian ‘noumenal’ boundary. To overcome this fear and avoidance strategy, we need to expose ourselves more deeply to the intentional gestures by which we are continually guiding the flow of mental images. It is true that these gestures cannot be found as additional mental images that are clearly in focus, but they can nevertheless be felt as an indispensable aspect of our immanent experience. We can sense that this invisible activity (synonymous with intuitive meaning) is barely noticeable at the ever-imploding horizon of our inner voice and mental pictures, but is nevertheless present and inviting us to ‘delaminate’ its layers, discerning its rich contributions to the flow of experience.

Becoming Active Within the Inner Depth

Indeed, as thinking humans we are already instinctively active within this deeper intuitive domain, for example, whenever we resist a tempting desire, like indulging in unhealthy food or spirits. We can't simply manipulate our familiar receding mental pictures (thoughts) and report to ourselves about the negative consequences - these thoughts cannot modulate deep enough to modify the alluring desire. Instead we need to reach into a deeper scale of inner life, with a new kind of inner effort, through concentrated activity. Our inner activity needs to become fiercely present within the flow of its experience and remain vigilant as the desirous flow continually threatens to drag it away toward the next chocolate cake or the next drink, like we are stopping ourselves from scratching a really bothersome itch. In this scenario, we utilize the mental pictures not to build theoretical models of our soul life, but to anchor ourselves within the soul flow and develop a strategy of resistance.

That strategy is only implemented at a deeper intuitive scale of activity which normally remains ‘out of focus’. If we manage to accomplish such a small miracle of resistance in our existential flow, then we experience ourselves coloring outside the lines of the sclerotic pathways of experience that we normally flow through passively. This experience then stimulates positive emotional feedback and motivates us to continue resisting the tempting desire and even to creatively work on seemingly unrelated desires. Thus we enter into a positive feedback cycle and gradually spiral upwards into new inner scales of creative activity. We can illustrate this deeper scale of inner activity needed for the soul flow with a metaphor to Tetris.

Imagine that we are facing the pile of blocks from above and the new blocks are coming from behind our head, which is a symbol for our first-person experiential perspective. If we are too close to the pile, the moment we see the new block it is already shaped and we have very limited time to find a place for it. In our ordinary thinking life, we are practically an ‘inch’ away from the already condensed blocks, i.e. our existing beliefs, opinions, desires, interests, character traits, and so on. In this state, they immediately crystallize like water that hits a freezing cold surface according to the already etched patterns of our soul life - by the time we become aware of them, they are fully formed and beyond our creative control. In other words, our thoughts are simply a dry commentary on the meaning we are experiencing through the lens of our moods, desires, beliefs, etc. Everything we generally think of as sympathies and antipathies, which push us toward or pull us away from certain paths of experience, are what most proximately steer our condensing Tetris blocks.

If we gain cognitive distance from the pile, on the other hand, we can begin anticipating the incoming blocks and therefore creatively guide the temporal unfolding of our thinking stream. We may even shift from guiding the condensing blocks (thoughts) to choosing their shape, i.e. the palette of potential thoughts we can intuitively experience and condense into focus at the horizon of consciousness will expand, such that we can stimulate new kinds of ideas. For example, if we have never stretched our inner activity into the meaning of multiple Earthly incarnations and the lawful relations between them (karma), that entire palette of thoughts remains veiled to us, inaccessible to the inner gestures by which we condense intuitive meaning into thoughts that inform our emotional and volitional life. Then we may continually condense blocks that fit poorly with our already existing structure, i.e. we experience thoughts, feelings, and corresponding deeds that work at cross-purposes with the compensatory tasks that would help us restore inner balance.

In the light of what we have discussed above, we can now properly orient to the impulse brought through Rudolf Steiner around the dawn of the 20th century, which was first prepared as a seed through philosophical works (e.g. The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity) and later blossomed into what he called “Anthroposophy” and “spiritual science”. This impulse and its symbolic descriptions of inner activity bring our intellectual thinking to the point where it can gradually loosen itself from its rigid bodily constraints through unfamiliar and expanded inner movements, thereby gaining cognitive distance on the condensing Tetris blocks.

Today I shall describe a path into the super-sensible that is much more for the scientist. All my experience has taught me that for such a scientist a kind of precondition for this cognitional striving is to take up what is presented in my book, Philosophy of Freedom. I will explain what I mean by this. This book, Philosophy of Freedom, was not written with the same intent as most books written today. Nowadays books are written simply in order to inform the reader of the book's subject matter, so that the reader learns the book's contents in accordance with his education, his scientific training, or the special knowledge he already possesses. This was not my primary Intention in writing Philosophy of Freedom, and thus it will not be popular with those who read books only to acquire Information. The purpose of the book is to make the reader directly engage his thinking activity on every page.

In a sense, the book is only a kind of musical score that one must read with inner thought activity in order to progress, as the result of one's own efforts, from one thought to the next. The book constantly presupposes the mental collaboration of the reader. Moreover, the book presupposes that which the soul becomes in the process of such mental exertion. Anyone who has really worked through this book with his own inner thinking activity and cannot confess that he has come to know himself in a part of his inner life in which he had not known himself previously has not read Philosophy of Freedom properly. One should feel that one is being lifted out of one's usual thinking [Vorstellen] into a thinking independent of the senses [ein sinnlichkeitsfreies Denken], in which one is fully immersed, so that one feels free of the conditions of physical existence. Whoever cannot confess this to himself has actually misunderstood the book. One should be able to say to oneself: now I know, as a result of the inner thought activity I myself have expended, what pure thinking actually is.⁴

The first step on this path of liberating thinking from its physical constraints is always to confess (become more self-aware of) the inner fear of doing so, which generates anxiety, hesitation, defense mechanisms, avoidance rationalizations, and so forth within our soul life. We need to become perfectly honest with ourselves about the inevitable rationalizations, projective tendencies, and excuses we will encounter. Only in this way can we avoid blaming our neighbors, our teachers, our president, Steiner, or the Gods for the obstacles we meet. An exercise like the ‘reverse review’ described below is a great way to heighten our inner sensitivity to this default fear of moving our inner activity against the grain of its familiar etched pathways. If we try to engage this exercise at the end of our day and work through the events backwards, it should feel like a huge strain and we should be tempted to quit. Those feelings are key indications that we are moving in the right direction along the inner axis.

In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings… When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.⁵

Another exercise we can use to intensify our concentrated resistance and confront the inner phobia at even deeper scales is as follows. We can produce vowels - a, e, o, u, i - while freely morphing between them. For example, we start with 'a' and smoothly morph into 'e' - aaaaaeaaaeeaaeeeaeeeeee. It may help to first warm up with our physical voice, since the latter gives us more support. We take a deep breath and begin slowly and smoothly morphing among random vowels in one continuous sound until we run out of air. After we get used to it, we let go of the physical support and continue the exercise, now only producing the sounds through our subtle inner gestures. We can also modulate the pitch of the sounds to add more inner texture to our gestures - aaaaAAAeeeEEEE. At first, most people will notice that they are still subtly vibrating their vocal cords even when attempting to produce the sounds only mentally. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up if we continue clinging to the physical support in this way but should calmly take note of it as valuable intuitive feedback on our inner phobic stance, a snapshot of our ‘soul geometry’. If our inner stance could be described in an image, it may look like:

“For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of righteousness: for he is a babe. But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age, even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised to discern both good and evil.”⁶

That is, we refuse to let go of our inner training wheels (our infant’s milk), not because we know for sure that the alternative is excessively dangerous, but because it is unfamiliar and mysterious, i.e. we have never checked to see what would happen if we tried to stabilize our inner activity without the support. We simply don’t know what to expect if we let go, but it’s also obvious that there is only one way to find out. The only reliable way to overcome this inner fear is spiritual exposure therapy - we persistently work with the vowel (or similar) exercises day after day, incrementally increasing our exposure to bodily support-free inner activity. Even setting aside five minutes a day in the morning or evening will make a huge difference. It can feel like we are inching more and more into the water until our feet eventually come off the seafloor and we start to buoyantly float.

Eventually, if we can morph the sound continuously, without vibrating our vocal cords and without our inner activity being dragged away by a distraction, for about 30 seconds, that is a significant therapeutic achievement. Even ten seconds with the needed concentration and intensity can be enough to experience ourselves confronting and transcending the phobia of inner activity in a meaningful way, which builds a solid foundation for our continued efforts moving forward. In this exercise, we should experience our active inner gestures as clearly as possible, which are the same inner gestures we use to think through daily experience. We stir our inner gestures in one way and produce the continuous sound, just as we stir our inner gestures in another way and produce the verbal words by which we think. The inner activity at the foundation of both is one and the same.

It is most important to feel as tightly as possible how it is through our own activity that the morphing of the sound is accomplished. The slower and more smoothly we can we do it, the more sensitivity we will gain. The sound should feel like an expression of our innermost being. We should resist the temptation to split from the act of sound producing and observe it ‘from the side’ or encompass it in our mental pictures, i.e. to intellectually think about what we are doing. The goal is to redirect the force of that intellectual voice which has the tendency to move in the background and imperceptibly comment on experiential phenomena as a bystander. We need to gather all the forces of this bystander and project them into the sound at our focused center. When our activity meets the sound in the right way, we feel a very characteristic stability, as if there is a taught string connecting our activity with its continuously sinking perceptions.

Some Results of Our Deeper Inner Activity

Through this intensely concentrated state, our stabilized inner activity gains the basis to drag against the ordinary flow of experience and the various etched soul channels that format that experience. These are the channels that are always implicit in our daily perceptual experience, always coloring how we perceive and understand the events occurring around us, but are tightly laminated into our conscious perspective such that we can barely sense their existence. What we normally sense is a dim intuition that we have arrived at our current state of perception and understanding through a stream of life experiences and corresponding qualities, knowledge, skills, relationships, etc., and that we can expect our experience to lawfully unfold further to new states with potentially new qualities, knowledge, skills, and so on. All of that temporal intuition is embedded into our present concentrated state.

With our intense concentration, we can ‘split the atom’ of this present intuition and unleash the living forces that make its experience possible. This is not merely a technical cognitive accomplishment but involves the whole spectrum of our emotional and volitional activity as well, our noble feelings and virtuous conduct. Imagine being at a loud party where you can barely register any particular conversations. Yet imagine you are also there with a partner or close friend who you are deeply interested in and therefore have attuned to their voice. Even in the midst of the noise and even if the person is speaking normally, you can much more easily understand the meaning of their speech than anyone else’s. This is the same principle we find in concentrated meditation - the scale of meaning we can attune to amidst the noisy soul life directly depends on how much devoted interest we have cultivated for the inner life of other souls who are entangled with our stream of existence.

Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock—at the moment of drowning, for instance—when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.⁷

There is nothing that prevents us from reaching, during life, the panoramic memory experience that is usually only stumbled upon after a 'near-death' episode, except the phobia of revealing our ‘soul geometry’ in the light of Truth. That fear, in turn, steers our philosophizing toward mental pictures imbued with the meaning “that isn’t possible” or “that can only happen after death”, but as we have seen, this fear can be overcome and new courageous mental pictures can be condensed at our conscious horizon. These mental pictures are courageous because they point right back at the invisible activity from which they condensed, not in any theoretical way, but in a living and artistic way. They don’t give us excuses to avoid the depths of inner activity but invitations to probe it more deeply. Our continually receding mental pictures about spiritual existence begin to feel more like the pictures below.

When we see the image above, we won't assume it intends to give us third-person pictures of people doing asanas so we can memorize them and build up a theoretical model or framework, but rather it is giving us symbols that can anchor our first-person experience of going through the same physical motions. Likewise, the mental pictures that condense when we steer through the intuited meaning of existence can be understood as symbols of 'thought-asanas' that anchor our first-person experience of that meaningful journey. We only realize the value of these asanas if we effortfully move our inner activity through the various formations that are offered to us out of the depths of intuitive existence, without analytically dissecting them into third-person pictures about the 'nature of reality'. The latter is what has been habitually done in modern philosophy, science, and theology.

Once we have inverted our perspective on our receding mental pictures in this way, we can say we have started recursively thinking about thinking itself. In fact, this is what we have been doing the entire essay but what was mostly implicit before is now hopefully more explicit. Let’s examine the imaginative life that structures our thinking further. Whenever we need to make a decision on how to conduct our activity in the World, we play out the various scenarios of what could happen in our memory pictures, like a virtual simulation. In this way, we can dimly go through the experience of those scenarios and their consequences without immediately committing to one or the other and making those consequences into physically crystallized states of being that we no longer have any control over. This capacity is at the root of what makes us uniquely human and capable of taking the course of ‘natural evolution’ consciously in hand, creatively influencing its course through our spiritual intents. Let’s listen to Peterson again:

That is essentially the first stage of liberating forces that otherwise maintain the living organism and lower soul processes like urges and instincts, bringing them into the domain of conscious imaginative activity. We can dimly experience these liberated forces if we try to concentrate on what we are doing when deciding whether and what to eat, for example. We instinctively surf through mental pictures that encode the intuitive meaning of our culinary tastes, desires, preferences, goals, and so on. From these we encode a verbal commentary like, “I will skip lunch today so I can stay within my daily calorie limit.” This capacity that we normally take for granted is at the basis of all our innovative culture. Instead of eating the first appealing thing that pops into our field of vision or smell like an animal does, and living with the fated consequences, we inwardly do something akin to what is depicted in this clip:

Indeed, modern entertainment stumbles upon these ideas and portrays them cinematically because the creators intuitively sense what they are always doing with their inner activity and condense these intuitions into specific pictorial and verbal forms. This surfing through mental pictures that encode the meaning of anticipated experiences, based on the intuited lawfulness of past experiences, is what allows humans to plan out their lives and build civilization. At the same time, however, these new degrees of freedom present new opportunities for deviating from the Wisdom that lives in our lower instincts. Animals in the wild will never eat themselves into morbid obesity and death, but humans certainly can and do. And before we write this off as a trivial example, we should consider that our gluttonous tendencies are intimately entangled with deeper passions that have sometimes erupted in large-scale conflict. An animal never kills with knowledge of its victim’s suffering, while humans can torture and kill despite that knowledge or even because of it.

That is why humanity needs to stretch its newly liberated imaginative activity beyond the confines of dim mental pictures that encode receded and anticipated meaning, into deeper scales of virtuous activity. In that process we will surely need to renounce many of our hedonistic pleasures, but in return we rediscover the Wisdom of the World in full consciousness. True inner freedom is always an exercise in strategically renouncing old conditioning - opinions, beliefs, preferences, expectations, sensuous desires, character traits, etc. - so that new capacities for higher insight and creative work can grow from the ashes. These new capacities cannot be linearly extrapolated from the old qualities any more than newly evolved physiological structures can be predicted from the old ones - the former can only be traced back to the latter in hindsight. This is why spiritual exposure therapy requires an inverted inner stance from what we are accustomed to in our ordinary intellectual inquiries - instead of trying to encompass the new meaningful spaces of activity with our already receded thoughts, we prayerfully allow ourselves to feel how those thoughts are structured by the former.

The panoramic memory experience described by Steiner above will not be found as any fundamentally different experience than what we are always doing in our artistic, innovative, and decision-making life, but rather as a concentration, purification, and refinement of that same underlying experience, e.g. what we just experienced when feeling out the food survey example, or when we survey memory pictures of a sporting activity we engaged in. There is so much implicit holistic meaning aliased from our dim mental pictures, however, that purifying the experience is practically equivalent to discovering new ‘realms’ in which we are active and in which our existence unfolds. That is how we begin to creatively guide the shape and direction of the Tetris blocks as they condense. Instead of witnessing ourselves becoming irritated, frustrated, and angry in response to sensory events like a pre-recorded program, we can channel new soul forces of patience, reverence, and gratitude for the valuable feedback we continually receive from the wider World.

As we expand into into this imaginative experience, we are also exposed to what we normally meet in a chaotic and transformed way during our dream life and we discern how these soul currents overlap with and modulate our bodily life as well. We can move our intentional activity to stimulate mental pictures of our favorite food, for example, and notice how this reaches right into the depths of the living body, activating the salivary glands even if there is no possibility of eating the food in the near future. The same applies to lustful or frightening mental pictures that modulate our breathing and blood circulation. There is no need to search for speculative external mechanisms by which this feedback takes place or a ‘transcendent’ reality that “explains” it. We only seek to trace the first-person experience further and further by purifying it, such that its implicit meaning comes more and more into focus at the horizon of consciousness. Then we will become more sensitive to how our receded soul movements (mental pictures and corresponding feelings/deeds) are continually working into the bodily life to stimulate either harmony or disharmony, health or illness.

Our imagistic dream narratives speak to us of these same continual feedback processes, except we usually lack the intuitive foundation to make sense of them at the time and, upon waking, we can only piece together rapidly fading dream fragments. With that waking reflection, we can discern how inner bodily processes, for example a headache, can give rise to a whole theatrical dream narrative, like being tossed around in a mosh pit at a heavy metal concert. These dim experiences of our dream life speak to us about the fact that all our sensory and mental perceptions are compressed symbols of more temporally expanded intuition, embodied in theatrical imagistic scenes, which elucidates our psychic constitution. Now the content of events unfolding in the World around us no longer feels to be so foreign and unknowable, and therefore something to fear, but as symbols continually testifying to the intuitive meaning we are steering through with our movements in the deeper layers of our soul being.

For example, we often speak of the “gestures” in the plant world. These outer expressive forms remind us of crystallized movements, as if someone communicating with hand gestures in sign language was frozen in the act and we only remained with a snapshot of the meaning conveyed. These colloquial sayings are dim remembrances of inner realities we were once much more acquainted with. Again, the inner realities of these outer forms, i.e. the playback of the interrupted speech, won’t be found on the imagined ‘other side’ of the color perceptions, but from within the experience of the meaning we encounter when dimly contemplating the gestures. That dim experience is purified and intensified through the experience of our own temporally extended inner gestures, as they come into focus when our normally chaotic inner activity is ‘strained’ of its impure admixtures through something like the vowel exercise.

Then we intuitively discover that the gestures of the plant world are essentially no different than the gestures of our human speech and indeed convey similar depth of meaning as when we focus our intuition of existence through a continuous stream of vowels. In other words, the whole World content is experienced more and more in its Logos nature. We begin to gain inner certainty that, indeed, in the beginning could only be the Word. This primal beginning is still with us today, just as our own receded inner gestures are continually embedded in our new states of being such that we maintain continuity of consciousness, i.e. every new state feels like it also contains the reverberations of previous states. The Logos ensures the continuity of not only our personal consciousness, but also the continuity of collective humanity’s consciousness as an organic whole. It vouchsafes the overcoming of our collective conditioning (karma) and the exposure to a ‘new Heaven and new Earth’.

"And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof."⁸

Therefore, at the center of our phenomenology must be the greatest voluntary exposure and sacrifice in World history, that of Christ Jesus. We don't need any particular religious affiliation to now have a solid inner orientation to what this event symbolizes for humanity. What could a Cosmic Divinity lack except the experience of being entangled with physical constraints and corresponding human-scale destinies, and all the suffering and fear that entails? His story is one of voluntary exposure to the wilderness of the individualized soul and the most tempting possible circumstances for such a soul; to the most humiliating and tortuous death such a soul could experience. We can imagine that Christ could have avoided it all if he told just one small lie in response to the Pharisaic and Roman inquisitors. Yet that would betray his mission, which was the most important exposure of all - the exposure to and of the Truth. It is the Truth that one must die to one’s old classical conditioning through higher insight before one can truly live in freedom.

When we expand our inner activity beyond its familiar mental pictures to intuitively resonate with Christ and his Intent, we gain the courage to speak and embody the Truth no matter what the attendant circumstances. We are no longer afraid to see what lives inside us or to let other souls peer inside as well. Now we gain the motivation to transmute the old selfish pathways of our be-ing so those who peer inside will not be horrified, but inspired. Fear rendered our soul space opaque, yet the courage of Truth restores its transparency. The fruits of spiritual exposure therapy are no mere personal concern, since the spheres of inner activity we are exposed to encompass the overlapping living experiences of many beings, asymptotically approaching All-Being. Once the intuitive spark of Truth is ignited within us through our spiritual exposure, it will grow brighter and stronger without ceasing, like Giacomo-of-Crystal.

Once in a faraway city there was born a baby who was completely transparent. You could see through his arms and legs just as if they were air or water. He was made of flesh and bone but he looked as if he were made of glass. If by chance he happened to fall he didn’t break into pieces. At most there would be a transparent bump on his forehead.

You could see his heart beating, and his thoughts flickering like colored fish in their tank.

One time by mistake, the boy told a lie. Right away the people could see it like a ball of fire just behind his forehead: then he told the truth and the ball of fire dissolved. All the rest of his life he never told a lie.

Another time a friend told him a secret and right away everyone could see a black ball which rolled without stopping in his breast, and the secret wasn’t secret any more.

The boy grew, became a youth, then a man, and everyone could read his thoughts. When they asked him a question, they could guess his answers before he could even open his mouth.

His name was Giacomo, but people called him “Giacomo-of- Crystal” and loved him for his loyalty. Everyone became kind when they were around him.

Unhappily in that country there came to power a ferocious dictator who began a time of bullying, injustice and poverty for the people. Whoever dared to protest disappeared without a trace. Whoever rebelled was shot. The poor were persecuted, and humiliated in a hundred different ways.

People kept quiet and suffered, afraid of what might happen otherwise.

But Giacomo couldn’t keep quiet. Even if he didn’t open his mouth, his thoughts spoke for him: he was transparent and everyone could read behind his forehead angry thoughts and condemnation for the injustice and outrageousness of the tyrant. In secret, then, people began to repeat the thoughts of Giacomo and they took hope.

The tyrant had Giacomo-of-Crystal arrested and ordered him thrown into the darkest prison.

But then an extraordinary thing happened. The walls of the cell in which Giacomo had been shut became transparent, then the inner walls of the prison and at last the outermost walls. The people who walked near the prison saw Giacomo seated on his stool, as if the prison were made of crystal and they continued to read his thoughts. At night a great light poured out of the prison and the tyrant in his palace had all the curtains drawn so that he wouldn’t see it, but all the same he wasn’t able to sleep. Giacomo-of-Crystal, even in chains, was stronger than he, because the truth is stronger than any other thing, brighter than day and more terrible than a hurricane.⁹

1. 2 Timothy 1:7

2. What Causes Learned Helplessness?
https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-learned-helplessness-2795326

3. ”Mystical Experiences Occasioned by the Hallucinogen Psilocybin Lead to Increases in the Personality Domain of Openness”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3537171/

4. Rudolf Steiner, GA 322, Lecture VIII

5. Rudolf Steiner, GA 227, Lecture II

6. Hebrews 5:13-14

7. Rudolf Steiner, GA 84, 15 Apr. 1923

8. Revelation 5:5

9. Gianni Rodari, Giacomo-of-Crystal
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2010-08-20/giacomo-crystal/