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In the first part of this article, it was shown how thoughts, and their entrainment as correct reasoning, cannot be the result of any processual genesis, not even one that takes place in a subconscious; but rather, can only arise spontaneously and whole as intuitions. That is, thinking does not advance algorithmically, and “intuition” is just a synonym for creatively spontaneous responsive naturing.
However, the idea of intuitions being the result of instincts, as is the understanding in modern Science, is a phantasm of wishful thinking because no instinctual faculty has ever been found in any human, nor any other animal — nor can it be, as I have explained in the first part of this dialogue.
It has also been shown that awareness as typically understood as a kind of observational or perceptual knowledge is incorrect, and that instead, what is being pointed to is a recognition of autogenous action in every case. We are not aware of things going on outside of our mind, we recognize the autogenous activity — including thoughts — that arise in response to the actualization of our bodily senses, including proprioception, and brain activity. We only secondarily become conscious of external — meaning beyond the mind — activity via a secondary recognition of the apperceived contents of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings.
In this article the necessary formal structures that support the recognition of spontaneously arising thoughts will be explained in detail. I have already discussed the distinction between brain and mind.
Many physicists have recently emphasized anew the fact that intuition and the direction of attention play a considerable role in the development of the concepts and ideas, generally far transcending mere experience, that are necessary for the erection of a system of natural laws (that is, a scientific theory).¹
The question before us now is how the necessary basis for recognition is established, given that to recognize some form of activity there must also already be some pattern to somehow match it to, yet how is that possible, since there are no entities available in this new paradigm to serve as an actual basis against which to compare.
For those who have read the sequence of articles leading up to this one, the answer will be obvious and necessary: cognition is the activity of manifesting this universe of actual — that is existing — activity. However, the specific meaning of “actual” herein does not carry the accretions of an independent self-existence. The corollary of this is that the recognition of autogenous action is not limited by the phantasms of Time and Space, as classically understood, and that “action at a spooky distance” (which is a playful characterization), is evident proof of what this article will present to be the case.
There was a fundamental misstep at the advent of modern Science in the West. Due to an admixture of excitement, hubris, and bad timing, ancient science of mind, primarily from Asian cultures, was shunned when it was disseminated to Europe, cast into oblivion as if it were just naïve superstition, and centuries, if not millennia, of meditative and contemplative insights were ignored.
But what is worse, they were not replaced.
Modern Science has, since the beginning of the 18th Century, if not earlier, suffered because of its conscious adherence to unfounded religious belief and speculative philosophical assertions in relation to how we know anything at all — having purposely anathematized those two bases for scientific knowledge in all other cases. Today, this massive failure to follow the Scientific Method — a failure that puts all of Science in jeopardy — is ignored within all scientific explanations.
How is it that we are we conscious, and how, therefore, can we reason about anything at all?
You would think that would be pertinent to all theoretical science, but in fact it isn’t, because Science doesn’t look for the Truth, and never has. Science looks for practical knowledge, and in fact consciously avoids any knowledge that cannot be potentially refuted. Unfortunately, too many scientists today don’t seem to understand that , and the public even less so.
The fact that Science has not grappled with our ignorance in regard to what consciousness is, and how we can reason, shows that the truth is still not pertinent, so long as Science produces useful knowledge.
It is useful to revisit the article “What is Intuition?” in the Proem section of this book before proceeding. As I show in that discourse, there is no intelligible character of intuiting that can help us understand this evident phenomenon.
It may seem that I am ignoring the findings of modern neuroscience, but I am not. I am dismissing it out of hand, because Science has found its findings to be biased and irreproducible,² and its experiments designed to prove the theory du jour,³ rather than disprove them, as all good scientific experiments should be constructed. Furthermore, it is infected by an implicit materialist perspective.⁴
And, while it is not correct to label every unintelligible phenomenon as being spontaneous, if we are trying to understand it using the causal paradigm, it is even more incorrect to assign a cause that is itself just a phantasm of human thought, as modern Science does today.
We must of course guard against thinking of every event whose cause is unknown as “causeless“. This, as I have already stressed, is admissible only when a cause is not even thinkable. But thinkability is itself an idea that needs the most rigorous criticism. Had the atom corresponded to the original philosophical conception of it, it’s fissionability would be unthinkable. But once it proves to be a measurable quantity, it’s non-fissionability becomes unthinkable. Meaningful coincidences are unthinkable as pure chance. But the more they multiply and the greater and more exact the correspondence is, the more their probability sinks and their unthinkability increases, until they can no longer be regarded as pure chance but, for lack of a causal explanation, have to be thought of as meaningful arrangements. As I have already said, however, their “inexplicability” is not due to the fact that the cause is unknown, but to the fact that a cause is not even thinkable in intellectual terms.⁵
In the case of intuitions, having failed to find any intelligible thought process as cause — and indeed, I have shown this to be impossible — asserting that the cause must be the non-conscious mind — as if there provably is such a thing — that gives rise to intuitions, is definitely wrong. The non-conscious mind is a phantasm that is asserted to exist simply because it is necessary that there be a cause for what is evident, even though, as it always is in such cases, not evident itself.
As I have shown, human thought can only proceed via the manifestation of intuitions at each step of reasoning. But to put what should be obvious bluntly: you shouldn’t therefore be using intuitions to define what an intuition is. That is like pouring water to describe what water is. A description, or explanation of some phenomenon, is not the phenomenon itself.
So when we say that intuitions are the product of the non-conscious mind, we are trying to sweep the problem under a rug without having a broom in our hands. Obviously, you can’t sweep without a broom, so believing that you have swept is delusional. Imagining a cause, rather than finding one — in the causal paradigm — is equally delusional.
And having already shown the impossibility of various offered explanations for how intuitions arise, and having shown the impossibility of reasoning without the aid of intuition, it becomes clear that our ability to think and reason is irrefutable evidence for responsive naturing being the veridical paradigmatic understanding of reality, and the only explanation that supports itself. It is irrefutable, unless, and until, an omniscient agent is found putting thoughts in hour heads.
The causal paradigm, on the other hand, breeds delusions.
For example, causal determinism asserts that everything arises in a mechanistic process of lawful chaotic interactions (which is oxymoronic to begin with), but if that assertion is applied to the origin of the idea of causal determinism, we are saying that the source of this idea is chaos. Even a roomful of monkeys randomly typing away on keyboards seems a more likely source for the crown jewel of modern Science.
Responsive Naturing as an explanation, on the other hand, takes into account present conditions and the possibilities that those conditions engender, which is evident in the coherent continuity of all that is manifested, so the assertion that responsive naturing is the genesis of intuitions is at least based in reality, not fantasy. This explanation is axiomatic because it is plainly evident, and it is non-delusional because it abstains from hypostatizing an entity that is responding, but which is not discoverable.
And I stop short of asserting God, simply because, it adds nothing that is not already present as this Responsive Naturing. But nothing that I am arguing here undermines God, it simply refuses to impose human limitations on the understanding that word points to — to wit: Creation wouldn’t proceed as we humans build things. Responsive Naturing is creation.
And Responsive Naturing is a complete explanation because I have shown how the naturing proceeds:
Thoughts arise whole and complete, each in its own vignette Now, and thus recognition of the active reconfigurations in the brain, when a thought arises, are conditions that give rise to the immediate experience of the thought, in the same way that inner spontaneous sounds arise.
So, thoughts occur in the brain as reconfigurations that are recognized as autogenous activity, but the recognition is, as all other recognitions are, ‘in the mind’, which is to say, the continuous unfolding that is responsive naturing. There aren’t two things going on, only one unfolding stream of activity.
Therefore, the question is how the brain reconfigurations occur and why they occur. To that, I point to responsive naturing, which is not some other activity, but is simply the unfolding reconfigurations. The brain is, as the rest of the body is, like a musical instrument. The reconfigurations — like artistic manipulations of the musical instrument — give rise to the immediate recognition of the reconfigurations, which is the imperience of this autogenous activity, and the imperience of the activity comprises the necessary condition for the experience of the thought to occur, which unfolds in parallel with the imperience as a secondary recognition, logically offset. This is why there is a small ‘delay’ between the brain activity and our recognition of that activity as a meaningful activity.
Responsive naturing is cognitive as it unfolds within each sæculum encompassed within the ‘human being’, which is the overall encompassing sæculum at that level of focus. And this cognition is constrained by the ontogenetic potential of each sæculum as that potential is natured.
A criticism of this might be “Well, why then are we not aware of everything autogenously happening in the body? To which I would simply point to the perspectival focus that we call “attention” within the sæculum of all beings, according to the ontogenetic potential of each. A human being has a different attentional potential than a photon, to take two extremes.
And this is backed up by the well-documented progression of absorptions that occur over the course of a traditional meditative practice. Each ‘step’ or ‘level’ of which, can be clearly seen as a change of attentional focus, and its concentration, or diffusion. And along with that, the so-called "super-mundane powers," as documented in each meditative tradition in different ways, that arise in conjunction with each of these absorptions, are clearly changes in the ‘range of motion’ and ‘perspicuity’ of attention, much as physical yoga can change the range of motion, and energy flows, of the various parts of the body.
This is how thoughts occur, and why the potential for thinking is dependent upon the ontogenetic species and particular potential of each manifested sæculum. Most humans think in language statements, while some do so in images, and others do so in emotions. A lion, most likely does so in images and emotions, although this statement may be based in my own ignorance of lions. Honeybees may think in ‘wiggle’ dance moves, and probably emotions, because they communicate with their wiggle dances and certainly have preferences for different types of flowers, and they seem to enjoy them when they discover their particular favorites.
So to recap briefly, thoughts arise spontaneously⁶ based upon perceptions, memories, emotions, etc., but it is the animadversion of attention that steers the thinking process as trains of coherent thoughts arise, are evaluated, and judged, which is coupled to the mindful intention to arrive at some particular conclusion or statement, even though it may be unknown.
When we focus attention on some thought that has arisen spontaneously, we elevate the probability of that line of reasoning’s coherent continuation. This answers the criticism that if all awareness is a recognition of things being done, which logically requires a slight delay (no matter how small), then our attention must always lag what is done, and thus cannot drive the probability of what will happen next. Animadversion is the turning of attentional focus, which gives added weight by advancing one or more possibilities over others. In the realm of thinking, this animadversion steers the line of thought that is responsively natured next.
Volitional attention is the "turning away from," "turning towards," or "resting non-judgmentally in" a particular activity, such as a sense perception. Non-volitional attention is simply recognition of activity. Non-volitional attention is the initial state in each reconfiguration, which, as recognition, has an affective quality, which is then the volitional attention. These two are really one: the non-volitional being the logical beginning, and the volitional being the logical end of each momentary recognition of activity. This structure is intelligible in deep meditative states of absorption.
Our thoughts control us only in the sense that they preoccupy us and frequently deplete our capacity to pay clear attention to other events in our lives. Most people do not know — nor do we normally learn in modern culture — how to direct our thoughts.
Traditional meditation mind training practices focus practical efforts on attenuating, or ending, the excitation of thoughts, because the point of mind-training is to develop concentration, focus, and the correct perspective — as in which end of the ‘telescope’ to use — in relation to the appearances. This reduces the incidence of wrong, invalid, non sequitur, disturbing, useless thoughts from arising. However, in our practical daily life, right thinking in a controlled, directed manner is a necessity.
Normally, which is to say habitually, when we turn our attention within the mind, we are just lost in imaginative thoughts and dreams. We have not truly and immanently ‘turned our attention around’. As Meister Eckhart (1260–1328), the Catholic theologian, philosopher and mystic, described it, “like wine that has permeated the wood of its cask.” Meditating on the one who is meditating, requires that we let go of the imaginative streams of thought and visions that we habitually entertain ourselves with, as if we are watching a television drama that we have front-row seats for, rather than watching the one watching the television. It is hard, because it is habitual, to not fall into a one-dimensional mode of being simply a perceiver.
Our thoughts need to be logically correct and coherent, serving a clear purpose, rather than being a chaos of non sequitur, disconnected, and incoherent thoughts that serve no purpose, or worse, harm us, and obstruct our path to understanding.
Unlike the coherent continuity of the appearances, our thoughts, our behavior, our interactions, and thus, our feelings, are often wild and incoherent, not congealing into a harmonious whole — because our mind is like a wild stallion, running, jumping, kicking, without any obvious purpose. And an untrained mind, like a wild stallion, must be broken before it can be trained.
Thoughts arise as brain activity, just as sense perceptions arise. Unlike sense perceptions though, thoughts are manifested as conceptual, rather than perceptual, pattern recognitions. This means that in exactly the same way that the brain activity is recognized for sense perceptions, the brain activity is recognized for conceptual thought. We know the difference because perceptions are visceral and affective, while thoughts are only affective. Affective means that we have a reaction to the recognition — good, bad, or neutral — whether it be accompanied with visceral sensations, or not. This is why our attention plays such an important role in right thinking, and our inattention, or inability to attend in a focused way often leads to a chaos of useless thinking.
Which is to say, thought, whether conceptual language-based, or metaphorical image-based, is manifested as an actual soliloquy or dream in the brain. In the same way that dogs run in their sleep, but not for real, yet while still making attenuated running-like movements with their legs and paws.
This raises the question: Responsiveness is responsive to what exactly? Obviously it must function in response to the current contextual configuration of events, thus it must be an aspect of each context and not something centralized. If it were, then it would not be privy to our intentions and aspirations, for example, nor to our affective responses, all of which are interior to the context. This is the justification for my use of the qualifier “autogenous” — all the activity that arises does so from within the particular saecula entangled in the current context. It is not something that is other than these saecula, and yet, because it responds to the entangled context of saecula as well, it must be non-localized.
Intrinsic in each moment is the entire entanglement of all the prerequisite actualizations along each sæculum’s path as well. These are not memories, these are entangled actualized responses, which are entangled in an ever growing web of connections over the course of the unfolding of each sæculum. The importance of this insight is not to be glossed over.
Naturing entails a cognitive recognition of what is manifested. Naturing is intrinsic and non-local, because cognitive recognition is both local and nonlocal. This means that responsive naturing transcends the appearances of all things, all beings.
So how does this cognitive activity learn? Is knowledge something held apart?
Attention to various recognitions of things done creates connections between the current context and the necessary precedents in each moment (vignette), forming a network of forms of continuity that can be manifested again. These forms are like a recursive chain of performative skill that can be redeployed.
This is why our attention is such an important condition, overweighted in a sense, of what happens in our lives. We think of our attention as merely the movement of something in space, like turning our heads to look behind us, but this is an interpretation based upon our paradigmatic understanding of physicalism. Animadverted relations form the structural basis of all forms.
This also means that the combined entanglement of actualizations is the source of the very wisdom that is actualized and recognized as such. Recognition requires — if only logically — a ‘pattern’ upon which the actual is both based and compared to (in some fuzzy manner). Yet, since there are no entities, there cannot be a storehouse for such patterns, nor can there actually be patterns, and so recognition can only be formally based within the totality of what has been actualized. Such forms are not static definitions, and certainly not conceptual; instead they are performative — literally a heuristically developed canosis for doing something, like manifesting a human being.
How does that wisdom develop? Heuristically, by the combined entanglement of what has been actualized, and the ontogenetic potential of all the entangled sæcula, and the cognitive naturing of the potential, within the constraints imposed by what is actual, what is possible, what is attended to (according to the ontogenetic potential of each sæculum), and the affective turning towards, turning away, or remaining unmoved, which are adumbrated by intention and desire — plus the innate creative response to all of that in a way that ensures the coherent continuity of all, even as it develops along the intended and desired path of each living being.
Freedom of response, the creative play of responsive naturing, is also the capacity to develop wisdom (canosis). This occurs as response to conditions, including that of latent possibilities in the fuller context, gives rise to affective judgements of positive success, negative failure, or neutral (these being the endpoints and middle of a weighted range of valuations). Thus, response is not fixed, but evolves through naturing responses. We learn, not by acquiring opaque or incoherent facts, but by integrating facts into the body of our understanding. This process is not built atop responsive naturing, but is the character of responsive naturing.
Synchronicity is no more baffling or mysterious than the discontinuities of physics. It is only the ingrained belief in the sovereign power of causality that create intellectual difficulties and makes it appear unthinkable that causeless events exist or could ever occur. But if they do, then we must regard them as creative acts, as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.⁷
When, for example, a brain injury occurs, it is exactly the creative play of responsive naturing that allows for the reconfiguration of functional areas in such a way that the brain ‘recovers’ as a result of function redeployment. If this was not the case, how would the unaffected areas of the brain know to switch roles? Prescient or clairvoyant neurons?
So it is, in every evolving reconfiguration along the path of coherent continuity.
No aspect of what is can be incoherent, or unrelated to what was. Wisdom, the evolving state of understanding, primordially conditions response.
Every phantasm, hypostatization, and golem infecting our understanding is fundamentally a failure to minutely investigate incorrect reasoning because of laziness, weakness of having an untrained mind, or attachment to our self-created apparitions.
For, to know is to compare that which is externally perceived with inner ideas and to judge that it agrees with them, a process which Proclus expressed very beautifully by the word “awakening,” as from sleep. For, as the perceptible things which appear in the outside world make us remember what we knew before, so do sensory experiences, when consciously realized, call forth intellectual notions that were already present inwardly; so that that which formerly was hidden in the soul, as under the veil of potentiality, now shines therein in actuality. How, then, did they [the intellectual notions] find ingress? I answer: all ideas or formal concepts of the harmonies, as I have just discussed them, lie in those beings that possess the faculty of rational cognition, and they are not at all received within by discursive reasoning; rather they are derived from a natural instinct and are inborn in those beings as the number (an intellectual thing) of petals in a flower or the number of seed cells in a fruit is innate in the forms of the plants.⁸
Today, we call the font of wisdom in our lives, ‘the unconscious’, even the “Collective Unconscious,” or similar. And since responsive naturing animadverts certain latent possibilities present within the present conditions in each context, we grasp onto that animadversion and call it our attention, and that which is animated, we call our doing. And this is wrong and needs to be redressed.
When two contexts become entangled, the intrinsic naturing of each, not being separate natures because responsive naturing is non-local, become synchronized (in some way) and thus each context enlarges. This is how higher 'levels’ of more complex forms are constellated — from the smallest ‘physical’ entanglements of photons, to the most complex biological organisms. It also explains our ‘relations’ with other people and what that means psychically and socially.
How does this wisdom become instantiated as a thought, in the case of the responsive naturing of a thought? This cannot be answered because this activity I call Responsive Naturing has no intelligible character beyond the arising of form, which, of course, is intelligible. Since one of the types of form that this activity manifests is thought, simply thinking about how responsive naturing accesses the combined wisdom that it results in, has not transcendent the activity in any way.
The synchronicity principal possesses properties that may help to clear up the body–soul problem. Above all it is the fact of causeless order, or rather, of meaningful orderedness, that may throw light on psychophysical parallelism. The “absolute knowledge” which is characteristic of synchronistic phenomena, a knowledge not mediated by the sense organs, supports the hypothesis of a self–subsistent meaning, or even expresses its existence. Such a form of existence can only be transcendental, since, as the knowledge of future or spatially distant events shows, it is contained in a psychically relative space and time, that is to say in an irrepresentable space-time continuum.⁹
There is no process, as I showed in the first part of this discourse, and so nothing about responsive naturing can be intelligible. This universe of constellated sæula is an ‘inside’ without an ‘outside’. It cannot be transcended. Yet this activity is incontrovertible, and there is nothing behind the liminal horizon, because responsive naturing is just activity, not an entity that acts.
The stories we tell ourselves structure and lead our lives, and ultimately the only truth is that these stories are the creative response to what we focus on now, how we feel about it, the heartfelt direction we wish for our life, and the strength of our desire to attain it.
How then can we say that God created Heaven and Earth? It’s we that create the stories that structure and lead our lives. We are so enamored of these stories — so lost within them — that we miss the actual presence of God that is the storytelling.
Why would God labor to create Heaven and Earth, when God could create a self-evolving reality? One or infinite realities that self-construct, or destruct? That aren’t even separate things because there is no separation, neither here or there, nor between God and we story tellers.
Since Time is just another story we tell ourselves to structure and lead our lives, “7 days” is our convention, which has no hold, or relation, to God.
We are so enamored of these stories of ours that we believe God would be too. Because we have created our story of God in the image of our own limitations, successes and failures. God help us…
The revelation of God is this life we lead and structure with our stories, not our stories.
To my mind, this is the purest understanding of God, simply because there is no idea here. There is nothing to see, nothing to imagine, and not even an absence to name. This universe is a flower without a stem to ornament, and more beautiful than our thoughts can contain.
ཨེ་མ་ཧོ། ཕན་ནོ་ཕན་ནོ་སྭཱཧཱ།
👈 || UNSAYING | CONTEMPLATION | TRADITION | MEDITATION | DISCUSSIONS | BACK MATTER || 👉
