Star Wheel

Sensing The Road

A.N. Whitehead writes “The many become one and are increased by one” and “No thinker thinks twice”.

Loving vacuity allows everything we care about to find a natural home in our consciousness. That home within our awareness has no fixed furnishings or tasks to be fulfilled; awareness gives the heart a home, and that heart is the steady seat of the intellect. As the Sufi would say: “heart is the throne of the intellect”. In contradiction to this, we have this idea that there is a strategic throne or a “soul’s code” of authority that is obtained from elsewhere. That elsewhere place becomes a teleological endeavour to be realized. That authority will also give us happiness, and that too is somehow unobtainable. The intellectual understanding is reflective, it places us (along with our conditions) as a proxy life that lives on the other side of our reflective image. Just as we rarely listen to the heart, we rarely glimpse the idea of consciousness.

The intellect reasons about experience; the heart orients the intellect; but awareness, which holds them both, cannot be known by either. The heart is the position of authority as it has the last say in a living organism. It has the authenticity of the senses to hold ground. The senses that have the most intimate tie with the kingdom of awareness, hold inner and outer boundaries of concern. But we rarely give our senses any authority to authenticate the intellect’s reasoning, or the heart’s orientation. Where the intellect and heart find a lighted filament, is where the senses are directly held by awareness. From this sensory alignment from the ground-up, both heart and intellect are found to be lifted by the air of inspiration.

If life was restricted to physical-conceptual interaction, there would be little freedom. Temperance between these two are always in tension. What gives them creative tension is the wings of the soul and the anchor of the senses. Through this vertical causation curls the strands of pure consciousness. The soul regards itself as an alien attractor that calls in all passing information to enter awareness. It is right to say that soul invokes consciousness as its lasting reality, and not informed content which is only the product of experience, but not its originator.

During times when one or two of the cast members we think of as aspects of our persona, have the lack of humility to mistake themselves for the entire actor network, the underlay of reality becomes obscured by their selection. We like the persona because it has physics and concepts working for it. It is curiosity that takes us to new places from where we can get a new angle on life. It gets anxious and gives a place to retreat. Consciousness has every curiosity and anxiety beyond the imagined. The Soul Eye of “Learned Ignorance”, comes closest to pure awareness. It has no contempt or favour for one anxiety or curiosity over another. At all times and occasions, consciousness has the hunger of learned ignorance, it has a voracious apatite for more, that leads us on to a full spectrum of experience. Sensing the road ahead, along with the verges, we expand the parameters of learned ignorance. Unlike our physical-conceptual model, the Divine unfolding is never surpassed. 

The work of Alfred North Whitehead is an “organic” philosophy that affirm the individual as being in the processing-relating world, and the world as process is in the individual. The world in the individual is bound tightly within the instinctual organ that lives as the physical memory. This memory of how to process data and turn it to purposeful action is an inheritance from a very deep lineage of antecedents. The individual in the world is to live as a symbolic “I” made from the realm of physicalized concepts, which will be the latest successor of collective experience. Between these “dipolar” extensions of the physical and symbolic there is an appreciation of what is wanting to become. This becoming is what Whitehead described as “prehension”. The physical perception cannot be fully taken from the symbolic, and the conceptual prehension cannot be complete without the physical ground of experience. There is no such view that is taken independently of these. The eternal object at their center is lent to each actual occasion, to give that eternity its own space and time. It could be seen as white light refracting into a full spectrum of perception.

Whitehead’s prehensions are a different attitude to seeing that is a radical departure from measuring the static properties as a stand-alone. The Five Eyes as described below is a complete perceptual cycle that takes different contextual elements of perception, and feeds these back on themselves. They individually compress parts of a perceptual frameworks, but together, they roll back the boundaries of awareness by extending the dipolar physical-symbolic prehension introduced by Whitehead’s organic philosophy. Their apertures open up to the four corners of the processional world. The first four set of eyes all have particular blind spots. The central, fifth eye is all seeing; it brings the many to one, and are increased by one. 

SPIRIT EYE reveals vitality. Instinctive curiosity is inherent to the learning organism. Leaving the invincible mother requires navigating the vast unknown. But vitality is generated between the inflation of curiosity and the deflation of anxiety. Spirit Eye tests the degree of tolerance that keeps the upper reaches connected with the valley floor.

DREAM MIRROR EYE reveals validity. In order to extend the physical grasp, the physical necessity invites in the conceptual possibility. The dream projects through the frame of the mirror that reflects who and what is standing here presently. Dream Mirror Eye ensures that the conceptual dream and physical reflection completes a picture of a world that wants to be occupied. That dream world is always configured within the frame of tolerance as being necessity. 

KARMIC EYE reveals vacuity. Spaces that resist attention are loaded with false pretenses, pain and shame. Attention grows with possibility and necessity, but the past is never downstream from the present. These share valuable space and both make demands on this moment. Some pasts come with a crowd so large that it crowds out the space needed for nearsightedness. The Karmic Eye dissolves the resist so that every past finds adequate necessity, and a place of termination within the void.

LIFE PATTERN EYE reveals volition. It appreciates the current path is critically narrow; pinched by what was considered as upstream-downstream experience.  Criticism gives way to validation as the wider view of the path is opened up as  transformation. Life Pattern Eye creates “turning points” around which to weave another strand for the patterns of purpose.

SOUL EYE reveals the voraciousness of learned ignorance. It finds as the alien onlooker finds – a perplexity of wonderance that demands its own space and time. As it is adjacent to what is seen by the other four eyes that operate from models, it brings its omnidirectional aperture to open up what is obscured by selection – that is the autonomous view before any contempt or valiance is placed to justify the attitude brought to the occasion.