Sensing The Trail
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 first-person consciousness. That home within our awareness that needs no fixed parameters or tasks to be fulfilled. First-person reduces all distance to give 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 third-person idea that there is a strategic telos or a “soul’s code” that will take us to a prized elsewhere. The former is the immediacy of love. The latter is the representative of love. That elsewhere place that would be love, becomes a teleological endeavour to be realized. That place of authority will also give us happiness, and that too is somehow elusive. The intellectual understanding is reflective, it places us next to our ideal conditions; as a proxy for what life might hold for us. Just as we rarely listen to the heart, we rarely glimpse the ever-present first-person consciousness.
The intellect reasons about experience; the heart orients the intellect within a horizon of care; but awareness, which holds them both, cannot be known by either. The heart is the metabolic center of a living organism that well exceeds the boundaries of skin and bone. It has the authenticity of the electromagnetic pulse that interacts within its sphere of resonance. The senses that have the most intimate tie with the territory of awareness, holds inner and outer boundaries of concern. But rarely are the senses given full reign of their scope and efficiency to authenticate the intellect’s reasoning, or even as a reference to help the heart’s orientation. This is most puzzling as both the intellect and heart find a enlightening filament in the directness of the senses. Awareness is another word for consciousness, and is most attuned when sensors align heart and intellect from the ground-up, and from the sky-down. Sky-down anchors awareness into efficiency, ground-up lifts it into the scope of inspiration.
If life was restricted to physical-conceptual interaction, there would be little freedom between maintaining efficiency and scope. Temperance between these two are always in tension. What gives them a creative break that liberates that tension is the pull of the outer dream, which is not intellectually reasoned or heart orientated. This is a higher vortex of causation that is received in moments of pure consciousness. The soul has a vortex nature. It regards itself as an alien re-framer that calls on an awareness that is not bound by efficiency or the scope of coherence. It is right to say that soul enters the senses as an evocative consciousness that stays as a lasting reality, which is irreversible and irreducible.
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 higher being, their overlay on reality obscures the legitimate underlay. The tendency to opt for the overlay of persona is because it takes us into the “what-if” world of phenomena. It is a means of managing the double-bind of anxious curiosity.
We are still conscious when we are not attending to the senses in our body. Concepts about our persona and its conditions are not consciousness. They are the contents of our reality rather than reality itself. All these phenomenological components have conceptualized physics to support their points of perception. Consciousness is the embracing reality that raises physical memory into a conceptual symbol. Either way, we cannot be sure that the contents of our experience will prove to be durable enough to build our persona. Either way, these perpetuate a world-view with the persona at its center. But we can be sure that the consciousness holding these variables is real, as there is only one consciousness capable of bringing all this into the one occasion where all sensations have a place to congregate within the mentations that make persona an assembly place.
The persona makes good use of different first-person and third-person perspectives. There is an ontological primitive prior to this persona, which is approached here as the Soul Eye of ‘Learned Ignorance’. It carries the initiate into a deeper participation of pure awareness. It has no contempt or favour, no comparative times and occasions, it values the next moment as so completely distinct from the last, that there is no reference points of comparison. It clears away selection, and is free to experience the underlay that is reality. Unlike intelligence, consciousness is not a need to know. It allows each moment to unfold into a full spectrum of experience. Sensing the trail ahead is the Divine unfolding that is never surpassed by assumption.
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 that lays a foundation for a conceptual possibility to read the incoming data derived from the inner and outer sensory surface. This memory and possibility within a framework of necessity, is purposeful action, and 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 physical and conceptual realms. At every moment, this “I” is the latest successor of collective experience. Between a “dipolar” coextensive physical, symbolic process, there is an appreciation of what is wanting. This becoming is what Whitehead described as “prehension”. The physical and conceptual are the two sides of the perception. There is no such view without these two, which is not to say this is dualism in action as they are both given reality by one consciousness; Whitehead was a monist. The “eternal object” is at the center of all his processes. Each actual occasion will “rest” into the thing that gives its eternity, and can be recalled as having its own space and time.
Whitehead’s process of prehension is a different attitude to seeing that is a radical departure from measuring the isolated properties of a stand-alone. The tradition of “The Five Eyes” as described below, has commonality with the process of prehension, as a complete perceptual cycle that takes different contextual elements of perception, and feeds these back on themselves. They individually compress parts of a perceptual framework, but together, they extend the vortex of awareness. None of the first four eyes can see into the vortex that pulls them close. All have their particular blind spot. The central, fifth eye is all seeing; within that vortex of clarity, the many become one reality, and are increased by one.
SPIRIT EYE selects for vitality. Instinctive curiosity is inherent to the learning organism. Leaving the invincible mother requires navigating the vast unknown. Vitality owes as much to anxiety as well as curiosity about what is necessary and what is possible.
DREAM MIRROR EYE selects for vicinity. The physical world is relocated in a dream, except dreams have no final grip without physical reality. The cell has its construct, and so has the concept. Dreaming mirror ensures that the cell has a place in its conceptual future.
KARMIC EYE selects for vacuity. The cellular memory that resists entering the conceptual space made by the dreamer, leaves an unoccupied space in the heart. The past is a felt emotion that moves as a deeper current of awareness. It takes the fire of emotion to surface and liberate the heavier cellular past.
LIFE PATTERN EYE selects for volition. It appreciates that the path is being pinched by the need for experience. Staying present, it finds expansive potential making several turning points optional to the patterns of purpose.
SOUL EYE reveals the vortex of learned ignorance. It finds space for the stranger that has not been used to make any selection, in the interest that this eternal form will once again be distinguished from its universal eternity.
Star Wheel 