Star Wheel

Sensing The Trail

A.N. Whitehead writes “The many become one and are increased by one”.

Loving the vortex allows everything we care about to find a natural home in our first-person consciousness. That home is our awareness that needs no fixed parameters to find itself. First-person reduces all distance to give the heart a home, and for that heart to hold steady basis for the excursions of the intellect. As the Sufi would say: “heart is the throne of the intellect”. In contradiction to this, we have a belief that a mechanism can replace a third-person place to triangulate and validate our findings. To be sure, without third-party verification, we slip into solipsism. When that third-party “elsewhere” is prized about all else, we are never comfortably at home within ourself, and there is no individual sovereignty. The former has the immediacy of love, the latter is the representative of love. That elsewhere place that would be love too if it came with an inherent, teleological endeavour to be realized. That place actualized place of authority is here ready to be claimed as happiness. The intellectual understanding is reflective, it places us as an object next to our ideal subjective conditions. With the exception of those moments when we listen to the improvisations of the heart, we rarely sense ourselves as purely first-person consciousness.

The intellect reasons that some narratives are truer than others; the heart gives the intellect its bearings on which to settle that truth. Between these two, there is a zone of coscious care; but awareness, which holds them both, cannot be known by either. The heart is the metabolic center of a living organism that has the authenticity to sense the pulse in the other living being. The senses have the dual aspect of inner and outer concern; their physical home as homeostasis also has an outer anticipation that is allostasis. But the senses have no sovereignty in themselves. The space between intellect and heart is the spirit turning on its center that inspires growth in total awareness.

If life was restricted to physical-conceptual interaction, there would be little freedom between maintenance and meaning. Temperance between the one that stays home and the other that risks to find more, is the incentive of both necessity and chance. What gives temperance its creative force is the spirit that sets the dream, and collapses the space for the rise of the energy vortex. At its center, moments are timeless; the soul has no regard for itself as a mortal actor; its off-planet call-center receives requests, and recruits the right service department.

During times when one or two of those members within the service departments are used to represent the persona, that individual mistakes themselves for the service they have created. Sometimes these actors become surprisingly identical to those they serve. The underlay of being becomes illegitimate, useless, and worthless. The tendency to opt for the personally inauthentic, but is recognized by others, seems safer and more controllable. This break from the “wholly one” sacrifices potential for the assured. But the potential is never completely frozen out, it shows up as a 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 derivatives are used as a swage to shape the physical future. Each of these sharpen another point on the imaginative path of perception. But none of these points stand on firm ground unless they are taken back into first-person consciousness. Building a persona requires the energy to bind piecemeal evidence. That assembly-disassembly point of entry and departure is an energy and attention hog. There is only one kind of view capable of supporting that level of projection and conclusion, which is consciousness itself.

Francis Lucille – “Consciousness is a reality that exists in itself, for itself, and by itself”.

The ontological primitive that is the anchor and wings of this persona, is well described as a learning where the ignorance about conscious reality plays a vital role. Nicholas of Cusa invented the useful idea of ‘Learned Ignorance’. It carries the initiate into a deeper participation with phenomena to eventually arrive a more open awareness of the Divine. Far from surpassing the mind of God, Learned Ignorance has no contempt or favour for the past. It values the next moment as completely distinct from the last, where the reference points of assured comparison may not be found. It clears away what it just selected, and is free to swing through the flight-lines of experience. What emanates is the underlay of reality. Unlike intelligence, consciousness does not have a need to project from a database of what is known. It allows each moment to unfold into a full spectrum of experience. Sensing the trail ahead as the Divine Order that will not be 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 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. As consciousness cannot see itself without creating a concept of itself as an object, the orbiting eyes individually compress parts of a perceptual round, but together, they extend the vortex of awareness. None of the orbiting four eyes can see into the center of the vortex that gives them height and gravity. All have their particular blind spot that can be revealed by their opposite. The central, fifth eye is all seeing; within the center of the vortex is authentic clarity; the many become one reality, and are increased by that one reality. 

SPIRIT EYE OF VITALITY: Cellular memory of the learner is inherent to the learning organism. Leaving the invincible memory of the mother requires navigating the vast unknown. Vitality owes as much to anxiety as it does to curiosity, with the need to find the greater necessity within the possibility.

DREAM MIRROR EYE OF VICINITY: Cellular memory of the dreamer is located in a dream that retries what was missed in tangible awareness. The concept has its floating perception, but the cell offers anchored sensation. Dreams need reflective mirrors to see which part of the self is originating the dream.

KARMIC EYE OF VACUITY: The cellular memory of the lover stands as an authentic staging place for the spiritual self. The space between floating intellect and a grounded heart, is a field for spirit to be cultivated in the throes of love. When the intellect takes its seat on the throne of the heart, the spirit of past and future is at first felt as present emotion, and then rises into salient clarity.

LIFE PATTERN EYE OF VOLITION: Cellular memory of the voyager frames the path of experience with what is known now. That presence that holds the present is something that remains the same across time. Staying with the present while finding space for expansive intention, is like a prayer flag: one side is tied to prevailing purpose, while the other three sides fly with prevailing forces of nature.

SOUL VORTEX EYE: Transcendent memory of the authenticator lives free from context. It has its place in intention rather than selection. It has no counterpart, and stays central to passing realities. When it sees its physical host in reflection, it knows itself as an experiencing subject that makes objects within its conscious awareness. Its at the center of its four eyes, and holds space for the four winds.