I am in Auroville, India 🇮🇳, as I write this reflection in honor of the 153rd birthday of Sri Aurobindo.

Auroville is an experimental town in India inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo.

Sri Aurobindo was a political activist during the British occupation of India. His birthday, August 15, falls on the same day as India’s Independence Day. This alignment of his life with the destiny of his country is highly symbolic.

He lived at the same time as Mahatma Gandhi. While Gandhi believed in nonviolent resistance, Sri Aurobindo considered such methods insufficient to secure freedom.

Man cannot not be free merely because external conditions allow it; that would contradict the very essence of freedom. Like we often explore together here, freedom is an inner journey willed into being and it only becomes real when we consciously choose and act out of higher nature rather than compulsion, ignorance, or mechanical habit.

Sri Aurobindo saw that to accept injustice without meeting it with decisive force, was to enable it.

Peace is no virtue if it comes at the expense of truth.

His activism and leadership in the freedom movement eventually led to his arrest and he spent about a year in jail.

During this imprisonment, he underwent profound spiritual experiences. These transformed his outlook and shifted the core of his mission from political liberation to spiritual liberation.

This was not a change in the core of the mission of the freedom movement. It was a realization that the battle for India’s freedom was not just against political oppression but a part of a larger human struggle between ignorance and truth. And that battle has to be fought within each and everyone of us individually to have long lasting political effects. Otherwise, no political freedom can last. True liberation could not be achieved by political freedom alone, but requires a spiritual transformation at the very root of human life.

Spirituality is used in this context in a practical sense. It is about recognizing that every human creation; our cities, political institutions, technologies, and the very chairs we sit on, before they became matter, they were thought. However, thought alone is not enough; it must be warmed by feeling, directed by will, and realized through skillful action.

If these inner faculties in each of us are left in ignorance, then ignorance continues to rule and build the world. Ignorant thoughts can only lead to ignorant creations. And no political transformation can prevail against this ignorance ruling in our personal lives.

A spiritual transformation is to become conscious of these processes and to each take responsibility for the quality of what we think, feel, and will, so that freedom is not only proclaimed in politics but embodied in each of our lives.

After his release, he moved to Pondicherry, a French territory then, effectively living in exile. There he spent the rest of his life in spiritual practice and writing. His days were devoted to yoga and writing monumental works such as The Life Divine and Savitri.

The Life Divine is one of his major works and it is how I have become more familiar with his teachings. I downloaded the book on my tablet, thinking I would just read it in a few weeks like any other book. Little did I know what I was getting myself into, including moving to Auroville just to read it in an environment where I would be immersed in his thoughts. Ten months later, I am still studying the same book. Luckily, I did not see the physical book first, otherwise, I would not have started it this innocently.

The Life Divine is not a book in the traditional sense; it is a journey.

A beautifully guided exploration of questions so vast and perilous that without Sri Aurobindo’s crystal-clear intellect and unwavering integrity, we could easily be led astray into fear, dogma, personal bias, or simply, as I have often done, the urge to form naive incomplete conclusions too quickly to avoid staying in the uncertainty of not knowing.

The journey starts by addressing questions I have personally contemplated more than any other in my life: « Why do we exist? ».

Sri Aurobindo argues that if there is an absolute behind the universe that is indeed truly infinite, all-wise, all-loving, all-powerful, then creation cannot be out of compulsion or lack. It must be the expression of its own inherent delight of existence, which takes form as the unfolding universe.

The claim that creation might exist only for the delight of existence was something I had never considered before and I found it deeply intriguing.

To put this into a more practical relatable yet extremely reductive analogy: we could imagine a human being who is truly and completely free, not compelled to act for any of the usual reasons that drive us, such as survival, salary, belonging, recognition, status or the many other reasons. Such a person is under no external or internal compulsion. If this person still chooses to create whether to write, paint, build a company, or dance; then what could the motive be?

The next obvious question for me was: What about the suffering, death, evil and pain in this world? Why would that be part of creation if it is for delight? What is their role?

This is exactly where Sri Aurobindo guides us next on that journey. He discusses the tension between the individual and the universal, the divine and the undivine. He explores how falsehood, error, and evil arise and how they might be remedied.

Sri Aurobindo does not go on to give direct answers to any of these questions, there can be none, but he takes us on a journey to explore all of those questions and much more in exhaustive details and nuance.

He discusses the two extremes of the materialist who believes “only matter is real” and the ascetic who says “only spirit is real”, arguing they both miss something essential. The materialist risks reducing life to just physical processes without meaning. The ascetic risks rejecting the value of earthly life and matter altogether. He shows that neither denial gives us the full picture of reality.

He examines the major spiritual systems of the world, taking each to their logical and material consequences. He shows both the truths they capture, the points where they fall short and the existential and material discomforts they cause in human life.

In many spiritual teachings, the goal of life is seen as transcendental, outside of earthly existence. Life is a test, an evaluation for heaven or hell, it is called an illusion (Maya), or a school and many other metaphors that make it subordinate to a higher, non-material reality. In this perspective, we revere the Absolute as formless and often dismiss form as a fall from grace.

The Life Divine challenges these limitations. If we think this way, life on earth will always be second to eternal life. Earth will always fall short of heaven. We will live for ulterior motives, to pass a test, to go to heaven, to escape rebirth, to endure for the sake of some otherworldly goal, or perhaps to live for pleasure instead of finding meaning in life itself.

There are ever-increasing degrees of understanding. Each level is a necessary step in our journey and cannot be skipped, but none of them is the final truth. Along the journey, each of those partial understandings solidify into a belief system, requiring further systems to clarify and break their limitations.

Sri Aurobindo examines most paths humanity has taken; spiritual renunciation, material progress, the pursuit of heaven, the retreat into nirvana, then he asks: What if the goal is not a divine outside of material life, but to grow the divine into material life? What if evolution is the slow awakening of a spiritual being destined for a life of knowledge, and the realization of the divine here on earth?

From this emerges his vision of an evolving universe where consciousness progressively unveils itself in matter, matter becoming increasingly spiritualized. The purpose of evolution is to make the inherent Delight of existence conscious in every part of our being, from spirit to body. The Earth then is not an inconvenient detour on the way to the divine, but a field for the full manifestation of the Divine in time; from imperfection toward ever greater perfection.

The Life Divine is not reached by running away from life’s difficulties or by tolerating ignorance. It is built by facing falsehood within ourselves and casting it out, by refusing to withdraw from the world, and by continuously choosing to live according to higher ideals and what moves us closer to truth.

In this sense, physical wars reflect the same struggles that play out within each of us between ignorance and clarity. To fight our own inertia and ignorance and choose instead to serve beauty and what is real.

This path to spirituality demands courage, discipline, and endurance. Unlike purely contemplative paths, it forges the body and the mind together as vehicles for the spirit.

If the divine is infinite, then formless and form, transcendent and material, are equally real expressions of that infinity. There is no need to escape life to find the divine; life itself is the manifestation of the divine.

The Life Divine is an invitation to shift our perspective of life from escaping matter to embracing and transforming matter, honoring both the time and eternity as equal faces of divinity.

Thank you for reading,

🟣✨🟡

Today, I would like us to explore the name The Art of Freedom, discuss its meaning and tell you who exactly is 🟣 xōē 🟡.

What Makes Art?

Most of us walk, talk and write our way through life, but few of us would call our steps a dance, our speech a song or our words poetry.

What is it that turns steps from walking to dancing? That turns speech from talking to singing? That turns words from writing to poetry?

Among many considerations, we generally walk to get somewhere. In dancing, there is no question of getting anywhere. On the contrary, we might want to elongate and articulate each step. Our bodies become a means for expressing how the music moves through us. Each gesture and step expresses what is happening within our being as we experience the music.

Each step is a graceful brushstroke on a canvas of time, step after step, we make up for the whole time painting called the dance. We do not take each step to cause a dance, we take each step for the sheer delight of the movement itself. And yet, by the end of the song; a dance has been performed nonetheless. Not as a caused calculated result, but as an emergent expression of our meaning.

In a dance we may become sensitive to subtle, nuanced, refined and often elusive inner revelations that we express into tangible forms with our bodies.

Those forms can be experienced by others. However, even if the dance has a tangible form, it points us beyond, to the stirrings of our soul. It becomes the bridge by which the inner revelations of another start reverberating in our own being.

Herein lies the appreciation of art, in the movements of our inner being provoked by the art form contemplated.

The more sensitive we become to the beauty and truth in those inner revelations, the more we have to express through our technique.

The more we master the technique, the more expressive, refined and moving our dancing becomes. We become more capable of expressing ever more refined and nuanced meaning; and within this lies an increasing freedom of expression.

A beginner dancer may lack awareness of certain parts of their body, and those parts may not reflect the meaning expressed in the forms and movements of the rest of the body.
The body of an advanced dancer, on the other hand, is far more articulate, it embodies fully their inner meaning in all its nuance. Each movement is deliberate and precise; reflecting a coherent inner meaning that is present in each step like a brushstroke and that is gradually revealed through the dance as a complete and unified painting.

Creating Inner and Outer Palaces

So creating art is a twofold endeavor, we have to equally cultivate:

• 🟣 Our technique as the means by which we create and express in the outer world.

• 🟡 Our inner life as the muse that allows us to hear and understand the whispers of Life revealing herself to us in all her majesty.

Cultivating our art comes from the intertwining dance of these two pillars; technique and meaning. Each time we raise one of the pillars, we create the support to complete the turn of the spiral and raise the other pillar equally, and in turn, the whole structure upwards. Each ascent refining our expression as well as our meaning soaring higher and higher.

The technique is what allows us to express our meaning; through it, our inner life takes form in the outer world as our art. Now made visible, we are able to inspect it, live with it, and reflect upon it. In this reflection, we come face to face with both the limitations of our technique and the distortions within our meaning.

If we speak pictorially about this, we could say:

We can only build magical elegant majestic palaces if we:

• first, have it within ourselves to be able to conceive of and design such a palace inwardly.

• equally, if we have the technique, to be able to create it as a reality.

In our dreams, palaces can materialize themselves out of thin air. We want them, so we dream them.

Fortunately, that is not the case in reality. In reality we have to live through a series of logical sequential steps to materialize our palaces.

Reality always demands that we honor its logic and the effort appropriate in the achievement our feats. In every art form, there are structures we must respect in order to give form to our meaning.

Dreams tend to bypass structure, discard the effort and continuity required by reality. They would have us live in fairytales where anything we desire can be experienced without regard for the cost or the illogical inconsistent nature of realizing them.

In building a palace, we must regard the laws of structure. No matter how grand our vision is, if we ignore the distribution of weight in an arch, the structure will collapse.

Equally important, without sensitivity to beauty and truth, we might inadvertently build technically impressive prisons rather than palaces.

The more majestic and refined our vision, the more respect and mastery we must have over the physical principles that allow it to take form.

Freedom of expression in architecture emerges not from defying the laws of reality, but from collaborating with them; mastering them so well that we can make stone come to life.

So we let reality shape our dreams. With practice we start having reality as part of the constitution of our inner lives. We learn more and more to respect its structures when trying to impress our meaning upon the world with ever increasing freedom, ease and fluidity. In this relationship between reality and our meaning, our art becomes the meeting point; the tender and warm reunion of two long-lost lovers.

So art is about balancing two beautiful equally essential pillars:

• Technique and meaning

• Outer and Inner

• Form and formless

• Reality and dreams

• Past and Future

• Matter and Spirit

And I can go on and on, but I am sure you see my point.

We often think of art as wild creativity, free of rules. However, it is a strong expansive structure that lets the fire of creativity grow without turning the whole structure into ashes 🔥. What is the use of an intense creative fire if we cannot get ourselves to sit and create our art. Not one time exceptionally, but consistently. Because it is this consistency that allows for the structure to grow which in turn allows for the fire to have the space to grow even bigger.

The stronger and the more flexible the structure, the more movement it can contain without collapse.

The tallest skyscrapers have to allow for the strongest movements caused by the winds and earthquakes; because without flexibility, even the most solid structures can break under fierce movement.

To summarize:

Art not only cultivates our sensitivity to make our inner world beautiful, delightful, golden cozy palaces; art also gives us the way to make those palaces an outer reality we live in.

How is Freedom an Art?

When I first started exploring the nature of freedom, I might have thought it is something along the lines of doing whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, wherever we want with whoever we want.

Essentially, that freedom is completely doing away with any structure and form. After all, structure and form always constrict and limit the possibilities of movement. And if movement is limited, how could there be any freedom?

It did not occur to me at that time that structure is what equally allows for any movement at all.

I really only started considering the nature of freedom, after having heard of Spiritual Liberation. It sounded like the perfect summary of what I was looking for in life:

Freeing individuals from the cycle of suffering bound by time, which is often associated with worldly existence and the illusion of separation from the divine and others. And awakening a direct knowing of the source of existence, not as theory but as living experience.

This sounded perfect.

Not only as the perfect escape plan from the unbearable delight of existence; but equally as the opportunity to finally fulfill my lifelong dream to peak behind the scenes of existence and have the meaning behind it all revealed. If there is such a thing.

Not to spoil the ending of the post, like I wanted to do with my life… it turns out I was confusing the word liberation with another word.

Luckily, my naive understanding at that point was enough for me to go all in and not just all in, all out and around.

I organized all of my life toward this goal. If it did not contribute to liberation as I understood it, I did not do it. I studied the sacred texts and practiced every day morning and evening for hours a whole lot of austerities and even more superstitions, the details of which I will spare you here.

I thought, or more precisely; I bargained: you just have to endure this for a few years and get an eternity of freedom.

What a sweet deal 🫱🏽‍🫲🏻.

The freedom I imagined was of course transcendental, beyond and outside this life. Exactly as my conception of freedom was at the moment: a formless existence. I was hoping I could skip the plot, the characters development, their backstories and just have the meaning revealed in a glorious ending scene.

It turns out you only get meaning, and liberation for that matter; by sitting through the whole movie.

What happened next I can only describe as mercy or grace. I had read that the path to liberation may take as many life times as a tree has leaves. Notice not years, but life times. I thought with extreme dedication and commitment and perhaps a bit of luck I can bargain it down to just one life. So I was naturally ready to spend the rest of my life pursuing this.

Luckily, or perhaps due to a divine oversight, the petals of a flower were counted in years instead of the leaves of a tree in life times, and I got what I was seeking.

To my surprise (probably not to yours 🤭) it was not a liberation in any real meaning of the word. It was however a seed of understanding and freedom.

Taking Flight

If I speak symbolically about what happened; I could use the following predicament from earlier in my life starting my skydiving journey.

In the week after my first skydive; I witnessed the death of one of the skydivers during a high-speed landing not properly executed that lead to an impact.

I was in the same predicament all over again.

Do I prefer to stay safely on the ground, free from impact, but also free from flying? Or do I prefer the sky, free to fall but also free to fly?

Where I went, so to speak, nothing could happen to me, and that was exactly the point. Nothing could happen!

I was free from heartache but equally free from love.

I was free from suffering but equally free from the delight of meaning, discernment, wisdom and understanding.

I was free from pain and disease but equally free from a body to dance.

I could hover over any experience I could imagine, but never truly land in it, no real experiencing, no involvement, no participation, no skin in the game.

Before my first skydive, I had to go through rigorous ground training and practicing security procedures that would make flying as safe as possible, though never entirely without risk.

My first skydive was the most raw, overwhelming terror I had ever felt. It was so overwhelming to the point of blanking out the whole experience. I could not remember myself or anything that had happened in life prior to that moment. I remember thinking: what did I just get myself into and why would I ever do this again to myself?

Had I not bought my full involvement by paying for the full course upfront, I might have tried to free myself from having to do it again. But now I had money in the game.

During the first jumps there was no flying. I could barely move my body in any coordinated manner to call what was happening flying. I was just falling and tumbling from a plane.

The more we practice on the ground and in the air, the better we become at involving ourselves safely and skillfully. Over time, we begin flying rather than falling and the fear we feel in each jump subsides gradually.

During the skydive we feel and revel in all of the sensations of flying, after the jump we often reflect by watching the video to debrief and understand what we can do better the next time, and we repeat this over and over.

The more skillful I became, the more I started flying only for the sheer delight of flying. No longer to follow up on a contractual commitment, not to get anything out of the situation later on, whether in this life or in a transcendent reality. Flying became my first taste of a truly free act, no ulterior motives, no bargains. Just flying for flying itself.

In those moments, it is very important to remember a saying often repeated:

Complacency is a skydiver’s worst enemy.

Not lack of skill but complacency. In fact, skydiving accidents involve more often experienced skydivers than beginners, because they grow too comfortable breaking the very rules that keep them safe, and that a beginner would still respect.

Another equally important reminder is that:

A skydiving accident is rarely a single oversight. They are the result of a chain of small oversights; each one insignificant on its own, but together forming a path to collapse.

So the more skillful and advanced one becomes, the more essential it is to continue honoring the fundamentals alongside the advanced moves.

The more a skydiving career progresses, the freer one becomes. But also the greater the potential for hurting oneself.

It is easy to imagine how skydiving could become a sheer delight. It might take a stretch of the imagination to regard all of life, with its ups and downs, in the same light.

This was a turning point, I could either stay safe where I was, or I could choose to go back, with no guarantees of safety, however with endless possibilities for flight and delight.

I had practiced those austerities as a way out of life, now I had a choice. I could either:

• Redeem them as the ground exercises I had to practice for flying safely.

• Or stay on the ground.

This structure became my way in, within and through life.

I did not stop most of my practices. Instead, I started doing them freely with meaning instead of as a bargain.

Just as we saw with dancing, each practice in itself became a meaningful brushstroke and, equally, contributed to a time painting called flight or life. Not as a caused calculated result, but as an emergent expression of meaning.

Those practices allowed me to go from carrying my body around life, so to speak, sometimes as a burden at best with indifference; to feeling the immense privilege of being in this body. It became coordinated, balanced, strong and flexible. Even when it falls sick, it eventually recovers or adapts.

My mind went from being a source of confusion, noise and anxiety to gradually becoming a source of clarity, expansiveness, discernment, reason and peace.
This allowed even greater appreciation for the privilege of study and creation. I could now sit for hours with focus and create and contemplate the questions I so dearly wanted to study.

I also learned to confront my emotions and sit with them. I had to learn that, there is nowhere to escape them when one is sitting still in a meditation for hours at a time.
This allowed me to gradually develop a certain sweetness of feeling, the inner warm knowing that:

all is well, this too shall pass ☺️

Whether pleasant or unpleasant, any emotion will pass just like all the rest of emotions that arose and passed during all of those of meditations.

Through the ascetic practices, we learn about the power of choice. We learn to walk away from misplaced value. There is no freedom if we are compelled to do the things we do. We have to learn to say no even to the things we value the most if they could be regarded as not beneficial to either ourselves in the future or to others now or in the future.

So implied in freedom, is equally important our capacity for restraint. Because the capacity for restraint is what makes a choice possible at all. If we cannot say no and are compelled to do something, then there is really no question of choice nor freedom.

So in freedom, there is a choice, but not only a choice. A choice made in full consciousness.

It does not take long to realize that simply doing as we please may feel like freedom now. But we might not be pleased with what we did tomorrow. Just as importantly, neither might others.

Additionally, a free action does not only assert our individual freedom. It has to equally uphold the freedom of others. If our freedom takes away from the freedom of another, it is only a question of time before the other takes away from our freedom.

So a free action not only asserts our freedom now, it equally has to ensure the freedom of others and the continuity and growth of freedom in the future.

Free Individuals

Freedom is not just an individual luxury, it is of collective benefit. It ensures the protection of reality against distortions. When we are not free, we become unconscious extensions of the will of another. We become agents of distortion.

We start living in a reality where things start to mean very little.

We are always ever so slightly manipulating reality to get something out of it. We do things to get things and not because things mean anything.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this.

I am in Ubud, Bali 🇮🇩 as I write this post, where there are more yoga studios than days in my stay to try them all. So I chose a yoga studio to try based on Google Maps reviews.

As I arrived, everything was average, nothing unpleasant, but definitely not a 4.8 ⭐️ experience. It was clear there is a distortion between reality and the reviews.

Things became much clearer at the end of the class. After dropping some heart-opening wisdom, the teacher encouraged everyone to leave a review on Google maps in exchange for a free smoothie bowl. After bowing down to the divine in each and every one, comes bribing the divine in each and everyone.

My first thought was imagine giving up your freedom for a free smoothie bowl. Then I naturally thought: I will do it only if they have mango smoothie bowls 😋.

What a wonderful coincidence that the word free is used both for freedom and for things that are offered without any expected returns. It seems obvious conceptually but it is very hard to experience practically.

Expecting a smoothie bowl in exchange for our voice or, like I did, liberation in exchange for meditation is not freedom.

It is a transaction, it does not involve money, it involves us.

In such a reality, we hear and read words, however we never really know if the person is saying what they truly mean or if they are just trying to squeeze a smoothie bowl or liberation out of the situation.

If we can distort reality to such an extent with one smoothie bowl, imagine what we can do with two smoothie bowls, or even a salary?

No need to imagine, we can just ask the engineers at Volkswagen, or the yoga instructor probably doing as her manager asked.

The Capstone Π: 🟣 xōē 🟡

To put it all together.

Freedom of expression in art comes from the pursuit of mastery of both technique and meaning. It does not come from simply freeing ourselves from the responsibility of our art.

So it is in our personal lives, freedom comes from an increased understanding and mastery of the ways of nature as well as a conscious self-directed effort to birth meaning in our inner being.

In the same way that the result of the balancing of technique and meaning results in our art. The same balancing in our lives is what gives birth to the being I here call 🟣 xōē 🟡. She is the radiant princess of their union dancing on the capstone of their existence.

That is the essential premise of what we are going to be exploring together here on .

How to reconcile the immanent with the transcendent to explore how we can live in increasing freedom individually and collectively.

I might cover topics including but not limited to:

• Reasonable explorations of esoteric topics, approached with curiosity, discernment and a grounded spirit. Approach occult teachings with practical insight.

• Living interpretations of various sacred texts.

• Freedom in cooperative games and relationships.

• How to practically build structures for the blossoming of freedom.

• Language and meaning.

• Explore how to live freely in the marketplace in relationship with money, where nothing is free by definition.

• Speech, gestures and its relationship with the body.

• Different forms of bodily movement and how we can gain a deeper experiential understanding of our existence through our physical bodies.

What structures in your life can you redeem to turn your steps into a dance, your speech into songs and your words into poetry✨?

🫱🏽‍🫲🏻 After those formalities, lets get real:

Like, comment and share this post, to get a free mango smoothie bowl with extra peanut butter🥭.

And a printed version of this post to read it again more carefully.

Thank you for reading,

🟣✨🟡

I thought I had delicate articulate hands and fingers.

After all, I have been cultivating this sensitivity for years.

I naturally thought:

• of course my hands are sensitive

• of course I can touch with nuance and precision

Until I tried Pottery.

The clay revealed to me with no room for ambiguity the reality.

It became the exact image of how articulate my hands really are.

I no longer needed to swear by it, I just had to observe how much meaning I could mold into the form.

The more articulate my hands became, the more meaning I could reveal in the clay.

I realized I am not able to fairly judge the level of my skill. But once I observed my clay work, my skill became evident.

The form, the clay, revealed to me the reality of how articulate I am.

It revealed the distortions of my own perceptions.

It made me face the matter-of-fact.

Thank you for reading,

🟣✨🟡

Dear Friend 🟣✨🟡,

In the last post, we explored the idea that: “Understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱”.

In this post I would like us to explore what is “understanding” and take a journey into the realm of reason, where everything makes sense, in theory anyway 🙃.

Belief, Experience and Understanding

Why do we ask questions such as:

• Do you believe in life after death?

• Do you believe in free will?

But it never occurs to anyone to ask:

• Do you believe in airplanes?

• Do you believe in ships?

I am not concerned with defending or denying the existence of free will or life after death. What I would like us to explore today is the nature of the divide between belief and understanding. What separates faith from reason? Why do we treat some questions as matters of personal belief and others as objects of knowledge?

If I tell you about flying vehicles and you have never seen one before, you can either believe or disbelieve me; or you can ask for the nearest location on Google Maps where you can experience them. Now it becomes a question of choice: am I willing to put the effort to travel to the location and have the actual experience? However, we assume quite reasonably that it is more difficult to travel to the after-life and come back with reviews about our experience.

In both cases, if one is not willing to travel whether in space or in time, it is tempting to fallback to the comfort of belief or disbelief and miss the experiences that might lead to understanding.

But while airplanes may be visible and seemingly self-evident today, experiencing them does not mean we understand them. Most of us accept that they fly without grasping why they fly. The trip to the airport, turned the question of belief into experience, but not quite yet into understanding.

And perhaps the same is true for much of what we call belief, we either accept it or dismiss it without ever really seeking experience or the journey of understanding.

Why Understand?

I often have the same conversation with my Mother:

• My Mother: How was your trip?

• Me: It was a wonderful trip, I learned a lot.

• My Mother: But most importantly I hope you lived (or enjoyed or something similar…). Live your life do not try to understand it.

She has a great point, I agree with her.

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced

~Soren Kierkegaard

In addition:

• We learn to speak without understanding the rules of grammar

• We breathe, digest food, and the body carries all of its functions whether we understand them or not

• We built the first airplane through a mix of careful observation, experimentation and intuition and not through a complete understanding of theoretical aerodynamics

There is an intelligence, a wisdom in action that often precedes formal understanding. We can say that:

Life is much wiser than thought

Lack of understanding does not prevent us from experiencing life, from creating and from having an intuitive grasp, even if dim and vague.

Then What Is the Value of Understanding?

We can speak without grammar, children do it every day. But without the deeper structure that grammar provides, and the lived experiences that give meaning, it is unlikely they will go on to write literature that touches our hearts and minds.

We can breathe and digest without understanding, but it is unlikely we would be able to care for life and heal, without understanding.

We flew without advanced theoretical aerodynamics, but only through deep understanding that we excelled in the field and created all of the magnificent reliable safe planes we have today. Except for Boeing, who clearly cared more about profit and moving fast and breaking things.

The value of understanding is not that it enables action or creation. Creation can occur through intuition, inspiration and imitation.

But understanding transforms that into conscious, self-directed activity. Understanding enables freedom and evolution.

Only understanding allows us to say:

“I know why I act, and I choose it.”

👆🏽How many times have you done this in your own home?

Without understanding:

• We cannot draw a correlation between our thoughts, actions and reactions in the world.

• We repeat patterns whether the outcome is desirable or not without any question of choice.

• We may wish for outcomes we cannot achieve, simply because we do not know how to think and act in ways that could make them real.

So first life, then reflection on life.

We live forward and understand backward

~Soren Kierkegaard

It naturally follows that the more experiences we live the more we can understand.

Experiences in the Language of Life is analogous to learning new words in English. It becomes even more meaningful when we can utilize them to expand our capacity for expression and understanding. A whole new world of stories and meaning becomes available to us through the newly learned words and experiences. Turning experiences into understanding is what allows us to weave those experiences together composing ever more nuanced and refined meaning and understanding.

We have to experience the meaning of heartache, confusion and suffering at least once or until we learn them, so that we can express and appreciate stories of redemption, wisdom, resilience, compassion, and a deeper love that could have not arisen any other way, or any other stories we like.

Let us use a timely analogy, when we ask how does a software system work, we do not expect to understand the answer without prior experience and preparation. We know we must raise our understanding to the level of the system we are trying to comprehend.

We can ask ChatGPT: “Explain to me like I am 5 (ELI5) how ChatGPT works?” and we will receive a simple satisfying explanation.

ChatGPT is like a super-smart autocomplete that has read a lot and tries to guess the best next words based on everything it has seen before.

It might be satisfying, and we might feel like: now we understand how ChatGPT works. But in reality, this answer could be considered as misleading as it is simple. The same explanation will not satisfy an expert. They would require a far more sophisticated and nuanced explanation, one that reflects the system’s intricacies and complexity in a more delicate manner.

So I asked: “Explain to me like I am an expert how ChatGPT works?”:

ChatGPT is a large-scale, autoregressive transformer model trained via supervised and reinforcement learning to model conditional probabilities over token sequences, using multi-head self-attention to encode contextual relationships and generate coherent continuations based on learned statistical structures from massive pre-training corpora.

We see here that the difference between this version and the previous version is the vocabulary used. In order to understand this version, I do not only need to know about the new words, but much rather, I need to have lived through the experiences that would reveal the meaning of those words.

And ultimately even this explanation, is still not the “whole” reality. Reality is much more alive, evolving, multi-dimensional, layered, textured, nuanced than any explanation we can give. By the time we have understood this, ChatGPT would have already evolved to something more than what we have studied.

So simplified models are useful because they allow us to understand limited parts and behaviors of the systems. They are the best rendering of reality that we can grasp given our experience and the effort we are willing to put. However, it would not occur to us, in this case, to regard the simplicity of the explanation as the simplicity of reality. We reduce or increase the complexity of reality given our faculties. Yet we often attribute this simplification to reality itself and we do not recognize it as a reflection of our limited experiences and capacity to understand.

Curious to get another perspective, I reached out to our friend the alien scientist. You may remember him from a prior post, the one who once claimed cars move because places pull them.

Here is what he had to say:

“You take any human, really, it does not matter who; we have to remain scientific and objective, and you sit them in front of a glowing screen. They begin making clicking noises with their fingers in a specific rhythm, while sipping a hot black bitter beverage. After around a hundred million clicks and fifteen thousand liters of this liquid inspiration, suddenly, intelligence emerges on the screen. Just the right conditions, and Artificial Intelligence emerges. No need for plans, experience or purpose.

I have remarked that this liquid inspiration is often at the origin of your creations ☕️.”

He paused thoughtfully, then added:

“It is remarkable how often, complex things emerge like this on your planet.”

I did not have the heart to tell him we have a whole origin story that sounds quite similar.

The Origin Story

Let us move from software systems to something slightly bigger… the universe.

Why can science vaguely answer the question: “How did the universe emerge?” But not in any convincing manner the question: “Why did the universe emerge?”

Modern Science seeks to create reproducible experiences, by eliminating any subjective bias in pursuit of objectivity. This leads to excluding the validity of inner experience, moral values, meaning, purpose and free will. All of these are regarded as subjective and cannot be considered as evidence.

However that is a choice, one which not only prevents us from getting to the reason of things, but which inevitably leads us to find only explanations devoid of these very things, as if by design.

As soon we ask the question of why, the answer will not be in all of the data we have gathered or in anything we observe in the outer world, there we only find how. This is the boundary between observation and meaning, outer and inner.

And this is where the paradox starts, because in modern science even with all the objective empirical repeatable observations, we still make sense of it all in our reason.

Data does not interpret itself. Scientific models are stories, arranged in reason, and told to one another. The fact that we have observed might be empirical and repeatable. However the story we have made is subjective.

The Big Bang (Matter First, Reason Later)

The perspective we currently hold of the universe given in the Big Bang story, is not without consequences on how we live. We currently explain that a singularity expanded rapidly, cooling and allowing for the formation of subatomic particles, which later merged to form atoms, stars and galaxies. According to this view, on the remote planet Earth, in the vast abandoned universe, and against all odds; life emerged, billions of years later. Just like Artificial Intelligence emerged after millions of keyboard clicks and liquid inspiration. We do not know why, or whether it was meant to happen at all. This perspective while seemingly scientific, objective and neutral holds a very subjective belief that profoundly shapes our lives today. Which is:

The universe came first and reason came later.

Of course this is inevitable, since it is woven in the very method of examination itself. When you try to examine the universe from an absolutely empirical objective stance, you can only discover explanations that fit that stance and nothing that points beyond it.

Each domain of experience is accessible primarily through faculties suited to the nature of its reality. The whole of the world of colors, shapes, textures becomes manifest to us through the eyes. In a similar manner, the world of reason is primarily available to our reason. I referred to this as Spiritual Sight in a previous post.

Imagine trying to experience a song by reading the lyrics 🎶.

Reason First, Matter Later

To continue this exploration with integrity is not to dismiss or choose one perspective, but to explore with the full sincerity of our heart and mind our outer as well as our inner worlds.

So let us consider another perspective:

• What if reason is at the root of everything?

• What if the universe is meaningful from the start?

What makes an embryo grow? What makes a seed grow?

I am not speaking of cell division but rather: what is the process by which matter, otherwise part of the mother’s own body or the soil, reorganizes itself into a new distinct being, with its own Raison d'être.

What is this organizing, animating principle that gathers atoms into a living being, into the new tree, and into the organism «I» can inhabit?

What is it that changes at the moment of death to cause the collapse of that organism, the loss of organization and coherence? And now the same materials that used to make up a human body, are given back to the earth with the disappearance of their organizing animating principle.

What is it that turns matter into meaning? That transforms a bunch of rocks into devices on which you can read this post? That makes Artificial Intelligence emerge out of millions of keyboard clicks?

The material itself is available in the universe. Once what we call a human being, takes hold of it, it becomes animated, the same materials organize themselves differently to become a living organism, capable of sustaining itself, regeneration and replication. The same material directed and shaped by human reason, becomes the devices we use. Through human reason and understanding, those millions of keyboard clicks give rise to Artificial Intelligence.

Let us explore this from a more practical perspective.

What makes so many of us wake up every morning, and choose to go to work and carry out our functions with remarkable reliability?

Companies are not created randomly or incidentally, like how life supposedly emerged after the Big Bang. They exist because, at some point, there was a reason for being strong enough to gather people around it, a purpose, a need.

This reason became the gravitational center around which individuals chose to align their time, energy, and reason. It became strong enough to justify creating all of the infrastructure, hiring employees, and waking up early to write emails. So this reason organizes the employees lives in turn.

In this sense, a company is not just a legal entity. It is a reason, made visible, that proves strong enough to organize others into meaningful action.

Whether we agree with the purpose or not, whether the reason is noble or otherwise, it is still reason that organizes, what would otherwise remain scattered, into higher and higher forms of order: cells into a human body, and human beings into collective organisms.

Additionally, we can observe that higher reason can organize lower reason through clarity, coherence, and resonance and not through force or coercion.

As an example, the company with the highest understanding of the market, their craft, their technique, sensitive to the users needs, caring for aesthetics ends up building the best product. Not by coincidence, but by understanding. Remember the launch of the iPhone, it completely changed the market of smartphones, it simply understood something deeper than others. That understanding was confirmed by the users who chose to buy it over any other phone on the market. Competitors aligned and the ecosystem evolved through clarity and understanding.

We see that reason takes different forms, interacts with itself, reorganizes itself into forms that are more coherent, more alive. Each degree of understanding takes a particular form, higher degrees of reason and understanding assume higher and higher forms and organize lower reason. Reason is constantly developing and evolving in time through experience, reflection and interaction with itself as other.

What we call evolution may (simply 🙃) be reason learning more of itself by itself, through the different forms it takes.

What a Fine Story

The second story might make us feel warmer. It puts the human being within the narrative, rather than outside it, as the first one does. But it is still a story, one constructed by reason, just like the first.

And here is where we start noticing something fascinating about the nature of reason:

Reason and belief are not only descriptive of reality but they are also creative.

Whether matter came first or reason came first, reason is capable of constructing self-coherent worlds, organizing all of the scientific evidence to back it up, believing the story and living in it forgetting it is living in a world of its making.

A person who believes life is meaningless lives differently from one who believes it has meaning. But belief disconnected from reality is delusion. So it is not merely a question of finding an “empowering belief”, but how to align with higher reason and the deeper reality?

Belief or disbelief, by themselves, do little to nourish our lives; understanding does. And genuine understanding, as we explored so far, arises mainly when we are willing first to experience inwardly and then to reflect. Until we feel compelled to seek that understanding, clinging to belief, or to disbelief, amounts to little more than ignorance.

Belief to Understanding

So how to move from belief to understanding?

Genuine understanding must be cultivated individually. I can have the book of universal wisdom in front of me, yet unless I actually put in the effort to open it, read it, and have previously lived the experiences required to interpret the meaning, I will just have mere paper in front of me, nothing more.

The same applies to both scientific discoveries and spiritual teachings. It requires personal engagement, sustained effort, and the willingness to relate knowledge with one's own experiences.

Perhaps to go further from here, we can find guidance in the Greek saying:

Know thyself, and thou shalt know the universe and the gods.

In science, we seek objectivity by understanding our instruments profoundly; we quantify their margins of error and correct for every distortion, we do not attempt to eliminate them all together for objectivity. Likewise, we cannot deny our humanity no matter how objective we seek to be. However, if we embrace it and seek to understand it fully, perhaps it can become as invisible as our eyes, when they are functioning properly. A dis-eased eye pulls our attention from anything outside and obstructs vision. And perhaps so it is with reason, the healthier our reason, the clearer it discerns. The more dis-eased it becomes, the more it absorbs our attention and prevents us from seeing through it.

As we have explored so far, the more we elevate our inner lives through experiences and reflection, the more we can understand of the nature of our reality. In fact the nature of our reality is always revealing herself in every interaction, only if we have eyes to see the dance and ears to hear the music. Without this cultivated sensitivity, we end up settling for a slightly different genre: a bleak drama of an abandoned piece of rock.

In any case, understanding is a journey. We must embark on the path, live through the experiences, and only later, does understanding begin to dawn 🌅.

The journey of understanding starts when we make the choice of letting part of our reason go in favor of trying to let a different reason organize our lives. Through the life it generates and we live, we get to have a living practical deep understanding of that reason. This reason becomes our outer world, and we get to live in it and explore it spatially. We get to know it the same way we get to know our homes. Not theoretically nor passively, but we come to know it intimately by active participation. The quality of our lives becomes the measure of the quality of that reason. We have explored in more details how this happens in a prior post.

Faith is the first step toward understanding, because it is the force that allows us to begin the journey at all. Without faith, it would never even occur to us to seek the answers. After we walk the path, after we live and experience, understanding comes. And faith is reborn now at a higher octave. Faith becomes knowledge. We rest for a while in that clarity… until the next journey calls.

The Human Garden

Here we come to one of the most wonderful insights about the nature of a human being and freedom.

A seed might have reason in the capacity to organize matter otherwise part of the soil into a tree. A mango seed will always grow into a mango tree, nothing less, nothing more. However, a human has the additional capacity of self-directed reason. I could say pictorially that a human is a self-rewiring seed. A human being respecting higher reason, can imagine and become what their reason can conceive and their will can realize.

There is in each and every one of us, a part that stands above reason, that can direct reason. We can identify this part in us by contemplating the following analogy:

If we allow ourselves to see our lives as a gardener would tend to their garden. We come to see that each seed planted in the soil, will bear certain trees and eventually fruit in time. Understanding as we have explored, is the temporal connection between a seed and a tree. We already know that if we want to eat mangos from our garden, it would be unreasonable to plant apple seeds and expecting they bear mangos. It would be equally unreasonable to demand that the seed gives us mangos immediately as soon as it is planted.

We as human gardeners get to decide what we want in our gardens. So it is with our lives, if we want certain outcomes, we have to understand that those outcomes have to be regarded as a consequence of certain habits and not occurrences that would arise randomly in our lives.

However the point here is not to exert too much control nor is it to completely abandon any planning. Too much reason and we live in cold, calculated yet meaningless worlds. Too little of it and we live in magic but also delusion without any free-will. And here is where we come to the Art of Reason. It is an art to the extent to which we have to balance trust and surrender with active deliberate involvement. We have to consciously and deliberately decide the trees we want in our garden, find their seeds, and once planted, we have to have the patience to tend to them for the following years until they bear the fruits.

Once the seeds are planted there is nothing to do except show up consistently to tend to them.

Understanding is what allows us this comfort and trust.

We also have to make space for the seeds that we do not know what kind of trees or fruits they bear. For those, maybe we dedicate a part of our garden to experiment, to plant them and wait and see if we like them or not.

An important note has to be made here regarding the dimension of time, which we will explore in future posts. For now, it is enough to remember that:

• It takes at least 5 years for a mango seed to grow into a tree that bears mangos.

• No one ever became fit by going to the gym once.

• No one ever got fat by having dessert after a meal once.

Above Reason

What is that part in us that stands above reason and that can direct it? And according to what would it direct reason?

I hope you can contemplate this until we explore it in future posts.

I hope you enjoyed this trip into the realm of reason as much as I did. May it leave a little sparkle of magic through your reason ✨.

Thank you reading,

🟣✨🟡

Dear Friend 🟣✨🟡,

In the last post, we embarked together on a journey that lead us to say that:

Understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱.

This is where I would like to begin today. But before we can meaningfully consider the question of freedom, we must first inquire into the nature of our actions.

Why is it that we do the things we do?

After quick consideration, we might come up with some of following reasons:

• It feels good

• A sense of obligation, such as providing for our family or paying rent

• It is a social convention

• Habits carried from childhood

• Love, pleasing others, guilt, fear, rebellion, …

• Our parents

• Religion

• A personal philosophy or belief system

• Ambition

• Experimentation

• Increases some KPIs

• Our manager said so

• Or simply, we do not actually know 🫢

• And many other reasons of course…

At any rate, we see that we act out of motives held in the deep recesses of our being. And as we just saw, not all of those motives are thoroughly examined beliefs and convictions that we hold in full consciousness.

But that is not the whole answer to the question we asked. The further we contemplate this question, not only in “thought”, but especially in self-awareness while willing. We would quickly come to the fascinating realization, that we are mostly asleep with regard to our will.

Let me clarify what I mean by asleep. Imagine yourself in a room with a couple of your friends having a conversation. If I am awake, I will be able to hear them and engage in the conversation if I choose to do so. If I am asleep, I would not hear what they are saying and I would most definitely not have in any way the capacity to engage in the conversation. So despite my physical presence in the situation, I am not awake to chose to engage with it.

This is, by analogy, how we are with regard to our will. We are present in the situation, but we (🙃) are often not awake to chose to engage with it. Needless to say here, that this is not absolute. We are awake to different degrees in different situations.

Let me offer a vivid example. I often change the hand where I wear my watch. And despite knowing this, I cannot tell you the number of times I catch myself checking the time on the hand where the watch habitually is and not on the hand where the watch actually is. Of course this only happens for a few days, until the new hand, in turn, becomes the habitual hand. Then once again, I change where I wear the watch.

So despite knowing in my thoughts, where the watch is. I do not know in my will where the watch is.

You might try a similar experiment: decide to hold your phone with the unfamiliar hand for the next month and see how often your will goes back to the familiar one, as if on its own.

We now begin to see that there is a clear separation between our thoughts and our will. Even when “I” decide to act differently, it does not go that I “will” act differently.

I do not necessarily always will what I think and I do not think what I will.

However, this separation is only temporary, because eventually my will catches up to my thoughts. In the same way, that eventually, my habit catches up with the actual hand where the watch is.

So we could say, that:

Thoughts become will in time.

We explored this in more details in the last post.

Conclusions

Most of us are familiar with the idea of conclusions as the result of our reasoning. We often regard conclusions as simply another type of thought. This perspective leads us to believe that thinking and willing are of a different nature, different substance: one is internal and ethereal (if I may use this word), and the other is external and material. We would like to believe that what we think has no impact on the external world, and only what we do matters. This clear-cut distinction often leads to all sorts of hypothetical unrealistic thinking; a conceptual loop without end. But if we come to see thinking and willing as one continuum of the same nature and substance, we might begin to regard action as the conclusion of our reasoning.

To draw a vivid analogy, I could say the following:

In the same way that water vapor becomes ice in cold and in time, thoughts become will in time.

And we can probably all easily understand that if the vapor is polluted, we cannot expect the ice produced to be pure. In fact, it is far easier to purify vapor than ice. Just as one might purify the will by heating it and refining the vapor of thought from which it forms.

This is perhaps why Pythagoras said in his Golden Verses, verse 30:

“Never do anything which you do not understand.”

Or why a Zen koan might say:

“Before you raise your hand—who is raising it?”

As long as I have not awakened to my will and thoroughly examined the thoughts that form them, “I” may not truly exist in any meaningful sense. What I call “I” is mostly a stream of almost automatic actions motivated by borrowed beliefs, collective assumptions, societal norms I never questioned, religious codes I inherited, and countless other influences I have mistaken for my own.

What is Freedom?

Now that we have examined the nature of our actions, we can come back to the question of freedom. What is freedom?

Freedom is not a rejection or a rebellion against our held beliefs. Freedom is holding beliefs in full understanding or in other words; converting beliefs into knowledge. Whether those are the same, refined or new-found beliefs. If those beliefs are seeds, full understanding or knowledge means knowing what kind of fruits those seeds will bear in the passing of the seasons. So if we want mangos, we have to plant mango seeds.

I could say:

Freedom is the degree to which we become aware of the thoughts that guide our will, discern their origin and truth, and consciously guide our will in alignment with thoughts we have individually recognized as true and good.

The next obvious question is, how do we recognize the true and good?

Leave a comment

I will let you contemplate this question while I tell you some trivia.

Did you Know?

• Did you know that, Ford did a cost/benefit study and “concluded” that it would be “cheaper” to pay death lawsuits than to fix a defective car?

• Did you know about the world’s most perfect food that is technically delicious and science backed? (You might think I am joking but that is actually how this company presents itself on their website, check it out.)

  It is a ready-to-drink powder in a bottle that you mix with water 😋. They call it: “real science, real nutrition, real food.”

  I guess I have to learn what the word “real” means 😅.

How we do we direct our actions?

I hope you enjoyed the trivia.

Now let us come back to our question. If freedom is acting according to thoughts we have individually recognized as true and good, is there not a paradox hidden in this idea? How do we recognize what is truly good, and not simply what is convenient, familiar, or self-serving? How do we ensure that the thoughts we follow are not just those that advance our own interests at the expense of others, while still appearing noble or justified in our eyes? After all, it is always easier to believe that chilling on the couch is better for us than any form of physical effort.

To approach this paradox with clarity, let us recall a few essential ideas we have explored so far:

• In the previous post, we discussed how we can come to regard the outer world as a vast museum with an exhibition of the past of our inner lives.

• We already discussed the process of creation by which our inner life becomes the world we live in. In doing so, we no longer experience our inner life as something subjective within us, but as the very environment that surrounds us. We become subject to our own thoughts, made outer through creation.

This is important because within our minds, we are rarely able to judge the quality of our thoughts fairly. We tend to live inside them as if they were unquestionable laws, unaware of their distortions or limitations. But once those thoughts become our actual lives, their quality becomes evident; not through analysis, but through experience. We begin to feel their beauty or their weight and sharpness reflected back at us by the life they generate and we live. And in that reflection, we may either revel, or wish we had thought differently.

What is this faculty by which we may either revel or wish we had thought differently ?

The Warmth of Feeling ☀️

It is unfortunate that I have to make this comment, but here I do not refer to feeling as moodiness or the sentimental romanticized version we may associate with the word today.

I refer to feeling as the faculty of sight into the future, what cannot yet be seen. The way we recognize harmony or dissonance between our thoughts and life itself.

Have you ever worn new shoes that were just slightly uncomfortable, but you pushed through the discomfort anyway until the discomfort turned into a blister and eventually the blister into a wound?

This might give us an idea of how the meeting at Ford went. What do you mean it does not feel right? The spreadsheets are always right.

Or a much needed conversation before creating the most perfect food. What do you mean it does not feel good? It is technically delicious and science backed.

That is what happens when we let our thoughts and will take the lead without listening to feeling. Whenever we ignore the subtle signals and reason ourselves into actions that are necessary or that seem right but do not feel right, it is only a question of time, before the discomfort turns into a blister and the blister turns into a wound. Or before we all end up eating the most perfect food.

Feeling, on its own is not enough. Our feelings have to be reflected upon, understood, digested. Only then do they begin to warm and clarify our understanding and shape the way we act, which it turn shapes the way we feel in future actions.

The Tree of Freedom

Understanding is the seed of freedom, however the seed is not the tree. The seed is the tree in the passing of the seasons, the nurturing of the soil and the warmth and light of the sun.

So we might say: the seed of freedom is born from right understanding. But unless this understanding is carried into action, it remains abstract, not yet real.

Through action, our thoughts enter the world, or more accurately, our thoughts become the world. And from the world, we receive something back; not just results, but a feeling. This feeling tells us whether our action harmonized with our deeper nature, or whether we forced it, ignored something, or distorted it.

This resonance, must be thought through; not reacted to, but reflected upon. And thus begins the spiral: from clear thinking, to free willing, to resonant feeling, and back again. Each turn of the spiral draws us deeper into understanding and higher into freedom; not as a state we achieve but a journey to unfold.

We often live in cycles of thinking, then willing then feeling. They are separate processes that we experience in different points of time. We think, but sometimes we act against our resolutions. We act, then we regret. We regret, but we do not learn the lesson. We often find ourselves repeating the very same patterns.

The tree of freedom grows to the same extent to which we can align those three to happen simultaneously and harmoniously in perfect resonance. So we will what we think and what makes us carry no regrets into the future.

Whether we believe in heaven or hell, or Karma and reincarnation, we often hold that this happens after death where we either reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of our actions. But perhaps this idea only becomes necessary when we do not regularly reflect upon, feel, and learn from the lives we are already living. If our thoughts, our actions, and our feelings remain fragmented, then the uncomfortable shoes cause a wound.

But maybe, just maybe, we do not need to wait until after death to pass through either one. Maybe we pass through them every day or even every moment. What is death anyway?

Leave a comment

May you nurture your understanding until you see it grow into a magnificent freedom tree 🌳.

What about the Others 🤔 ?

So far we have considered the question of freedom from the perspective of one individual. You might be wondering, what about the others?

Can two free individuals live together 😆?

You might also be saying I did not create the world I live in, I did not create any of these systems. Others did.

What others 🙃? What do you mean “two”?

I will let you contemplate that, until we explore it further together in future posts.

Leave a comment

Thank you for reading,

🟣✨🟡

Spirituality is the simple understanding that everything around us (nature aside, for now), before it was matter, was a thought. Thoughts then go through a process of materialization, or not, through further faculties of the personality such as feeling, willing, acting and technique.

If my faculty of thought is impaired, it would be like trying to grow a garden without seeds; nothing can take root.

If I cannot feel, it would be like watering only once a week, even when the plants are clearly withering in the heat. Without feeling, I follow rules, not life. I act based on outdated thoughts, not the living needs of the moment.

If my will is weak, it is like having the seeds but never watering or caring for them; nothing will grow, no matter how fertile the soil is.

And if I lack technique, it is like plucking the flowers instead of the weeds; I may work hard, but I harm the very thing I meant to nurture.

Without harmony between those faculties, creation becomes difficult.

Take the very device you are using to read this post. Long before you could ever use it, someone had to imagine it, then tend to that imagination long enough to nurture it, and eventually utilize various skills to bring it to life.

If the people involved in its creation had not thought of it first, they could not have created it later. It would not have existed.

In the beginning was the Thought.

So spirituality is looking at life through this shift in perspective, and allowing all the consequences of that shift to unfold. It is about putting back in the right order the relationship between our inner life and the outer world.

That is what I refer to as Spirituality and Spirit in the rest of this post.

We Create In Our Image

Given what have just uncovered, that the act of creation is a process of materialization of spirit. Of making visible, our inner life according to our faculties.

It follows that if I do not have any sensitivity to aesthetics, it is highly unlikely that I will create anything aesthetically pleasing, just as a mango seed will not grow into an apple tree.

If I have experience building software and no experience with engines nor a will power or passion strong enough to learn, it is highly unlikely that I will create a car company.

However, clear thinking and a strong will power can make up for the lack of knowledge if I am passionate and/or willing to learn.

To create harmony in the outer world, we have to have harmony in our inner lives. To live in peace outwardly, we have to live in peace inwardly.

I do not know if you relate to this, but almost every time I sit on a chair, I think-feel: “It is obvious that no one involved in the creation of this chair spends any time sitting on it”. And then I wonder, if they do not sit on the very chair they are creating… what do you think they are creating it for 🫢🙃?

Evolution

From here, we can say that not only: “In the beginning was the Thought”, but also that:

Thought was an image of the Creator.

It often happens that we don’t see our own image until we create. So we create in our own image, and then through the act of externalization, through our separation from what we have created, we get to live it. We live in it as something outside of ourselves. Our inner world, becomes the outer world. We experience its shortcomings not theoretically, but experientially by being on the receiving end of our own thoughts. This invites us to iterate and evolve, first in our inner lives through our new found experiential understanding and then again in the outer world, as we re-create in our new image.

Our creations reflecting our nature, end up shaping us as much as we shape them. This is evolution.

To put it all together:

In the beginning was the Thought.

And the Thought was an image of the Creator, yet with its unique essence and potential.

And the Thought was also the Creator.

The Limitations of Materialistic Sight

Imagine the following scenario. A university professor, coming from another planet to study Earth. They stand at the side of one of our roads, fascinated by all those different metallic creatures, we call cars, of all colors, kinds, shapes and making different sounds. They are eager to understand them, to explain them. They start studying what they see, they note the color, sound and the routes those fascinating creatures take.

After careful study, they start finding that they can observe a pattern, they can guess reliably, how certain cars with certain attributes will end up at certain places. They figure out that cars with the symbol “ambulance”, always end up at places with the symbol “hospital”. Cars with the symbol “police”, always end up at places with the symbol “police station”, and so on.

They start drawing up all sorts of fantastic conclusions, of course backed by the rigorous scientific methods they learned on their planet.

This professor, now content, having finally explained the riddle of those metallic creatures, returns to their home planet to teach those laws to the students aspiring to visit Earth. They teach that in earthly physical laws, there is an invisible force of attraction between places and cars. A place always pulls cars. They teach formulas to calculate with extreme precision, what kind of cars any place would attract.

Of course, this professor has not really explained anything, they merely observed. Because they failed to notice the simple fact that these cars are not being pulled, so to speak, by any place, but that each of one these cars is being “driven” by a human. One who has to provide for their family, so they go to work. One who has a loved one, so they go to visit them. One who feels curiosity, so they travel to see new places. And of course, endless other motives, noble and otherwise, that I do not have to detail here.

So we see that in the outer world we have observations, reasons have to be sought somewhere else.

This example might seem absurd, but it is a very common perspective today.

Just Google, “How did the universe emerge?”

Of course, I understand now, it makes a lot of sense…

Spiritual Sight

Spiritual sight is training ourselves to not only see cars, but to see the very human behind the steering wheel. To pierce beyond the visible form and see the very living processes that move those cars around: thoughts, feelings, intentions, emotions, motives and passions.

As we said earlier, through creation, our inner world, becomes the outer world. So spiritual sight is to see the inner world, behind the immediately apparent outer world.

What would the world look like if we could look at it with spiritual sight? And keep in mind, as we agreed in the beginning of the post, we are setting nature aside for now.

When we use a product, we would see it as the living interaction with the spirit of those who created it. Instead of seeing arbitrary features in those products, we would see thoughts, discussions, choices, intentions, emotions, a living interaction with the spirit of the creators made manifest.

I would look at the world, and I would not just see buildings, roads, cars, clothes, smartphones or computers. I would rather tell myself, I would think-feel, everything I see around me now, is past thoughts, feelings, willing and actions of other beings. What I see around me now, is not lifeless inert matter, it is not random, but it is the result of those spiritual processes. I am not just surrounded by matter, I am surrounded by the spirit, the manifestation of the inner lives of countless beings. I would say, I am grateful for all those beings who made my life so convenient. I am grateful for all the time they spent learning and creating, for now my life is better for it. (For the most part, except for those uncomfortable chairs).

I would perhaps begin to see that behind those chairs are intentions and emotions.

I would no longer see artificial flavors and colors just as mere ingredients, but I would begin to see-feel behind those into the spirit and the drive for mass appeal, the desire to sell in vast quantities, to make profit even if it comes at the expense of the well-being of the very people being served.

We would see that while a back pain can be relieved by going to the doctor, it also has to be accompanied by an understanding of what caused the back pain in the first place? What do we need to change in our posture, in the way we walk, in the way we sit, to make sure that the pain doesn’t arise again? What kind of habits inform those very postures that hurt us? What kind of circumstances led us to those habits? What thoughts and feelings? And most importantly, do we have enough will power to be able to correct such a habitual posture?

So if everything we see around us now, in the material world, is the past spiritual processes of ourselves and others:

Where or what is the present? And what is the future?

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Spiritual Development

So having understood that the inner and outer worlds are deeply linked, that certain mental, emotional and volitional postures always carry material consequences, as surely as an object left in space is pulled by 🙃 gravity towards the earth.

We start, perhaps, to wonder: what are those mental, emotional and volitional postures that are conducive to our well-being and the collective well-being? What other postures are detrimental?

And perhaps we begin to wonder further: how can we develop those faculties, in the same way we understand the importance of training our bodies for our physical well-being?

We come to realize that moral development is not just a question of faith, or perhaps a way to secure a good spot in an after-life, but that it is as essential to our well-being now as it is in eternity; just as the quality of the food we eat determines, to a large extent, the quality of our lives.

We understand that untruthfulness is not to be avoided. simply because some religious authority said so, or because we fear consequences in some realm beyond this life. Untruthfulness, as my experience confirms 🫢, can make us live hell on Earth. We end up in painful circumstances surrounded by deceitful relationships. But we may not immediately relate the cause to the effect, if we have not yet adopted the habit of looking for causes beyond material life.

But the more we start integrating everything we talked about so far into our lives, the more those patterns begin to reveal themselves. With that clarity, we choose truthfulness not out of fear, but out of an understanding, out of care for ourselves and the kind of life we are creating.

And understanding is the seed of freedom 🌱.

Let us come back to an important question we have set aside for now. If in everything that surrounds us in the human-made world, are past spiritual processes of other humans.

What about Nature?

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What is the difference between a letter-based language like English and a symbolic language like Hieroglyph or, more casually today, communicating only in emojis?

Let us take an example. Try to contemplate for a moment the following emojis:

💃🟣✨🟡🌊🔥🦅💨🌍

What thoughts and feelings are evoked when you contemplate this? What could be the meaning?

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When we use English, we transcribe our thoughts with impressive structural precision, but often only in form. I could say we create a body, but we don’t always breathe life into that body. Consider a human being: their physical body might give us a glimpse of who they are, but it never fully reveals their whole living nature. A corpse moments after death, may appear identical to the human being, but it is no longer them. It is no longer alive.

So what does it mean to be alive? Where is the human relative to their body? The human lives in breath, thought, feeling, action, reaction, interaction, gesture and movement. A human cannot be located as their body is in a point in space or time, they unfold throughout time in space. Meeting someone for some time, doesn’t reveal what it would be like to live with them, witnessing their nature unfolding. The key word with a human is that they live. A human is infused with spirit, a corpse is not. A human is in a constant state of transformation, motion, growth and decay, change and evolution. A corpse remains in place in a process of decomposition.

The same analogy applies to language. English often reveals with great precision the body; or even the corpse, of communication. But it reveals little of the life or meaning unless, the listener actively engages with it. Meaning is not only given by the clarity of expression, it must be evoked through effortful interpretation. We could call this thinking-feeling; it is thought enlivened and made dynamic by the power of feeling.

We may read the noblest human truths, if we don’t engage with them in thinking-feeling, they will not move us, they leave us indifferent.

As one saying goes:

The untrained mind reads the secrets of the universe and sees nothing.

The wise reads a bubble gum wrapper and sees the secrets of the universe.

Being able to use a word such as freedom is a huge leap in precision of expression of thought, yet it could leave us indifferent to the ideal of freedom if we don’t engage with what lies behind the word. Most of us know the word freedom. But how many understand its ideal? And among them, how many have pursued the living experience of freedom?

Symbolic Language

A symbolic language, on the other hand requires more effort to understand but it reveals meaning more intimately. When we encounter a symbol, we must not only explore its literal 🙃 reference, but also the metaphors and qualities it might evoke.

If I want to express the idea of freedom in symbols, I might use 🦋 or 🦅, or most likely a combination of more symbols, but let's keep it simple for now. When I do so, I don’t mean a literal butterfly or eagle, rather the qualities they might evoke. A 🦋 might evoke freedom to the extent to which it can evoke in the reader the contrasting feeling of the experience of metamorphosis; from a crawling worm to a soaring butterfly. But, it might also evoke a sense of delicate, fleeting, ephemeral, short-lived kind of freedom.

🦅, might evoke a stronger freedom with vision, height, clarity, sovereignty, precision, sharp focus. Yet it might equally evoke feelings of preying, attack, solitude and domination.

None of this is necessarily readily available to our minds when we first see a 🦋 or 🦅. We have to put in the effort to recall all that we know, and feel, about those objects used as symbols. What do I think when I see a butterfly? What do I feel? What might these thoughts and feelings be trying to express?

Misunderstanding often arises when we focus too much on words more than meanings. When are truly seeking the meaning, I could use 🦋 or 🦅 or the word freedom, as long as the thought-feeling is evoked, you would forgive my imperfect choice of symbol. There is no perfect symbol to the idea itself anyway. Once we live the idea, move from object to essence, form to spirit, the symbol has fulfilled its function, it is no longer needed and can fall away.

Symbolic Perception

This is symbolic perception. And it is not limited to symbolic languages. It is an attitude; a way of engaging with experience itself. Symbolic languages simply forced us into this mode. Literal language offered us precision, but made it easier to miss the meaning altogether.

Literal language helped us map the external world with great refinement and precision; to build, to describe, to systematize. (Imagine I had tried to write this article in Emojis). But in doing so, we lost clarity within our inner world. Symbolic perception offers a way back: a way to map our inner lives with the same clarity we use to map our outer lives. But the question here is not of choosing between the two, but of integrating them. To express and create not just with extreme precision, but with essence and meaning.

Creating Without Meaning

By analogy, we might relate to this dynamic in our world. We have become brilliant at building forms: products, processes, systems, structures, technologies. But the forms we build don’t always carry meaning or humanity.

In my past life as a Software Engineer, I spent hours refining technical implementations of elaborate features, but not nearly enough time contemplating the purpose or the need of the user. But without meaning, the most elaborate forms will still be meaningless.

"The convergence of interpretive modalities within the framework of contextual flux generates a semiotic resonance that defies categorical articulation."

This, of course, is an example of an elaborate meaningless sentence generated by ChatGPT.

Our task now is to infuse our creations with sincere, meaningful human ideas. To build not just with efficiency, but with purpose and delight.

Reading the Living Texts

Of course, English can also be used symbolically. This is the spirit of sacred texts or what some may call occult texts. These texts are occult not because they wish to obscure. They are obscure because their meanings are so alive, layered, and nuanced that only a living, nuanced engagement can reveal them. To interpret them only literally is to profane and reduce their living nature to corpses, in the same way that we can’t find the human in their body alone, it would be missing their essence and spirit.

Occult texts obscure only to the extent that the reader would not put in the effort to seek the qualities and attributes of the allegories and symbols behind the apparent form expressed. However, once those texts are read with symbolic perception, with thinking-feeling, they come alive. They reveal truths in movements, like interacting with the spirit of a living being.

Learning to understand this language, or what I may call the Occult Script, means moving from the symbol, to the qualities, to the idea and finally, if one is fortunate, to the experience itself.

Experience is the key.

In English we can speak fluently about anything and everything. We can give opinions about the things we understand but also the things we don't understand and the things we have never experienced, just because we know of the words. We can discuss God, Freedom, Love or Death without having lived any of their meanings. The fact that I know a word, does not imply that I understand the idea or have lived the experience. We often confuse knowing the word with understanding its meaning.

Practicing symbolic perception is the first step to understanding Occult Script. Not in a nebulous mystical sense, but in a reasonable and practical way. Occult in its original meaning, simply means hidden. Hidden not behind veils or rituals or secret societies, but in plain sight. Hidden only for those who will not put in the effort, who are not willing to engage with thought-feeling. The occult lays in plain sight for the sincere seeker.

The Language of Life

So to return to the original question:

Do you speak life?

What if, in the language of life, we must live through the vocabulary before we can weave it into sentences, chapters, stories? Not just to speak but to speak with meaning.

Imagine every time you wished to know a word, you had to live it. You would spin a whole universe and live the experience of each word you are speaking, not only from one perspective, but from the perspective of as many characters as possible, just like in good storytelling 😉. Perhaps then, we would be more careful what we speak into existence 🫢

Which brings us to a final curious question:

Can we ever truly know what we have not experienced?

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Thank you for reading,

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