Tag Archives: perception

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Magellanism

authentic artistic productions
the avant garde…
whisper unconscious koens
subliminal social suggestions
haunting the ready, the restless…
prepares ground
for punctuated emergence

what is this light ???
a cascading series
of erotic creative toggles
which vitalize the preparation
of this special autopoesis
the poetry of our collective dance
becomes obvious
in these special glimpses
of the great remembering

it’s more than the eros
of pursuing the excellent questions,
the loving play and design
of cognitive gifts and exercise…
it’s more than the sacred reverence
of our sanga in practice,
this emergent suchness,
exhibiting delicious blended elements
of both…
ah !!

at this intersection of our experience
a fresh, new, and alive we-ness emerges
mysterious, gorgeous, seductive presentations
the stuff of this new manifestation
the resonance of our fresh social moment
this precious group
this shared new luminance
new containers are formed
already brimming,
with our splendid light

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GD. Goethean Experimental Observations for 12/06/2012

(noticing the phenomena of sounds arising from within);

Prelude: I have relocated to a big old house near the beach, with a forest across the road. To honour the occasion, we had a fire ceremony at the beach on the evening of the 12th June. After enjoying the beautiful starlit evening we returned to the house, after I have settled my son I settle into sitting meditation on the mat in front of the altar.

I sound the singing bowl, chant Aum and then sit with my double dorje in my hands, contemplating the energetic nexus that it represents, and creatively imagining the dynamic structure which it represents the underpinnings of.

 

I begin to feel the arising of kundalini shakti, gently undulating through my subtle energetic system and up my spine, out through the top of my head with a tingling sensation and into the familiar fountain-like pattern of return to the overflowing pool at the base chakra where the flow continues up the central channel and back out my head. After sitting like this for some time I feel the need to surrender into savasana (corpse pose) however I am also feeling chilled as it is mid winter so I take my body to bed and continue my meditation there.

At this point my body begins to tremble and shake, to vibrate from a deep-down-phenomenon of silent sound arising in the very core of every atom and cell. I note my heart rate increasing, and breathing deepening and lengthening. I am surrendered, all action taking place now is spontaneously arising of its own accord, I am remaining in lucid awareness and observing.

With the deepening of the breath I note an expansion of the abdomen, accompanied by deep creaking and groaning sounds, my chest and throat are also expanding to the sounds of cartilage creaking. My vertebrae are aligning and stretching apart. From a place deep within my skull a secretion of cool, sweet liquid begins to flow into my throat and upper nasal passages. This flow of (?) seems to precipitate an intensification of the phenomenon.

 

I begin to feel pressure stretching me from the inside like a balloon being filled, the air flowing into my lungs seems to penetrate every organ, membrane and cell of my physical body beyond their capacity to contain it in their present shape. I feel like I am being tickled from within, I am laughing intermittently and potent “chemical” tears are streaming from my eyes. My hands move to hover over my sacral and solar plexus chakras, the hands are moving in rapid circles counter rotational to each other, the chakras feel like ‘solid’ balls of whirling energy. The trembling in my body intensifies, my heart rate is still accelerating and my breathing seems to have stopped at a full in-breath. Part of my mind is cautioning me about the possibility of having a heart attack or brain anurism because of the unusual conditions. I consciously make the decision to surrender and trust the experience, even if it means I do in fact die as a result (!).

At this point an impossibly bright yet cool light erupts in both my heart and head (witnessed in the third eye) which expands out to include my whole body. Now all my physical bodily components seem to completely liquify, there is a sensation of dissolving and (hard to describe what) I imagine being like a chrysalis undergoing the metamorphic process. The level of inner sound which is accompanying this event is tremendous yet also very difficult to describe, something like a howling storm perhaps (I will try to find an approximation on mp3 somewhere). My inner eye is registering myriad complex fluidic geometric structures dynamically interacting and energised by seemingly liquid light throughout my field of awareness, all emanating from the core of my being. My physical body feels like it is a writhing mass of system interactions from the cellular level through to the level of organs, tissues and bones. This is a full spectrum immersive experience of something extraordinary!

The complex “body of light” which it appears to my inner eye that I have become is expanding to fill the room, expanding out across the forest, across the ocean and encompassing the whole planet, the expansion continues, waves of energetic intensification continue, I now contain the whole galaxy, and continue to expand and absorb greater and greater spheres of (?) perhaps awareness of consciousness – I am the universal essence in all its forms for a ‘moment’ – it is almost totally overwhelming. I am not breathing and my heart seems to be stuck on full throttle.

Sound begins to emit from my expansive throat, a deep moaning nameless sound. The observational part of my mind is still restless and registering cautions about the possibilities of damage to the physical vehicle. I decide that I need to ‘ground’ the experience and that I can Aum with it as a means of fully embodying that which is flowing through me (rather than becoming fully disembodied by its raw power). So I begin to Aum, low and deep into the lower chakra triad, and then a higher tone, into the heart, and higher again into the upper chakra triad. I slowly begin to reintegrate and re-inhabit my physical vehicle. The toning is re-establishing a breathing rhythm, my heart rate begins to decelerate somewhat.

I find myself glowing and buzzing, it is as if I have just been born, My body feels like a fresh new organism, weightless for a while, tingling and throbbing with light and sound – I seem to be in psychic contact with every mind I have ever contacted, all of you are right here with me, I hear your voices and feel you in me. We are all connected to this vast and fathomless energy source which is still flowing through me, as me (and everything and everyone). My subtle sensitivities appear to have been enhanced, yet so has my capacity to accept being in such a state.

At the time of writing, 5 days later, I am still in this ‘renewed’ state. Speaking with the Goethe track group (16/06/2012) helped me ground the experience a bit more, thank God for these eminently qualified comrades. Many of the images which have sprung unbidden to my mind over the last 20 years are now relating to each other in my mind in ways that they have not done before – so many symbols of a pre-cognised experience which only now is unfolding – the whole concept of time and space is so plastic. And underpinning the whole experiential context – the sound which arises from within – what a revelation.

Conclusion: No amount of theory can adequately describe a knowing which only direct experience can deliver.

The lucid contemplative reflections continue….

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Language Patterns.

John writes;
My aim is to create questions that may locate your perceptions in your perceptual space and then through proper naming, develop qualities and attributes that may be of use to you in your experiment.
I am quoting from your last paragraph and offer the following questions, staying as close to your language as possible. Please relax and enjoy…

“My aim is to now become much more aware of the factors surrounding the phenomena;”

J. And when my aim is to become much more aware of factors surrounding the phenomena, is there anything else about ‘much more aware’?
G. “much more aware” feels like pressure inflating a balloon – there is an increase in scope as well as intensity of perceived experience.

J. And when  ‘much more aware’ how much more aware is that’?
G. about as much as is possible to sustain whilst maintaining focus on the phenomena, sometimes more – I experience peak states of omni-awareness, however, these seem to lose the original phenomena, and indeed all phenomena “dissolves” in this state (which may extend beyond ‘awareness’ I conjecture).

J. Is ‘much more aware’ on the inside or the outside?
G. when “much more aware” there is no “inside and outside” there is only that in which perception and phenomena arise, and in which experience is possible.

J. Does’ much more aware’ have a size or shape?
G. in my experience awareness is spherical, the “size” relative to the world of form and phenomena seems to vary  significantly according to what may be required in any given situation.

J. And where does ‘much more aware’ come from?
G. the state of being more aware is definitely facilitated by regular meditation practice. It is probably an act of cognition in alignment with intuition – which I experience as a free flow of information through the context in which both myself and that which I am aware of are arising.

J. And when ‘much more aware’ what happens to phenomena?
G. phenomena seem to come into clearer focus, and at the same time they tend to reveal their transparency – depending on the ‘degree’ of awareness bought to bear upon them, their physicality can dissolve altogether revealing only the patterns of energetic interactions which support their arising (which strictly speaking are still phenomena, albeit of the subtle variety, just not available to be apprehended by the purely “physical” perceptual apparatus).

J. And is there a relationship between ‘much more aware’ and Goethe’s Way of Science?
G. as far as I can tell, Goethe’s method calls for a deep intuitive awareness to be bought to bear upon the phenomena being studied. It seems to me, as I experiment with fine tuning this perceptual apparatus for the purpose, that it will require self-awareness and discipline to control the various functions of perception and cognition in order to attain the ‘view’ suggested by his methodology.

Thank you John for encouraging this clarifying dialogue.

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Sound – water.

Sitting in the canyon just absorbing the sounds of the crystal clear water echoing off the rocks and trees, and reflecting upon the elements as they arise as “me”.

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Goethean Experimental Process Unfolding.

My observations this week of the phenomena, my son saying “mum” and my internal soundscape has revealed the slightly unnerving tendency for that which is focused upon to ‘disappear’. As I have been reading the article “Place, Goethe and Phenomenology: A Theoretic Journey” by John Cameron
of the University of Western Sydney, recommended by Steven Nickelson (http://www.janushead.org/8-1/Cameron.pdf) I have learned that there is a potential ‘obstacle’ to clear perception of phenomena in the form of what is called the “natural attitude”.

Miriam Hill described natural attitude as follows: Human experience abounds in unifying conditions and forces which are disguised by an aura of obviousness and implicitness. This situation of normal unawareness is called by the phenomenologist the natural attitude – a pre-philosophic dimension of consciousness which conceals the world and prevents close scrutiny. The phenomenologist works to circumvent the natural attitude and to undertake a fresh exhaustive examination of consciousness and experience. One result of this exercise is a clear sighting of the communion between body and world .

I am realising that the obviousness of the utterance “mum” and the implicitness of the arising of internal sounds (the foci of my experiment) are themselves that which needs to be overcome in order to truly study them as phenomena in their own right. This line gives a clue to approaching this in a lucid manner;

… the strength of the natural attitude and its twin concept, the ‘lifeworld,’ the “inner and outer dimensions of the essential phenomenological fact that people are immersed in a world that normally unfolds automatically”

These concepts also (in my mind anyway) relate back to the “naïve” interpretation of that which is perceived, and “taken for granted” or unquestioningly accepted on the assumption that ‘things’ are what they appear to be, all at a deeply unconscious level. A type of pre-filtered experiential context, so to speak.

So, my aim is to now become much more aware of the factors surrounding the phenomena; my responses to them, what is evoked in me, and how I am affected by them. In this way I hope to begin to overcome the obstacles and appreciate the phenomena in context with the embodiment that I bring into relationship with them.

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Goethean insights.

Goethe, Science, and Sensory Experience. (Hensel)

… more is required for the perception of the essential features of the qualitative realm than just the physical sense organs. A more subtle perceptual capacity includes the emotional, aesthetic, and spiritual aspects of sensory qualities.

The endpoint of the discursive-conceptual analysis can become the starting point of the suprarational realm of qualities by means of an imaginative experience.

 

“Whatever great, beautiful, or significant experiences have come our way must not be recalled again form without and recaptured, as it were; they must rather become part of the tissue of our inner life from the outset, creating a new and better self within us, continuing forever as active agents in out Bildung. (formative development)” – Goethe.

 

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Goethe’s Way Of Science. Excerpts and Reflections. 01.

Preface.

[Goethe's] ideas continue to influence science and related areas like the phenomenology of nature and the philosophy of science.

Goethe developed a method to encounter and understand the natural world more directly, intuitively, and intimately. This approach promises much for strengthening our love of nature and for helping us to better care for the natural environment and earth.

Introduction. One phrase that Goethe used to describe his method was delicate empiricism (zarte Empirie) – the effort to understand a thing’s meaning through prolonged empathetic looking and seeing grounded in direct experience.

Goethe argued that, in time, out of commitment, practice, and proper efforts, the student would discover the “ur-phenomenon” … , the essential pattern of process of a thing. Ur – bears the connotation of primordial, basic, elemental, archetypal; the ur-phenomenon may be thought of as the “deep-down-phenomenon”, the essential core of a thing that makes it what it is and what it becomes.

“The highest is to understand that all fact is really theory. The blue of the sky reveals to us the basic law of colour. Search nothing beyond the phenomena, they themselves are the theory.”

 

This aspect of Goethe’s approach resonates with a core drive in me, that is to experience and describe that which gives rise to the phenomena appearing in awareness.

 

Goethe’s approach moves away from the reductionist thinking of positivist science and facilitates an increasing freedom and self-determination both for the researcher and for the thing he or she studies.

In our postmodern time of fragmentation and relativity, we must somehow find ways to bring our thoughts, feelings and actions in harmony with ourselves and with the world in which we live. … In this way perhaps we come to feel more care for the natural world, which answers back with meaning.

 

The approach to phenomenology which Goethe seems to be suggesting promises to bring about a deep experience of being with the ‘thing’ as it is in awareness. He seems to be suggesting that the “object of contemplation”, so to speak, can be approached directly through the senses and will yield its nature to the patient and attuned “observer”.

 

I have decided to “observe” using my hearing, listening and harkening capacities, specifically to two phenomenon. 1) the sounds that arise from deep within my being as life lives in me and expresses itself through sound, and 2) my son’s utterances of the seed syllable “mum” – which I have noticed can be intoned in myriad ways, I plan to pay extra attention to this phenomena as I engage this learning track on Goetheian science!

I hope to describe these sounds using images as well as words, I often experience sounds as vibrant fields of geometric shapes and colours, so I will try to share those observations as clearly as I can.

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PAL. Chapter 24. The Nature of Existence. pp.635-661.

 

The mind independent real is not the same as the feeling of realness, which is the affective residue that accompanies the outgoing stream of perception. This feeling in everyday objects derives from beliefs that help us to cope with the incapacity to tolerate unreality, once we have become aware that some events seem to be more real than others.

Since time is generated within a state, the “interval” between contiguous states is timeless for that person, though other minds might exist in the interstices of those states. The microgenetic theory of subjective time is consistent with the possibility of parallel worlds, a topic of lively debate in current physics.

States are not concatenated in chains, as in cognitivist theory or the casual sequence of arisings and perishings in Buddhist metaphysics. Rather, like the “pulse of consciousness” described by William James, states arise in overlapping volleys in the decay of their antecedents. We are neither aware of the process over which mind/brain states develop nor of the “gaps” between them. What we are aware of is the virtual duration elaborated by a comparison of phases within a single transition. It is a paradoxical feature of microgenetic theory, as in process metaphysics, that temporal epochs are created out of non-temporal phases that are “collated” after their traversal.

The intuition that the foundations of all knowledge rests on momentary intrinsic relations, bounded by physical unobservables, exposes the surreal quality of conscious experience. Those who are sensitive to this experience will have the impression that what is taken for real is like the thin, fragile elastic of a balloon, balancing constraints on its inner and outer surface.

… reality is not what is real, it is what is true – veridical – and the only way we have of turning the real into the true is to put the real into the form of a statement and then test whether or not the statement is truthful. How we test such truths is a complex matter, but they often involve negation, which achieves a relative truth by the elimination (sculpting) of a falsehood.

Thought and perception are modelled to nature by sensation and consensus, in either case, by adaptation. But the nature that is realised in thought and perception is not the nature that underlies that realisation. Whatever is conceived by the individual, or confirmed by others, distils to the activity of a single brain. … Just describing a process severs its relations and turns it into thing. But there are deeper problems in access to the physical brain than the inability to capture its dynamic nature.

… independent of their truth, scientific facts are riddled with, indeed are actualisations of, the values and beliefs of the observer. It is an important question whether facts are values, but the more general question is whether we should apply to physical nature those qualities of thought by which nature herself is known, or whether thought is external to nature and does not infect the observation and interpretation of physical data.

The rock bottom fact about fact is that nay fact is an objectified perception in a single brain. The relation of mind and brain is prior to an understanding of the relation of perceptual objects to physical entities, and the ultimate “fact” about the mind/brain state is that our knowledge of this state rests on experiential data. … The brain is merely a portion of nature that mediates our knowledge of the remainder. Facts are values through which we infer a reality common to all perceptions, or a reality on the other side of perception that is conveyed through the senses and verified by thought.

There is no compelling reason to believe that reality – even if it is ultimately non-experiential and unknowable – differs fundamentally from the thought life in which it makes its appearance.

In our time, this difficulty – the gap from mind to brain, from the ideal to the Real – has been avoided by reducing mind to brain or ignoring mind completely. The consequence of an extraction of mind from nature is that the psychic qualities of nature are not realised in the mind, that mind is not determined to be, as it is, a mirror of a psychic nature.

(emphasis mine)

Sensations, however, like the entities they point to, are extrinsic and non-experiential. In spite of the best efforts of science, they cannot be given a description that excludes the conceptual. … We have no idea what sensation is like. It is a speculation on the origins of a perception, a kind of fable on the connections of a mind with its body and the world.

Sensation is the proximate inference about nature. We feel (see, hear) perceptions, not sensations, so a sensation is an explanation of where perception comes from. … what we perceive is a though-up nature – one that is assembled or constructed, or one that actualises out of potential – but in both the outcome adapts to an inferential world of sense. The choice between a world of endogenous objects or one that is constituted by their sensory ingredients. In the former, the brain generates images that adapt to a noumenal world, in the latter, sense data build up entities in physical passage.

Acts and objects are initiated prior to the consciousness of an intention, or a perception. It takes time to create the world and to effect a deliberate action in that world.

Affect and reminiscence are not psychic additions to archaic or advanced perceptions. They are ingredient in the perception, or rather, the perception is ingredient in cognition.

We assume that perceptions do not appear spontaneously but result from the physical impressions of sense-data. Similarly, the products or contents of conscious mind have a history that must be included as part of conscious experience. Not all inferences should be included in experience, , but direct experience is only a portion of what is experienced. The inferred is its major part. It has to be said that in this area the search for precision can be fatal to certainty. At least one can agree that if inference depends on experience, the fully non-experiential, for example, the nature of the noumenal reality, is beyond inference.

One might add that experience is for things that appear to be stable (objects) or changing (events), not for the change out of which things materialise. Transition gives rise to feeling, but it is the feeling, not the transition that is experienced. Lacking an awareness of genuine change, we have no experience of that which is essential and uniform in mind and nature. Moreover, if experience and the experiencing self are deposited by change, we do not have experience, we do not have a self. Experience is not a possession; selves and experience are creations of process. The experience of the self for that moment is, for the moment, what the self is. While experience and the thoughts or inferences that flow from it are all that we can know, experience, even so broadly defined, in respect to the non-experiential nature of change, does not include what is essential for its own manifestation.

(emphasis mine)

The feeling of community within which individuality develops can be regained by regression to an earlier phase in thought. The mark of this feeling – compassion – is concealed beneath the pretence of autonomy. Alienation is of course the price of too forceful an individualism.

The characteristics of the organic are unity of feeling, dependence of the parts on the whole and self-replication, but with respect to these properties there is no sharp transition from inorganic to organic life.

(emphasis mine)

The organic is characterised by needs to which elements are subordinate. Needs involve the direction of energy. The physical-chemical bonds that establish the energy of the base constituents of inorganic matter have no prevailing direction. The energetic cycles of organism have a direction. … the direction does not aim at an object, it merely deposits the object toward which it seems to be pointing.

It happens that the global often evades description while the local is self-evident.

(emphasis mine)

… one can say the universe is a whole to parts that only seem to be particulars because the whole is incomprehensible and the whole part relation is imperceptible.

It seems that what gives an object an organic unity is less in the synchronic relations that appear to keep it together, than the diachronic relations through which organic systems grow.

… the notion of entities as epochal packets of energy aligns the inorganic with the glimmerings of organism. The importation of change into matter enlivens the inorganic with creative energy and is the transition to living matter.

Physical nature is continuous with organism as the non-cognitive world is continuous with mind. Indeed mind is its final realisation. Reality is mind in the process of becoming aware of itself, the product of world organism that enfolds all forms, all changes, of greater or lesser degree of development.

What is ultimately real is what exists. Change, time and realtionality are the measure of existence.

The entity does not actualise out of nothing or non-existence. The universe is a continuous process of becoming. Were becoming to cease, the universe would not exist. But between the arising and perishing of a becoming, “between” potentiality and actuality, the process is not yet temporal, thus not yet an existent. The ordinary concept of reality as a collection of instantaneous events – the “solid” particles of the older physics – is inconsistent with the interpretation of existents as epochs. The epoch encloses phases that, being non-temporal, do not exist until they are traversed. For an entity to exist is for it to have a minimal duration, i.e. for becoming to actualise into being. A physical instant is an imaginary section through this becoming.

What it comes to is that the world is either a self-realisation and we live in a kind of cognitive bubble chamber, or the mind is a fiction and the world, including the brain, is vast, unobservable spectacle in the void.

To maintain that one can assume an objective perspective is coherent only if nature is mind, so the perspective does not sacrifice psychology to achieve objectivity.

Problems with materialism beyond the derivative and uncertain sources of perceptions and the construction of entities in an “empty” hypothetical space, includes the “time” taken by – and the how of – the transmission and combination of the senses to a unified object. To invoke a mechanism for the unification of experience – the reintegration of that which science had fragmented – illustrates the improvisation of present-day thinking in psychology. Such postulates ignore other aspects of perception, e.g. object recognition, familiarity, constancies, conceptuality and category membership. In sense-data theory, the overwhelming contribution of mind to perceptual objects is secondary and post-perceptual. In microgenesis, this contribution is preliminary or pre-perceptual.

The notion of the real is meaningless without mind. The relation of appearance to reality is that of mind to physical nature. Appearance is unreal only in relation to objects perceived as more real, or entities inferred as ultimately real. However, real and unreal apply to perceptual images or objects, not physical entities. This may not be the case with fact or truth, for we do not speak of objects or entities as being timelessly real, as we do of truth. Yet in spite of all the arguments concerning “timeless truths” , at least since the famous sea battle of Aristotle, it is difficult to understand how such terms take on meaning in the absence of mind.

… the real is not a limit on existence.

We can agree that the unknown is a swamp of superstition and false belief that is that is slowly drained by science. But can we also agree that the unknowable may well be a reservoir of mystery at the limits of scientific explanation?

The microgenetic theory of mind applied to actualisation in the physical world entails a manifold of nature unified at the onset of an epoch that gives rise to novel particulars. Diversity does not combine to unity but, like speciation in evolution, is the outcome of of an individuation of the whole.

Followed deeply enough, a psychic nature, or a subjective universe, is a metaphysics of evolutionary psychology.

Historically, the view of an individual as a vehicle through which the forms of nature actualise preceded the idea that experience is what the self experiences. If we strip away the superstition that overlays animism, and its ornamentations in magical thinking and everyday life, and accept the bare primitive intuition of mind in nature as a kind of unmediated truth, we are left with a sophisticated theory of reality that asks what features of psychic life are present in the world and how those features are elaborated in the human mind.

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PAL. Chapter 20. Thought and Memory. pp.531-551.

It is merely assumed that perception provides the material for memory, and that memory – reciprocally – provides the material for feeling and thought. This approach has been justified by the presumed need to study memory apart from its relation to other aspects of cognition, which have their own sub-systems and separate lines of observation and experimentation. This trend towards increasing analysis, compartmentalisation and localisation – the triumph of the “splitters” over the “lumpers” – is the bugbear of modern day psychology.

… it is one thing to analyse a whole into its parts, and quite another to re-unite the parts once they have been separated.

Prospective memory is a recurrent thought about the future, and thus a dialectic of thought and memory on the axis of time. A thought of a prior experience that is accompanied by a feeling of pastness, repetition and familiarity is as much a memory as an idea, while memory becomes thought when it departs form reproduction and its content is not evidently perceptual.

We think that “real” experience is the basis of memory, whereas an imagined experience is a kind of thought, or a dream. Memory is grounded in experience, but actual or objective experience is not necessary for a memory, and with respect to experience, the distinction of memory, dream and thought is not sharply drawn.

The dream-time of the myth does not contradict the serial order of the conscious present. Rather, the myth informs or merges with the perception as part of the reality of present experience.

The historical past, whether or not it is remembered and whether or not one can say it actually occurred, leaves it mark on consequent events in the same way that the past leaves its unconscious effects on thought and behaviour. Indeed, invented or misconstrued events can be more vital to behaviour in the present than true facts. What exists in the personal past is, for the subject, as for historical consciousness, what is actively remembered, and this varies with the state of the person at the moment of acquisition and/or recall.

In everyday life, we know that the recall of an event is effected by feeling, novelty and familiarity, interest and semantic or conceptual relations. What is not generally recognised is that this is also true of what we perceive. Value and meaning are guides to perception.

… the self is as much a product of memory as what is remembered.

The theory of generative grammar proposed infinite creativity in language production, though most people are limited to one or two conversations, and tend to repeat themselves endlessly within the topics of their interest. The categorical nature of perception limits novelty to unfamiliar objects, i.e. those which seem outside the usual categories. The novelty of any object or thought is not felt acutely because it resembles in some respect the objects and thoughts we have previously experienced. The priority of the categorical over the particular gives the feeling of the habitual that pervades most aspects of life.

The greater the feeling of stasis on reproduction, the closer the object to perception and memory. The greater the feeling of change within a replication, the closer the object to thought. The novelty that pervades all material and mental process involves a departure of memory into thought. There is a precedence of becoming over being. The stability of category over process entails the relaxation of the activity of thought into the solidity of being. Now, replication or memory predominates.

A memory is felt more like an obligation. An intention is more like a desire.

Agency does not arise form the momentum to the present but is enhanced as the self goes out to objects. The shift in attitude depends on the subtle accentuation and degree of completedness at serial points in the actualisation process. The temporal direction of an intention is closely related to the prospective or retrospective character of memorial experience.

Agency enters intention to the extent that we desire what we remember, either to repeat a prior experience or, in prospective memory, to posses an object that recurs in thought. The relative freedom of intentionality from desire tends to align the former with the “reflective faculty”. This is partly its appeal to philosophy as the criterion of mentality, much as syntax for many linguists is the hallmark of language.

In the intentional state, one object – idea, memory – is selected as a focus of interest from all other possible foci. This interest is a sign of value. Unlike desire, in which feeling is centered in the self, or worth, in which feeling is centered in the object, interest occurs with weak desire in an object of modest worth as a state of feeling in which self and other have equal share.

The productivity of thought, as with all acts of cognition, begins with conscious or unconscious reproduction. In perceptual experience, sense-data constrain thought to model the world.

… prospective memory, which combines past, present and future – memory, thought and expectation – in a siungle cognition. The microgenetic account of this state holds that the revival of a familiar content in a present thought concerning a future event can be interpreted in terms of a sigle process of thought-development which, by way of intrinsic constraints in the phase-transition, tends towards the reproduction of prior contents, while the growth of the content over successive recurrences is a measure of the degree to which the constraints of habitual thinking are relaxed, so that revision or expansion of content can occur.

A chief irony is that reflection on past or future tends to detach the individual from the vividness of the present, while immediacy of experience is felt by those who are reflectively engaged in life as it passes.