A Discussion on the Language of the Wheel

Thanks Ryan for starting this key topic. If we can understand the criteria of thinking, we can begin to understand the world. If we can understand the world, we can take effective action and fulfill our life purposes.

Just a Few "Thoughts" on Thinking...

Thinking is the intentional, conscious process by which one critically evaluates information processed by the senses to form mental & or physicals images, models, symbols, and constructs, therefore developing ideas, impressions, or positive knowledge about the observed subject/object. This function is enhanced by purposeful, non-attached, unbiased, mental process, by way of systematic, analytical and analogical algorithmic cognitive sequence. The syntax of thought requires imagination, discretion, reasoning, and memory recall of past experience. Reflecting on the subject/object, then relating the information to similar or different concepts, is a valuable piece of the thought puzzle. Thinking also entails abstracting subparts of the point of focus, relative to the whole, for deeper analysis. With this process, bridging of the right and left hemispheres of the brain (analytical: analogical) proceed towards logical conceptual outcomes.

Emotion, cultural-habituation, preconceived notions, and other unconscious programmed psychic processes are oftentimes mixed up with what one unknowingly believes to be the act or process of thinking. Confusion, mental discord and psychological unbalance arise when the individual subconsciously or habitually mistakes other functions of consciousness, such as sensing or feeling, with thinking. To avoid such internal mishaps, understanding the divisions of consciousness: thinking, sensing, feeling and willing will bring ease to the process. Making effort to develop each function individually, the adept can work towards integrating thinking, sensing, feeling and willing with the body, soul and spirit; thus awakening to balance, harmony, and clarity of mind and purpose.

The Wheel,” as created by the late Arnold Keyserling, can be used by the “Wisdom Seeker” as a tool for bringing order to the thought process. As a skill to be learned, developed and honed, such as that of the architect or artist, thinking, with it’s numerous components, is a function of consciousness that requires purposeful focus and practice for one to become astute and comfortable with the process. The Wheel is one such tool that aids in this process. This asset is a mainstay of focus within The School of Wisdom and valued by many who have taken the time to learn its language and components; such as the function of “Thinking.”

The map is not the territory. 

The Wisdom Wheel is a map.  One of the tricks to help convert raw knowledge into usable understanding is to have a cognitive map to help arrange the onslaught of knowledge and information that we are exposed to.  The Wheel is certainly not the only map available, but it is a very powerful map that is somewhat uniquely tuned to a great variety of topics that a spiritual seeker is likely to encounter.  In order to begin to make sense of the Wheel so that we can use it to convert knowledge and experience into wisdom, I want to start with the two broad structural components that make up a substantial part of the Wheel’s capacity for organizing thoughts, ideas and teachings from various traditions into a meaningful coherence: Functions & Realms.

The functions are fairly easy to explain.  There is, in any given moment, the capacity to Sense, to Think, to Feel, and to Will.  Depending on your current understanding, and what your philosophical leanings are, there are the five basic senses plus a small number of possible additions…  The Buddhists treat the mind itself as a sense organ…  If you do much body work or are familiar with Somatic psychology, you may want to count certain proprioceptors and the like under the category of senses…  If you do a lot of energy work, you may count the ability to sense Qi (Chi, Ki, Prana) as a specific sensing capacity…  If you are inclined towards understanding psychic phenomena as ‘ESP’ then you may include that perception process as a sense capacity as well…  But we can all pretty much agree that you see the light reflected off the moon, smell the lotus blossom, hear the rain’s pitter-patter outside your window, taste the lasagna, and have a variety of sensations all over the skin-bag that keeps our insides from spilling onto the floor.  Easy enough.

Thinking is trickier.  As you can see in Ryan’s post above, there are numerous aspects to thinking.  Separating the energies of Sensing & Thinking provides one clue about the process of development necessary for “full-throttle” Thinking.  When our basic energies are confused it is entirely possible to mistake the process of taking information in (Sensing) and spitting it back out as actual Thinking…  But there are other, far more insidious pitfalls on the way to a fully developed Thinking capacity.  I like to think of this process in its most basic terms – we have the potential to move from a pre-rational type of thinking to a more fully developed rational capacity and then we can take that capacity beyond, to a more integrated post-rational, logical & analogical, left & right brained functionality.  This is a genuine human potential, but it is by no means a given.  Simply increasing self-awareness around this topic and the internal flow of the 4 Functions can be of great assistance in what can become, essentially, a continuous process of growth – not just in Thinking, but in all of the Functions.

Feeling weaves a rich tapestry.  Our feelings have a physical energy to them.  We feel them in our bodies…  But we also attach a ton of commentary and intellectualizing to our raw feelings (Thinking muddling Feeling).  Digging into our feelings, allowing for the raw body sensations, separating out the stories we tell ourselves about our feelings, and even allowing the development of nuanced variation in our perceptions and labeling / interpreting of Feelings is a definite and legitimate pursuit in most programs of human development…  In my experience, we all have room to grow here, but at the very least it is important to differentiate the Feeling energies from the other Functions so they can become more fully integrated (without recourse to undue pathology).

Anyone that consistently engages in a ‘Spiritual’ practice deals with Will, in the form of discipline, fairly regularly.  Will is an energy that can be cultivated – Will-power increases with usage.  Will can often get subverted from its true target when feelings and temporary desires get confused for the ‘true’ Will.  Excessive Thinking can derail Will as well.  (Paralysis by Analysis, so to speak).  These are just some of the ways in which the 4 Functions can get confused and out of synch with each other.  One Function generally tries to masquerade as the other energies when it is least to our benefit (under stress, say, when our fullest capacities would be most advantageous).

That is a decent enough starting point for discussing what the 4 Functions are, but remember when I said “At any given moment” some or all of the Functions can be active?  For the purposes of understanding the use of the 4 Functions as key structural components of the Wheel, we have to keep in mind that the Functions operate in Time.  The Functions make up the Time component of Space-Time.  As we all know, Time and Space can be converted into each other, are intermingled in meaningful ways, and are generally both required if we want to locate an event in our normal reality.  That leaves the 3 Realms to contain the Spatial component of our Wisdom Wheel Map.

I’ve found that talking about the 3 Realms with people is far thornier than getting a consensus on the Functions.  It is important to maintain a certain agility of mind when discussing these things; to keep reminding yourself that these are words that point to an advantageous way of ‘seeing’ the world; to resist the urge to be too literal with your interpretation of maps and symbols…  (the map is not the territory)  It is also important sometimes to try and get a little bit of depth and clarity going (Not Too Tight, Not Too Loose). 

In order to explain the 3 Realms to the best of my ability, I am going to divide the discussion into two parts: The first will deal with the spatial construct of the 3 Realms so that we can finish the underlying structural discussion of the 12 Sectors of the Wheel, while the second part of the discussion will deal with the Chakra correspondences of the 3 Realms (Body-Soul-Spirit).  I am only going to touch briefly on the Chakra aspects in this post, but you are encouraged to read my posts under the Music and Meditation section of this forum and the Qi Qong discussion of Taoist Alchemy under the Holistic Philosophy section of this forum…  That is, if you are interested in a more specific discussion about Chakras & Qi that moves from “mere theory” to “informed practice.”

There are so many tripartite divisions in the world of ideas that it can often get confusing.  Why not Mind-Body-Spirit instead of Body-Soul-Spirit?  These diversions are often well intentioned but stray into a kind of idle speculation that borders on an attempt at literal truth claims.  Keep in mind that while the realms of experience are real, the words are merely symbols.  With that preamble, I am going to break my own rule and reinterpret the 3 Realms into a language that I’ve been using lately and that seems decidedly fruitful when I’m attempting to delineate the nature of the 3 Realms in general…  It should also give you some idea that there are many different layers to a good map.  Google maps may give you a street map, with or without traffic overlays, or you can view a satellite perspective.  You might decide that you want to see the current weather overlay or even a street-level pictorial view of your destination.  Perhaps you are hiking in the back country and need a good topographical map overlay.  Who knows?  The point is that you can have many maps available without having to declare one to be ‘correct’ and the others to be somehow ‘wrong’.

For the purposes of this discussion I want you to temporarily suspend your preconceived notions of Body-Soul-Spirit.  You can pick your current understanding back up in a minute; nobody is trying to take it away from you.  Resist the urge to think that you have a Body, a Soul that is separate from your Body, and Spirit that somehow encapsulates the whole endeavor.  You are certainly free to see things like that, but I want to talk about the 3 Realms in a very different way for a second.  Think of the Body Realm as the physical & biological reality we experience everyday.  That shouldn’t be too hard, as we live in a largely materialistically inclined culture.  The Soul Realm, on the other hand, can be thought of as the social sphere of our existence, while the Spirit Realm can be thought of as that personal (or transpersonal) ‘subjective’ consciousness we live most of our lives completely enmeshed in... 

If you are familiar with Integral Theory (Ken Wilber), this would translate directly into It-We-I, or the Big 3 of his quadrants.  The reason I am making this conversion, and the reason Realms are important to talk about at all, is that while they exist simultaneously and inform each other, and also all grow and evolve in their own interconnected ways…  What they don’t do is collapse one into the other without a remainder.  That’s why the distinction is important.

Let’s take an easy example: I have a thought.  There are neurons firing (I usually get at least a few working) and there are all kinds of chemical and electrical interactions taking place in my brain.  This is an ‘It’ Realm analysis (Body Realm).  I am not subjectively aware of the deep physical “brain happenings” of my experience, and despite the tremendous advances in neuroscience that surely await us, no matter how you objectively measure a human brain it will not substitute for the personal subjective experience of consciousness – there will always be a remainder.  This insight alone can help you understand why some people try to collapse all of human experience into the physical, materialist worldview, and also why these sorts of descriptions of reality, when they attempt to devalue personal experience, fail to captivate us for long.  All of your embedded personal experience screams out at the obvious fact that there is a divide between subject and object (mystical truth claims notwithstanding), and that the difference is marked, obvious, and important. 

The personal realm of experience we are talking about can be seen as the interior side of the mental processes, or what we would call the Spirit Realm (Wilber would say ‘I’).  Going back to that initial, fleeting thought that ‘I’ (Spirit) had; the one that registered on my CT scan as some brief electromagnetic activity (‘It’ or Body Realm), we have also to consider that I am having this thought in a cultural context.  My thinking is conditioned by the language I speak, the people I know, the schools I went to, etc…  I am also trying to communicate something to you!  Pondering the simple ability to communicate anything at all can be almost overwhelming.  This is the Soul Realm, or what Wilber would designate as ‘We’.

All of these spheres of experience intersect and happen simultaneously, but they can not be reduced, one to the other, without a substantial hole or deficit in explanation – a remainder.  Just like an increasing awareness of the 4 Functions can help you to separate Sensing-Thinking-Feeling-Willing, and integrate them better, so too can a growing awareness of the 3 Realms of experience help you to separate and integrate Body-Soul-Spirit (It-We-I).  What realm do you spend most of your time in?  What realm maybe feels stuck in neutral?  These are useful ways to expand your self awareness and understanding of the world, certainly, but when you combine the constituent elements of Time and Space, a whole new world of understanding unfolds before you…  And that is precisely what happens when you multiply the 4 Functions by the 3 Realms: You get the 12 Sectors of the Wisdom Wheel.

Once the outer ring of the Wheel is firmly in mind (seriously, study the materials on this site regarding wisdom and the Wheel for a deeper insight) you can unravel a great many mysteries.  For instance, you can look at life as you move through the different structural potentials of the Wheel during your lifetime.  Obviously people get older and grow, and there is some fascinating insight available about what types of activities and what life energies are normally pursued in each stage of life.  You can even look back at potentials that may not have been fully realized to determine where some of your energy is stuck…  Or you can look at larger time-scales and see how civilizations have switched their focus, or how our conscious understanding of the world has evolved…  Once you understand the basic structures you will find that the Wheel can demystify, explain, and help organize disparate understandings into a rather cohesive whole.  That is my introductory explanation of the 4 Functions and the 3 Realms…  But remember that I wanted to divide the discussion of the 3 Realms between the spatial component and the Chakra association??

It seems that everyone with a Yoga habit, a library card or an internet connection has seen a discussion of the Chakras these days.  They know the colors, the number of lotus petals, and the symbols that make up the visualization process…  They know which energies are associated with each Chakra, and what the warnings, pitfalls, experiences, and integrations look like…  And while there is tremendous insight available in this area due to the diligent work of centuries of Yogis, I find that there is not nearly as much direct experience as there is ‘philosophy’. 

There is a problem of explanation that exists even with the lower 4 Chakras (corresponding to the 4 Functions).  People have already adopted a cognitive map of the chakras.  That’s fine and all, but this is a highly symbolic discussion that is based concretely on advanced interactions with the energies of the Chakras…  The field test of the claim to be able to work directly with the Chakras sonically should certainly overshadow doctrinal disputes.  Let’s take this Primasounds tool for a test drive before we engage in deeply attached, speculative debate!  If we’re wrong, then add that to your mental map of what we have to say…  But if we’re right, well, you can keep arguing and disagreeing with us (we kinda prefer it to unthinking acceptance), but at least you’ve found a cool new tool for self-exploration. (and a way to prove to your friends that you’re not crazy… on this particular point, at least)

I’ve found myself able to get some general ‘suspension of disbelief’ when I use Primasounds to help people finally experience the energy centers in their bodies directly…  Keeping in mind that this initial detection of the Chakras physically falls into the Body-Realm sphere of experience, it tends to make little sense to people to then experience the throat chakra as ‘Body’, the third eye chakra as ‘Soul’, and the top of the head chakra as ‘Spirit’.  While you could certainly point out that the throat is the gateway between the torso and the head (between body and mind) or that the crown Chakra most certainly correlates well with the standard interpretation, I choose a different path altogether…  I choose to shift from theory to practice and allow people to test the truth claim that Primasounds makes about being able to directly resonate the Chakras.  I choose to provide precise and clear instructions on how to use Primasounds with some profound Qi Qong insight in order to experience the Chakras directly and start delving into their potentials for personal growth...  With a truth claim as powerful as having the sacred tones that open the Chakras, I choose to facilitate the testing process.  My experience with people that practice Yoga is that they need little to no assistance working directly with the Chakras once they start using Primasounds, but my experience also tells me that the rest of us that don’t have a sincere Yoga habit need a little assistance.  (I kid the Yogis… It’s out of love…)

In my next post, under the heading of Primasounds Experiences, I will make clear some profound and simple instructions for anyone looking to start a Chakra exploration practice or simply deepen the practice they already have with Primasounds.  Hopefully this will open the door to hearing about the many ingenious ways everyone has come to use this potent tool for energy enhancement and self-discovery…

I hope my explanations proved helpful.  As always, we encourage your feedback, insight, argument, accolades, indulgence, and continued self-exploration. 

Namaste…
Solvitur Ambulando,
Ian