Formscapes

A "fluke" is what's left over from a bad theory. "Random" is a broom used to sweep inconvenient facts under the rug. "Arbitrary" is derived from the word "Arbitrate" - meaning to decide, to choose, to dictate. Nothing is ever "just" anything. Nature is not complex, but it is smarter than you unless you discipline yourself to think in the same way a professional athlete disciplines themselves to run, breathe and jump. Nature doesn't abhor vacuums - the self-annihilation of vacuums is the engine of cosmic, create Eros - but Nature does indeed abhor inelegance. What you see as complexity is subtlety and nuance. What you see as inconsistency is a fractal which you haven't managed to back up from enough.

The "veil" which prevents us from seeing the truth of the world clearly doesn't consist in our organs of perception - which are themselves the most finely crafted epistemological instruments imaginable - but rather this "veil" consists of the things that we think we know without even realizing that we believe them; assumptions which live rent-free in the ideas which we internalized as teenagers and which we don't realize even **can** be called into question. Nothing is hidden from us. Seeing the Pleroma - the world of Geist, Psyche, Spirit - is a matter of realizing that you are wearing sunglasses indoors that you forgot to take off. It is a matter of realizing that you are stumbling through a dark cave, but also realizing the crucial fact that you are already carrying the only flashlight you will ever need - your own thoughts.

Genuine thinking is a skill that most human beings never develop; not because they are stupid but because the "thinking" taught in universities is nothing other than skillfully toying with thoughts which were created centuries ago, and which have hence calcified into lifeless museum specimens. The world-in-itself is not hiding behind our sensory impressions. It is not waiting for us to meditate ourselves into a dissociative stupor by staring at a wall and repeating a matra for three weeks. It is not hiding behind some hallucinogenic chemical or anomalous experience. The world-in-itself is **within** the phenomenal, and encountering those inner depths is something we do with eyes wide open, sober as a judge, in broad daylight.

Thinking is not a passive, solipsistic act; it is an act which penetrates nature and is penetrated by nature. And before you perverts beat me to the innuendos; yes, this means that thinking is quite literally an erotic act when conducted properly.

The purpose of this channel is not to give you the answers so that you can have it all figured out. Good luck even trying to regard it as that, considering I'm incessantly tweaking and modifying the cosmological narrative I am composing here. Rather, the point of this channel is to walk you step by step through the process of genuinely phenomenalogical - genuinely **empirical** - thinking, including all of my mistakes and corrections. This channel is not a textbook, let alone entertainment; it is a set of dumbbells to be lifted. Do not expect my philosophy to remain consistent over time, because I am also lifting those dumbbells.

Nothing is hidden.

Nothing.

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3 days ago (edited) | [YT] | 388

Formscapes

Substacker Rick Jansen recently wrote a piece about my most recent video, with a transcript of part of the video and some commentary on it;

riiiick.substack.com/p/the-envisionary-ego

I replied with some commentary of my own and decided I may as well share this with everyone, as it might help clarify a number of topics;

Whitehead doesn't say that all physical objects have mental poles. He says that all **organisms** have mental poles and that the basic constituents of reality are organisms. So for example, a car engine is a mechanical artifact. It does not have a mental pole unto itself. However, because the basic substrate of reality is organic, that means that the car engine must be **composed** of entities which have mental poles (I would argue that any solid piece of metal which can be magnetized actually does have a mental pole, so you could say that the individual gears and rods inside the engine are in fact organisms, albeit organisms that are in a rather sleep -like state of consciousness).

There's also quite a bit of nuance here regarding the difference between psyche/spirit and the subtle bodies, and incidentally this is something I'm going to be covering in the script I'm currently working on. To make a long story short, I would say that the primary difference between the two is that the bodily realm (including subtle bodies) consists of particular events/entities, while the psychical realm consists of the forms themselves. As I described in the videos, there is co-generative reciprocity between those two poles. So if we look at something like phantom limbs, for example, that would be an example of the Aetheric **body** because even a "phantom" limb consists of particular sensations, feelings of gestures, pains, etc. the Aetheric **psyche** conversely (what Steiner calls the "life spirit") would consist of the forms which actually generate - and are generated by - such particulars; i.e., the psychical "composite images" which I described in the video(s).

So when Steiner describes the Aetheric as "formative", he is actually using that term in a narrower sense than how I am using it. He is referring specifically to the formation of physiological "shapes" in organisms, or more generally to the "shape" of an ecosystem, a culture, a geological formation, etc; i.e., corporeal forms which are stable over time, in contrast to the astral, which concerns forms of motion, action, behavior, emotions, etc...

So with that said, when Steiner describes Aetheric imagination, he is describing something closely related to what I'm calling Envisionary Perception, but they aren't quite identical. Aetheric imagination would be a capacity to see the subtle - but very much corporeal - actions or manifestations of the psychical "Aura" which produces them. What I'm describing is a capacity to perceived the Auras themselves (in this case, the "life spirit"). Recall that Steiner says that even very recently in human history, we retained the capacity to perceive the Aetheric, so Aetheric imagination in itself isn't something entirely new. It is something we will be regaining in a new manner as we develop our capacity to perceive spirit/psyche itself. I would argue that we were actually able to perceive the Aetheric until maybe around ~500 years ago, when dianoetic consciousness ("sentient soul" in Steiner's language) gave way to perspectival consciousness ("intellectual soul" in Steiner's language (I think his terminology - or at least the common translations of it - are rather misleading, frankly, which is why I prefer my own Jargon).

Our previous capacity to perceive the Aetheric was rooted in the fact that we exhibited a form of consciousness - and thus, a phenomenological horizon - within which somatic, physiological forms could actually be cognized as fundamental constituents of nature. The metaphysics of classical antiquity ("dianoetic") was one in which forms were understood to exist independently of the human mind, and were understood to be unchanging, static and eternal - recall what I said a moment ago about how the Aetheric contrasts with the Astral insofar as the Aetheric concerns **stable** or physiological forms (in a very broad sense of "physiological"), rather than forms of motion, action or experience.

Because of the metaphysics which was the "Urphanomen" of this mode of consciousness, we were able to perceive such Aetheric forms as actually "out there" in the world. This wasn't simply a philosophical belief; the underlying metaphysics literally changed what we saw when we looked at the world with the exact same eyeballs.

If we rewind back to before the Axial age, then we find that we were also capable of experiencing the Astral before the emergence the Dianoetic ego, and we can see this transition clearly if we contrast the post-Platonic view of reality with the classical Hellenistic view. Platonists certainly believed in the Gods, but they saw the Gods as static, eternal, perfect archetypes - i.e., they saw the Gods, and all other forms for that matter, as essentially being the "life spirit" of the world, and therefore saw the world as the activity of such life-spirit (that activity being the Aetheric domain). The classical Hellenic pagans, conversely, saw the Gods as active beings which could make decisions, change their minds, pursue goals, etc... all in a quite literal sense.

Such "mythical consciousness" saw a distinction between the immanent world and the transcendental, but they didn't see the transcendental as perfect, pure and static in the way that post-Platonic consciousness would see it. The Gods were thus seen as "Manas Spirit" as well as "life spirit". The idyllic, transcendental world was seen as being in motion, and therefore we were able to perceive the astral enactments of such psychical motion within the corporeal world. It wasn't that we had a superpower and then lost it; it is literally that the way we perceive reality is conditioned by an implicit metaphysics, and that metaphysics has evolved over time.

Following the development of perspectival consciousness, our perception of reality came to be conditioned by a metaphysics within which all forms were seen to be contents of the our own inner reality which were projected into the world from within, rather than things that existed in the world independently of us. Within such an ontology, there is no "form of the pine tree" which actually exists in the world. There is only the contingent actuality of little "bits" of matter which happen to be stuck together in a shape which correlates with the human concept of "pine tree". We came to assume at a metaphysical level that those "bits" were the only thing that existed independently of us; there couldn't be a form of pine-tree-ness which actually defined the identity of the pine-tree, as we no longer believed in such forms as all. Without such forms, only "extended surfaces" could define the identity of a given entity. "Barriers" between things came to be the central notion of our ontology - an "ontology of difference" as I described it in the video.

When a person from classical antiquity looked at a pine-tree sapling, he could literally see the Aetheric body of the pine tree as a kind of translucent "glove" in the shape of the fully grown pine tree which the sapling was attempting to "fill out", and that person would have believed that that "glove" was in fact the "vegetative psyche" of the pine-tree (we were not yet capable of fully distinguishing between psyche itself and subtle bodies). If you extrapolate from this, you can infer why human beings were significantly more capable of precognition prior to the development of Dianoetic consciousness, at which point such capabilities began to be increasingly relegated to specific individuals who retained the capabilities of mythical, astral perception - e.g., the Oracle of Delphi.

So regarding the Aetheric imagination which we are now becoming capable of; this will be something rather different, precisely because we will be capable of actively seeing the complexes of psyche/spirit which generate the subtle and physical bodies which constitute the corporeal world. Perceiving such psychical realities will no longer be the result of receptive, mystical revelation, but rather will be something that we can actively do through internalizing into the human ego the very power of Noesis which actually generates those psychical realities in the first place. We synthesize within ourselves the phenomenal manifestations, such that the psychical realities which produced such manifestations come to be generated within our own inner worlds; the inner world of the subject and the inner world of the object enter into a unison - i.e., Empathy. Empathic perceptions of Noumenal/Numinous reality.

2 weeks ago | [YT] | 119

Formscapes

Hints for the next video;
It will be EPO7
**AND**
A reboot of the "Structures of the Archetypal Realm" video

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3 weeks ago | [YT] | 280

Formscapes

Finally finished the new video and I can assure you it was worth the wait! We are going to be talking about Ian Mcgilchrist, Heidegger, The Archetypes of Athena and Jupiter, the breakdown of human civilization, and the future of ego-evolution, among other things. Be sure to drop some comments so that the Algorithm remembers that my channel still exists!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-s4n...

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1 month ago | [YT] | 314

Formscapes

There are plenty of spiritual gurus and new-age dorks on YouTube preaching the same old, tired mantras of "all is God", "all is love", "we are beings of light, blah blah blah..."

And like yeah, those things are ultimately true in a sense, but those platitudes all end up just being more meaningless noise at the end of the day because they are lies-by-omission. They always conveniently fail to mention the part that noone wants to hear;

Believing you are some sort of super-special angelic star child or whatever changes absolutely nothing about why human life is torturously agonizing; love isn't free. It isn't cheap. It isn't easy. It's savagely brutal. It destroys you. It isn't the real thing unless it rips you into a million pieces - crucifies you.

Those of you who have been following along with the story I've been telling on this channel can already see why that is; the innermost core of our will-to-love - our will unto existence itself - is also an unhealed wound; a gap between being and nothingness which we are desperately trying to claw our way out of through endless torment of alienation, despair, abandonment, and - lest we forget - violent existential rage. Forget that at your own risk.

The reason why love seems hell-bent upon tearing us down to nothing is because love only becomes genuinely possible once you realize the brutal, unacceptable and inescapable truth that you aren't actually capable of it - not yet. Becoming genuinely capable of that doesn't require us to believe in things we can't see; it requires us to believe in something impossible with such conviction that it becomes possible. Faith isn't irrational. It is madness. Only madness can save us. Only Beauty can save us.

Not everyone makes it - not in one lifetime at least. The road to heaven is littered with corpses, and that's a fact that deserves more reverence and humility than any of these useless hippie gurus can manage.
Noone is coming to save us. Not anymore. We have to be the saviors. The sun must be crucified to become the father.

1 month ago | [YT] | 463

Formscapes

Just giving everyone a heads-up that I have not in fact fallen off of the face of the earth or been assassinated by international espionage operatives.

The next video is taking forever, partially because the ideas needed to cook for a bit longer than usual; I had a handful of puzzle pieces in front of me that I knew would lock into place if I just stared them down hard enough, and I was indeed correct about that. It's also taking a while because this one is going to be long. Like long by Formscapes standards. So like comically, stupidly long.

But it's also going to tie the entire EPO series into a grand, epic climax - which, yes, means we are now finally getting to the structure of consciousness which is currently developing out of the perspectival structure. Gebser calls this the "integral" structure, but I really don't like how Ken Wilber bastardized that term in his "integral theory", and also I am insufferably type-4 and must be the most special-est snowflake, so I've taken to calling this "Envisionary Consciousness", for reasons that will become apparent in the video.

I'm also going to be discussing, among other things, Ian McGilchrist's work regarding hemispheric lateralization, the destiny of North American culture, the breakdown of masculinity in the modern world, and maybe also the Mantis people (do not trust the Mantis people. Nothing shaped like that can have good intentions)

Anyway, toodles 👋🏻😎 thanks for the being patient.

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2 months ago | [YT] | 443

Formscapes

Just got back from ‪@paricenter1532‬ in Tuscany. Absolutely fantastic trip and every person I met there was incredible. Alex, you're the man. The. Man.

Anywho I'm back home now and EPO5 is now in the works. How many episodes will there be in total, you ask? I have no idea anymore lol. Im just gonna keep the series rolling until I feel like I've told the whole story... so like alot, probably.

Cheers 🥂

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6 months ago | [YT] | 323

Formscapes

No, Mr Carlson, the moon is not an artificial alien spaceship. It "doesn't make sense" bc modern science attempts to look at it as a giant, lifeless rock, which is floating around another, slightly less lifeless rock.

The moon "doesn't make sense" because the moon is an organ of the organism that is the earth. Both of which are very much alive. The functions of that organ have been described and studied for all of known human history.

6 months ago | [YT] | 317

Formscapes

Recent interview with the LOTU posse

6 months ago | [YT] | 28

Formscapes

In an effort to branch out and expand my audience a bit, I've decided to give TikTok a shot. I'm skeptical, tbh, but regardless as to whether I continue using TikTok, the content I make for that will eventually become YT compilations, so we will see how it goes.
www.tiktok.com/@formscapes_astro/video/74951251852…

7 months ago | [YT] | 174