Change in appearances is merely a transformation.

Kant

Critique of Pure Reason is trying to explain how we experience change without experiencing the world as total chaos. The sentence sounds abstract because Kant uses the word “substance” in a very technical way. By substance, he means something enduring, something that persists through change. Not necessarily a mystical substance, but the idea that there is “something there” that remains while its properties alter.

You see a tree in summer with green leaves. Later you see the same tree in autumn with yellow leaves. Later again, the leaves are gone. What changed? The color changed. The shape changed. The state changed. But Kant says we experience these as alterations of one persisting thing. The tree remains the underlying object while its determinations change.

So when Kant says “all appearances of the temporal sequence are collectively only alterations,” he means that what we call change over time is usually not the coming into existence of entirely new reality from nothing, nor complete disappearance into nothing. Rather, something enduring persists while its states change successively.

Water freezes into ice. A child becomes an adult. Iron rusts. A fire burns wood into ash.

The appearances differ across time, but the mind organizes this as transformation of something persistent. This matters enormously for experience. Imagine if consciousness did not assume persistence underneath changing appearances. Every moment would feel like an entirely disconnected universe. You could never identify “the same object” across time. Kant thinks the mind automatically stabilizes experience by presupposing enduring substance beneath alteration. So when you watch a candle burn, you do not experience reality as “one universe vanished and another unrelated one appeared.” Instead, you experience one thing undergoing successive modifications.

This also links directly to causality. Once the mind assumes persistent substances undergoing alterations, it can connect states lawfully.

The wood was dry. Then it was ignited. Then it burned. Then it became ash.

The mind interprets this as ordered transformation of enduring reality through causal sequence. Without persistence, causality collapses because there would be no stable entities connecting one moment to the next.

At a deeper level, Kant is describing a structural feature of human cognition. Consciousness does not merely register isolated snapshots. It synthesizes continuity. It binds changing perceptions into enduring objects moving through lawful transformations in time. This is adaptive and necessary for functioning. A creature unable to track persistence through change could not navigate the world coherently. You could not recognize faces, remember places, use tools, or predict consequences.

What is philosophically strange is that we cannot easily tell whether persistence belongs to reality “in itself” or whether persistence is partly a way the human mind organizes experience. Kant leans toward the second position. The mind contributes continuity and substance structure to appearances so that a stable world can appear at all. So when Kant says temporal appearances are “only alterations,” he means that experience presents reality as ongoing modification of enduring structures rather than absolute creation and annihilation at every instant.

Between Biological Adaptation and Philosophical Reflection

The perceiver is one local activity within reality itself.

The organism evolved inside a specific environment and therefore experiences a world shaped for action within that environment. In that sense, perception is not a neutral mirror of reality. It is more like an interface shaped by survival pressures. A nervous system that failed to carve the world into relatively stable objects, boundaries, threats, tools, and agents would not coordinate behavior effectively enough to persist.

So when you see a “solid object,” this may say less about the ultimate structure of existence and more about the kind of creature you are. The brain evolved to compress overwhelming flux into manageable forms. It turns turbulence into chairs, predators, faces, roads, and bodies. The world of experience is therefore not arbitrary illusion, but adaptive simplification.

First Thunder Then Lightning. The Second Analogy

The mind automatically imposes continuity, sequence, and causality onto experience.

Kant in Second Analogy of Critique of Pure Reason is trying to solve a very deep problem. He asks how we can tell the difference between merely seeing one thing after another in our mind and actually understanding that one event caused another event in the world. When we observe the world, we notice that events happen in sequence. One thing appears, then another thing appears afterward. But simply seeing two events one after another does not automatically tell us that the first caused the second. For example, you might see lightning and then hear thunder. Or you might see a ball hit a window and then see the glass shatter. Your senses only give you a sequence of perceptions. First this, then that.

The problem is that time itself is not directly visible. You do not literally see causality with my eyes. You only experience changing perceptions inside consciousness. Because of this, the imagination could arrange perceptions in different orders. A sequence alone does not yet prove an objective connection in the world. To move from subjective sequence to objective knowledge, the mind must apply a rule. That rule is causality. The understanding assumes that certain events must follow others according to lawful necessity. The shattered glass is not merely something that happened after the ball struck it. It is understood as the effect of the impact. The earlier event determines the later one.

Kant’s point is more radical. Cause and effect are not simply read passively from the world like labels already attached to things. Rather, the human mind actively organizes experience through the concept of causality. Without this structure, experience would collapse into disconnected flashes with no stable order. So when we say that something happened, we already assume more than raw perception. We assume lawful succession. We assume that events unfold according to necessary relations. Without that assumption, there would be no coherent experience of an objective world at all.

Kant is also connecting this to his earlier idea of substance. Things do not pop in and out of existence completely. Instead, enduring substances persist while their states change. A tree loses leaves. Water freezes. A person ages. The underlying thing persists while its properties alter over time. Change is therefore understood as alteration of something enduring, not creation from nothing or disappearance into nothing.

The hidden psychological point is important. Human consciousness does not experience reality as pure chaos because the mind automatically imposes continuity, sequence, and causality onto experience. The organism needs this stability to navigate the world, predict danger, and survive. A mind that experienced only disconnected sensory fragments would not function for long. What philosophy later calls “objective reality” already arrives filtered through structures that make action possible.

What if scientific research and philosophy are just another way to play survival?

Once you see this possibility, philosophy and science begin to look less like activities floating above life and more like specialized human adaptations within life itself.

A scientist who discovers important truths gains not only understanding but also status, influence, institutional power, resources, recognition, security, legacy, mating value, and symbolic immortality. A philosopher may gain authority, followers, cultural influence, prestige, intellectual territory, or psychological orientation. Even the pursuit of “pure truth” occurs through organisms embedded in competition, institutions, incentives, reputations, and survival pressures.

This does not mean scientific findings are false or philosophy is meaningless. That would be an oversimplification. A theory can be objectively useful or accurate while the humans producing it are simultaneously driven by ambition, insecurity, curiosity, fascination, or status competition. Motive and truth are not identical categories.

For example, Isaac Newton revolutionized physics while also being intensely competitive, secretive, and status-conscious. Arthur Schopenhauer produced profound philosophy while being deeply concerned with recognition and resentful toward rivals. Friedrich Nietzsche attacked herd psychology while simultaneously constructing an intellectual identity of radical distinction. Human cognition rarely escapes entanglement with human drives.

Knowledge itself is extraordinarily adaptive. Better prediction means better survival. Understanding weather, disease, social behavior, agriculture, physics, or psychology increases control over uncertainty. An organism capable of modeling reality more effectively gains leverage. In evolutionary terms, intelligence is not detached contemplation. It is strategic advantage.

Even abstract philosophy may indirectly serve survival functions. A coherent worldview can stabilize identity, reduce anxiety, organize behavior, strengthen group belonging, justify suffering, or increase social prestige. Intellectual systems are not merely collections of ideas. They are often psychological and social technologies.

This is why some thinkers become suspicious of claims to “pure objectivity” or “pure transcendence.” Humans often imagine themselves standing outside the system while still operating inside it. The philosopher denouncing ego may still protect a philosophical ego. The spiritual teacher condemning worldly ambition may still compete for influence and admiration. The scientist pursuing truth may still crave recognition and legacy.

At the same time, reducing everything entirely to survival strategy also becomes too narrow. Humans sometimes pursue understanding even when it harms comfort, status, or security. Scientists risk careers challenging dominant paradigms. Philosophers become isolated pursuing unpopular ideas. Artists destroy themselves trying to express something true. Curiosity itself appears to become partially autonomous in humans, no longer reducible to immediate survival payoff.

So perhaps the most accurate picture is layered. Understanding is both. It is genuinely directed toward reality and simultaneously embedded inside biological, psychological, and social machinery. Humans seek truth, but humans also seek orientation, leverage, meaning, continuity, influence, and symbolic survival through truth.

What Can Be Called an Awakening?

It is a momentary disruption of automatic mental continuity. Most people move through life inside layers of routine perception, internal narration, memory, anticipation, social role, and practical concern. Occasionally something interrupts that flow and the organism suddenly experiences the raw fact that existence is occurring at all. That can feel shocking, uncanny, grounding, frightening, or strangely vivid.

Realizing that there’s something is actually more honest than many polished spiritual formulations because it avoids pretending that the person suddenly understands reality. They do not. They simply encounter the fact of existence more directly for a moment. The experience is primitive and immediate before theories rush in to explain it.

Where we should become cautious is when one moves from this psychological interruption to metaphysical certainty about God, existence, or awakening. The experience itself is real as experience. Humans genuinely can shift from absorbed automaticity into heightened existential awareness. But the interpretation placed on top of that experience is another matter. One person calls it God. Another calls it consciousness. Another calls it derealization, awe, existential cognition, or nervous-system interruption. The raw event and the narrative explaining the event are not identical.

A deeper skepticism here is valuable. Humans often take a powerful subjective experience and quickly universalize it into ontology. The mind feels something profound and then assumes it has discovered the structure of reality itself. But the organism is capable of generating intense experiences without those experiences necessarily functioning as proofs.

At the same time, we should not dismiss the experience as meaningless. These interruptions can loosen the tyranny of habitual mental narration. They can briefly expose how much of ordinary life runs mechanically through repetition, social scripting, anxiety loops, and practical autopilot. In that sense, Gurdjieff’s “self-remembering” points toward something psychologically observable. Not transcendence of animal existence to kind of spiritual awakening but temporary interruption of cognitive momentum.

Ironically, even this “awakening” remains deeply biological. The nervous system momentarily shifts attentional mode and the world feels newly present. One does not escape the organism. One experiences a different configuration of the organism.

The accidental "awakening" reveals something tragic about human consciousness. Humans can notice existence itself, become astonished by it, philosophize about it, and then five minutes later return to emails, hunger, status concerns, irritation, or distraction. The existential shock rarely stabilizes because organisms are built primarily for functioning and survival, not for permanent metaphysical astonishment.

Higher Beings Eating Lower Beings

The organism dictates the use of reason more than reason dictates the organism. The bitter irony is that humans often call themselves “higher beings” precisely while constructing conditions that make them less capable of peace than the animals they consider lower. The organism that names itself supreme is also the organism most capable of torturing itself through abstraction.

What do many hierarchical spiritual systems quietly smuggle in through the back door? They begin with an observation about human automaticity, habit, sleepwalking, compulsion, and fragmentation, which is often perceptive, but then they transform this into a metaphysical caste system where “ordinary people” become unfinished beings and the teacher becomes the representative of a higher mode of existence. That move deserves scrutiny.

George Gurdjieff was brilliant at observing mechanical repetition in human life. People often do run on conditioned loops, social imitation, emotional contagion, routines, fantasies, and unconscious drives. Modern psychology, neuroscience, and even ordinary observation support much of that. But where things become questionable is when this observation hardens into the claim that ordinary human life is somehow “less than human,” while another elite form of existence becomes the true human destiny.

A turtle example cuts directly into this hierarchy. A turtle is not a failed human. A turtle is a successful turtle. Its nervous system, perception, metabolism, and behavior evolved around a particular ecological strategy. Likewise humans are not “fallen angels” compared to some mystical ideal. Humans are organisms with recursive cognition, symbolic language, narrative identity, and social abstraction. That brings both power and pathology. The same nervous system that can produce philosophy can also produce anxiety, shame, self-hatred, and existential paralysis. A turtle does not spend thirty years constructing an internal courtroom against itself.

This is where a point about reason becomes important. Many traditions quietly exaggerate the sovereignty of reason or consciousness. They speak as though once one “awakens,” reason takes command of life like a king ascending the throne. But experience suggests something closer to what Baruch Spinoza described. Reason is not an emperor standing outside causality. It is one force among others inside the organism. It can reorganize emotions, redirect impulses, widen perspective, and reduce unnecessary suffering, but it does not float above biology, conditioning, drives, embodiment, and survival pressures.

Even the desire for reason is itself part of the organism’s structure. A person does not independently choose to become rational from nowhere. Temperament, upbringing, stress, social environment, cognitive capacity, trauma, opportunity, and biology all shape what kind of “reason” becomes possible. In that sense, the organism dictates the use of reason more than reason dictates the organism.

One should also examine the social ecology of these teachings. Early twentieth-century European spiritual circles often catered to educated, relatively affluent people experiencing cultural dislocation, boredom, or existential emptiness after industrial modernity and war. Telling such audiences that they are “asleep” but potentially capable of higher being is psychologically potent. It wounds the ego and flatters it simultaneously. First you are degraded as mechanical, then elevated as a candidate for awakening. That creates both dependency and aspiration. Many systems operate through this double movement.

At the same time, Gurdjieff was probably responding to something real. Humans often live in contradiction. One part of the mind wants stability while another wants novelty. One part wants honesty while another protects self-image. One part wants freedom while another fears uncertainty. His language of “sleep” dramatized this fragmentation. But dramatization can become mythology. The danger begins when metaphor is mistaken for cosmic fact.

Did a growth sequence commission!  You can find the images on my lewdblog here:  https://capracaboose.tumblr.com/post/180632930806/flat-color-growth-sequence-commission-for