Criticism

[AshvinP]

I am ingoring your quote of Steiner, because we are discussing here what Cleric wrote to you and Ben. Who cares if it is "idealism anymore"? The question is whether it is true, not whether it conforms to any abstract intellectual theory. This is what Cleric keeps trying to tell you - if we want to have intellectual certainty that the arm can move before we try to move the arm, the arm will never be moved... and then we will continue claiming the "arm movement sect" is only making assumptions which could be wrong and therefore choosing to accept the reality of arm movement is a matter of personal preference. . It is you saying, "until we can experimentally verify that every arm is capable of being moved in every instance of someone attempting to move the arm, past, present, and future, we cannot reach any firm conclusions about arm movement". This defies all logic and reason, which may be OK if you deny the reliability of those things from the outset, but that is an even more extreme position than the Kantian divide.

Choosing to accept the reality of arm movement is a not matter of personal preference, but it is a matter of verifying this assumption against experience. Before it can be experientially verified (in 1-st person experience), it can only be an assumption (from this 1-st person perspective). Once experimentally verified, it becomes a proven fact regardless of 1-st-person personal preference.

But verifying that the arm can move is not enough to become a Spiritual Scientist, because SS is founded on the Steiner statement quoted above that can in principle never be verified experimentally and therefore is an unverifiable assumption.

The "arm movement sect" is clearly a metaphor to illustrate the underlying logic of what Cleric is writing and the flaws in your own logic. If you cannot understand even that we are using metaphors, on top of misrepresenting Steiner and SS (as if you have seriously investigated them enough to know what "SS is founded on"), then there is really no point in continuing...

[Cleric K]

Yes. Totally cognitive crack. I do wonder, since they haven't been around for long in our perceptual world, what kind of effect they have had on our situation since their introduction. Then again; They have been available to discover in Nature for a long time.

I would say at this time fractals work primarily in the aesthetic domain, in the sense Jeffrey speaks of it. They face us as something which rings some mysterious strings deep in us but our intellect simply works in completely different wavelengths at this time, and thus can't grasp this mysterious appeal cognitively.

The purely visual aspect of the fractals and their comparison with natural forms (like broccoli) is only the most superficial side of the story. Yet it is also the side that is grasped by the intellect. That's why at this time it's difficult to use fractals for metaphors of the structure of inner space, because they immediately produce purely spatial conceptions in the intellect. Thinking is in the blind spot and imagines some fractal spatial structures. Ultimately it comes to a point where it has to ask "OK, but what am I within this structure?" And we're once again up against hard problems.

To understand the deep nature of fractals we must understand things not only spatially but also temporally. Yes, the Cosmic Mind has temporal structure. The GR's block universe has something true about it as far as time is concerned, in the sense that from the highest perspective all states of being - past and future - exist as simultaneous potential. Where the GR picture goes astray is that is presents a picture of matter/energy and curved spacetime as the foundation of reality (which is really only abstract mathematical structure in the mind). In the case of reality this must be found as something living, in the way we find the meaningful relations between our own contents of consciousness.

Here's one example how we can use fractals as a metaphor for what we can experience in higher cognition. We know that the copies of the Mandelbrot shape are found everywhere along the filaments.



The bulbs around the main cardioid have specific orbital periods which reflect in the fact that different bulbs have filaments with different number of spikes. Above it's shown two small Mandelbrots, one taken from the filaments with three spikes, the other - with seven spikes.

Even though the Manelbrots look the same, we can see that one is 'made of' three-spikes filaments, the other of seven-spikes. If we zoom even more in the Mandelbrots, they have their own bulbs, their own filements but all of them are 'made of' those three- or seven-spikes respectively.

What does this has to do with consciousness? Let's build a metaphor. We can imagine that a single thought is like a small Mandelbrot. This thought may have some specific meaning, for example "one". Yet this thought never exists in isolation. Could we think this thought if we were not a human being with properly developed cognition? The thought always exists deeply embedded in Cosmic context. If we think the thought now and then again few seconds later, even though its meaning is generally the same (the shape of the Mandelbrot is almost the same) the context is different. Different filaments press into the Mandelbrot shape and give it its form.

Many things will become clear if we begin to pay attention that our thinking is always embedded into context. Of course, before we can pay attention to this, we must first pay attention that we at all think, and this is big enough challenge in itself for modern people. But assuming that we're conscious of our thinking metamorphoses, the next step is to become more and more aware of the conscious context. Only in this way we can gradually overcome abstract thinking. The phantom layer of the intellect is produced precisely when thinking hops from Mandelbrot to Mandlebrot but all of this exists as a floating layer of cognition, completely self-contained.

Ashvin spoke in his music essay about the liminal spaces. What we speak of here is practically the same thing. The space between thoughts is not empty, it's full of the contextual filaments. The meaning of the idea "one" is the same every time (in the same way we experience the same idea of the Mandelbrot shape when we see its different instances) but the thought-form (the Mandelbrot shape) is never absolutely the same. For example, if we are sad, we're in one type of context - say, four-spikes. Then if we think "one" it's the same general Mandelbrot shape but its 'made of' four-spikes. If we're happy, the same thought will be made of other number of spikes filaments.

The point is that gradually our consciousness should lift itself from the purely abstract. To live in the purely abstract is to hop from Mandelbrot to Mandelbrot, to arrange them in the most varied configurations and imagine the world-in-itself through these configurations. When we do philosophy, when we choose our ontological primes, it's like we're saying: "I'm taking this and this Mandelbrot shapes, I place them one here, on there. This is for me the world". So unwillingly we have once again drawn a picture of the Kantian divide as it manifests in its spiritual reality. Abstract thinking cares only for the general shapes of the Mandelbrots in which it experiences the general meaning. We move away from abstractness and approach reality when we understand that when we think the Mandelbrots, each on of them, even if having the same general shape (and thus reflecting the same general meaning/idea), the thought-forms exist deeply embedded into a spiritual context. We approach reality when we stop pretending that with our thoughts we exist in completely independent layer of reality, where we try to imitate the world through arrangements of Mandelbrots.

When we meditate in the way that is appropriate for today's developing consciousness, it is precisely the goal to gradually become aware of the liminal context by virtue of which the intellectual shape of the thought can at all exist. We pick the meaningful image for meditation and place it at the center of our consciousness. Initially it looks only like a Mandelbrot shape floating in vacuum, that is - abstract thought/image. But the deeper our concentration goes the more we begin to perceive the meaningful context within which the thought at the center exists. Our life situation, our spatial and temporal state, our feelings, goals and so on, they all form the filament web within which the Mandelbrot thought is embedded.

So that's the moral of the story. First we become aware that every time we think a thought - even if it reflects the same timeless idea - the thought-form is shaped by unique constellation of filaments. Normally we're completely unaware of this spiritual context. That's why thinking becomes abstract. Thoughts race in a phantom layer of cognition which it seems is completely opaque to reality. As long as we think within this layer our "I" feels to be completely disconnected from reality (or simply illusionary). When we grasp a thought and begin to concentrate our activity on it, around it begins to expand the living and unique context which presses into and gives the shape of the small Mandelbrot form. In this way thinking expands and we begin to understand in a panoramic way the invisible landscape through which we normally move. The great difficulty for imagining this, is that the landscape is not spatial but temporal. When we're conscious there, our moment 'now' expands and we understand the living ideas that unite a little more of the past and the future in a meaningful whole. The Imaginative panorama is not something that we build out of mechanically arranged Mandelbrots. It's the opposite - it's the living flow withing which the Mandelbrots are constricted. Interestingly, as the panorama expands we also sense the potential for all other Mandelbrots in the filaments. We experience cognitively the whole panorama but within it there is the potential to reduce it to small Mandelbrots. This is how Imaginative cognition is being translated into concepts that can be communicated - exactly in the way it's being done now. It is also the reason why Imaginations can be perfectly well thought through with normal thinking. When we experience livingly the small Mandelbrots, we're moving along the same filaments from which they have been initially extracted. In this way, through thinking we're touching our way through the invisible landscape and we gradually gain intuition of its 'geometry'. It's a powerful metaphor but not easy to grasp - just as the the filaments are 'made of' small Mandelbrots, so we can say that Imagination is not something that we grasp as a 'thing' but is the infinite variety of thoughts which can describe its inexpressible essence. Here we're touching upon a very fundamental mystery but I'll leave if for another time or the post will have to double in length.

Through this metaphor we can also see why mystical meditation (which dissociates from spiritual activity) remains sterile. It can live in the filaments through feeling but the thoughts (small Mandelbrots) simply dissipate and become no different than any other phenomena. Ultimately we're faced with impenetrable Imaginative wall, which we encompass with powerful religious feelings but the world of thoughts has no place in this state. The world of the filaments becomes not only religiously felt but cognitively known when we rise along the gradient of meaning, which shapes the context giving shape of the individual thought.

The same things can be explained with simpler words. The fractal concepts make great material for metaphors but in general they are too complex. The intellect becomes lost in the details of this complexity and forgets that it's all an image of higher order dynamics. For this reason we should use simpler metaphors at first. But when we break away from the phantom layer and begin to experience that our thoughts are only the tip of a spiritual iceberg, then fractals will find their renaissance.

Although I suspect the above metaphor might have been too abstract to follow by most, I hope that those who succeeded, can appreciate the way in which through transfigured thinking we must grow into the spiritual organism of reality, of which we otherwise experience only floating Mandelbrots against the background of perceptions.

[Cleric K]

Eugene,
I understand your concerns. Let's just mention that PoF (and later SS) do not rely on foundational assumptions. Yes, your Steiner quote really is presented as philosophical statement, which can be criticized in the way you do but it shouldn't be forgotten that in PoF we start from the givens. This doesn't mean that we can't make a step into something unknown (I'll elaborate below). But these steps are only in order to make the unknown known. In other words, the results of SS do not depend on the assumption that everything results from spiritual activity. Even if by some chance the spiritual scientist encounters part of the world content which is the true thing-in-itself, which can't be known from within, this won't invalidate anything of what has been discovered so far. For example, the structure of our spiritual organism (the bodily sheaths, the soul organs) are known experientially, just like we learn about the existence of thoughts and feelings. It's just that in our ordinary state we're too dissipated in order to gain consciousness within the regularities. If the absolute opaqueness of the thing-in-itself is confirmed in some miraculous way, this won't change in the least everything else that has already been discovered through direct experience. I'm saying this in order to make sure that you don't take SS as intellectual discipline which starts with its axioms and begins to build air towers on top of them. If that was the case - yes, your concerns would be justified because if the foundation cracks, the whole tower crumbles. But in PoF we're dealing with gradual expansion of consciousness. Even if what is beyond the horizon is still only an assumption, when the horizon widens it becomes a given.

Now this is actually at the crux of the matter. This transition between what is still unknown into becoming known. As I admitted in my previous post, the fractal metaphor there is quite complicated but it still can be understood. We're talking about the phantom layer of the intellect. I can place the metaphor here in more simple words. For example, thoughts can be imagined as islands in the ocean. On the surface they appear distinct. The mystic says "These islands are only floating fragments, I'm interested in the ocean within which they exist." Thus the mystic expands his awareness and lives in powerful feelings, in mystical contemplation of the ocean. But the islands are part of an archipelago. They have underwater structure. Actually the ocean can never explain the islands. Only the depths can. They are the context, the curvature of meaning within which the islands form. Just as the small Mandelbrots are shaped by their Imaginative context, so the islands can be understood only through the meaningful forces living in the depths of the archipelago.

The phantom layer of the intellect consists of attractions and repulsions of islands as seen above the surface. The more man had lost all sense of the fact that thoughts are part of reality, the more the "I" found its seemingly disconnected existence. Arranging islands above the surface is the abstract intellect.

Now what today is considered the highest ideal, is actually something completely unnatural. I'm speaking about the obsession with proof. Everyone today speaks of proofs. Even here in the forum people still hope that they can prove idealism and disprove materialism. This is simply a misunderstanding of what thinking is and what its role is. What we have in thinking is really perception of meaning. This meaning either grows into what has many times been called the harmony of the facts, or it diminishes and we find ourselves in confusion - everything floats around without any logic. This is really what thinking lawfully can do. Even in mathematics, the sense of truth of a given expression is the precise harmony of the arrangement of mathematical concepts. The idea that the phantom arrangements of thoughts can prove anything about reality is not grounded in experience. It's a possible meaningful construct but, as we've spoken many times, the fact that the mind can formulate some locally meaningful configuration, doesn't mean that it will integrate harmonically with the total picture. This is precisely the case with the obsession with proof.

What is the origin of this obsession? The origin is lawful. It's what every scientist knows subconsciously and what PoF speaks of. It's that to know the world it must become holistic meaning in consciousness. This healthy goal becomes distorted when thinking assumes that in the island view it is already in possession of the ultimate vantage point for understand reality. Since the islands are many, the only way they can become whole is to find universal principles which relate their attractions and repulsions. So science and philosophy seek the fundamental laws. This leaves the impression that all facts of reality should be reproducible from the laws. This is additionally fueled by the axiomatic nature of mathematics. So we see, the quest for knowledge has always sought one goal. But when it is assumed that the island view is the ground state from which the laws can be sought, all kind of paradoxes begin to emerge. Every paradox basically tells us one thing "check your assumptions!" And scientists very well know that. When the theory fails they go back and change the foundations, then try again. The problem is that they don't check the assumptions deeply enough. They completely refuse to check if the island view of cognition is up to the task.

We begin the investigation of reality not when we make a mockup of the world made of thought-islands but when we begin to investigate how the islands are formed from the spiritual archipelago. This is why science becomes spiritual science. We've been looking for reality in the wrong place - in the arrangements of islands that mimic the shapes of the world. Instead, reality is the very structure from which the islands are only the protruding parts. Obviously we need other types of cognition for this. We can certainly fantasize the archipelago through arrangements of islands above the surface but this keeps us above the water level, we don't see the archipelago-in-itself. And unwillingly we again described metaphorically the Kantian divide. To gain consciousness of the archipelago we need to find our own being there. We must find the deep, first-person perspective soul and spiritual processes which protrude above the surface and only there become our familiar thoughts of the intellect.

So the above is just an assumption for the mind living above the water and seeing only the islands. It wants proof. And this is where the ego doesn't really know what it wants. It's much like:

37 They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.”
38 “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said.

Yes, indeed. Very often we want things without knowing if they are at all compatible with reality. The proof that the ego demands can be found but not at the surface. The "I" must follow the Divine Word as it speaks forth the Cosmos. This is what the scientist secretly yearns for but looks for it on a level too low.

If we take a unprejudiced glance on how things work, we'll quickly see that practically nothing in our life proceeds in such a way that we first attain to perfect intellectual certainty in it and only then we make a step towards its reality. If that was not the case, a baby would never learn even a single word. If its consciousness wanted to first formally prove the consistency of language and only then step towards its acquisition, it would never learn even a single word. And this is true even in mathematics, which is otherwise considered the best example of axiomatic logic. Why don't we just teach first-graders set theory and let them generate from there all mathematics? Thinking simply doesn't work that way. Even if we have found axioms that can be seen to run like silver thread through any mathematical statement, it's still a fact that each theorem must be independently discovered and understood. Otherwise all mathematics would look like inexplicable amalgamation of sets. No arrangement of sets can prove, for example, that the concept of 'derivative' exists. We must discover this independently in order to make sense of (to imbue with meaning) certain patterns of sets.

Remember that thinking is not restricted in the phantom layer. We can think even about the archipelago, not abstractly but livingly. We do that when we say "If my thoughts are really only the protrusions of deeper cognitive reality, what does this mean for me? Not only as abstract speculation but what inner degrees of freedom should I seek if I'm to experience this in a real way?" Ultimately, with thinking we're probing our spiritual structure. A group of islands may seem completely independent but underwater they are part of a common ridge. This is the intuition that we gradually build when we think about these things in a living way. We begin to feel the curvature of meaning within which our thoughts, desires, will, flow.

The whole point of this (yet another long) post is to shaken the illusion that we can produce reality from the islands in the phantom layer. Even if they are ingeniously arranged, we'll still feel on 'our side' of reality - above the water level. The confidence is built not through clever proof-arrangements of abstract islands but when we expand the directions into which our thinking flows. The more we probe reality with our thoughts, the more we build intuition of its meaningful geometry. That's also how the child learns language. This is a much more literal truth than it may seem to be the case. Nature speaks to us from all sides but we refuse to imitate her speech. If the child refuses to imitate the speech of its parents, it will never learn not only to speak but also to think. By following with our thoughts, the curves of the archipelago, we learn something about Nature's thought-shapes. Yes, it is little insulting that we, grown people, should learn to speak like babies but this is what evolution is. We are always in the middle. There are beings in comparison to which we're old men, and others in comparison to which we're not even babies.

We can't construct higher order thinking out of arrangements of intellectual thoughts. That's why it's also impossible to prove it within the intellect. Any arrangement of intellectual thoughts leads to another intellectual thought. We need other inner gestures if we're to move perpendicularly to the surface. But this doesn't in the least mean that there's no gradient between the surface in the depths. This is what the harmony of the facts really leads us into. The more we understand metaphors such as the ones presented here, the more we feel how things click into place from the most varied directions. We almost begin to feel as if we can touch the things that are being spoken of. And gradually they become so substantial that we practically see them. We say "I now see what I've been moving through all this time".

[Martin_]

What philosophers call the absolute, the eternal being, the ground of the world, what the religions call God, this we call, on the basis of our epistemological studies: the idea. Everything in the world that does not appear directly as idea will still ultimately be recognized as going forth from the idea.

Eugene, can you source that please. I'm curious where and more importantly when he wrote it.

[Cleric K]

Eugene, can you source that please. I'm curious where and more importantly when he wrote it.

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/En ... index.html
Chapter IX: Goethe's Epistemology
1883

[Martin_]

Eugene, can you source that please. I'm curious where and more importantly when he wrote it.

https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/En ... index.html
Chapter IX: Goethe's Epistemology
1883

tyvm

[JustinG]

Also note that Cleric literally said "everything in the soul-realm results from the spiritual activity of beings" and not "everything I have experienced in the soul-realm results from the spiritual activity of beings". Guys, you need to be clear and consistent with what you are stating, otherwise you will only confuse people by changing you claims every other post.

Eugene,

I think it's helpful (it was for me at least) to bear in mind that PoF can be read and appreciated without having to unquestiongly accept Steiner's claims about the 'supersensible'. Steiner himself says this in the Preface:

Steiner wrote:
The course of this demonstration is so conducted that for anyone who is able and willing to enter into these arguments it is never necessary, in order to accept them, to cast furtive glances at the experiences which my later writings have shown to be relevant.

Also, I think the writings of existentialists can be a useful antidote to tendencies to regard Steiner as almost omniscient or more than human. Berdyaev's crtique of Theosophy and Anthroposophy (http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_l ... _252b.html) is worth looking at, as is Kafka's brief but hilarious description of his meeting with Steiner (https://anthropopper.com/2014/11/26/fra ... f-steiner/) :

Kafka wrote:
He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all, entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger in each nostril.

[AshvinP]

Also, I think the writings of existentialists can be a useful antidote to tendencies to regard Steiner as almost omniscient or more than human. Berdyaev's crtique of Theosophy and Anthroposophy (http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_l ... _252b.html) is worth looking at

Thanks for sharing this, Justin. It is very interesting and I can definitely understand where the critique is coming from. I think the main issue, though, is that we take the resources at our fingertips for granted now. People in 1916 would not have access to the hundreds of lectures Steiner gave that we have now transcribed for us in English, which in itself is an immeasurable blessing that we hardly pay attention to today. And in these lectures the love of Steiner for the Wisdom of God and man alike really is impossible to miss. Here is one of many examples:


https://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/LovWld_index.html

Our egoism gains nothing from deeds of love — but the world all the more. Occultism says: Love is for the world what the sun is for external life. No soul could thrive if love departed from the world. Love is the “moral” sun of the world. Would it not be absurd if a man who delights in the flowers growing in a meadow were to wish that the sun would vanish from the world? Translated into terms of the moral life, this means: Our deep concern must be that an impulse for sound, healthy development shall find its way into the affairs of humanity. To disseminate love over the earth in the greatest measure possible, to promote love on the earth — that and that alone is wisdom.

What do we learn from Spiritual Science? We learn facts concerning the evolution of the earth, we hear of the Spirit of the earth, of the earth's surface and its changing conditions, of the development of the human body and so forth; we learn to understand the nature of the forces working and weaving in the evolutionary process. What does this mean? What does it mean when people do not want to know anything about Spiritual Science? It means that they have no interest for what is reality. For if a man has no desire to know anything about the nature of Old Saturn, Old Sun, Old Moon, then he can know nothing about the Earth. Lack of interest in the world is egoism in its grossest form. Interest in all existence is man's bounden duty. Let us therefore long for and love the sun with its creative power, its love for the well-being of the earth and the souls of men! This interest in the earth's evolution should be the spiritual seed of love for the world. A Spiritual Science without love would be a danger to mankind. But love should not be a matter for preaching; love must and indeed will come into the world through the spreading of knowledge of spiritual truths. Deeds of love and Spiritual Science should be inseparably united.

Love mediated by way of the senses is the wellspring of creative power, of that which is coming into being. Without sense-born love, nothing material would exist in the world; without spiritual love, nothing spiritual can arise in evolution. When we practise love, cultivate love, creative forces pour into the world. Can the intellect be expected to offer reasons for this? The creative forces poured into the world before we ourselves and our intellect came into being. True, as egoists, we can deprive the future of creative forces; but we cannot obliterate the deeds of love and the creative forces of the past. We owe our existence to deeds of love wrought in the past. The strength with which we have been endowed by these deeds of love is the measure of our deep debt to the past, and whatever love we may at any time be able to bring forth is payment of debts owed for our existence. In the light of this knowledge we shall be able to understand the deeds of a man who has reached a high stage of development, for he has still greater debts to pay to the past. He pays his debts through deeds of love, and herein lies his wisdom.

It's also telling that we pay so much attention to the way in which someone writes or speaks or looks or conveys information, as if that personal configuration gives us deep insight into their ideas. It is as if we don't trust our own Reason to judge the ideal contents on their own merit. A feeling I am familiar with is the feeling that one is coming into contact with too much Wisdom and needs to offset it somehow. "This is really profound but making way too much sense right now... I think maybe my mind needs an 'antidote' which gets it back in line". I am really not being facetious here - that is the exact feeling I have had often when reading Steiner. The more we realize it is not about the personality who conveys the ideal content but how that content manifests to our own living Reason - the eternal transpersonal Spirit working within us - the more we see how that is only the intellectual ego speaking when its existence is threatened.

[Eugene I]

Also, I think the writings of existentialists can be a useful antidote to tendencies to regard Steiner as almost omniscient or more than human. Berdyaev's crtique of Theosophy and Anthroposophy (http://www.berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_l ... _252b.html) is worth looking at, as is Kafka's brief but hilarious description of his meeting with Steiner (https://anthropopper.com/2014/11/26/fra ... f-steiner/) :

Thanks for the links, I used to read Berdyaev but didn't know about that critique. Interesting that in one of his responses to the Anthroposophist N. Turgenyeva during that dispute he wrote about exactly the same problem that I spotted (sorry for poor translation from Russian):

In the Anthroposophy movement I can see a danger of transforming it into a gnostic sect with all typical features of sectarian psychology and with a lack of "breathing with the world's air" [it's hard to translate this idiom literally].

He is spot on. One of the features of sectarianism is rigidity and intolerance to anything even slightly different from a rigid set of the views of the sect.

[AshvinP]

Kafka wrote:
He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all, entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to consider an aid to strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his nose, one finger in each nostril.

I really love this anecdote from Kafka, but I am also really frustrated he didn't share the response! Perhaps the author is correct:

Can we make a guess at what else Steiner had said to him? It seems probable that Steiner realised that Kafka’s life would be a short one and that in his remaining time he would need to focus as much as possible on his writing. We may surmise that Steiner told Kafka to concentrate on literature above all else.

PS - maybe these comments should be split off into another thread?