Criticism

[JeffreyW]

Ok. 2nd try.
the Intellect gave us separations such as "E", etc.
It was Reason which recognized the unity in "E=mc²"
as per quote from Steiner:

The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations — because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements [ 52 ] — and reason recognizes the unity.

The fact that it was done in a domain of extremely abstract thought forms that might not be particularly meaningful to most of us, does not mean it wasn't Reason which unified them.

Martin,

I think it's fair to say Reason is what was working through Einstein to perceive a higher-order unity between the fragmented concepts of E, m, and c. But as Cleric said, this is still held by him as an abstracted equivalence. After all, it's not as if Einstein was the first person to experience what the "E" symbol is representing. In fact, he was perceiving it much more dimly than people living 2000 years earlier, if he was perceiving it at all. It helps to think of concrete perception as discernment of living processes (as in processes which are occurring within you now) in the conceptual unities while abstraction perceives ever-more dead and decomposing 'things'.

Ironically, it is that abstraction of "Reason" which makes it very difficult for us to understand or connect to our immanent perception. That is what led to the Kantian divide, when the latter is understood as an actual reality of living processes becoming dead things in our cognition. Then there appears to a be a disconnect between abstract representational thought-perception (including Reason) and higher spritual sight. That is why we don't perceive the continuity between Reason and higher order cognition such as Imagination. And so Eugene claims Cleric is excluding everyone without spiritual sight from participating in genuine knowledge, because of his own assumption of cognitions as abstracted and dead things in the world, which creates the apparent discontinuity.

Eugene, JW, BK, and many others are trying to find the continuity of cognition within the abstract representations, where it will never be found, instead of within the higher order spiritual processes from which the representations go forth. Those processes weave together through a world consisting in what we broadly refer to as "imaginations", "inspirations", "intuitions", "ideals", "purposes", "morals", and even more generally, "meaning". These must be understood as concretely as possible - in terms of our immanent desires, feelings, and thoughts which precipitate from our experience of their meaning. A simple analogy is going from a horizontal view of the world in 'front' of us to a bird's eye view of the world 'below' us - the underlying meaning of this analogy is what we should hold on to (not the abstract pictures).

It is only from that spiritual perspective we will find the concrete continuity of all modes of cognition, and the first, and perhaps most important step, to attaining it is realizing we don't already have it.

If you think I’m trying to find anything in abstract representations, you haven’t understood anything I’ve written.

[AshvinP]

If you think I’m trying to find anything in abstract representations, you haven’t understood anything I’ve written.

I am not saying this is your conscious philosophical method (anymore than it was for Kant). Rather, I am saying you have not thought to look in the place where the Reason-Imagination continuity will be found for the same reason as him. From the perspective of abstract conceptual thinking, there is quite clearly a discontinuity, but there is no warrant to assume this is the only perspective from which we can observe temporal phenomena such as Thinking and Music (and there is really no such thing as non-temporal phenomena, i.e. there is no individual note apart from the melody). You (and Kant) were using very sound philosophical reasoning from a flawed assumption, and the only place for sound reasoning to go from that [implicity subject-object dualist] assumption is to the conclusion that the fragmented perception (note) is more real than the overarching temporal idea (melody), the latter only discernible via Reason and higher order cognition. So if the temporal strcuture which Reason discerns is concluded less real than the fragmented perception (or Rovelli's "emptiness of emptiness"), then it makes great sense to conclude Reason is taking us further away from the underlying reality. That is the only sound conclusion to reach. But all of that issues forth from the flawed assumption at the outset.

The other issue is, I am trying to explain all of this to you in abstract concepts, because that is all I am really capable of doing now. It's like a piano trying to explain to another piano how an orchestral symphony comes into being. So here's another approach - read the below from Cleric and tell us if you have honestly thought of aesthetic musical phenomena in the way he is illustrating it. If not, why not? Where is the flaw in the logic? Do you really think it issues forth from someone stringing together abstract metaphysical concepts about "idea" and "thinking"? If so, we need actual arguments for why, not just a blanket dismissal or references to some scientist's abstract intellectual theories.

When you're having a musical idea, what faculty of your being are you using? What are you doing in order to produce the melody? Would you agree if we call this a kind of Thinking? Instead of speaking forth philosophical words, you speak forth music. It's very interesting to observe how we can speak forth our own singing (inner) voice but we can also sing with the voice of a guitar, viola, drums, etc. We can even sing a whole symphony. These are all degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity.

Now what if I tell you that reasoned thoughts are only aliased sounds of higher order music, yet music that is very richly meaningful? What if all those aesthetic arts and music in particular are only the shadow of this higher order language? In fact we feel joy in music because it secretly speaks to us about a higher world where this music is actual meaningful speech.

So please pay attention that you know music and any aesthetic and mystical art only because you can follow its curvature with your spiritual activity. When you listen to music it entrains your activity along with it (in the same sense that written text entrains your thinking). You can experience the opposite effect when you create the music with your own activity. Then your musical idea entrains the sound-thoughts. To say that these modes of spiritual activity are unreasonable/a-reasonable tells me that you seek to replace them with conceptual thinking. This of course makes the music disappear and you say "There! Music is unreasonable!" Here we should simply not mistake reasoning with reducing. We can think about melody, harmony, rhythm, precisely because our thinking lives in the music. We simply recognize the spiritual gestures that we perform when we think music. Similarly, when we move our body our thinking lives in the will. We can speak of our different body parts and their gestures because we live in them cognitively. When I can't draw my hand through a wall I experience that in the cognitive element. Concepts are only thinking precipitations from all these forms of thinking. We can think in color, sound, touch, smell, feeling, will. After all, we think primarily in sound - it's our inner voice - it is sound.

Everything is reasonable because concepts originally precipitate from meaningful reality. This means that when we contemplate the arrangement of the concepts they will be seen as logical. Logic is the higher musicality of thinking. Things become misunderstood because this arrangement of concepts can take on its own life. Then we can arrange concepts which are not necessarily taken from reality. They are local reality but not one extracted from the world content. Seen in this way everything is known by Thinking - not by words but by moving along the curvature of color, sound, will. Thinking is versatile. It's not something concrete but it's the spiritual activity which similar to the octopus can resonate with every phenomenon by mimicking it. So music has its logic, color has its logic, smell has its logic. All these logics are part of even higher order logic. In order to understand this we must overcome our desire to extricate everything into abstract thoughts into the phantom layer. Then if we are criticizing higher cognition, we're most certainly criticizing our own inability to think in color, sound, feeling. Everything collapses in the phantom layer and then we blame Steiner and others that they do the same. In other words we're saying "If I can't do it, no one else can, so anyone claiming higher order spiritual activity is a liar".

[JustinG]

Eugene, JW, BK, and many others are trying to find the continuity of cognition within the abstract representations, where it will never be found, instead of within the higher order spiritual processes from which the representations go forth. Those processes weave together through a world consisting in what we broadly refer to as "imaginations", "inspirations", "intuitions", "ideals", "purposes", "morals", and even more generally, "meaning". These must be understood as concretely as possible - in terms of our immanent desires, feelings, and thoughts which precipitate from our experience of their meaning. A simple analogy is going from a horizontal view of the world in 'front' of us to a bird's eye view of the world 'below' us - the underlying meaning of this analogy is what we should hold on to (not the abstract pictures).

It is only from that spiritual perspective we will find the concrete continuity of all modes of cognition, and the first, and perhaps most important step, to attaining it is realizing we don't already have it.

OK, this sounds fantastic, but then why is it that those esoteric initiates who claimed to attain the higher cognition and the knowledge of the higher-order spiritual processes, such as Steiner, Goethe, Cleric, could not get any sensible knowledge from those higher domains other than vague descriptions of the "curvatures of meanings", and bizarre ideas about Atlantis, supremacy of Germanic nation, Zodiacs, blood pumping itself, Willows curing arthritis, and no clues of any actual knowledge of the processes of the natural world? I think it would be very natural to ask such people: if you claim to have any supra-natural abilities of clairvoyance and knowledge of higher-order truths, then prove it. If you can prove it than we might believe you, otherwise, sorry, nice try.

I'll jump in here. I think that Wolfgang Schad's 2 Volume work Understanding Mammals (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Ma ... 0932776639), which is written from a Steinerian perspective, makes a valuable contribution to biology. IMO biology in academia is a conceptual shambles at the moment and this work, from what I've seen so far, is part of the process of improving this situation.

On the other hand, when Ashvin makes assertions of a sociopolitical nature such as those against 'blanket policies of any sort, targeted at materialistic desire, but conjured up with little thought and imposed on the population under the guise of "environmental protection"', the same rigour which he uses for philosophical argumentation and phenomenological description needs to be applied.

These sort of statements need to be explained and justified. If such assertions rely on knowledge of hidden spiritual forces obtained through Steinerian practices and therefore cannot be justified through philosophical discussion (which, incidentally, probably means that Steinerism entails theocracy and is incompatible with democracy), then perhaps they could be translated into a Hegelian framework or something similar. Alternatively, unsubstantiated sociopolitical assertions could be avoided altogether.

As Eugene says Anthroposophy is "a mixed bag and a critical approach is needed'.

[Eugene I]

I'll jump in here. I think that Wolfgang Schad's 2 Volume work Understanding Mammals (https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Ma ... 0932776639), which is written from a Steinerian perspective, makes a valuable contribution to biology. IMO biology in academia is a conceptual shambles at the moment and this work, from what I've seen so far, is part of the process of improving this situation.

Sure, many successful scientists have various beliefs outside their profession. I know a theoretical physicist from Harvard who is Orthodox Christian, but he never claims that his religious practice gave him any special deeper knowledge of the laws of the natural world. With SS the situation is different: they actually claim to attain higher knowledge, but alas, can not prove it, which raises suspicions that they might be self-deluded. This does not mean that higher knowledge and the world of higher-order meanings does not exist, I actually think it does. It's just that noone in the human history was able to demonstrate and prove any "privileged" access to it so far, even though people had and have intuitive glimpses into it. It is veiled from us, and I think there is a reason for that.

[AshvinP]

On the other hand, when Ashvin makes assertions of a sociopolitical nature such as those against 'blanket policies of any sort, targeted at materialistic desire, but conjured up with little thought and imposed on the population under the guise of "environmental protection"', the same rigour which he uses for philosophical argumentation and phenomenological description needs to be applied.

These sort of statements need to be explained and justified. If such assertions rely on knowledge of hidden spiritual forces obtained through Steinerian practices and therefore cannot be justified through philosophical discussion (which, incidentally, probably means that Steinerism entails theocracy and is incompatible with democracy), then perhaps they could be translated into a Hegelian framework or something similar. Alternatively, unsubstantiated sociopolitical assertions could be avoided altogether.

No, I do not rely on any spiritual sight to make those assertions (because I don't have it). I rely mostly on 20th century history and my own experience within the U.S. federal legal system. I see first hand the devastating unintended (or semi-intended) consequences of these policies. But it does all relate deeply to Steiner's philosophy of Thinking we are speaking of. The authorities of various nations, whether through desire for power, status, greed, pride, convenience, out of ignorance and arrogance, or generally a combination of all those things, are trying to reduce complex and living phenomena (such as human social behavior) which they do not understand into abstract rationalistic calculations and formulations in search of some Utopian ideal. That rationalism is presupposed in just about every large-scale policy one can think of today. None of that is to say more targeted, thoughtful, and spiritually-minded policies can't be enacted. Steiner himself outlines such policies in his book, The Threefold Social Organism, which was quite prophetic as well. The living principles underlying our democratic republic, with 'separation of powers' between legislative, executive, and judicial, and checks and balances between them, were very wise. It is the failure to deeply understand and evolve these principles in alignment with our own cognitive evolution which causes all the problems.



https://wn.rsarchive.org/Books/GA023/En ... eface.html

Anyone approaching the social problems confronting us, with Utopian ideas, is by that very fact rendered incapable of understanding these problems. Personal views and feelings as to the value of particular solutions are likely to lead a person astray. This would be true even with a perfect theoretical solution that someone might try to press upon his fellow men. It is simply because public life can no longer be affected in such a way.
...
Modern man has evolved a spiritual-cultural life that is to a great degree dependent on state institutions and on economic forces. While still a child, the human being is brought under the education of the state. Furthermore, he can be educated only in the way permitted by the industrial and economic conditions of his environment.

One might easily think that this would result in a person's being well qualified for present-day conditions. One could believe that the state can arrange education (the essence of the spiritual-cultural side of public life) in the best interests of the human community. Further, one might suppose that to educate people to fill available jobs in their environment was the best thing that could be done both for them and for society.

It devolves upon this book, an unpopular task, to show that the chaotic condition of our public life comes from the dependence of the spiritual-cultural life on the state and on industrial economy, and further, that the setting free of spiritual life from this dependence is one part of the burning social question.
...
This is the content of the first part of the book. The spiritual life did mature to freedom within the framework of the state. But it cannot now rightly enjoy and exercise this freedom unless it is granted self-government. It must become a completely independent branch of the body social, with the educational system under the management of those who are actually engaged in the teaching. There should be no interference from the state or industry.
...
The “social question” is not something that has just cropped up, nor can it be solved by any handful of people or a parliament — and stay solved. It is a part of our recent civilization and it has come to stay. It will have to be solved over again for each moment of the world's historical evolution. This is because man's life has entered on a phase in which something that starts by being a social institution turns again and again into something anti-social, and has in turn to be reconstructed.

A human or animal body, having been fed and satisfied, passes again into a state of hunger. Likewise does the body social go from a state of order again into disorder. There is no universal remedy for social conditions any more than there is a food that will permanently satisfy the body. But men can enter into forms of social community which, through their joint action will bring man's existence constantly back into the social path. One of these is the self-governing spiritual-cultural branch of the body social.
...
Thus the body social falls into two independent branches, able to afford each other mutual support owing to the fact that each has its own administration and management. Between these two must come a third. This is the true “state” branch of the body social. Here all those things find a place that depend on the combined judgment and feelings of every person of voting age.
...
In the free spiritual-cultural life, everyone is active in line with his special abilities. In the economic, each person fills the place that falls to him as a result of his connection with the rest of the associative network. In the political state-life of rights, each comes into his own as a human being. He stands on his simple human value. This has nothing to do with his abilities in the free spiritual life and is independent, too, of whatever value the associative economic system may set on the goods he produces.

Hours of labor and working conditions are shown in this book to be matters for the political rights life, for the state. Here everyone meets on an equal footing, because the activities and functions of control are limited to fields in which all men alike are competent to form an opinion. This is the branch of the body social where men's rights and duties are adjusted.

The unity of the body social will come into being out of the separate, free expansion of its three functions. In the course of this book it is shown what form the energies of capital and of the means of production as well as the use of land can take under the joint action of these three functions of the social organism.
...
The ideas in this book have been won from the observation of life. It is out of the observation of actual life that they ask to be understood.

[Cleric K]

Ok. 2nd try.
the Intellect gave us separations such as "E", etc.
It was Reason which recognized the unity in "E=mc²"
as per quote from Steiner:

The intellect causes the separation of the individual configurations — because they do indeed confront us in the given as individual elements [ 52 ] — and reason recognizes the unity.

The fact that it was done in a domain of extremely abstract thought forms that might not be particularly meaningful to most of us, does not mean it wasn't Reason which unified them.

In this sense - yes. Maybe it's simply better to look at things as rhythmic process of analysis and synthesis. This is iterative process. The intellect analyzes, reason synthesizes. My point above was to guard against imagining that the synthesis of E=mc² is the final step and leads directly to some "True Concepts". In fact, in itself it would lead to a dead end. It must be analyzed again and then synthesized in a higher form.

For example, we already have the concept of God/One Consciousness/Absolute/Idea and so on. This is certainly some kind of synthesis. But still, in our current thinking this synthesis can not reach the perspective from which the world indeed is seen as manifestation of the Idea. In other words, our thinking idea of the Idea might be fractally similar to it but is not yet the full Cosmic reality of the Idea. Otherwise we would be able to see (not theoretically but as the actual process) how the World proceeds from the small idea in our mind. We can indeed see partially how the world proceeds from the Idea but we need the higher forms of consciousness.

So evolution proceeds in iterative fashion. We synthesize towards the Idea but there's something imperfect in this synthesis. It still doesn't make perfect sense of everything. Then we bounce back and analyze again, then we synthesize again. Ideally, every iteration leads to more complete consciousness of the Idea. We can see this metaphorically in the plant. The plant synthesizes the seed. It packs its being there. Yet this synthesis is not yet the Idea in its all encompassing nature. So the seed analyzes again, which leads to growing, differentiating. From the process a new synthesis, new seed is extracted. This is an image of the incarnational rhythm, embedded into the even larger evolutionary rhythms. We continually try to synthesize the Idea of the Cosmos. This continues after death, although no longer in purely intellectual thinking. Instead, our whole being is the manifestation of the living idea that we try to synthesize. We reach up to a point where we can no longer make greater sense and then the World begins to grow again from the Idea-seed that we are. We analyze the Idea into a World and try to extract from it a more perfect seed, which can make perfect sense of the World.

[Cleric K]

It should be clear already that all four geometries exist only as eigen bases onto which the intellect can project its thinking. Reality doesn't operate through any such geometry.

OK, so, there is a “harmonious unity” of high-order Intuitive/Imaginative ideas that govern the reality ( including the sense-perceptory world) (the “time-domain ifdeas”), and there are lower-level abstract ideas formed by the intellect that attempt to describe the world but unable to do it properly due to its lower-level character (“Fourtier-tranfrom domain ideas”), and so the latter not belong to the “harmonious unity” of higher-order ieas. And Reason is a faculty of higher cognition that is able to attain clairvoyant insight into and the knowledge of the unity of higher-order world of ideas. I’m sure that this is clearly wrong and Kantian-divide dualistic because any non-initiate like me has no way to get it right, but I hope it at least roughly describes what you are saying.

Well, what to say? The attempts to know the ultimate truth has been humanity’s endeavor throughout all its history. Philosophy, science, religions, spiritual practices (dual or non-dual, Western, Eastern or Indigenous), poetry and art. Neither of them got it right, they all just spinned around in different areas of abstract ideas of lower cognition, all in vain, just rarely being able to get some intuitive glimpses of the higher-order meanings. Eventually, through the work of Goethe and Steiner a breakthrough was achieved into the realm of the unity of higher-order beings and harmonious ideas governing the world that we, lower-level beings, perceive through our senses. With our low-level cognition we can only intellectually speculate about the truths of that realm using abstractions, it’s only through the development of the faculties of Intuitive and Imaginative Reason-Thinking and through esoteric initiation attainable in the order of Anthroposophy where we can gain the true knowledge of these higher-order ideas. Goethe and Steiner were some of those initiates, Cleric is the other one.

But how do we know if the ideas they perceive actually are the true high-order ideas governing the reality and not a result of their self-intoxicating imagination or a manifestation of their personal or group sub-conscious beliefs? The adepts of SS will tell us that the only way to know it is to actually practice it, to develop the high-order Reason, Imaginative and Intuitive abilities and to know these ideas through direct perception by these higher-order faculties. Once you perceive the true high-order meanings, you will know they are true. OK, but are there any other criteria to somehow verify that this knowledge is actually relevant to reality and not just another product of human subtle self-confirming intuitive imagination? Well, let’s look at what knowledge Steiner brought us from the realms of higher-order ideas. There are plenty of them, for example, the knowledge about Atlantis, about ethnic supremacy of Arian and Germanic nations, about Zodiacs governing our life on Earth. Any other breakthroughs into the knowledge of the world of natural phenomena? Did he attain the knowledge about big bang or black holes, or elementary particles, or QM or GR prior to their discovery by science? Or could he explain why the natural phenomena always follow exactly the QM Shroedinger or GR equations? Nope, that’s too abstract, not for clairvoyants, they see much deeper. May be biochemistry, immunology, human biology? Sure:

I understand that SS and Steiner are hot topic, evoking emotions along the full range of the spectrum. That's why I've always tried to speak directly from experience, in the same way one can speak and others can understand Pythagoras's theorem, without mentioning his name.

In order not to irritate people with n-page posts I'll try to be shorter, at the risk of sounding incomplete or even cryptic.

In situations like these it's of no use to try and convince anybody of esoteric facts. Unless the nature of thinking is grasped, it is all counter-productive. It'll just provoke throwing around mud, trying to connect SS with the Nazi agenda and what not.

I spoke in the previous posts about the obsession with proof. This is something that can be realized only if one is willing to undo all preconceived ideas and see what is really given. At what point the intellect became obsessed with proof? When it became locked into its own abstract loops. When it climbed on the tree and cut the branch. When it drew a chalk circle around itself and postulated that it needs proof for stepping outside it. The Greeks used thoughts but it would have been nonsensical for them to prove the reality of the soul (psyche). They were not naive, it was just that the soul was still reality for them. They argued whether the soul has its seat in the brain or the heart but didn't argue if the soul exists. That latter arguing began much later when the "I" was driven in the completely abstract layer of thinking. Now the "I" began to question everything - even its own existence. The "I" reduced itself to intellectual activity. Everything else is uncertain.

Once the "I" has driven itself into a corner it becomes possible to fall into the obsession with proof. But this is completely unwarranted. Anyone can verify this if they're willing to. What is it in the given that gives us the confidence that the structure of reality should be derivable from combinations of abstract thoughts? This is the elephant in the room. The blind assumption on which the whole modern scientific endeavor rests. Man has become intoxicated with his own intellectual self-importance and now demands that the world should be derivable from abstract mineral concepts. It is as simple as that. And any attempt to explain it more than this, will simply obscure what is self-evident with thought-noise and provide hooks for the conversation to go astray into the non-essentials.

The given doesn't tell us anything about proofs, let alone that reality is created on basis of intellectual ideas. What we find in the given is thinking which lives in the harmony of the facts. Thinking reveals the musical consonances and dissonances of meaning. Thinking perceives meaning. The assumption that thinking, as we find it today, is in position to recreate the Cosmos from its abstracted concepts is something completely artificial.

Imagine that you receive your 'proof' of SS. Someone comes along and shows you something, I don't know what... apparatus maybe, and says "See, this apparatus can be explained only through SS". But this is simply nonsense. Immediately several people will provide mental models that can approximate the same behavior of the apparatus, without involving soul and spirit. They'll speak of energy, information, etc. Even further than this, it will be shown that all these models are equivalent because fundamentally everything can be reduced to universal computation. It will be the same if the model of reality is presented in lambda calculus, as a Turing machine, as string theory and so on. Ultimately everything remains abstract thoughts in the mind. No matter how ingeniously these thoughts are recombined, they remain within its layer.

As a matter of fact it would be catastrophic if someone would try to prove SS in this way. This would be precisely what we know from the scriptures as false prophets who through miracles mesmerize the masses. Make no mistake. A 'proof' will leave people exactly as they are. In fact, it will make them even more fanatical. Then they'll begin to fight in the name of their false prophet (because there will be many more than one). This would be the absolute negation of SS. It would the catastrophic abolishment of freedom. Actually this is the key to freedom - one attains to truth only by free activity. What is attained to through compulsion can never be the truth. And proof is compulsion. It is not the result of the spirit finding greater degrees of freedom but being forced into a framework. Proof tells you: you have no right to think in any other shape but in rectangles. That's what I tried to point out about PoF. One doesn't understand PoF if he feels that he's been provided a box in which he must enter and ignore all other boxes. We only understand it when we discover ourselves as a spiritual being which through thinking creates boxes and locks itself in them.

Think about it. Imagine that tomorrow you're presented with a proof that Christ exists and is the Lord of humanity. This wouldn't at all make you happy. In fact, it will be the greatest misery. You'll just shake your head and say "Well, what you're gonna do... I'll be a slave for all eternity. My dream for freedom has been proven impossible". See, such an external 'proof' would be the greatest curse. It won't lead to unity but to irreconcilable duality. The small "I" will forever carry the feeling of suppressed rebellion in its heart. We should be grateful that such a proof is not possible!

Truth is not something that can be attained to by intellectual thinking. Any proof is just a new arrangement of concepts that in themselves say nothing about the reality of the wider context. The only way we can move towards something that is principally different, is by exploring the forces that lie at the foundations of thinking. Only in this way we can break the vicious loop within the phantom layer.

These forces are not somewhere out there in a remote world to which only Initiates have access. There's only one world. The frequency domain is not somewhere out there. We're always in the middle. Ideas in the frequency domain, perceptions as the space-time domain. Thinking is the place where these meet. Higher cognition is not a privilege of the elite. In fact, it's practically free. It's immeasurably more expensive to go to Harvard. So it's useless to turn things around and make discrimination accusations. The only thing preventing us to understand our spiritual nature is we ourselves. Everything else is only excuse.

The intellectual ego has become intoxicated. It wants to feel as the top-level authority. This is why things are being misunderstood continuously. The intellect wants to deal only with things that are smaller than itself. When it thinks about planets and galaxies, it imagines them as marbles, such that they can fit in the mind. It wants to understand the Divine in the same way. It imagines that it can fit the Divine in its abstract concepts. This is really the great rebellion of the intellectual ego. It refuses to acknowledge that the phantom game into which it has become entangled is only a crystallization of a higher order process. This doesn't mean that one must throw away the intellect. Not at all. This is what the mystic does. As a result he loses both the intellect and the higher order cognition because he remains in the middle ground where the higher world can only be felt but not known. Thus the wait for death begins.

I'll finish by repeating that at the root of all hard problems is the fact that the intellect pretends to be a top-level knower. It wants to grasp everything, including itself only as marble-symbols which it can throw around. It abstracts itself from reality and wants to know the world and itself from a third-person perspective, which is above all. So the first step is humility. We must understand that we're always in the middle. What the intellect thinks is not its totally free and original creation. Unless we feel that we're flowing within streams of higher nature, the intellect will always pretend to be above all. This is additionally fueled by modern ideas of 'pure consciousness' and the like. This simply gives the ego carte blanche, to hide in the blind spot and feel as master of the universe. From that perspective it considers thoughts, feelings, desires and itself, only as marbles within consciousness, while the ego secretly fantasizes to be the container of all. Unless we realize that it's not enough to recognize the elements of soul life as marbles in consciousness, but instead our conscious aperture is being carried by these streams, we'll never attain to self-knowledge and the Guardian at the Threshold will remain hidden in the background.

Thinking is not restricted in the loops of the intellect. Thinking moves along the full spectrum. Thinking is humble. Thinking can address what is higher than itself and which cannot yet be grasped as a marble. To understand doesn't mean to dominate and enwrap marbles in the mind. Thinking can understand what is greater than itself but it needs virtually unknown in our days scientific attitude. It is humble openness towards that within which we exist. This has been said before: to approach higher cognition it's not a matter of inflating the ego in order to engulf reality as conceptual marbles. It's not what we think about the higher worlds but to experience how they think us.

[Eugene I]

Thinking is not restricted in the loops of the intellect. Thinking moves along the full spectrum. Thinking is humble. Thinking can address what is higher than itself and which cannot yet be grasped as a marble. To understand doesn't mean to dominate and enwrap marbles in the mind. Thinking can understand what is greater than itself but it needs virtually unknown in our days scientific attitude. It is humble openness towards that within which we exist. This has been said before: to approach higher cognition it's not a matter of inflating the ego in order to engulf reality as conceptual marbles. It's not what we think about the higher worlds but to experience how they think us.

Cleric, I'm talking about simple question that everyone involved in any spiritual practice should ask him/herself first of all. Especially when there is a question whether a specific spiritual practice or group is a sect or is it a healthy tradition. The question is: does what I'm believing, perceiving and experiencing have any relevance to reality or is it mostly a product of my individual mind/imagination/unconsciousness? You gave a bunch of reasons to avoid asking this question. And this is a red flag as this is typically what sectarians do: they convince the adepts not to question and verify the validity of their beliefs and spiritual experiences. One very common argument is: it is only your ego or rational intellect that is asking these questions. Almost every sect: Jehova's, Pentecostals, Osho, Adida, Scientology, you name it, employ this strategy.

The more I learn and read about Anthroposophy the more I'm convinced that this is a typical sect/cult. Steiner did have valuable philosophical and spiritual insights, especially in his early works like PoF. As a philosophy it is a legit version of gnostic idealism and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. But over time the movement transformed into a cult (just like Berdyaev predicted), and seems like Steiner contributed to it himself at later periods of his life when he claimed to be an initiate with clairvoyant abilities and access to higher knowledge.

Destructive sects: Anthroposophy
Anthroposophy and Ecofascism

As Oliver describes his experience being into Anthroposophy:
"Critical thinking was [portrayed as] the body of the Devil. If you were critically thinking, the Devil was inside your head. So, you can not critically think, you just have to read [listen/believe...]"

One feature of cults is their persistent proselytism, they are typically active on expanding their organization, going door-to-door (like Jehova's), or active on internet forums and resources promoting their belief system to convince and recruit new members. This is clearly what's happening on this forum as well.

[AshvinP]

or is it mostly a product of my individual mind/imagination/unconsciousness?

What does this even mean? Do you have any non-dualistic explanation for this in bold? Cleric is trying to explain to you what your own terms mean within a unified Reality, using the concept of "phantom layer" of abstract thoughts, but you appear not to be even reading what he is writing, given the rushed timing, poor quality, and unending repetitiveness, consisting mostly of irrelevant ad hominenem assertions, of your responses.

[Eugene I]

or is it mostly a product of my individual mind/imagination/unconsciousness?

What does this even mean? Do you have any non-dualistic explanation for this in bold? Cleric is trying to explain to you what your own terms mean within a unified Reality, using the concept of "phantom layer" of abstract thoughts, but you appear not to be even reading what he is writing, given the rushed timing, poor quality, and unending repetitiveness, consisting mostly of irrelevant ad hominenem assertions, of your responses.

Spiritual experiences do not only involve abstract thoughts of the "phantom layer", but they involve all kinds of intuitive, perceptual and imaginative phenomena. People involved in spiritual practices and meditations know it very well from experience. An experienced and sober practitioner usually take them with a grain of salt before jumping to believe that they have anything to do with large-scale transpersonal reality and not just a product of his personal or group's conscious/subconscious activity.

An SS practitioner/initiate perceives subtle imaginative/intuitive perceptions, but they believe these perceptions are in fact the high-order meanings of the Unified Idea. They convinced themselves based on the belief system they adopted. So, it's circular self-confirmation leading to self-deception: when they are convinced they are perceiving the higher-order meanings (based on their belief), it further confirms their belief system telling them that they can indeed perceive the high-order meanings in their direct experience. Every cult member will tell you exactly the same: I know that my beliefs are true because I experience high-level realities in my spiritual experience, and these experiences prove to me that my beliefs are true. But they do not realize that it's the other way around: it's their beliefs that confirm their experiences, not experiences that confirm their beliefs. The fact that many members of the same group may have similar experiences also cannot be a confirmation, because they all share similar "confirmation biases".

Let's take an example: Steiner by exercising his high-order cognition was able to perceive a meaning of the human blood and perceived the idea that "blood pumps itself". He was convinced that he was indeed perceiving a higher-order idea, but obviously such nonsense was a product of his own personal imagination. He failed to critically examine his experience. Moreover, I think this was a consequence of his belief in his own clairvoyant abilities and his special mission. Once he convince himself that he possesses these supra-abilities, he then believed that every one of his spiritual intuitions is actually the perception of the absolute-level high-order ideas of the ideal unified reality.