Understanding Steiner's Philosophy

[AshvinP]

Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.

Ashvin.

I really like this paragraph and it could be used to illustrate one of my ecological biases, which is that to grok a forest one does not only ascend to the atmospheric dynamics above it (like climate, etc) but one must descend to the underworld of soil beneath it to grok its interconnectivity as a single organism. However, it raises as well a deeper problem, namely that orchards and tree plantations are NOT forests, which are much fuller expressions of the glories of God than managed landscapes or crop systems.

Thanks. I should have mentioned, in the context that was taken from, it was meant to be a metaphor for the task ahead of humanity, which is to explore the 'fruits' of inner experience. We must become psychonauts in addition to cosmonauts. Modern science, in that way, is another instinctive grasp at Cosmic understanding (i.e. the Fall) and, for true understanding, we need to make a more conscious descent into the soul. We will never find ourselves, our own W-F-T activity, in only the outer reflections and their principles. That is what is needed the most now - to find ourselves in the World Content. I will likely add a section to make it more explicit.

[Lou Gold]

Ashvin.

I really like this paragraph and it could be used to illustrate one of my ecological biases, which is that to grok a forest one does not only ascend to the atmospheric dynamics above it (like climate, etc) but one must descend to the underworld of soil beneath it to grok its interconnectivity as a single organism. However, it raises as well a deeper problem, namely that orchards and tree plantations are NOT forests, which are much fuller expressions of the glories of God than managed landscapes or crop systems.

Thanks. I should have mentioned, in the context that was taken from, it was meant to be a metaphor for the task ahead of humanity, which is to explore the 'fruits' of inner experience. We must become psychonauts in addition to cosmonauts. Modern science, in that way, is another instinctive grasp at Cosmic understanding (i.e. the Fall) and, for true understanding, we need to make a more conscious descent into the soul. We will never find ourselves, our own W-F-T activity, in only the outer reflections and their principles. That is what is needed the most now - to find ourselves in the World Content. I will likely add a section to make it more explicit.

OK. Perhaps the soul lingo is becoming more balanced between ascent and descent. Know hope.

[Güney27]

Hallo Ashvin,
first i want to say that i don't know much about steiner's philosophy and my questions are not to criticize but to try to understand what steiner has to say.
i'll start by giving my understanding of the key points. Steiner says that we add thoughts to our perceptions (the impressions given by sense organs, colors, sounds, shapes...). When we see a tree, all we see is a shape with specific colors.
Only through our thinking do we add a term to it, in this case tree. The thinker and the one who perceives the thoughts are the same. Steiner interprets decrates in that he interprets that I exist in the sense that I bring forth the thoughts myself.
Also, thinking is neither subjective nor objective.
It generates these concepts and transcends them. Thinking and perception together are cognition, for thinking bestows perception with an ideal content. So knowledge is our own activity which makes sense of our perceptions. Questions that arise for me: what is a thought? A term that points to a certain consciousness content? Why are the thinker and the perceiver the same? In many Eastern teachings, thinking and perceiving are separate, why does Steiner claim the opposite? How does the thinker create concepts? where do the thoughts come from What are the objects of our perception? If our perceptions are not representations, then what are they? The thing in itself ? Why does our thinking change when we change the physical brain state? That and some other things I didn't read out of the scriptures.
Best wishes

Guney,

I understand. Criticism, clarification, both, or neither is all fine by me. I am going to take this opportunity to address a few different themes which will address your questions, but also the questions behind the questions. We have come across these questions so often that I can discern some patterns underlying them and I think addressing these patterns will u ltimately be the most fruitful way forward.

1) Many times our questions are presupposing a conception of reality that has not been established. As the earlier quote indicated, for ex., the materialist-dualist will ask, "how does the world get into my brain for me to perceive it?" He doesn't realize a flawed dualist conception of reality is presupposed in the question. Many questions on this forum surrounding the PoF approach are of this same nature, except the dualism has been moved within the sphere of the mind, so we need to pay attention for that. Often times it manifests as an assumed dualism between "thinking" and "awareness", "thinking" and "experience", "world as I represent it" and "world as it really is", or something similar. Fundamentally, it is still a dualism of subject/object, world "in here" vs. world "out there".

"In many Eastern teachings, thinking and perceiving are separate, why does Steiner claim the opposite?"

2) Exactly. That is the dualism I am speaking of. I highly recommend you read Cleric's latest post (of many) on this topic here. There is no warrant for treating them as fundamentally separate activities, which is inevitably how they are treated when only understood as isolated intellectual concepts. I find it really helps to understand the spiritual evolution of humanity over the last few epochs (3,500 years or so). "Spiritual" here means our inseperable Willing-Feeling-Thinking activity, which for our purposes here can be called, our Perceiving-Thinking (Matter-Spirit) activity. I am going to post an excerpt from an upcoming essay on this topic.

Humanity's inner thought-life was not always the way it is today. There was a time when ideas and meaning were more concretely perceived 'behind' the natural forms and processes of the world. Man himself felt his identity to be much more bound up with Nature and the collective he belonged to. The outer world and inner world were much more interwoven to the extent that there was practically little "inner" life to speak of. As the meaningful activity permeating the Cosmos became more and more inwardized within the individual human soul, there was a cultural 'big bang' across all cultures from ancient China and India to Persia and Greece. Mythology, religion, art, and philosophy were born as the cultural reflections of this changing relationship of Spirit-Matter within the human soul. We see this imaged in the ancient Egyptian myth of Osiris, who was chopped into little pieces. That was the decoherence of ancient participatory consciousness into rational thought-fragments. Then we have the birth of Horus with his All-Seeing Eye, who reflects the birth of the thinking individual himself. It is the image of the individual's synthetic gaze by virtue of its thinking.

We then have the deeply meaningful mythological and philosophical developments in ancient Palestine and Greece, all tied to the growth of the individual's inner thought-life and, consequently, the civic sovereignty accorded to the individual.

3) Many questions on this topic try to isolate claims here and there and understand them in isolation. That simply isn't possible. The nature of Reality and our participatory role in it can only be evaluated in the holistic context. When I first read PoF, I found that often I could mentally note things I didn't understand and keep reading, and later I would intuit the resolution to my confusion after perceiving more of the holistic context. For ex., all your questions related to "what is a thought" or "where do they come from" can only be understood in the holistic context of how we build up knowledge from observation and thinking. These questions also tend to presuppose dualistic view which asks from a 3rd-person non-existent perspective, and perhaps regards spatial dimension as fundamental as well (which it cannot be under idealism).

4) The quote before also indicated that the text of PoF itself has a polar relation between the first half and second half. I actually never thought of it like that until I came across the quote. It is accurate, though. For our purposes here, the first half is phenomenology and the second half is ontology. In other words, appearance and reality. The first half deals with how the world content confronts us in our first-person experience. It is not speaking to the 'absolute reality' of perception and cognition. It is starting from where we are now in spiritual evolution, i.e. we perceive a world of perceptual content external to ourselves which presents itself as a given, i.e. pre-existing our thinking, and then our thinking comes into motion to find the concepts which unite the perceptions into coherent wholes of experience.

We must come to really inhabit this process as our own first-person thinking activity. For that, I am going to share an exercise Cleric posted awhile back.

As said, we need nothing but livingly experienced thinking in order to make the proper observations. Here's a very simple but tremendously effective exercise. Look around and take some object. The more familiar, the better. Try to find something new about it, something you've never noticed before.





I try to pay attention to my cognitive process, I try to be aware of what I'm doing in my consciousness. And I make many observations. I see that the paint is peeled. I actually become aware that this pencil is in fact a piece of wood that has paint on it. Yes, it's super elementary fact but I've never thought about it. Then I notice that these peelings have longitudal shape, they are like lines. They are not strictly parallel to the edge of the pencil's hexagonal shape but seem to go slightly diagonally. I can go on and on.

Now just consider this. Moments ago I only had some generic perception and the concept 'pencil'. Then through my consciously willed thinking activity I found a way to attach a ton of other concepts - wood, paint, peeled, longitudal, hexagon, worn out, etc. All of these concepts are meaningful ideal content. They tell me something about the perceptions that I behold, and allow me to relate it to many other concepts. For example I was thinking what could I have done with this pencil such that these longitudal and slightly twisting peeled streaks have formed. I don't know. Maybe it has something to do with the way I repeatedly put the pencil in the pencil case. Maybe I have used it while I've been doing carpentry and it got damaged - I don't remember. Yet there's a whole world of ideas that I can link to by starting from these observations.

This is very simple and straightforward exercise. I invite everyone to try it. The experience may surprise you. I have perceptions and through my deliberate spiritual activity I've come to experience a ton of other concepts/meanings/ideas, which simply wouldn't be there unless I attempted this exercise. In the most phenomenological sense, through my thinking I have attached concepts to the perceptions belonging to the pencil. I'm not speculating what may be lying behind my thinking and behind this attaching process. I'm interested in the immediate spiritual experience - I have visual perceptions and through my thinking I came to experience the above mentioned concepts in relation to them.

So that is probably enough for now. To quickly give answers to the final questions - we don't need to try and categorize what perceptions are, in their essence, as if studying some object in our backyard. In fact, that endeavor is guaranteed to lead us astray, because no such neutral observer perspective exists. We only need to understand how they function in our own first-person experience. We are perceiving an array of constantly changing content - colors, sounds, smells, shapes, etc. - and we unite them through meaningful concepts. I think maybe this additional excerpt from upcoming essay could help:

Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.

Thanks Ashvin
for the detailed answer.
1. Isn't a dualistic perspective on the world the one we all start with? Even as children we have the feeling of being someone who perceives the world out there.

2. non dual mystics have non dual experiences in which they believe they are at the origin of everything. They were the entire universe. This is a knowledge from the respective experiences. But maybe they are just one level of consciousness among many. But don't we have a dualism here if there are hierarchies in the spiritual spectrum? I suppose these spiritual realities are not places outside of the body according to clerik, as in many naïve conceptions.

3. What do you mean by holistic context? I perceive the environment and thoughts structure my perception through concepts. This is how I get knowledge about things through the symbiosis of perception and thinking. How does this fact explain the origin of my thoughts. Babies don't think either, it only develops as they get older. Would it be wrong to conclude from this that thoughts are something man-made, not an entity that exists independently. There was a time in my life when I couldn't think.
Doesn't that mean that our thinking is a phenomenon that only develops through people and is not our original activity.

Kind regards

[Güney27]

Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.

[/quote]


Is it right to say that thoughts project meaning to observation?
Tree growth by water would still be there without thoughts projected by humans or I am missing something

[AshvinP]

Thanks Ashvin
for the detailed answer.
1. Isn't a dualistic perspective on the world the one we all start with? Even as children we have the feeling of being someone who perceives the world out there.

2. non dual mystics have non dual experiences in which they believe they are at the origin of everything. They were the entire universe. This is a knowledge from the respective experiences. But maybe they are just one level of consciousness among many. But don't we have a dualism here if there are hierarchies in the spiritual spectrum? I suppose these spiritual realities are not places outside of the body according to clerik, as in many naïve conceptions.

3. What do you mean by holistic context? I perceive the environment and thoughts structure my perception through concepts. This is how I get knowledge about things through the symbiosis of perception and thinking. How does this fact explain the origin of my thoughts. Babies don't think either, it only develops as they get older. Would it be wrong to conclude from this that thoughts are something man-made, not an entity that exists independently. There was a time in my life when I couldn't think.
Doesn't that mean that our thinking is a phenomenon that only develops through people and is not our original activity.

Kind regards

Guney,

Thanks for the responses.

1) We certainly grow into a dualistic thinking-perspective on the world. It is the rational intellect which becomes dualistic. There is no dualism necessarily in distinguishing our "I" from the World Content, but from failing to perceive any living connection between our inner life and the outer world. For ex., we reflexively have desires, feelings, and thoughts in response to sense-perceptions, but mostly we never stop to reflect on that feedback process. If we do stop to reflect, mostly we think of it as a mechanical interaction taking place, i.e. we conceive of it most abstractly and reductionistically. So the process of overcoming dualism is also the process of understanding the way in which our outer and inner worlds inform and complement one another, through lawful and living activities. We can begin this understanding with our intellectual reasoning, but eventually we need to expand the sphere of our perceptions. For ex., we have subtle bodies, as do many beings around us, and the Earth itself, which we simply don't perceive now. Higher cognition will begin to reveal these subtle bodies to our Imaginative vision. We cannot really conduct spiritual research for ourselves until we can expand the spectrum of perceptual content to consider.

2) True, the spiritual reality is non-spatial and not something outside of us but within us. I think #1 also addressed your question here. Dualism always relates to our understanding of the living processes we are perceiving and participating with. Not purely abstract understanding, but the way I begin to understand the living power of fire if I hold my hand to the flame.

3) A way to consider it is that you are asking a spiritual scientific question here - "what is the origin of my thoughts?" Let me give you the purely intellectual (philosophical) answer first - Thinking-Thoughts are fundamental and eternal. They never essentially come into existence within the Cosmos or go out of existence. It is the Power behind the manifestations of our first-person spiritual activity. That activity is our triune Willing-Feeling-Thinking activity. Humanity as a whole only fully incarnated the eternal Ego-"I" who Thinks within the physical organism around 2,000 years ago. Human individuals also incarnate the Ego after several years of life.

In my experience, this answer will have little, if any, meaning to someone who has not first built up the holistic conceptual foundation of our spiritual nature and its evolution. If we are still considering spatial dimension and linear time as fundamental, it definitely will not register. In addition to finishing PoF, I think you may want to consider reading Cleric's essay on the Time-Consciousness Spectrum. That was extremely helpful for me. It is true that inner thinking activity which interfaces with the physical sense-world only comes to express itself through humanity, but the human individual is not essentially a physical organism either, in our materialistic conception of "physical".

Our essential Thinking is non-physical and is expressed through the Logos principle which fashioned the entire Cosmos, including all the forms we perceive around us. These forms have become mineralized in our perception into what we call "physical" forms. In reality, they are embedded within more spiritualized and fluid processes. The only reason we hesitate to use the word "logical" in connection with natural forms/processes is because we have abstracted most of the meaning out of Nature and her appearances, but they do in fact unfold according to a logical and lawful structure (think about logic in math and how natural processes can be mathematically modeled). We are even at risk of abstracting out the logical structure of cultural forms today, but it's at least more evident how structured ideational activity led to all of our cultural institutions and technology. If we perceive some portion of that continuity of meaningful structure between cultural and natural forms, we have then imbued our reasoning with more abundant life of the Logos principle.

[AshvinP]

Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.

Is it right to say that thoughts project meaning to observation?
Tree growth by water would still be there without thoughts projected by humans or I am missing something
[/quote]

I think it's important we all recognIze how mentally habituated we are to the materialist paradigm, where perceptions of things out there preexist our thoughts, which come later and are added on top of what's already there. But, based on your previous comments, I am not sure whether you have already decided you can have confidence in metaphysical idealism, or whether you remain open to materialism-dualism? Depending on that, my response will be quite different. For now, consider this from PoF:

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

[Güney27]

Imagine you are in an orchard among many different trees, with oranges, apples, peaches, and fruits of all kind. They are of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. When you pick them and take a bite, they are of all different tastes as well. Each fruit stimulates a slightly different tincture of tastes on your palette. You are enjoying the fruit, but every next bite gives a new meaningful experience; new knowledge for your soul to in-corporate. Every new fact of experience creates new desires, new feelings, new thoughts, and new perceptual associations between them. You must begin differentiating between 'good' fruit and 'bad' fruit. Eventually, you are involved in a staggering complex of fruit-experiences. To make sense of them, you must reason your way back to the meaningful qualities they all share in common. You must work back from the manifold experiences to the fruits which gave rise to them, from the fruits to the leaves, the leaves to the branches, and the branches to the roots. Unlike your instinctive grasp at the fruit above for personal pleasure, you voluntarily descend to the roots below in full consciousness for shared understanding. You arrive to the meaningful principles which unite the experiences, like the human cultivation of orchards, tree growth by water and sunlight, planting of trees, and tree development from seeds.

Is it right to say that thoughts project meaning to observation?
Tree growth by water would still be there without thoughts projected by humans or I am missing something

I think it's important we all recognIze how mentally habituated we are to the materialist paradigm, where perceptions of things out there preexist our thoughts, which come later and are added on top of what's already there. But, based on your previous comments, I am not sure whether you have already decided you can have confidence in metaphysical idealism, or whether you remain open to materialism-dualism? Depending on that, my response will be quite different. For now, consider this from PoF:

It is quite arbitrary to regard the sum of what we experience of a thing through bare perception as a totality, as the whole thing, while that which reveals itself through thoughtful contemplation is regarded as a mere accretion which has nothing to do with the thing itself. If I am given a rosebud today, the picture that offers itself to my perception is complete only for the moment. If I put the bud into water, I shall tomorrow get a very different picture of my object. If I watch the rosebud without interruption, I shall see today's state change continuously into tomorrow's through an infinite number of intermediate stages. The picture which presents itself to me at any one moment is only a chance cross-section of an object which is in a continual process of development. If I do not put the bud into water, a whole series of states which lay as possibilities within the bud will not develop. Similarly I may be prevented tomorrow from observing the blossom further, and will thereby have an incomplete picture of it.

It would be a quite unobjective and fortuitous kind of opinion that declared of the purely momentary appearance of a thing: this is the thing.

[/quote]

First of all I want to apologize for my late response
I was very busy this weekend.


Let's start
I'm not a materialist, neither an idealist.
I have read Bk books (why materialism is baloney, The idea of ​​the world, Science ideated, Brief peeks beyond and more than allegory) but I disagree with his view. His books (except for more than allegory, which I highly recommend) are in the realm of metaphysical speculation.
He reduces the entire mysterious of existence to blind, unreflective subjectivity. An extreme reductionism. Also, his philosophy has no practical side, which I don't think should be the case.
Philosophy should not be in the realm of theoretical thought, but practical and provide the reader with first-hand knowledge. We shouldn't form a philosophy, e.g. to explain the hard problem(panpsychism, idealism,pamcomputationalism, physicalism.....), but to get closer to the truth.
I pretty much rule out materialism because of the big problems like intentionality or the hard problem. I don't rule out idealism if it has a practical side that shows its reality. I just haven't found one until now.
I also have a keen interest in near-death experiences, and believe that a philosophy must explain this phenomenon (in the full spectrum, not explain away). I've been working in the field of philosophy for years, but the theoretical knowledge is no longer enough for me.
I would like to be able to recognize practically how goethe did it. The whole theoretical knowledge brought me nothing in the end.
PS: Would it be correct to say that thoughts perceive ideas?
Kind regards

[AshvinP]

First of all I want to apologize for my late response
I was very busy this weekend.


Let's start
I'm not a materialist, neither an idealist.
I have read Bk books (why materialism is baloney, The idea of ​​the world, Science ideated, Brief peeks beyond and more than allegory) but I disagree with his view. His books (except for more than allegory, which I highly recommend) are in the realm of metaphysical speculation.
He reduces the entire mysterious of existence to blind, unreflective subjectivity. An extreme reductionism. Also, his philosophy has no practical side, which I don't think should be the case.
Philosophy should not be in the realm of theoretical thought, but practical and provide the reader with first-hand knowledge. We shouldn't form a philosophy, e.g. to explain the hard problem(panpsychism, idealism,pamcomputationalism, physicalism.....), but to get closer to the truth.
I pretty much rule out materialism because of the big problems like intentionality or the hard problem. I don't rule out idealism if it has a practical side that shows its reality. I just haven't found one until now.
I also have a keen interest in near-death experiences, and believe that a philosophy must explain this phenomenon (in the full spectrum, not explain away). I've been working in the field of philosophy for years, but the theoretical knowledge is no longer enough for me.
I would like to be able to recognize practically how goethe did it. The whole theoretical knowledge brought me nothing in the end.
PS: Would it be correct to say that thoughts perceive ideas?
Kind regards

Guney,

No apology necessary. Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with your critique of BK analytical idealism. I am sure you have seen us also bring that up often. Practically all modern philosophies and sciences end up in dualism, abstraction, and reductionism. It us our default mode of intellectual cognition which is chiefly responsible for that. But it is something we can also overcome now with inner effort, of the sort you are making here in your posts. Genuine liberation from this tyranny of modern abstraction, spiritual, physical, and all of the above, comes through our most intimate and essential thinking agency. Participating in that process is what is more important than forming the "correct" concepts. We will always form disharmonious concepts for awhile, but our link to our own thinking agency makes this an easily redeemable issue.

My own observation of my own intellectual tendencies is that I truly make things harder for myself. The more I observe how my 'illumination' arrives with various topics - especially those surrounding space, time, perception, thinking, and causality (which really sits at the base of all other topics) - the more it is revealed as a lifting of obstacles I myself have put in place. We have many beams to remove from our own eyes, in that regard, before criticizing others or 'reality'. And most of these obstacles came from me starting at a conceptual foundation rather than my own first-person experience of the world content. I highly recommend you also read Cleric's latest post on the other thread with the video game metaphor, in that regard.

Goethe is a fantastic resource for us today. Yes, our thinking perceives ideas, as Goethe concretely perceived the archetypal proto-plant responsible for all particular plant forms. Goethe held to a strict phenomenomogy in science. He says, when we observe objects of perception, we must be absorbed into those objects, and when we reason through the perceptions, we must be absorbed into our own thinking process. Ideally, we stop to also reflect on that thinking process once in awhile. Ask ourselves how and why are we asking the questions about perceptions, and how we are answering them. I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who said, we should not ask "what is the meaning of life?" but first recognize it is we who are being asked by life, and we can only respond to life by being responsible for imbuing that meaning into Nature and Culture.

As you say, theoretical knowledge is no answer to life. It is engaged merely for our own sake, which is fine to a limited extent, but can only be the basis for transitioning into a more active and participatory approach, which benefits not only ourselves but the Whole of the Cosmic organism. Personally, I have found it is indispensable to put aside all philosophical and scientific knowledge, put a bookmark on it for awhile, and return to the foundations of what it means "to know" as humans who will, perceive, and think. Consider our faculty of attention - we are always willing our intention to focus on some portions of the world content and not others. Naturally our underlying desires and feelings influence this attention, but we completely forget that and assume we are freely surveying a broad spectrum of content.

If we can remember this natural trade off that is always occurring, we can actively think to survey more content we normally exclude. Better yet, we can also think through the reasons we may be inclined to focus on some things and others. I mention this because our experience shows "thinking perceives ideas" can remain just as abstract as "MAL produces nature through its ideations". Eventually it will mutate within us into another form of reductionism. That's simply what the intellect does over time, when we don't take a much more active interest in our own thinking process. I hope these considerations help and I am happy to discuss further. I hope to post an essay soon which also elaborates on these points.

[Güney27]

First of all I want to apologize for my late response
I was very busy this weekend.


Let's start
I'm not a materialist, neither an idealist.
I have read Bk books (why materialism is baloney, The idea of ​​the world, Science ideated, Brief peeks beyond and more than allegory) but I disagree with his view. His books (except for more than allegory, which I highly recommend) are in the realm of metaphysical speculation.
He reduces the entire mysterious of existence to blind, unreflective subjectivity. An extreme reductionism. Also, his philosophy has no practical side, which I don't think should be the case.
Philosophy should not be in the realm of theoretical thought, but practical and provide the reader with first-hand knowledge. We shouldn't form a philosophy, e.g. to explain the hard problem(panpsychism, idealism,pamcomputationalism, physicalism.....), but to get closer to the truth.
I pretty much rule out materialism because of the big problems like intentionality or the hard problem. I don't rule out idealism if it has a practical side that shows its reality. I just haven't found one until now.
I also have a keen interest in near-death experiences, and believe that a philosophy must explain this phenomenon (in the full spectrum, not explain away). I've been working in the field of philosophy for years, but the theoretical knowledge is no longer enough for me.
I would like to be able to recognize practically how goethe did it. The whole theoretical knowledge brought me nothing in the end.
PS: Would it be correct to say that thoughts perceive ideas?
Kind regards

Guney,

No apology necessary. Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with your critique of BK analytical idealism. I am sure you have seen us also bring that up often. Practically all modern philosophies and sciences end up in dualism, abstraction, and reductionism. It us our default mode of intellectual cognition which is chiefly responsible for that. But it is something we can also overcome now with inner effort, of the sort you are making here in your posts. Genuine liberation from this tyranny of modern abstraction, spiritual, physical, and all of the above, comes through our most intimate and essential thinking agency. Participating in that process is what is more important than forming the "correct" concepts. We will always form disharmonious concepts for awhile, but our link to our own thinking agency makes this an easily redeemable issue.

My own observation of my own intellectual tendencies is that I truly make things harder for myself. The more I observe how my 'illumination' arrives with various topics - especially those surrounding space, time, perception, thinking, and causality (which really sits at the base of all other topics) - the more it is revealed as a lifting of obstacles I myself have put in place. We have many beams to remove from our own eyes, in that regard, before criticizing others or 'reality'. And most of these obstacles came from me starting at a conceptual foundation rather than my own first-person experience of the world content. I highly recommend you also read Cleric's latest post on the other thread with the video game metaphor, in that regard.

Goethe is a fantastic resource for us today. Yes, our thinking perceives ideas, as Goethe concretely perceived the archetypal proto-plant responsible for all particular plant forms. Goethe held to a strict phenomenomogy in science. He says, when we observe objects of perception, we must be absorbed into those objects, and when we reason through the perceptions, we must be absorbed into our own thinking process. Ideally, we stop to also reflect on that thinking process once in awhile. Ask ourselves how and why are we asking the questions about perceptions, and how we are answering them. I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who said, we should not ask "what is the meaning of life?" but first recognize it is we who are being asked by life, and we can only respond to life by being responsible for imbuing that meaning into Nature and Culture.

As you say, theoretical knowledge is no answer to life. It is engaged merely for our own sake, which is fine to a limited extent, but can only be the basis for transitioning into a more active and participatory approach, which benefits not only ourselves but the Whole of the Cosmic organism. Personally, I have found it is indispensable to put aside all philosophical and scientific knowledge, put a bookmark on it for awhile, and return to the foundations of what it means "to know" as humans who will, perceive, and think. Consider our faculty of attention - we are always willing our intention to focus on some portions of the world content and not others. Naturally our underlying desires and feelings influence this attention, but we completely forget that and assume we are freely surveying a broad spectrum of content.

If we can remember this natural trade off that is always occurring, we can actively think to survey more content we normally exclude. Better yet, we can also think through the reasons we may be inclined to focus on some things and others. I mention this because our experience shows "thinking perceives ideas" can remain just as abstract as "MAL produces nature through its ideations". Eventually it will mutate within us into another form of reductionism. That's simply what the intellect does over time, when we don't take a much more active interest in our own thinking process. I hope these considerations help and I am happy to discuss further. I hope to post an essay soon which also elaborates on these points.

Hello Ashvin,
I want to thank you for your effort and willingness to explain these topics to me.

I read through several discussions in the forum and found it more instructive than some books and lectures.
So what I was able to read from some threads is the following: what is given by our perception is the world content, which is the totality of our perception, to which thoughts, will and feeling are also counted here, before it is thought into certain concepts, categories etc .
These tell us nothing about the world.

About our activity is meaning, which expresses itself in thought form.
My first question is, if thoughts are part of my world content, and are not separate, but only come about through thought, and the thoughts are expressions of meaning, then who am I?
The thoughts are there.
Who thinks? isn't this all happening in my consciousness? Often thoughts come without my will. So am I not the perceiving one?
2. when people say you use thoughts or you think, who is meant?
We also work purely phenomenologically, so ontology is metaphysics etc. just a thought-analyzed and conceptualized version of the content of consciousness, which is actually worthless.
However, this conceptualized version works very well (technology).
What exactly is meant by the statement: we must make the thought process its own object?

I also read about the evolution of consciousness.
So what we perceive as gravity used to be perceived as spiritual power. What is the difference, other than using different terms for the same process?
How did humans survive if they didn't have a true self-awareness?

PS: have you read "taking appearance seriously"?
Kind regards

[AshvinP]

First of all I want to apologize for my late response
I was very busy this weekend.


Let's start
I'm not a materialist, neither an idealist.
I have read Bk books (why materialism is baloney, The idea of ​​the world, Science ideated, Brief peeks beyond and more than allegory) but I disagree with his view. His books (except for more than allegory, which I highly recommend) are in the realm of metaphysical speculation.
He reduces the entire mysterious of existence to blind, unreflective subjectivity. An extreme reductionism. Also, his philosophy has no practical side, which I don't think should be the case.
Philosophy should not be in the realm of theoretical thought, but practical and provide the reader with first-hand knowledge. We shouldn't form a philosophy, e.g. to explain the hard problem(panpsychism, idealism,pamcomputationalism, physicalism.....), but to get closer to the truth.
I pretty much rule out materialism because of the big problems like intentionality or the hard problem. I don't rule out idealism if it has a practical side that shows its reality. I just haven't found one until now.
I also have a keen interest in near-death experiences, and believe that a philosophy must explain this phenomenon (in the full spectrum, not explain away). I've been working in the field of philosophy for years, but the theoretical knowledge is no longer enough for me.
I would like to be able to recognize practically how goethe did it. The whole theoretical knowledge brought me nothing in the end.
PS: Would it be correct to say that thoughts perceive ideas?
Kind regards

Guney,

No apology necessary. Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree with your critique of BK analytical idealism. I am sure you have seen us also bring that up often. Practically all modern philosophies and sciences end up in dualism, abstraction, and reductionism. It us our default mode of intellectual cognition which is chiefly responsible for that. But it is something we can also overcome now with inner effort, of the sort you are making here in your posts. Genuine liberation from this tyranny of modern abstraction, spiritual, physical, and all of the above, comes through our most intimate and essential thinking agency. Participating in that process is what is more important than forming the "correct" concepts. We will always form disharmonious concepts for awhile, but our link to our own thinking agency makes this an easily redeemable issue.

My own observation of my own intellectual tendencies is that I truly make things harder for myself. The more I observe how my 'illumination' arrives with various topics - especially those surrounding space, time, perception, thinking, and causality (which really sits at the base of all other topics) - the more it is revealed as a lifting of obstacles I myself have put in place. We have many beams to remove from our own eyes, in that regard, before criticizing others or 'reality'. And most of these obstacles came from me starting at a conceptual foundation rather than my own first-person experience of the world content. I highly recommend you also read Cleric's latest post on the other thread with the video game metaphor, in that regard.

Goethe is a fantastic resource for us today. Yes, our thinking perceives ideas, as Goethe concretely perceived the archetypal proto-plant responsible for all particular plant forms. Goethe held to a strict phenomenomogy in science. He says, when we observe objects of perception, we must be absorbed into those objects, and when we reason through the perceptions, we must be absorbed into our own thinking process. Ideally, we stop to also reflect on that thinking process once in awhile. Ask ourselves how and why are we asking the questions about perceptions, and how we are answering them. I am reminded of Victor Frankl, who said, we should not ask "what is the meaning of life?" but first recognize it is we who are being asked by life, and we can only respond to life by being responsible for imbuing that meaning into Nature and Culture.

As you say, theoretical knowledge is no answer to life. It is engaged merely for our own sake, which is fine to a limited extent, but can only be the basis for transitioning into a more active and participatory approach, which benefits not only ourselves but the Whole of the Cosmic organism. Personally, I have found it is indispensable to put aside all philosophical and scientific knowledge, put a bookmark on it for awhile, and return to the foundations of what it means "to know" as humans who will, perceive, and think. Consider our faculty of attention - we are always willing our intention to focus on some portions of the world content and not others. Naturally our underlying desires and feelings influence this attention, but we completely forget that and assume we are freely surveying a broad spectrum of content.

If we can remember this natural trade off that is always occurring, we can actively think to survey more content we normally exclude. Better yet, we can also think through the reasons we may be inclined to focus on some things and others. I mention this because our experience shows "thinking perceives ideas" can remain just as abstract as "MAL produces nature through its ideations". Eventually it will mutate within us into another form of reductionism. That's simply what the intellect does over time, when we don't take a much more active interest in our own thinking process. I hope these considerations help and I am happy to discuss further. I hope to post an essay soon which also elaborates on these points.

Hello Ashvin,
I want to thank you for your effort and willingness to explain these topics to me.

I read through several discussions in the forum and found it more instructive than some books and lectures.
So what I was able to read from some threads is the following: what is given by our perception is the world content, which is the totality of our perception, to which thoughts, will and feeling are also counted here, before it is thought into certain concepts, categories etc .
These tell us nothing about the world.

About our activity is meaning, which expresses itself in thought form.
My first question is, if thoughts are part of my world content, and are not separate, but only come about through thought, and the thoughts are expressions of meaning, then who am I?
The thoughts are there.
Who thinks? isn't this all happening in my consciousness? Often thoughts come without my will. So am I not the perceiving one?
2. when people say you use thoughts or you think, who is meant?
We also work purely phenomenologically, so ontology is metaphysics etc. just a thought-analyzed and conceptualized version of the content of consciousness, which is actually worthless.
However, this conceptualized version works very well (technology).
What exactly is meant by the statement: we must make the thought process its own object?

I also read about the evolution of consciousness.
So what we perceive as gravity used to be perceived as spiritual power. What is the difference, other than using different terms for the same process?
How did humans survive if they didn't have a true self-awareness?

PS: have you read "taking appearance seriously"?
Kind regards

Guney,

The most important thing to realize is that we can't understand the reality we are involved in by starting from any concept of 'absolute reality', i.e. what the world is in its essence and, similarly, what I am in my essence. That is why abstract metaphysics leads to no greater understanding of who we are and what we can do to know, feel, will, perceive, and act in more integrated ways. Phenomenology of thinking starts from our most immanent appearances of thinking and thought-forms and works from there. There comes a point when we also realize the process of this concrete reasoning is one and the same with the 'reality' we are reasoning towards. That we have found an activity within ourselves where appearance and reality truly coincide. We get back into the living flow from which all concepts originate.

So, as a really general conceptual answer, we could say we are perfectly united "willing-and-feeling organism who Thinks". That is our essential spiritual essence, our essential"I". Again, the spiritual freeing potential comes from reasoning this out for ourselves from the outer-inner appearances - from engaging our essence to reveal our essence. Phenomenology becomes epistemology becomes ontology. Appearance becomes Reality, mediated through Thinking. Everything harmonizes and integrates and converges. Not as concepts which are matched up with each other by the intellect, but in the very way we perceive ourselves and the world through our inner activity. It is a very gradual spiritual awakening, but now is the critical juncture for the human soul to be reborn in its higher spiritual consciousness.

re: gravity - yes, we used to perceive the inner moral dimension of meaningful activity more directly. Gravity is an active moral force which stabilizes our being within the spiritual Cosmos through attraction of inner qualities. When we speak of "spiritualizing" the perceptual forms and forces, it is, in principle, nothing other than perceiving the inner meaning of them more concretely and livingly. How that can manifest in our consciousness, however, is generally in a way modern people find fantastic and impossible. Yet clearly our ancestors who produced the rich mythology and ancient art of the world were closer to this mode of consciousness.

I have not read that, only "saving the appearances" by Barfield, which I highly recommend. Notice the double entendre - he presents a spiritual evolutionary narrative which makes sense of the experiential facts (a "likely story"), and also which is undertaking the task of saving the world's appearances, including the Earth and all its kingdoms, from death in rigid atomized perceptions, when engaged by the thinking human spirit in good faith.