(Essay) A Phenomenology of Mechanism: The Liminal Spaces of Perception

[AshvinP]

...

Let's say I put the 'tracks' example in the essay (which is actually from Steiner) and nothing else - that wouldn't be a phenomenology, only a metaphor. The former should also include something which gets the reader to interact with perceptions from their first-person experience, either as actual perceptions (like sentences and music clips) or thought-experiments, which then leads their thinking to the underlying principle which the metaphor is also illustrating. So, on that note, I want to ask - what example would you have used if you were writing it, if not language or music?

The example is from Steiner not yours?! : ) That was subtle, I’m glad I ‘passed the test’ : )
I think the ‘tracks’ example alone would have worked well in the essay for the purpose of exemplifying the liminal spaces of perception. But your goal was to ultimately draw some conclusions about mechanism, and the tracks would not support that purpose. In my opinion the tracks would work equally well for the purpose of exemplifying a phenomenology of the liminal spaces of perception. To make the essay about penomeno-logy it’s enough that you offer the logic of the phenomenon. Then readers can always put on their boots if they want, go outside, leave tracks in the mud and perceive them, if they want to experience the phenomenon directly, once they know its phenomeno-logy. The suffix -logy inserts a thinking articulation between the bare phenomenon and the perception you want to offer, so that you are not bound to offer the perception of the phenomenon itself as a direct experience immediately accessible within the essay, but only the logic of its perception, which is its phenomenology.


What other example I would have used: I don’t think I am entitled to seriously answer this question. Commenting on what’s already there as I did is obviously way easier and different than producing standalone conclusive content. This being said, taking the question as an exercise, what comes to mind is the perception of the-things-that-are-not-there that we so commonly intuit in between someone else’s thoughts. We have a perception of someone else’s expressed train of thoughts and from that emerges in our conception a sense that something can be read between those lines. This could probably work as a thought experiment and those spaces would be of the non-typographic sort, found within the interpreted language. This phenomenon happens very commonly, here are two recent examples from this conversation: “I sense that perhaps you feel that I keep externalizing the blame for…” and: “What I think could be the explanation behind the choice of these examples…”

I would say it's not relevant whether or not the inference is confirmed within the perspective of the other person. What could be a liminal creation in this act is that by leveraging the percept, which not only encompasses thoughts, but also feeling and memory, we create, or co-create, or discover a new coherent idea. In retrospective, this opening on feeling makes sense to me, with reference to both the connection you made on the whirlpool side between liminal spaces and the things that are not manifesting, and the related Steiner lecture (that I have now read in full and grasped a little better) where the other world where the dead live, explorable through liminal creation, is also the world where feeling is consciously grounded.

When it comes to music, it should be equally possible to enter its melodic and lyrical meaning hence its spaces, but I admit that finding a specific example of search for liminal spaces within the perception of the interpreted musical language is easier said than done, because the qualitative focus makes it all more elusive, connected to feelings, personal. I have made a ‘quick and dirty’ attempt with the song you have shared on the other thread. By the way thank you for sharing it, I enjoy the song very much, wondering how I never heard before of this apparently popular band. What the song has inspired me in this case is a graphic transposition. All in all, very doubtful that there’s anything remotely liminal in there, let alone usable and convincing in an essay : )

The purpose of this phenomenology was to show, at the most basic level, what we do with our cognitive activity to get meaning from perceptions (and that our cognitive activity is actually involved). I also wanted to show with the quotes how earlier thinkers had reasoned out to the same conclusions about perceptions as negative images of meaning. The quantities and the melodies are the perceptions. It sounds like you prefer to focus directly on the meaning itself, and I am not sure how that would deepen a 'beginner's' understanding of how their own cognitive activity mines the meaning from perceptions. Now if we have already moved on to post-PoF inquiries, as you are at least very close to, then the liminal spaces of qualities (meaning) takes us even further into the realm of exploring higher cognition with our concepts. That's when we get to searching for meaning where the melody could have gone but is not going. Surely you see why that is a much more advanced discussion? It's not going to be one that is easy to follow. This is why I started to feel your criticism had a lot to do with you already progressing past the point where my essay would seem very useful for deepening your own understanding of these dynamics.

Ok, I had not realized this beginner’s focus of the essay. Which in all logic seems to point to only one conclusion : )

But, where we may still disagree, is whether the principle at work is the same for all liminal spaces, including those between words in a sentence and the beats of a song. That is how we characterize the tempo of a song, after all - based on the temporal intervals between the beat-perceptions. I have to reiterate here that there is a deep spiritual science behind why these 'spaces' are important in relation to our own spiritual activity. There is nothing arbitrary about these spaces and there are no spaces which are unimportant. They all simply reflect what is still subconscious in the World Process (WP) for us - the ideal, logical forces which weave together the perceptions. When we become inwardly conscious of them, they are no longer spaces but new perceptions within the WP (but at a higher spiritualized level). Then we move on to the liminal spaces between these new perceptions. What we can't do is simply extrapolate the method of searching within our normal waking spaces to that of all the higher-order spaces - later evolved modes of cognition cannot be derived mechanically from the earlier ones in any linear way. Yet the archetypal principles at work remain the same.

I’ll put it this way: I understand that what you describe here can be understood. By the way I have to admit that the active search for meaning in a complete song made it evident to me that the separation between tempo and melody is in reality softer than I thought, as it’s also intertwined with lyrics along the whole song.

It seems more clear from this post that we are mostly debating the choice of examples in the essay. I am not sure whether that particular debate will deepen either of our understanding of the principles at work. Certainly the essay was intended for a beginner level, pre-PoF audience, which was really the limit of my ideational capacity at that time. But perhaps there is still a principle divergence between us somewhere here. I am confused as to your position on writing/speech. Do you feel the actual spaces between the letters, words, sentences, etc. don't count to illustrate the principle of liminal spaces, or that they just don't work too well for most people?

I want to emphasize the importance of speech again. It is the mediating link between Nature, the human individual, and the Cosmos. Just like the physical Sun, it unites the Earth and the Heavens through human consciousness. We think in speech, we sing in speech, we express ourselves in speech (including gestures), we communicate to creatively shape the world in the speech. Like the Gods above once did, we are constantly speaking new worlds of forms into existence. And, as mentioned before, it is nearly impossible for someone to miss/deny the role of cognitive agents and logical structure in the speech they hear or text they see.

A person can deny such a role to tracks in the ground or any other outer natural perception. They could say a gust of wind blew a wagon down the road to create the tracks. Or perhaps, "sometimes the ground does actually sink on its own!" Speech, on the other hand, never arises spontaneously or independently of human thinking activity. Granted, it's getting to the point where many will say every sound they hear in Nature is a form of speech, and actually it is, but they have no idea why/how, and certainly they don't link these sounds to their own consciousness. The speech expressed through Nature is not inwardly creative activity as it has become in the speech of human individuals. The latter is truly unique in the history of our world evolution. Human speech resides at the threshold of the inner and outer worlds - it really is the threshold.

I think you're right that the tracks and other metaphors would greatly aid the discussion. If I were to update these and other essays, which I am contemplating doing, then I would certainly include such metaphors. I would also try to provide better examples of the liminal spaces in written speech. Perhaps I move from sentences to a full paragraph, and integrate speech and music, the spatial and temporal dimensions, with examples from poetry. Speech is really hearing made active from within and turned outwards, which then gets the inner warmth/breathing involved, and our vision in the case of written text. Moving on from that, the discussion on 'what isn't there' from our personal experience and collective history could be really helpful.

You have clearly grasped some of the key import of that discussion from Steiner, which I am glad you revisited. I am confident that it would mostly sound like gibberish to others who have lived with these ideas less and more abstractly. Certainly it wouldn't be a great place to start from. I sense we are going through similar tendencies, i.e. the spiritualizing impulse which we must lean into on this intuitive thinking path. When I first came across these ideas and delved into them, I felt the urge to skip past the beginner level stuff in my essays/comments and get into the deeper dynamics. Also the urge to express my ideas and express them quickly, which is clearly an egoic impulse. Actually that is still the case today, as is probably evident in my comments. Often I will condense some major points into a paragraph or two, simply assuming people are following the logic, remembering past comments I made, holding key insights fast in their mind like I am, and whatnot.

Looking back and, hopefully, forward to future posts, I think this is often a mistake. If we look at Cleric's posts, for ex., we often find he will revisit the same point multiple times with multiple elaborations and illustrations within the same post. This is the safest best, because these are completely unfamiliar modes of thinking for most people. And our modern memory of what was read before is also very weak. I can't count how many times I have reached a shared understanding with people on key points only for them to completely ignore them in future discussions on the same topic only a day or two later. So it's all about striking the proper balance, as usual, and that is clearly a task which evolves in relation to our own inner development. It gets easier as we get more and more living feedback from the higher ideations within, which provide the overarching context for all that we think, feel, perceive, and do.

On the topic of mechanism, it is clear to me that the essays didn't flesh out the connection between the liminal spaces and this phenomena nearly enough. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that mechanistic technology is permeated by spirits of darkness, which flow into the world through us. Even without any spiritual scientific research, we can discern that it is not progressive technology in the least. Everything from the purposes it serves to its modes of expression and its effects on our inner activity, like our attention (discussed more in 3rd installment), is regressive. Even if we approach such technology with the best of intentions, we must also have great Wisdom in our approach. We should limit our use of it whenever possible or at least get very creative in putting that use to more selfless spiritual purposes. I referenced Steiner's discussion of the sleeper car and how it's mechanisms 'grind down' the etheric body - these influences are very real and happen regardless of whether we are aware of them. They originate from and feed back into the deeper layers of our Being. Although our inner orientation to these things is critical, we shouldn't imagine it is a purely personal matter - these are transpersonal forces which are part of World Karma and should not be underestimated in their influence.

[Federica]

It seems more clear from this post that we are mostly debating the choice of examples in the essay. I am not sure whether that particular debate will deepen either of our understanding of the principles at work. Certainly the essay was intended for a beginner level, pre-PoF audience, which was really the limit of my ideational capacity at that time. But perhaps there is still a principle divergence between us somewhere here. I am confused as to your position on writing/speech. Do you feel the actual spaces between the letters, words, sentences, etc. don't count to illustrate the principle of liminal spaces, or that they just don't work too well for most people?

Yes, I agree, not sure it’s worth debating further on the choice of examples, especially because I am now getting a feeling that you are giving too much credit to my positions. They really are work in progress. It’s an oscillation which I am not clear whether it’s really in the credit you are giving or in my interpretation of it. I’m getting quite different moods from each of your posts and I am a bit at a loss to stabilize the tuning appropriately. To be completely explicit, just in case I accidentally suggested unwanted conclusions, when I wrote: “I had not realized the beginner’s focus of the essay, which in all logic seems to point to only one conclusion”, I meant the conclusion is, I am such a beginner.
Your question on how I feel about the actual spaces between words makes me somewhat pessimistic about my ability to clarify my thoughts on subtle matters. I am not being ironic here, at all, I am not suggesting that you didn’t read carefully or didn’t understand what was evident in my posts or anything along these lines. Instead I am realizing that despite not less than three attempts in three different posts, I still haven’t been able to communicate that. My current understanding is that the actual spaces don’t count. I see this as a position on writing, not speech. If you were to read a text out loud (which to me is a new scenario in this exchange) the pauses and the spaces between words would count. Should I add I am aware this could be wrong and my understanding will probably evolve.

I want to emphasize the importance of speech again. It is the mediating link between Nature, the human individual, and the Cosmos. Just like the physical Sun, it unites the Earth and the Heavens through human consciousness. We think in speech, we sing in speech, we express ourselves in speech (including gestures), we communicate to creatively shape the world in the speech. Like the Gods above once did, we are constantly speaking new worlds of forms into existence. And, as mentioned before, it is nearly impossible for someone to miss/deny the role of cognitive agents and logical structure in the speech they hear or text they see.

Am I correct, you use ‘speech’ as a synonym for verbal language? “Hearing made active from within and turned outwards”. Maybe not completely, because you mention gestures? Sorry it’s a basic question, but I don’t want to risk misunderstanding this. Anyhow, I am following, on the importance of speech (intended as verbal language). As a side note, I only wonder if we always think in speech. I am sure there’s a lot of verbalized thought, and I am really certain there is for me, because I notice how different languages predominantly pop up for different categories of thought-objects, and also in relation to contextual exposure to a given language (I am now writing a post in English, it’s likely that when I will be finished, English - my version of it - will dominate for a while in my verbalized thoughts). But I believe that some thoughts are sort of too quick to get caught by language, they beat language, especially when they reflect will, I would say. Maybe also feeling. And what about memory, when a thought-image from the past pops up, it does it as a picture, doesn’t it, I see the memory in my mind’s eye directly, right?

A person can deny such a role to tracks in the ground or any other outer natural perception. They could say a gust of wind blew a wagon down the road to create the tracks. Or perhaps, "sometimes the ground does actually sink on its own!" Speech, on the other hand, never arises spontaneously or independently of human thinking activity. Granted, it's getting to the point where many will say every sound they hear in Nature is a form of speech, and actually it is, but they have no idea why/how, and certainly they don't link these sounds to their own consciousness. The speech expressed through Nature is not inwardly creative activity as it has become in the speech of human individuals. The latter is truly unique in the history of our world evolution. Human speech resides at the threshold of the inner and outer worlds - it really is the threshold.

Yes, the role of cognition cannot be missed or denied in speech/verbal language, which emerges as inwardly creative activity. “Human speech is the threshold of the inner and outer world”. What a buoyant, expansive thought. I want to stay with it now.

I think you're right that the tracks and other metaphors would greatly aid the discussion. If I were to update these and other essays, which I am contemplating doing, then I would certainly include such metaphors. I would also try to provide better examples of the liminal spaces in written speech. Perhaps I move from sentences to a full paragraph, and integrate speech and music, the spatial and temporal dimensions, with examples from poetry. Speech is really hearing made active from within and turned outwards, which then gets the inner warmth/breathing involved, and our vision in the case of written text. Moving on from that, the discussion on 'what isn't there' from our personal experience and collective history could be really helpful.

You have clearly grasped some of the key import of that discussion from Steiner, which I am glad you revisited. I am confident that it would mostly sound like gibberish to others who have lived with these ideas less and more abstractly. Certainly it wouldn't be a great place to start from. I sense we are going through similar tendencies, i.e. the spiritualizing impulse which we must lean into on this intuitive thinking path. When I first came across these ideas and delved into them, I felt the urge to skip past the beginner level stuff in my essays/comments and get into the deeper dynamics. Also the urge to express my ideas and express them quickly, which is clearly an egoic impulse. Actually that is still the case today, as is probably evident in my comments. Often I will condense some major points into a paragraph or two, simply assuming people are following the logic, remembering past comments I made, holding key insights fast in their mind like I am, and whatnot.

Looking back and, hopefully, forward to future posts, I think this is often a mistake. If we look at Cleric's posts, for ex., we often find he will revisit the same point multiple times with multiple elaborations and illustrations within the same post. This is the safest best, because these are completely unfamiliar modes of thinking for most people. And our modern memory of what was read before is also very weak. I can't count how many times I have reached a shared understanding with people on key points only for them to completely ignore them in future discussions on the same topic only a day or two later. So it's all about striking the proper balance, as usual, and that is clearly a task which evolves in relation to our own inner development. It gets easier as we get more and more living feedback from the higher ideations within, which provide the overarching context for all that we think, feel, perceive, and do.

I think I can see in what your posts communicate, the spiritualizing impulse you speak of, although the egoic impulse does not shine through as such, at all. I really, really don’t recognize any similar impulse in me, unfortunately. I am eager to understand and experience more, and I do apply myself, but I don’t want to skip past any beginner levels. I want to be careful, Cleric has warned me enough against that. When I have now been trying to sit down and take a moment for concentration, as soon as the bigger distractions start fading away, my heart starts beating hard and fast and I get distracted again by that, wondering if it’s the wrong type of feeling that I’m bathing in. If anything, I feel I am too earthly grounded and run no risk of over-spiritualizing. Maybe we are talking about two different things, I don’t know. Regarding the way you organize and write your arguments and comments - and of course this is only one individual perspective - I find luminous and consistent value in them. Even when there’s misunderstanding and ‘disagreement’, even then you keep the intention that flies your thoughts just as transparent. Therefore I certainly can’t confirm your reflection that you should bring a change in how you write in future posts. Modern memory and cognition are weak, it’s painful direct experience, but more than re-elaboration and repetition, what helps is the ability to offer an in-sight across the veil through a breach that is opened exactly before our eyes. I think the transformative power in Cleric's posts resides in that, and the value you bring comes from the same place. As a reader, I cannot expect to find the solution to my weak memory in your posts and essays. Instead, I have to take responsibility and work actively on it by myself. If I don't do it, no amount of bright illustrations will solve, or even alleviate the issue. I would forget them all in bulk anyway. What I can hope to find in them is the catalyst for personal work on memory and cognition, in the form of those in-sights. And those insights are already there, Ashvin, in your current writing mode.

On the topic of mechanism, it is clear to me that the essays didn't flesh out the connection between the liminal spaces and this phenomena nearly enough. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that mechanistic technology is permeated by spirits of darkness, which flow into the world through us. Even without any spiritual scientific research, we can discern that it is not progressive technology in the least. Everything from the purposes it serves to its modes of expression and its effects on our inner activity, like our attention (discussed more in 3rd installment), is regressive. Even if we approach such technology with the best of intentions, we must also have great Wisdom in our approach. We should limit our use of it whenever possible or at least get very creative in putting that use to more selfless spiritual purposes. I referenced Steiner's discussion of the sleeper car and how it's mechanisms 'grind down' the etheric body - these influences are very real and happen regardless of whether we are aware of them. They originate from and feed back into the deeper layers of our Being. Although our inner orientation to these things is critical, we shouldn't imagine it is a purely personal matter - these are transpersonal forces which are part of World Karma and should not be underestimated in their influence.

I understand, and agree with you completely on these regressive effects of technology, in particular, but not only, on weakness of memory and focus.

[AshvinP]

Your question on how I feel about the actual spaces between words makes me somewhat pessimistic about my ability to clarify my thoughts on subtle matters. I am not being ironic here, at all, I am not suggesting that you didn’t read carefully or didn’t understand what was evident in my posts or anything along these lines. Instead I am realizing that despite not less than three attempts in three different posts, I still haven’t been able to communicate that. My current understanding is that the actual spaces don’t count. I see this as a position on writing, not speech. If you were to read a text out loud (which to me is a new scenario in this exchange) the pauses and the spaces between words would count. Should I add I am aware this could be wrong and my understanding will probably evolve.

Well this is a pretty significant diverge between our perspectives right now. I wouldn't attribute it to your inability to clarify the disagreement, because it came off that way at first, but I sort of brushed around it, assuming it was something less fundamental. So, if anything, it was my fault.

I don't see how we can differentiate speech from writing in this manner. Writing is simply thoughts-speech which has been precipitated from supersensible nature, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms. There is no essential difference between them.

Related to that, the physical spaces, attained through the written syntax, signify the pauses which would occur if I were reading it out loud. The ordered structure of the perceptions reflect my intentions in communicating the shared idea. We could say I resided in the idea with my consciousness and then, through my intentional activity, incarnated some aspect of that idea onto the perceptual plane. The perceptual structure reflects the manner in which this was done. You then reside in that same idea when reading through the perceptions, and the structure in-forms you of the same thought-gestures I went through when incarnating the perceptions. Your thinking activity can then mimic those gestures. This same logic holds for all perceptions, but again there is a big difference between starting with speech and most other natural perceptions.

Much of this wouldn't be possible with other phenomena. I could point to the liminal space of dawn and dusk, for ex. These are archetypal transitional states, Earthly and Cosmic 'pauses', which everyone is familiar with and is deeply meaningful, regardless of time, place, circumstance, etc. If we are awake and paying attention at the right moment, we can perceive the full spectrum of Earthly and Cosmic forces in the reddish hues (Earthly) merging into the orange-yellow hues (mediating Sun) into the blue-violet hues which expand into blackness (Cosmic). Yet no one is going to feel their own cognitive activity is creatively responsible for the meaning gained from these transitional states. Even if they attribute it to Cosmic 'consciousness' which is linked to their own, it will remain abstract and externalized. With speech/writing, there is simply no mistaking the immanent creative involvement, which I see you also acknowledged later in your comment.

Am I correct, you use ‘speech’ as a synonym for verbal language? “Hearing made active from within and turned outwards”. Maybe not completely, because you mention gestures? Sorry it’s a basic question, but I don’t want to risk misunderstanding this. Anyhow, I am following, on the importance of speech (intended as verbal language). As a side note, I only wonder if we always think in speech. I am sure there’s a lot of verbalized thought, and I am really certain there is for me, because I notice how different languages predominantly pop up for different categories of thought-objects, and also in relation to contextual exposure to a given language (I am now writing a post in English, it’s likely that when I will be finished, English - my version of it - will dominate for a while in my verbalized thoughts). But I believe that some thoughts are sort of too quick to get caught by language, they beat language, especially when they reflect will, I would say. Maybe also feeling. And what about memory, when a thought-image from the past pops up, it does it as a picture, doesn’t it, I see the memory in my mind’s eye directly, right?

I think the first question was answered above - in short, no. I don't see any reason to restrict it to only verbal instead of written and physical gestures (like sign language).

Certainly we don't only or always think in verbal speech. Some people think more with images and the higher cognitive path is aimed at the developing this capacity further, among other things. Much of our normal waking intellectual thinking will be immersed in verbal forms, though, and regardless of how much we progress on the path, most of our time will still be spent in that mode. This is not arbitrary, of course - there is great Wisdom in how our evolution proceeds, at both the individual and collective poles. The verbal/written intellectual thinking will be a necessary bridge between the physical and spiritual for some time to come. And as we delve deeper into the imaginative state, our appreciation for the intellectual bridge will only be enriched.

I just wanted to respond to those parts for now and will return with an additional response to the rest of the comment. Thank you for the complements on my writing!

[Federica]

Your question on how I feel about the actual spaces between words makes me somewhat pessimistic about my ability to clarify my thoughts on subtle matters. I am not being ironic here, at all, I am not suggesting that you didn’t read carefully or didn’t understand what was evident in my posts or anything along these lines. Instead I am realizing that despite not less than three attempts in three different posts, I still haven’t been able to communicate that. My current understanding is that the actual spaces don’t count. I see this as a position on writing, not speech. If you were to read a text out loud (which to me is a new scenario in this exchange) the pauses and the spaces between words would count. Should I add I am aware this could be wrong and my understanding will probably evolve.

Well this is a pretty significant diverge between our perspectives right now. I wouldn't attribute it to your inability to clarify the disagreement, because it came off that way at first, but I sort of brushed around it, assuming it was something less fundamental. So, if anything, it was my fault.

I don't see how we can differentiate speech from writing in this manner. Writing is simply thoughts-speech which has been precipitated from supersensible nature, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms. There is no essential difference between them.

Related to that, the physical spaces, attained through the written syntax, signify the pauses which would occur if I were reading it out loud. The ordered structure of the perceptions reflect my intentions in communicating the shared idea. We could say I resided in the idea with my consciousness and then, through my intentional activity, incarnated some aspect of that idea onto the perceptual plane. The perceptual structure reflects the manner in which this was done. You then reside in that same idea when reading through the perceptions, and the structure in-forms you of the same thought-gestures I went through when incarnating the perceptions. Your thinking activity can then mimic those gestures. This same logic holds for all perceptions, but again there is a big difference between starting with speech and most other natural perceptions.

Much of this wouldn't be possible with other phenomena. I could point to the liminal space of dawn and dusk, for ex. These are archetypal transitional states, Earthly and Cosmic 'pauses', which everyone is familiar with and is deeply meaningful, regardless of time, place, circumstance, etc. If we are awake and paying attention at the right moment, we can perceive the full spectrum of Earthly and Cosmic forces in the reddish hues (Earthly) merging into the orange-yellow hues (mediating Sun) into the blue-violet hues which expand into blackness (Cosmic). Yet no one is going to feel their own cognitive activity is creatively responsible for the meaning gained from these transitional states. Even if they attribute it to Cosmic 'consciousness' which is linked to their own, it will remain abstract and externalized. With speech/writing, there is simply no mistaking the immanent creative involvement, which I see you also acknowledged later in your comment.

Am I correct, you use ‘speech’ as a synonym for verbal language? “Hearing made active from within and turned outwards”. Maybe not completely, because you mention gestures? Sorry it’s a basic question, but I don’t want to risk misunderstanding this. Anyhow, I am following, on the importance of speech (intended as verbal language). As a side note, I only wonder if we always think in speech. I am sure there’s a lot of verbalized thought, and I am really certain there is for me, because I notice how different languages predominantly pop up for different categories of thought-objects, and also in relation to contextual exposure to a given language (I am now writing a post in English, it’s likely that when I will be finished, English - my version of it - will dominate for a while in my verbalized thoughts). But I believe that some thoughts are sort of too quick to get caught by language, they beat language, especially when they reflect will, I would say. Maybe also feeling. And what about memory, when a thought-image from the past pops up, it does it as a picture, doesn’t it, I see the memory in my mind’s eye directly, right?

I think the first question was answered above - in short, no. I don't see any reason to restrict it to only verbal instead of written and physical gestures (like sign language).

Certainly we don't only or always think in verbal speech. Some people think more with images and the higher cognitive path is aimed at the developing this capacity further, among other things. Much of our normal waking intellectual thinking will be immersed in verbal forms, though, and regardless of how much we progress on the path, most of our time will still be spent in that mode. This is not arbitrary, of course - there is great Wisdom in how our evolution proceeds, at both the individual and collective poles. The verbal/written intellectual thinking will be a necessary bridge between the physical and spiritual for some time to come. And as we delve deeper into the imaginative state, our appreciation for the intellectual bridge will only be enriched.

I just wanted to respond to those parts for now and will return with an additional response to the rest of the comment. Thank you for the complements on my writing!

Ashvin,

This is becoming entangled… Written language and sign language are verbal languages. Verbal means a language made of words, as opposed to for example musical language, or programming language, or so-called body language. ‘Verbal', from ‘verbum’, which means word, as I understand it. So my question was if you were extending the meaning of 'speech' to all verbal language, rather than restricting it to its proper sense of audible expression, speech is the sense of speaking, spoken word. With that in mind, I guess the answer is actually yes! Now, in this sentence here below, curiously, you are back to using 'speech' in proper sense, as spoken expression:

I don't see how we can differentiate speech from writing in this manner. Writing is simply thoughts-speech which has been precipitated from supersensible nature, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms. There is no essential difference between them.

But let’s not get stuck in these semantic distinctions. I see your position, and on second thought it actually does call for some more debate, because now I have to show you the essential difference between speech and writing. Sorry, it requires a long start, connected to the threshold of inner and outer worlds you have spoken of, as speech. I have reflected on this idea, and I think it’s exactly right, in the sense that concepts in themselves - supersensible meaning continually summoned in thinking, and integrated in the creation of thought-images from percepts - do not require words. However we often do reduce them to words, we encode them in verbalized form, in order to make them transferable. Technically, this happens inwardly. We can certainly ex-press a constellation of thought-images in words and keep it for ourselves as inner speech, instead of externalizing it by speaking or writing, hence transferring it to others. However, even in that case we are materializing that inner-to-outer threshold, because we are speaking to ourselves as if we were another self. We encode the thought in words at the threshold, as if we were to transfer it, then we bounce it back into our own perception, in a dialogue that we call internal, overlooking that the thought has been processed verbally through language and is less good now than its unprocessed version. Thought has been squeezed into words, pushed down towards the threshold, and impoverished by contact with it. This encoding of thought can happen in different ways, and that corresponds to different languages. Each language breaks it down and organizes it in somewhat different fashions, but a certain loss of information and meaning is the common price to pay, regardless of the specific language.


Now with this inwardly encoded thought, ready to be transferred as spoken or written word, we can come to our question of the essential difference between speech and writing. As you say, the supersensible is "precipitated from thoughts-speech, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms". I would first drop the ‘perhaps’. Our inwardly encoded, verbal thought is in essence the same as its auditory form, the only difference being the sound volume. Not at all so for the written language. Writing the speech is an additional processing, or encoding. It's an additional degree of precipitation from living language to dead language! With it, comes meaning degradation and loss. Spoken word is breath, it’s spirit. Although downgraded from thought level to some extent, it remains the closest possible ex-pression of the supersensible meaning. Conversely, these written words you are reading here are only a heavily processed multiple precipitation of that meaning (no surprise it makes communication more difficult, which is what we are experiencing to some extent). These written words cannot even start to convey the living abundance of meaning that spoken language can convey. Of course this difference is essential.


Here’s a metaphor: as our intellectual thoughts are pale, flat, dry, fragmented, dead precipitations of living ideas, in the same way written language is a heavily impoverished rendition of spoken word, flattened in spatial sequence. It actually lays two steps down on the path of downward precipitation. Let me give you the step-by-step recipe for written language: take a piece of fresh living speech, then strip it of its vertical temporal backbone, strip it also of its unique musical living quality, then mold its audible continuum into a squared grid, name every little square with a symbol of your liking, in culinary jargon: to signify the squares (not very much to do with meaning, rather it's about assigning the symbols), then actually discard the speech fragments from the grid, don’t be afraid, and just serve the symbols, dish them out in linear arrangements on a platter of your choice, and there you have it! Enjoy the recipe : ) And just like nutritional value is greatly altered in heavily processed food, meaning is altered in written language, compared to speech. Writing is actually not really language anymore in the same sense speech is. It’s more like a smart, sharable workaround that provides some organized account of speech. It’s like looking at a musical score (as someone who knows how to read it) versus going to the musical performance at the theater. Would you say that there’s no essential difference between the two experiences?


To conclude, as a thought experiment, let me try to mimic the type of logic I have seen you apply a few times by now. Does it sound viable? During the course of evolution, in parallel with the evolution of thinking and, later, the birth of the emancipated I, man has gone from instinctual, immediate exchange of meaning between individuals, facilitated by the conductive medium of Nature, to articulated speech. Speech has emerged as a way to elaborate the inner thought process for communication, by degrading it one step down towards the threshold between inner and outer worlds. The price to pay for this first level of precipitation has been a loss of meaning. Later, writing emerged as an additional descent, through one more level of precipitation, down into the outer world, away from the threshold, to expand communication options, at the cost of further loss of meaning. While speech lies at the threshold of outer and inner worlds, writing is fully detached from it, down on its lower side. In the future, as the I will evolve its thinking by rediscovering higher ideation, this time around as independent from Nature, so communication between individuals will be elevated again from writing (outer world) and speech (threshold) up and into the inner world again, as telepathic direct thought transfer, without any loss of meaning, but this time as fully-fledged I, independent from Nature.


With this, I hope I have further clarified why, in my understanding, the typographic, visual spaces of written language count very little to illustrate the principle of liminal spaces.

[AshvinP]

Your question on how I feel about the actual spaces between words makes me somewhat pessimistic about my ability to clarify my thoughts on subtle matters. I am not being ironic here, at all, I am not suggesting that you didn’t read carefully or didn’t understand what was evident in my posts or anything along these lines. Instead I am realizing that despite not less than three attempts in three different posts, I still haven’t been able to communicate that. My current understanding is that the actual spaces don’t count. I see this as a position on writing, not speech. If you were to read a text out loud (which to me is a new scenario in this exchange) the pauses and the spaces between words would count. Should I add I am aware this could be wrong and my understanding will probably evolve.

Well this is a pretty significant diverge between our perspectives right now. I wouldn't attribute it to your inability to clarify the disagreement, because it came off that way at first, but I sort of brushed around it, assuming it was something less fundamental. So, if anything, it was my fault.

I don't see how we can differentiate speech from writing in this manner. Writing is simply thoughts-speech which has been precipitated from supersensible nature, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms. There is no essential difference between them.

Related to that, the physical spaces, attained through the written syntax, signify the pauses which would occur if I were reading it out loud. The ordered structure of the perceptions reflect my intentions in communicating the shared idea. We could say I resided in the idea with my consciousness and then, through my intentional activity, incarnated some aspect of that idea onto the perceptual plane. The perceptual structure reflects the manner in which this was done. You then reside in that same idea when reading through the perceptions, and the structure in-forms you of the same thought-gestures I went through when incarnating the perceptions. Your thinking activity can then mimic those gestures. This same logic holds for all perceptions, but again there is a big difference between starting with speech and most other natural perceptions.

Much of this wouldn't be possible with other phenomena. I could point to the liminal space of dawn and dusk, for ex. These are archetypal transitional states, Earthly and Cosmic 'pauses', which everyone is familiar with and is deeply meaningful, regardless of time, place, circumstance, etc. If we are awake and paying attention at the right moment, we can perceive the full spectrum of Earthly and Cosmic forces in the reddish hues (Earthly) merging into the orange-yellow hues (mediating Sun) into the blue-violet hues which expand into blackness (Cosmic). Yet no one is going to feel their own cognitive activity is creatively responsible for the meaning gained from these transitional states. Even if they attribute it to Cosmic 'consciousness' which is linked to their own, it will remain abstract and externalized. With speech/writing, there is simply no mistaking the immanent creative involvement, which I see you also acknowledged later in your comment.

Am I correct, you use ‘speech’ as a synonym for verbal language? “Hearing made active from within and turned outwards”. Maybe not completely, because you mention gestures? Sorry it’s a basic question, but I don’t want to risk misunderstanding this. Anyhow, I am following, on the importance of speech (intended as verbal language). As a side note, I only wonder if we always think in speech. I am sure there’s a lot of verbalized thought, and I am really certain there is for me, because I notice how different languages predominantly pop up for different categories of thought-objects, and also in relation to contextual exposure to a given language (I am now writing a post in English, it’s likely that when I will be finished, English - my version of it - will dominate for a while in my verbalized thoughts). But I believe that some thoughts are sort of too quick to get caught by language, they beat language, especially when they reflect will, I would say. Maybe also feeling. And what about memory, when a thought-image from the past pops up, it does it as a picture, doesn’t it, I see the memory in my mind’s eye directly, right?

I think the first question was answered above - in short, no. I don't see any reason to restrict it to only verbal instead of written and physical gestures (like sign language).

Certainly we don't only or always think in verbal speech. Some people think more with images and the higher cognitive path is aimed at the developing this capacity further, among other things. Much of our normal waking intellectual thinking will be immersed in verbal forms, though, and regardless of how much we progress on the path, most of our time will still be spent in that mode. This is not arbitrary, of course - there is great Wisdom in how our evolution proceeds, at both the individual and collective poles. The verbal/written intellectual thinking will be a necessary bridge between the physical and spiritual for some time to come. And as we delve deeper into the imaginative state, our appreciation for the intellectual bridge will only be enriched.

I just wanted to respond to those parts for now and will return with an additional response to the rest of the comment. Thank you for the complements on my writing!

Ashvin,

This is becoming entangled… Written language and sign language are verbal languages. Verbal means a language made of words, as opposed to for example musical language, or programming language, or so-called body language. ‘Verbal', from ‘verbum’, which means word, as I understand it. So my question was if you were extending the meaning of 'speech' to all verbal language, rather than restricting it to its proper sense of audible expression, speech is the sense of speaking, spoken word. With that in mind, I guess the answer is actually yes! Now, in this sentence here below, curiously, you are back to using 'speech' in proper sense, as spoken expression:

I don't see how we can differentiate speech from writing in this manner. Writing is simply thoughts-speech which has been precipitated from supersensible nature, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms. There is no essential difference between them.

But let’s not get stuck in these semantic distinctions. I see your position, and on second thought it actually does call for some more debate, because now I have to show you the essential difference between speech and writing. Sorry, it requires a long start, connected to the threshold of inner and outer worlds you have spoken of, as speech. I have reflected on this idea, and I think it’s exactly right, in the sense that concepts in themselves - supersensible meaning continually summoned in thinking, and integrated in the creation of thought-images from percepts - do not require words. However we often do reduce them to words, we encode them in verbalized form, in order to make them transferable. Technically, this happens inwardly. We can certainly ex-press a constellation of thought-images in words and keep it for ourselves as inner speech, instead of externalizing it by speaking or writing, hence transferring it to others. However, even in that case we are materializing that inner-to-outer threshold, because we are speaking to ourselves as if we were another self. We encode the thought in words at the threshold, as if we were to transfer it, then we bounce it back into our own perception, in a dialogue that we call internal, overlooking that the thought has been processed verbally through language and is less good now than its unprocessed version. Thought has been squeezed into words, pushed down towards the threshold, and impoverished by contact with it. This encoding of thought can happen in different ways, and that corresponds to different languages. Each language breaks it down and organizes it in somewhat different fashions, but a certain loss of information and meaning is the common price to pay, regardless of the specific language.


Now with this inwardly encoded thought, ready to be transferred as spoken or written word, we can come to our question of the essential difference between speech and writing. As you say, the supersensible is "precipitated from thoughts-speech, perhaps to auditory form, then into visual forms". I would first drop the ‘perhaps’. Our inwardly encoded, verbal thought is in essence the same as its auditory form, the only difference being the sound volume. Not at all so for the written language. Writing the speech is an additional processing, or encoding. It's an additional degree of precipitation from living language to dead language! With it, comes meaning degradation and loss. Spoken word is breath, it’s spirit. Although downgraded from thought level to some extent, it remains the closest possible ex-pression of the supersensible meaning. Conversely, these written words you are reading here are only a heavily processed multiple precipitation of that meaning (no surprise it makes communication more difficult, which is what we are experiencing to some extent). These written words cannot even start to convey the living abundance of meaning that spoken language can convey. Of course this difference is essential.


Here’s a metaphor: as our intellectual thoughts are pale, flat, dry, fragmented, dead precipitations of living ideas, in the same way written language is a heavily impoverished rendition of spoken word, flattened in spatial sequence. It actually lays two steps down on the path of downward precipitation. Let me give you the step-by-step recipe for written language: take a piece of fresh living speech, then strip it of its vertical temporal backbone, strip it also of its unique musical living quality, then mold its audible continuum into a squared grid, name every little square with a symbol of your liking, in culinary jargon: to signify the squares (not very much to do with meaning, rather it's about assigning the symbols), then actually discard the speech fragments from the grid, don’t be afraid, and just serve the symbols, dish them out in linear arrangements on a platter of your choice, and there you have it! Enjoy the recipe : ) And just like nutritional value is greatly altered in heavily processed food, meaning is altered in written language, compared to speech. Writing is actually not really language anymore in the same sense speech is. It’s more like a smart, sharable workaround that provides some organized account of speech. It’s like looking at a musical score (as someone who knows how to read it) versus going to the musical performance at the theater. Would you say that there’s no essential difference between the two experiences?


To conclude, as a thought experiment, let me try to mimic the type of logic I have seen you apply a few times by now. Does it sound viable? During the course of evolution, in parallel with the evolution of thinking and, later, the birth of the emancipated I, man has gone from instinctual, immediate exchange of meaning between individuals, facilitated by the conductive medium of Nature, to articulated speech. Speech has emerged as a way to elaborate the inner thought process for communication, by degrading it one step down towards the threshold between inner and outer worlds. The price to pay for this first level of precipitation has been a loss of meaning. Later, writing emerged as an additional descent, through one more level of precipitation, down into the outer world, away from the threshold, to expand communication options, at the cost of further loss of meaning. While speech lies at the threshold of outer and inner worlds, writing is fully detached from it, down on its lower side. In the future, as the I will evolve its thinking by rediscovering higher ideation, this time around as independent from Nature, so communication between individuals will be elevated again from writing (outer world) and speech (threshold) up and into the inner world again, as telepathic direct thought transfer, without any loss of meaning, but this time as fully-fledged I, independent from Nature.


With this, I hope I have further clarified why, in my understanding, the typographic, visual spaces of written language count very little to illustrate the principle of liminal spaces.

What has effectively happened here is the Kantian divide - you are implicitly assuming the written language is a 'representation' of some pure meaning which existed in the form of thoughts and, to a lesser extent, spoken speech, and was 'downgraded' in the course of evolution to written status. We can easily test whether this divide is in play if we simply ask, 'am I creating a universal rule about the 'essence' of written language, applicable to all people at all times?' Effectively, with such a rule, we are then disconnecting written language from first-person thinking perspective, treating it as a separate thing which has been 'abstracted' and floats around. Notice how this makes the process of mining meaning from written language independent of one's own cognitive development. One can say, "the writing I encounter in scripture (for ex.) is meaning which was reduced to dead thoughts and written forms, so no wonder I can't get any more meaning from it." We are washing our hands of the responsibility for the difficulties entailed of mining meaning from written speech.

All of these metaphors we can use, i.e. intellectual thoughts and writing as dead skin shed, flattened meaning, empty husks of meaning, etc., are only valid from the first-person perspective. They are expressions of our own cognitive development at any given time. It is precisely our task to bring back new life to the flattened appearances, including written language. When I read your words in these comments, they are only deadened or flattened abstractions of meaning, i.e. 'representations', so long as I cannot impart new imaginative life to them. In essence, if we go back to ontology mode, I am not perceiving mere representations of pure meaning when I read your sentences, but meaning itself. The limitations of that meaning come from my own personal organization - my habits of thinking, my spatiotemporal angle on the meaning, my inner soul qualities which obscure the meaning, etc. This subtle distinction is most critical for us to make, since it really determines how effectively our consciousness can grow into higher perspectives on the world phenomena (including ourselves).

Similarly, there is no essential difference between looking at a musical score and going to the performance. Let's revisit TCOTCT Part 2:

viewtopic.php?t=726

How do we originally learn what 'falling' is? When we observe sensory perceptions of a falling apple, for example. We have succession of images, similarly to the fly, and the image of the apple entrains our attention (movement of attention is also an elementary act of our spiritual activity). This movement forces us to experience certain thinking gesture. Imagine that we're dancing and we let our partner lead. She initiates the movements while we simply follow in suit and as a result we experience sensory movement. If we pay attention we can later replicate the same movements with our own will. Something similar happens in thinking. If after we've seen the apple we close our eyes and replicate the process, now we don't have attention dragged by perception but thinking gesture moving an imaginary perception. This gesture has its recognizable feel to it. Just like moving our hand horizontally vs. vertically feels differently, so moving an imagined object from top to bottom in accelerating pace, feels as something recognizable. We can distinguish it from moving our focus horizontally, for example. Any such inner gesture has its unique meaningful fingerprint, so to speak. Each thinking gesture expresses a 'shape' of meaning. Thinking lives in meaningful time-patterns. The patterns are not something that we perceive externally and then interpret with thinking. They are the geometry of meaning itself. This is not something that we can understand intellectually. We can only grasp it in intuition when the hysteresis process has been brought to unity, when we experience how willed temporal meaning shapes the flow of thought-perception.
...
We can recognize that we perform quite similar thinking gesture even if we imagine not apples but falling stones or tomatoes, just as we can move our hand in the same way with different objects in it. This common gesture is what is labeled 'falling'. So the word 'falling' is a token, something like a reminder. Sometimes when I don't want to forget to do something before leaving home, I place some object at the door step. In this way on my way out I see it and it reminds me why it is there. The object may have nothing to do with what I had to remember, it only serves as a link. Similarly, the sound of the word 'falling' has nothing to do with the thinking gesture of falling (the movement of attention from top to bottom), yet it reminds us of it (the word has no similarity to the gesture in most of our modern languages but it can be argued that it wasn't so in the proto languages).

The important thing is that when initially perceiving the falling apple, it is no different from the fly. We don't know from the start that apples fall. But when we think about the falling apple, when we summon a memory image of it and move it through our own thinking, we experience it as (T) and we know the 'law' through which the imaginary apple (not the perceived) is falling because it is really the meaning that we think and which temporally glues together the apple 'frames'.

There is no principle difference here between perceiving the meaning, with our thinking, as inner speech, audible speech (to others), or written speech. These are all tokens for aspects of the holistic Time-organism of ideas. It is quite possible for someone to imaginatively branch out with their willed thinking from any of these tokens to the living thought-worlds which they symbolize, only it requires much more cognitive development. It is hard to even imagine how this is possible without some of that development taking place, bringing us across the first inversion horizon. Until then, we are always tempted to view these things as more rigid, universal, uniform rules which govern the ideal Cosmos. But such rules simply cannot exist for any first-person evolving perspective. The meaning of written text is only 'downgraded' from the living meaning so long as we leave it exactly where it is, rather than using it for its intended purpose, which is to seek out the higher ideational perspectives from which it precipitates. In the course of evolution, humanity can recover the 'proto-languages' in full consciousness.

[Federica]

What has effectively happened here is the Kantian divide - you are implicitly assuming the written language is a 'representation' of some pure meaning which existed in the form of thoughts and, to a lesser extent, spoken speech, and was 'downgraded' in the course of evolution to written status. We can easily test whether this divide is in play if we simply ask, 'am I creating a universal rule about the 'essence' of written language, applicable to all people at all times?' Effectively, with such a rule, we are then disconnecting written language from first-person thinking perspective, treating it as a separate thing which has been 'abstracted' and floats around. Notice how this makes the process of mining meaning from written language independent of one's own cognitive development. One can say, "the writing I encounter in scripture (for ex.) is meaning which was reduced to dead thoughts and written forms, so no wonder I can't get any more meaning from it." We are washing our hands of the responsibility for the difficulties entailed of mining meaning from written speech.

All of these metaphors we can use, i.e. intellectual thoughts and writing as dead skin shed, flattened meaning, empty husks of meaning, etc., are only valid from the first-person perspective. They are expressions of our own cognitive development at any given time. It is precisely our task to bring back new life to the flattened appearances, including written language. When I read your words in these comments, they are only deadened or flattened abstractions of meaning, i.e. 'representations', so long as I cannot impart new imaginative life to them. In essence, if we go back to ontology mode, I am not perceiving mere representations of pure meaning when I read your sentences, but meaning itself. The limitations of that meaning come from my own personal organization - my habits of thinking, my spatiotemporal angle on the meaning, my inner soul qualities which obscure the meaning, etc. This subtle distinction is most critical for us to make, since it really determines how effectively our consciousness can grow into higher perspectives on the world phenomena (including ourselves).

Similarly, there is no essential difference between looking at a musical score and going to the performance. Let's revisit TCOTCT Part 2:

viewtopic.php?t=726

How do we originally learn what 'falling' is? When we observe sensory perceptions of a falling apple, for example. We have succession of images, similarly to the fly, and the image of the apple entrains our attention (movement of attention is also an elementary act of our spiritual activity). This movement forces us to experience certain thinking gesture. Imagine that we're dancing and we let our partner lead. She initiates the movements while we simply follow in suit and as a result we experience sensory movement. If we pay attention we can later replicate the same movements with our own will. Something similar happens in thinking. If after we've seen the apple we close our eyes and replicate the process, now we don't have attention dragged by perception but thinking gesture moving an imaginary perception. This gesture has its recognizable feel to it. Just like moving our hand horizontally vs. vertically feels differently, so moving an imagined object from top to bottom in accelerating pace, feels as something recognizable. We can distinguish it from moving our focus horizontally, for example. Any such inner gesture has its unique meaningful fingerprint, so to speak. Each thinking gesture expresses a 'shape' of meaning. Thinking lives in meaningful time-patterns. The patterns are not something that we perceive externally and then interpret with thinking. They are the geometry of meaning itself. This is not something that we can understand intellectually. We can only grasp it in intuition when the hysteresis process has been brought to unity, when we experience how willed temporal meaning shapes the flow of thought-perception.
...
We can recognize that we perform quite similar thinking gesture even if we imagine not apples but falling stones or tomatoes, just as we can move our hand in the same way with different objects in it. This common gesture is what is labeled 'falling'. So the word 'falling' is a token, something like a reminder. Sometimes when I don't want to forget to do something before leaving home, I place some object at the door step. In this way on my way out I see it and it reminds me why it is there. The object may have nothing to do with what I had to remember, it only serves as a link. Similarly, the sound of the word 'falling' has nothing to do with the thinking gesture of falling (the movement of attention from top to bottom), yet it reminds us of it (the word has no similarity to the gesture in most of our modern languages but it can be argued that it wasn't so in the proto languages).

The important thing is that when initially perceiving the falling apple, it is no different from the fly. We don't know from the start that apples fall. But when we think about the falling apple, when we summon a memory image of it and move it through our own thinking, we experience it as (T) and we know the 'law' through which the imaginary apple (not the perceived) is falling because it is really the meaning that we think and which temporally glues together the apple 'frames'.

There is no principle difference here between perceiving the meaning, with our thinking, as inner speech, audible speech (to others), or written speech. These are all tokens for aspects of the holistic Time-organism of ideas. It is quite possible for someone to imaginatively branch out with their willed thinking from any of these tokens to the living thought-worlds which they symbolize, only it requires much more cognitive development. It is hard to even imagine how this is possible without some of that development taking place, bringing us across the first inversion horizon. Until then, we are always tempted to view these things as more rigid, universal, uniform rules which govern the ideal Cosmos. But such rules simply cannot exist for any first-person evolving perspective. The meaning of written text is only 'downgraded' from the living meaning so long as we leave it exactly where it is, rather than using it for its intended purpose, which is to seek out the higher ideational perspectives from which it precipitates. In the course of evolution, humanity can recover the 'proto-languages' in full consciousness.

Ashvin,

Have you read the first paragraphs of my post or just the 'thought-experiment' in the last paragraph?
Please discard that last paragraph. Do you still see a Kantian divide?

I can assure you that my starting point has been my experience of thought and formulation of language from there. I know this for sure, because I have thought in depth about the threshold that you mentioned yesterday, trying to really follow my internal process of going from thinking to verbal. I actually never did it before in such depth as I have done it today. And I think it is reflected in my post.
Of course I don't discard the possibility for us to discover meaning from written language... I would be crazy to do that! (no need to elaborate that)... still the loss of meaning in written language is a fully personal direct experience...

Anyway, one thing is sure: the best way to lose meaning in written language is by simply not reading it!
And, I can assure you that if you could hear this in speech form, instead of reading these written words, the meaning you would get would clearly be on a whole different level!

[AshvinP]

What has effectively happened here is the Kantian divide - you are implicitly assuming the written language is a 'representation' of some pure meaning which existed in the form of thoughts and, to a lesser extent, spoken speech, and was 'downgraded' in the course of evolution to written status. We can easily test whether this divide is in play if we simply ask, 'am I creating a universal rule about the 'essence' of written language, applicable to all people at all times?' Effectively, with such a rule, we are then disconnecting written language from first-person thinking perspective, treating it as a separate thing which has been 'abstracted' and floats around. Notice how this makes the process of mining meaning from written language independent of one's own cognitive development. One can say, "the writing I encounter in scripture (for ex.) is meaning which was reduced to dead thoughts and written forms, so no wonder I can't get any more meaning from it." We are washing our hands of the responsibility for the difficulties entailed of mining meaning from written speech.

All of these metaphors we can use, i.e. intellectual thoughts and writing as dead skin shed, flattened meaning, empty husks of meaning, etc., are only valid from the first-person perspective. They are expressions of our own cognitive development at any given time. It is precisely our task to bring back new life to the flattened appearances, including written language. When I read your words in these comments, they are only deadened or flattened abstractions of meaning, i.e. 'representations', so long as I cannot impart new imaginative life to them. In essence, if we go back to ontology mode, I am not perceiving mere representations of pure meaning when I read your sentences, but meaning itself. The limitations of that meaning come from my own personal organization - my habits of thinking, my spatiotemporal angle on the meaning, my inner soul qualities which obscure the meaning, etc. This subtle distinction is most critical for us to make, since it really determines how effectively our consciousness can grow into higher perspectives on the world phenomena (including ourselves).

Similarly, there is no essential difference between looking at a musical score and going to the performance. Let's revisit TCOTCT Part 2:

viewtopic.php?t=726

How do we originally learn what 'falling' is? When we observe sensory perceptions of a falling apple, for example. We have succession of images, similarly to the fly, and the image of the apple entrains our attention (movement of attention is also an elementary act of our spiritual activity). This movement forces us to experience certain thinking gesture. Imagine that we're dancing and we let our partner lead. She initiates the movements while we simply follow in suit and as a result we experience sensory movement. If we pay attention we can later replicate the same movements with our own will. Something similar happens in thinking. If after we've seen the apple we close our eyes and replicate the process, now we don't have attention dragged by perception but thinking gesture moving an imaginary perception. This gesture has its recognizable feel to it. Just like moving our hand horizontally vs. vertically feels differently, so moving an imagined object from top to bottom in accelerating pace, feels as something recognizable. We can distinguish it from moving our focus horizontally, for example. Any such inner gesture has its unique meaningful fingerprint, so to speak. Each thinking gesture expresses a 'shape' of meaning. Thinking lives in meaningful time-patterns. The patterns are not something that we perceive externally and then interpret with thinking. They are the geometry of meaning itself. This is not something that we can understand intellectually. We can only grasp it in intuition when the hysteresis process has been brought to unity, when we experience how willed temporal meaning shapes the flow of thought-perception.
...
We can recognize that we perform quite similar thinking gesture even if we imagine not apples but falling stones or tomatoes, just as we can move our hand in the same way with different objects in it. This common gesture is what is labeled 'falling'. So the word 'falling' is a token, something like a reminder. Sometimes when I don't want to forget to do something before leaving home, I place some object at the door step. In this way on my way out I see it and it reminds me why it is there. The object may have nothing to do with what I had to remember, it only serves as a link. Similarly, the sound of the word 'falling' has nothing to do with the thinking gesture of falling (the movement of attention from top to bottom), yet it reminds us of it (the word has no similarity to the gesture in most of our modern languages but it can be argued that it wasn't so in the proto languages).

The important thing is that when initially perceiving the falling apple, it is no different from the fly. We don't know from the start that apples fall. But when we think about the falling apple, when we summon a memory image of it and move it through our own thinking, we experience it as (T) and we know the 'law' through which the imaginary apple (not the perceived) is falling because it is really the meaning that we think and which temporally glues together the apple 'frames'.

There is no principle difference here between perceiving the meaning, with our thinking, as inner speech, audible speech (to others), or written speech. These are all tokens for aspects of the holistic Time-organism of ideas. It is quite possible for someone to imaginatively branch out with their willed thinking from any of these tokens to the living thought-worlds which they symbolize, only it requires much more cognitive development. It is hard to even imagine how this is possible without some of that development taking place, bringing us across the first inversion horizon. Until then, we are always tempted to view these things as more rigid, universal, uniform rules which govern the ideal Cosmos. But such rules simply cannot exist for any first-person evolving perspective. The meaning of written text is only 'downgraded' from the living meaning so long as we leave it exactly where it is, rather than using it for its intended purpose, which is to seek out the higher ideational perspectives from which it precipitates. In the course of evolution, humanity can recover the 'proto-languages' in full consciousness.

Ashvin,

Have you read the first paragraphs of my post or just the 'thought-experiment' in the last paragraph?
Please discard that last paragraph. Do you still see a Kantian divide?

I can assure you that my starting point has been my experience of thought and formulation of language from there. I know this for sure, because I have thought in depth about the threshold that you mentioned yesterday, trying to really follow my internal process of going from thinking to verbal. I actually never did it before in such depth as I have done it today. And I think it is reflected in my post.
Of course I don't discard the possibility for us to discover meaning from written language... I would be crazy to do that! (no need to elaborate that)... still the loss of meaning in written language is a fully personal direct experience...

Anyway, one thing is sure: the best way to lose meaning in written language is by simply not reading it!
And, I can assure you that if you could hear this in speech form, instead of reading these written words, the meaning you would get would clearly be on a whole different level!

Federica,

I read the whole post and the issue remains the same. You are reifying what is your experience of language going from thought to verbal into an ontology. That's when you feel there is a fundamental discontinuity between speech in thought-perceptions, audial perceptions, and visual ones. How else could we conclude that physical spaces within written text is of an essentially different character than those between spoken words? Sorry if this comes off as condescending, but I feel it might be useful here:

According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language as well as other dictionaries like Collins English Dictionary and American Heritage, the word essence is a noun that refers to the individual or ultimate nature of something as opposed to its existence. This could be the most significant element, quality, or aspect of some person or thing, or someone that possesses or exhibits said quality in abundance, like a concentrate. The word essence implies an essential part and unchanging nature of a thing or person, a vital part of some idea or immaterial entity, or the predominant qualities or central meaning of someone or something. These indispensable qualities never change.

Now is the essence of written language to be an absolute loss of meaning, let's say in comparison to spoken words or other sensory perceptions in the world around us? I would say this could only hold true if we one-sidedly consider the involution of meaning into perception, which occurs through us, without also considering the evolution of perception back into meaning at a higher level, also occurring through us. When we factor both legs of the descent-ascent rhythm, we see how meaning is actually enriched through the precipitation into written forms. This holds valid at all scales - that of the Cosmic evolution as a whole, our Earthly evolution, the various epochs of that evolution, our own lifetimes, down to every single time we endeavor to write something down. We could even be writing only for ourselves, i.e. journaling, and this enrichment of meaning holds valid. But if we don't also become conscious of this whole process as it occurs, then we begin to flatten out the ascent leg in our own experience, and if we project that out onto Reality itself, we get most of modern philosophy/science.

[Federica]

What has effectively happened here is the Kantian divide - you are implicitly assuming the written language is a 'representation' of some pure meaning which existed in the form of thoughts and, to a lesser extent, spoken speech, and was 'downgraded' in the course of evolution to written status. We can easily test whether this divide is in play if we simply ask, 'am I creating a universal rule about the 'essence' of written language, applicable to all people at all times?' Effectively, with such a rule, we are then disconnecting written language from first-person thinking perspective, treating it as a separate thing which has been 'abstracted' and floats around. Notice how this makes the process of mining meaning from written language independent of one's own cognitive development. One can say, "the writing I encounter in scripture (for ex.) is meaning which was reduced to dead thoughts and written forms, so no wonder I can't get any more meaning from it." We are washing our hands of the responsibility for the difficulties entailed of mining meaning from written speech.

All of these metaphors we can use, i.e. intellectual thoughts and writing as dead skin shed, flattened meaning, empty husks of meaning, etc., are only valid from the first-person perspective. They are expressions of our own cognitive development at any given time. It is precisely our task to bring back new life to the flattened appearances, including written language. When I read your words in these comments, they are only deadened or flattened abstractions of meaning, i.e. 'representations', so long as I cannot impart new imaginative life to them. In essence, if we go back to ontology mode, I am not perceiving mere representations of pure meaning when I read your sentences, but meaning itself. The limitations of that meaning come from my own personal organization - my habits of thinking, my spatiotemporal angle on the meaning, my inner soul qualities which obscure the meaning, etc. This subtle distinction is most critical for us to make, since it really determines how effectively our consciousness can grow into higher perspectives on the world phenomena (including ourselves).

Similarly, there is no essential difference between looking at a musical score and going to the performance. Let's revisit TCOTCT Part 2:

viewtopic.php?t=726



There is no principle difference here between perceiving the meaning, with our thinking, as inner speech, audible speech (to others), or written speech. These are all tokens for aspects of the holistic Time-organism of ideas. It is quite possible for someone to imaginatively branch out with their willed thinking from any of these tokens to the living thought-worlds which they symbolize, only it requires much more cognitive development. It is hard to even imagine how this is possible without some of that development taking place, bringing us across the first inversion horizon. Until then, we are always tempted to view these things as more rigid, universal, uniform rules which govern the ideal Cosmos. But such rules simply cannot exist for any first-person evolving perspective. The meaning of written text is only 'downgraded' from the living meaning so long as we leave it exactly where it is, rather than using it for its intended purpose, which is to seek out the higher ideational perspectives from which it precipitates. In the course of evolution, humanity can recover the 'proto-languages' in full consciousness.

Ashvin,

Have you read the first paragraphs of my post or just the 'thought-experiment' in the last paragraph?
Please discard that last paragraph. Do you still see a Kantian divide?

I can assure you that my starting point has been my experience of thought and formulation of language from there. I know this for sure, because I have thought in depth about the threshold that you mentioned yesterday, trying to really follow my internal process of going from thinking to verbal. I actually never did it before in such depth as I have done it today. And I think it is reflected in my post.
Of course I don't discard the possibility for us to discover meaning from written language... I would be crazy to do that! (no need to elaborate that)... still the loss of meaning in written language is a fully personal direct experience...

Anyway, one thing is sure: the best way to lose meaning in written language is by simply not reading it!
And, I can assure you that if you could hear this in speech form, instead of reading these written words, the meaning you would get would clearly be on a whole different level!

Federica,

I read the whole post and the issue remains the same. You are reifying what is your experience of language going from thought to verbal into an ontology. That's when you feel there is a fundamental discontinuity between speech in thought-perceptions, audial perceptions, and visual ones. How else could we conclude that physical spaces within written text is of an essentially different character than those between spoken words? Sorry if this comes off as condescending, but I feel it might be useful here:

According to the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language as well as other dictionaries like Collins English Dictionary and American Heritage, the word essence is a noun that refers to the individual or ultimate nature of something as opposed to its existence. This could be the most significant element, quality, or aspect of some person or thing, or someone that possesses or exhibits said quality in abundance, like a concentrate. The word essence implies an essential part and unchanging nature of a thing or person, a vital part of some idea or immaterial entity, or the predominant qualities or central meaning of someone or something. These indispensable qualities never change.

Now is the essence of written language to be an absolute loss of meaning, let's say in comparison to spoken words or other sensory perceptions in the world around us? I would say this could only hold true if we one-sidedly consider the involution of meaning into perception, which occurs through us, without also considering the evolution of perception back into meaning at a higher level, also occurring through us. When we factor both legs of the descent-ascent rhythm, we see how meaning is actually enriched through the precipitation into written forms. This holds valid at all scales - that of the Cosmic evolution as a whole, our Earthly evolution, the various epochs of that evolution, our own lifetimes, down to every single time we endeavor to write something down. We could even be writing only for ourselves, i.e. journaling, and this enrichment of meaning holds valid. But if we don't also become conscious of this whole process as it occurs, then we begin to flatten out the ascent leg in our own experience, and if we project that out onto Reality itself, we get most of modern philosophy/science.

Ok Ashvin, sorry for having implied that you had not read properly. Thank you for the comments, I have to revisit them further. I admit that while I see that I have transposed my experience to reality, I can't properly connect every piece and close the circle. Also I have this very strong sense, conviction or whatever the right word is, standing in the way, that there is something very off with interpreting the typographic spaces in that way, and I have to find out, even if I am wrong, where this sense comes from…

[AshvinP]

Ok Ashvin, sorry for having implied that you had not read properly. Thank you for the comments, I have to revisit them further. I admit that while I see that I have transposed my experience to reality, I can't properly connect every piece and close the circle. Also I have this very strong sense, conviction or whatever the right word is, standing in the way, that there is something very off with interpreting the typographic spaces in that way, and I have to find out, even if I am wrong, where this sense comes from…

No worries. The most likely culprit is always what we refer to as the 'Kantian divide' or duality. This is a deeply ingrained habit of thinking in the modern age. Kant as a personality was simply the original and most influential vehicle of its expression. If we consider it in terms of the TC spectrum, we could say the idea of the Kantian divide is still precipitating its influence into our thinking states of being. It doesn't matter if we have heard of Kant or know anything about philosophy, it is still active in all of us. Why does this habit keep reasserting itself?

1) Convenience - it is easier to have hard and fast rules which we use to conceptualize the world phenomena. We then have a certain epistemic confidence in the face of unending complexity of the world forms, such as spoken and written languages. Each new particular form doesn't need to evaluated on its own merit, so to speak.

There is definitely great value in such a conceptualization process. In my law practice, when I come across a new 'fact pattern' for a client, the first thing I do is try to discern what overarching statute, rule of law, etc. is most applicable to it. This directs my attention to the resources I will need to further evaluate the situation. Yet if I stop there, then I could easily miss significant issues at play in the fact pattern which are not so evident at first. I should also pay more attention to the specifics of any given case.

How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?

Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.

2) Addiction - this goes back to the essay on dualism and Cleric's post. Our habits are deeply entrenched and, in the case of this particular habit, unlike a substance addiction, we have no experience of what it means to think without being entrenched in the habit. Everything in our modern environment, from education to academia to entertainment to technology, is structured so as to reinforce the habit from the moment we are able to start thinking independently.

3) Secret desire - if we are addicted to smoking or drinking, and we find it terribly difficult to quit, we do well to ask ourselves how much we actually desire to free ourselves from it? Freeing ourselves from the habit means more responsibility and our modern environment, especially mechanistic technology, is likewise structured to give us ways of surviving with the least amount of creative responsibility possible. Our inner life has become adapted to this condition of perpetual addiction, seemingly free of responsibility.

Of course, man does not become conscious of the fact that such forms produce quite definite effects; they occur in the unconscious. He cannot be rationally clear about what is happening in his soul. Many people believe that the materialism of our modern time arises because so many materialistic writings are read. The occultist, however, knows that this is only one of the lesser influences. What the eye sees is of far greater importance, for it has an influence on soul processes that more or less run their course in the unconscious. This is of eminently practical importance, and when spiritual science will one day really take hold of the soul, then will the practical effect become noticeable in public life. I have often called attention to the fact that it was something different from what it is today when one in the Middle Ages walked through the streets. Right and left there were house façades that were built up out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of him who had made it. Try to realize how the individual craftsman felt joy in each piece, how he worked his own soul into it. In every object there was a piece of soul, and when a person moved among such things, soul forces streamed over to him. Now compare this with a city today. Here is a shoe store, a hardware store, a butcher shop, then a tavern, etc. All this is alien to the inner soul processes; it is related only to the outer man. Thus, it generates those soul forces that tend towards materialism. These influences work much more strongly than do the dogmas of materialism. Add to these our horrible art of advertising. Old and young wander through a sea of such abominable products that wake the most evil forces of the soul. So likewise do our modern comic journals. This is not meant to be a fanatical agitation against these things, but only indications about facts. All this pours a stream of forces into the human soul, determining the epoch that leads the person in a certain direction. The spiritual scientist knows how much depends upon the world of forms in which a man lives.

Everything really comes back to the depths of our soul-plumbing in the end, and the fear of what we may find when attempting to clean it out. Now I want to be clear, I am not saying any of the above is 100% responsible for your line of thinking on this thread. It is just the most likely culprit in these situations where discontinuities pop up between ideas and perceptions. I am sure there are aspects of the essay which fall short, perhaps over-emphasizing the visual spaces without enough of a conceptual/metaphorical foundation for why they matter. You are certainly correct to identify the overall abstract, prosaic nature of our outer world today, including our written language, which apparently removes it from the sphere of our creative soul life. The main takeaway should be that, the destiny of abstracted and prosaic forms in the outer world lies in our own thinking consciousness and how much we free the soul from these mechanized habits of thinking. In aesthetics, like poetry, as well as technology, we can clearly discern the seeds of a perceptual world shaped much more by our own creative ideation, for worse or for better.

There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of Man than by placing them in opposition to each other. This antagonism of powers is the great instrument of culture, but it is only the instrument; for as long as it persists, we are only on the way towards culture.
...
As surely as all human individuals, taken together, with the power of vision which Nature has granted them, would never succeed in observing a satellite of Jupiter which the telescope reveals to the astronomer, so beyond question is it that human reflection would never have achieved an analysis of the infinite or a critique of pure reason, unless Reason had become dismembered among the several relevant subjects, as it were wrenched itself loose from all matter and strengthened its gaze into the Absolute by the most intense abstraction...

But can Man really be destined to neglect himself for any end whatever? Should Nature be able, by her designs, to rob us of a completeness which Reason prescribes to us by hers? It must be false that the cultivation of individual powers necessitates the sacrifice of their totality; or however much the law of Nature did have that tendency, we must be at liberty to restore by means of a higher Art this wholeness in our nature which Art has destroyed.

- Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)

[Cleric K]

When I have now been trying to sit down and take a moment for concentration, as soon as the bigger distractions start fading away, my heart starts beating hard and fast and I get distracted again by that, wondering if it’s the wrong type of feeling that I’m bathing in. If anything, I feel I am too earthly grounded and run no risk of over-spiritualizing. Maybe we are talking about two different things, I don’t know.

Hi Federica,
a quick note about the grounding.

Lou, for example, often says "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens". Such a view usually results from the conception that through spirituality we somehow lift ourselves from Earthly reality and care only about higher things. But this isn't so when we speak about genuine spirituality, in the way demanded by proper evolution.

We can note that 'grounding' may hold different meanings for different people. For some, to be grounded means to be entangled in Earthly happenings, for example, drinking beer, going to the movies, having a nice meal, laughing with friends. Such a person may say "I'm down on Earth man. I live in the Earthly reality. The spirituality you speak about is up in the clouds, it's volatile. I prefer to hold on to something substantial."

Interestingly, this is not really grounding in the deeper sense. Actually, compared to the grounding we speak of, it is really only a vague dream life. When we dream at night we may also feel to be sticking firmly to the dream content and we may feel 'down on Earth', grasping at something substantial.

Grounding in the proper sense is begins by concentrating our (thinking) spiritual activity. Our consciously willed spiritual activity and its reflections are the marriage of Heaven and Earth. In meditation it's not the goal to move away from our center and seek reality in the spiritual clouds.

There's an interesting exercise we can do to make it clearer what this center is about. When walking outdoors (assuming safe and calm environment) we can try concentrating roughly in the head area and conceive how we are always at the center of existence. No matter where we are in space or along time, we never really move away from our own center. So we can experiment to feel how we're stationary, at the center of All and only our perceptual content changes. As a rough analogy, if we look at a video like this, it's clear that we're stationary and only the pixels on the screen change. Similarly, when we're able to stabilize our concentration in a point in the head region we may get a feeling that we're not really moving, we're at the same center we've always been and only the World Content metamorphoses (This exercise shouldn't be turned into some kind of one-sided goal. The center that we can experience within ourselves is still a subject of metamorphosis, so we should avoid absolutizing it).

My point is that being grounded, doesn't really have anything to do with being carried along by sensory perceptions. We're really grounded when we find the absolute point of reference within ourselves. This is not something that we see externally in front of us but, as it has been explained elsewhere, it's like a growing sense for a center of gravity around which World phenomena revolve.

Of course it will be prideful to imagine that World phenomena revolve round our Earthly perspective. That's why the hidden order of these revolutions unveils only when we begin to resonate with the World "I" which is concentric to our limited sense of self, yet the latter oscillates hectically as an electron cloud around the deeper spiritual well.

So there are two main points in all the above.
1. We're grounded in the true sense not when we are swayed by Earthly affairs but when we begin to sense the center of gravity of our being, which is the same in the waking life, in dreaming and deep sleep, on Earth and in the life between death and new birth. Thus we're grounding not in sensory perceptions, neither in nebulous spiritual ideas but in the immediate reality of our being. When we do that in the proper way we begin to feel that in the experience of our concentrated spiritual activity, we're neither on Earth, nor in some imaginary Heaven but in the only reality we ever know. If we think about it, even from materialistic perspective, when we take an electron in our brain we can say that it is floating in Cosmic space, like asteroids float. Similarly, when we focus on our spiritual activity we don't need to go anywhere, we don't need to fly away in some clouds. We're already in Cosmic space, it's only that our spiritual activity has previously been entrained by patterns of perceptions and habitual thinking/feeling/willing.

2. Ascent to higher worlds doesn't consist into flying away either. Our concentrated activity becomes the kernel around which the World Content and the living ideational activity of the Cosmos integrates. We speak of higher worlds insofar that consciousness encompasses the greater meaningful order of the first-person World Content metamorphosis. For an ordinary person life consists into transitions from sensation to sensation, desire to desire, etc. For the initiate, whose organization has been attuned to the Cosmic organism, life is seen as hierarchical superposition of ideational activity of intelligences. It's like living in a movie with clear consciousness of the intelligences that art in real time the general plot, the chapters, the scenes, the details. It is of great import to understand that we don't rise to the higher order being of the Cosmos by flying away from our Earthly center but by slowly and patiently integrating the Divine activity around our grounded center. On archetypal level this also why the Christ had to appear in the flesh. This is the grounding at Cosmic scale. The Sun Spirit has impregnated the Earth. Now the Earth is like the grounded kernel which like a caterpillar will metamorphose through its future states. In the same sense there's something of our feeling of centeredness, when we do the above exercise, which will persist through all evolution. The Spiritual Cosmos will inflow into consciousness through that center.