I had some fun today translating the beginning of another of Scaligero’s books, “Methods of inner concentration” (the entire book is freely available
here untranslated). Needless to say this won’t be better written in English than my average post. The influence of Steiner seems very clear, including in the proposed concentration exercise, still there could be some value in reading the same ideas expressed in slightly different language.
Chapter I - The unknown identity
Through thinking, man knows and somehow masters the world. The contradiction is that he neither knows nor masters thinking. Thinking remains a mystery to itself. Philosophy and psychology draw nourishment from it, however, throughout their existence, they don’t seem to have grasped the meaning of its activity, the ultimate content of the logical process, of which they take advantage for the purposes of their dialectical structures. They consider thinking to be dialectics, that it coincides with dialectics, that it arises and ends with dialectics.
For the purposes of Knowledge, outer objectivity arises as value system in human knowledge, but the latter overlooks to establish the foundation of the former, and to determine objectivity as concept, before the dialectical awareness of the concept itself.
Logically, man knows what a concept is, but he ignores what it is as a force, and how it is born, and what its power of accomplishment in reality is, which is more than its dialectical and logical appearing, that is to say, the power of Life itself.
Even if Materialism did not exist, as metaphysics of the present times, the materialistic attitude, as inability of thinking to know itself, could not but be the measure of present-day knowledge, which, through the act of knowing, proclaims the external world as real, while it nevertheless believes it exists outside that knowing. On the contrary, it is the world that arises from the presence of the
I in the act of perceiving, and from the simultaneous correlation with thinking.
One of the first experiences of the Supersensible opens the way to discover that, if the
I were not ex-pressing itself corporeally, until it “touches” the physical, through sense organs, neither perceptions nor
I-consciousness would arise. The perception would present itself as in the animal, as a sentient, impersonal reaction, transcendent, pertaining to a group-
I, and not as the reaction of an individual, immanent
I. Individuality, as the presence of the
I in the act of perception, is the secret of thinking, as well as it is the secret of the overcoming of the human-animal nature.
The physical world stands before the observer as a thick reality, a reality that indeed appears as pre-existing observation and inquiry, to the one who contemplates it. The physical world appears powerful in its be-ing, but such power is truly granted to it by the deep essence of consciousness, in which thinking is a correlating force, and as such, one with the essence of the world. “Existence is” is the assent of an alienated thinking, which simultaneously assumes reality and leaves it dominant, as symbol of an unpossessed dominion, a lost dominion, of the
I.
Surely, one cannot pass through a wall, or walk on air, however such material pre-existence and its thick otherness are a correlation due to the fact that man is integrated in a physicality unmastered by the original thinking. A phisicality made of the same substance as the thick otherness which summons the concept of the correlation, but the alienated concept. In truth, Matter arises as objective reality, as a consequence of an alienation of Spirit, but one that is secretly dominated by the Spirit. Such dominion and such alienation equally co-exist in the human mind. If the original force were active in thinking, the body wouldn’t constitute otherness from thinking. It would be its manifestation. Identity - which is realized in the original instant of thinking - would come true, with its unlimited power, at every degree of consciousness, that is to say, at every degree of the “manifestation”.
The concept, alienated from its own original content, yet lacking the duality-surmounting identity, cannot but have as its opposite its own corporeal support, symbol of alienation, and nevertheless necessary to the initial overcoming of that alienation. Going through the wall with the corporeal being, or walking the Earth without resting on its surface, cannot be conceived, only imagined as a non-reality. And still, this imagination is the embryonic beginning of surmounting duality.
The correlation with the thick reality of the world would change if the concept of the correlation ceased to be alienated. The observer could not go through physical matter - the wall, the rock - with his body, but he would intuit such possibility, in relation to an original power of Thinking that could be won back. The current correlation, as concept, is not dictated to him by the world, but it happens solely in himself. The being-ness that appears to him is already the correlation underway.
The whole effort of ancient Yoga consisted of seizing that correlation as supra-mental force. Modern, rational man accesses the immanent unconsciously, in the mathematical experience of the physical world. The correlation happens in him, according to an inner act of constructing the world according to the “laws of nature”, which are not nature, but indeed, the correlation of thinking, alienated from the world. Limits appear external, but they belong to thinking correlated with perceiving. Limits belong to an inner relation with thinking, estranged from its own intuitive magnitude. In that original magnitude is realized an identity with being, of which the modern investigator, despite his empiricism, does not seem to discern the existence. It’s an identity from which no otherness could exist.
The conscious conquest of this identity is the ultimate meaning of the experience of man on Earth, because once the awareness of the earthly condition is realized, the direction of the “fall” can be inverted and the re-ascent can start. Ancient Yoga has secretly prepared such possibility, which is achievable for a man who has come to the point of full identification with the physical, that is to say, modern man, whose self-consciousness wakes up once the
I-identification with the sensible is complete.
The
I finds expression in this identity, from which arise perceiving and thinking. From it, the
ego is simultaneously born, as the reflected force of the
I, averse to the Spirit. The same identity is simultaneously the profound and organic act of the
I, through corporeity, and the
ego-force, unaware of its own metaphysical root.
In order to recover the
I, the modern ascetic must go to the root of this identity, and be that
I whose name he never ceases to pronounce.
Chapter II - Concentration
Of the three faculties - thinking, feeling, willing - only possessed by modern man as reflection of the physical, only one - thinking - can be traced back to its metaphysical root. Feeling and willing, when traced back, lead to a physical root, not because their essence is not metaphysical, but because such essence gets expelled from the resonance of feeling and willing in the soul, in keeping with the connection of thinking consciousness to physicality. This fastening of the soul to ‘cerebrality’ and to physicality pertains to thinking, not to feeling and willing, which simply suffer the consequences of such necessity of thinking, that is, the fall of thinking into ‘cerebrality’ instrumental to the formation of individual consciousness and to the lower process of freedom.
Thinking can trace back its own process. In this way, it realizes its authentic activity, its pure activity, independent from ‘cerebrality’. In this way, it gives back to feeling and willing their respective, legitimate, metaphysical connections. In the supra-mental sphere, thinking-feeling-willing constitute a unity that is lost at mental level. Through the conversion of thinking, such unity is restored.
Insofar as it is concentrated on a simple, easy-to-command theme, thinking wins back the power of self-motion. Rather than the theme, what is important is the thinking engaged in it. Thinking is always identical to itself, no matter if it is thinking of a chair or the Apocalypse. Initially the theme should be a man-made object, or a mathematical content, because the impersonal thought lying at its basis, once re-lived, has the power of freeing the conscious principle from the subjective psyche, linked to corporeity. Such thought secures against drifting into the subconscious, the medianic, or the mystical. This thought is the concept, independent of the object itself. At the conclusion of the exercise, the concept, once restored, becomes an object of contemplation.
Concentration. The pupil concentrates on an object, of which he considers form, substance, color, use, etc. - the whole series of representations that constitute its physical structure - until, in their place, the thought content remains. This operation should not occupy the conscious attention any shorter than five minutes. At its end, the object should stand before his consciousness as a symbol, or a sign, or a synthesis, containing in itself, in a non-dialectical way, the whole elaborated thought content.
This is the typical exercise of concentration. Its process requires the cooperation - although momentary cooperation - of the man’s constitutive principles: the
I, the soul, the subtle body, the physical body, according to the original hierarchy. Therefore this exercise is fundamental for the modern investigator. In its quality of typical exercise, it is complete. If rigorously practiced, it can alone lead to inner equilibrium, and subsequently to super-sensitive experience.
The importance of this exercise resides in its simplicity, that allows maximum intensity of conscious thinking. The material that enters into its formation - representations, memories, notions, discursive form, etc. - are not thinking power, but only the clothes thinking power is dressed in, in order to express itself, while always remaining elusive. The exercise seeks to surface this elusive thinking-power in consciousness.
One should transport himself entirely within the object, considering the object in itself, according to its contained determinations, correlated to a unity that thinking already possesses in itself - a unity that, for this reason, thinking can restore. Whoever decides to execute a more elevated exercise, by means of thinking of a sacred symbol, a deity, a
mantram, or a “mystery”, does not realize that he is not escaping his own personal nature, because he is already tied to the evoked theme, through subconscious feeling. Conversely, he can become independent of nature, insofar as the thoughts he activates are not dictated by nature, but by the impersonal objectivity of the theme.
By realizing that there’s no man-made object that is not, at its origin, a thought, the pupil cultivates the idea that, at the level of earthly appearances, the invisible continually becomes visible. This idea is the initial principle of overthrowing appearances. Any man-made object sends back to a moment when the object was not in existence, it was a thought that later became sensible concreteness. The invisible became visible.
There is no human production or creation that does not bring us back to a time of inexistence, in other words, to an original void, in which the idea can be recovered. Nobody who sees a machine or a building thinks that they came to existence by themselves. It has happened, however, that aboriginal people, at first contact with mechanistic devices, believed in prodigious natural creations, not as if the objects were self-created, but as if they belonged to the creative process of the Universe. Whoever believes that a compass created itself would be considered mentally impaired. But the naive realist, despite his analytical logic, does not behave that differently with respect to created nature. He is not better than the aboriginal before the unknown world of mechanistic devices.
If there is no man-made object that does not send back to an aware thought able to conceive it and produce it, then it is possible to intuit how the invisible becomes visible. That which has not been made by man, and nonetheless expresses a creative impulse, sends back to a Thought that man is not able to think, at least in the present time. Indeed, the task of the elevation of thinking is to awaken the capacity for such Thought in the soul. The naive stance of whoever thinks that a perfect organ like the human ear, or the tree, or the arrowhead, have created themselves cannot elude a concrete logical reasoning. It is necessary to discover that, as a clock sends back to the thought that has ideated it, and technically produced it - a thought that can be restored by penetrating the clock structure - in the same way, the seed of a plant sends back to a thought that man is able to imagine, but not to possess as a structural process. He does not possess such a structural process as he possesses the clock’s. His thinking lacks the possibility to identify the force that, in a plant, works as archetypal, organizing principle of the mineral substances. While he can reproduce such archetypal process of thinking with reference to the clock, he cannot do it for the plant. The most talented scientists on Earth all together would not know how to reproduce a blade of grass.
Man can only operate on that which he can perceive. He can translate that perception in terms of thought. Through such thought, he can reproduce what has been perceived. Of Nature’s four realms, the mineral, the vegetal, the animal and the human, he can only really perceive the mineral. The substantial forces of the other three escape him. With different elaborations, these forces use the mineral element to create their own sensible form, respectively, the vital force in the plant, the vital-sentient force in the animal, the vital-sentient-mental force in man. In plant, animal, and man, he only perceives the mineral appearance, elaborated at different degrees.
In essence, man imagines the world, animated by itself, living, but he does not perceive it. He only perceives the mineral, the inanimate. Thus he can only build inanimate machines. He can build a planetary missile, but he cannot build a plant seed. His production stops at the sensible inorganic limit, because his perception does not cross that limit. He supposes the life of every living being, but he does not perceive it. Of life, he only perceives its sensible manifestations, at the mineral level, but not its causal, non-sensible element, which operates through the mineral substance. In truth, man only sees the mineral appearance of the realms of nature. He does not see the forces that use minerality to specifically build such realms.
By the means of chemistry and physics, a scientist today can exactly reproduce a plant seed, composing it with every substance comprised in the authentic one, until a material and formal identity is achieved. He will have before him the two seeds, the authentic one and the chemically reproduced, indistinguishable from one another. The difference will emerge when planting the seeds: the artificial one will decompose, the authentic one will give rise to a new life.
Just as the clock did not make itself, so the seed, generator of new life. It too, presents itself as a realized thought, which realization does not stop at sensible appearance - because it is not identified with the form in which it appears, as the clock is. Instead, it continues in the process from which it arises, and by virtue of which a new life can be born.
Normally, the fluid process of life in the plant is thought, conceived, or imagined by man, but it is not perceived by man. He can only perceive the sensible effects of the life process, which in itself is non sensible, and based on those effects, he can conceive the process. As he can, from the sensible data of the clock, reproduce the concept of the clock, in the same way, from the sensible phenomenology of the seed, he can reproduce the idea of Life. But, while in the first case his knowing faces the sameness of concept and object - which he can possess entirely and use to reproduce the clock - in the second case he faces an idea that does originate in him, but contains a kernel that refers to an imperceptible transcendence. Hence the task is to discover that, because it is in the idea, it is immanent.
Concentration accomplishes this immanence. The transcendence of the immanent kernel of the Life-idea escapes the materialist, because he identifies the Life process with the process of Matter, to which he lends the same ideal foundation. He unwittingly falls in the same naive realism of the one who sees a clock for the first time, and thinks that the clock made itself. The idealist, on the other hand, believes in a spiritual process of Matter, however he thinks he holds it by the only fact that he thinks it. He does not realize that he thinks the kernel of the idea in a reflected way. He does not intuit the decisive task, empirically and idealistically, which would change the course of his life, allowing him to go from inert philosophizing to inner act, or ascetic act. The act of experiencing that which - by virtue of its immanence in the idea - is the transcending kernel of thinking, intuitable as organizing force of the Life of the living, just as the concept of the physical object is intutitable as its abstract principle.
based on: Scaligero, M. (1975).
Tecniche di concentrazione interiore. Edizioni Mediterranee, Roma
This is the goal towards which the sixth age of humanity will strive: the popularization of occult truth on a wide scale. That's the mission of this age and the society that unites spiritually has the task of bringing this occult truth to life everywhere and applying it directly. That's exactly what our age is missing.
