Federica wrote: ↑Wed Jan 11, 2023 5:09 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Jan 10, 2023 2:01 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 08, 2023 10:53 pm
Thank you, Ashvin!
This exercise description is impressive. I am not familiar with it, although a few months ago you offered a description of the first part, and your experience with it:
I didn't try it then, nor I fully understood your comments, but now I get them better, also in combination with Klocek's description, and I surely want to attempt the complete exercise.
Federica,
Nice catch - I had forgotten about making that comment here. At that time, I hadn't come across Klocek or the exercises. I wasn't really doing it as an exercise, but just observing the process and wondering what it was all about. Now, after reading him and studying more spiritual science in general, and prayerful meditation, I have a much better sense of what's occurring. It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were. These impressions are always forming part of the riverbed through which our spiritual activity flows. Once we can bring them more into the light of our waking consciousness through spiritual training, we can then understand them more as an objective force of our soul life (in the sense of Cleric's post on the other thread). In the case of sensory impressions, this can be a quite vivid perception. It's similar for the songs I mentioned which get stuck in the head - even if I wasn't made aware of them, they would still be 'stuck in my head' and influencing the course of my spiritual activity. Of course this is still only the very surface of the normally subconscious soul life, yet it still provides valuable living feed back for how to find new DoF and steer the spiritual activity in novel ways. At the very least, it drives home that everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds.
Yeah, for better or worse - and probably worse - I tend to have a good episodic memory.
But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:
"
It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."
I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:
"
everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"
where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...
I'm sure that's for better. Although, as we spoke before, there could be a transition phase where some aspects of the memory
appear to get worse for a while. I'm not sure if that happens for everyone. I understand it as part of the deconditioning process from normal sensory-conceptual life, so that we find our conscious bearings in life more within the free flow of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions which build up our organism in relation with the environment. It reminds me of my cat who always needs to sniff out an area before she lays down to rest there, even if she has been in that same area many times. She hasn't developed the thinking capacity to rely on memory for such decisions, which is certainly an advance in spiritual evolution for humans. Yet, in order to develop and perfect that capacity, we also dampened the living impulses which impart a much more Wise orientation towards the surrounding world. Now we need to recover that Wisdom through our spiritually awakened consciousness. We are no longer compelled to 'sniff out' the environment for our strictly necessary actions, yet we can freely choose to do so in full consciousness. Or in the terms of PoF:
Steiner wrote:A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences. He recalls, before coming to a decision, what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a comparable case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit, these prior conditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes a completely first-hand decision. What others have done in such a case worries him as little as what they have decreed. He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.
That is mostly an introduction for the rest of my response below.
Federica wrote:But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:
"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."
I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:
"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"
where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...
Right, this oscillation into the blind spot will continue to happen, but the more we anticipate it, the more we neutralize its effect. What you say about the frightening aspect is exactly what happens with these living dynamics when they remain unconscious or only in the form of abstract theory. Even with the latter, we are permeating the unknown with our concepts, making the underlying forces more transparent to our consciousness, and mitigating the apparent threat. The quickest way to deal with anxiety about some phenomena is to analyze it and make it more coherently sensible. We disentangle the content from personal inclinations and emotions and purify it with logical reasoning. Thinking doesn't care about how we feel at any given time - whether we are happy, sad, or afraid, whether we have a headache, a stomach ache, a flu, etc. It's either logically coherent or not - if it's not, then we are impelled to move forward to find the missing pieces of a more holistic image. Yet we are now at the cognitive evolutionary stage where the logical forces we discern only in abstract theory are still felt to be something which happens
to us, rather than something we are intimately participating in.
Now we need to acquire a living remembrance of all the ways in which we bring about our own circumstances, how we bring about all that which only appears to impress upon us without our involvement. We can begin working on this even with ordinary cognition. First we should try to notice how our thought-life and soul-life directs us to certain parts of the World Content and not others. We end up at certain places at certain times, and pay attention to certain portions of the spectrum and not others, based on our interests, emotions, character, beliefs, theories, etc. The very act of paying more attention to these details, even if we aren't very clear on the connections at first, works to loosen our habitual patterns of thinking and feeling, creating new leeway in the soul-organism for our spiritual activity to explore. Eventually this will lead us into the stream of Karma associated with our previous incarnation, where the seed was formed, through our moral-spiritual activity, which has now grown into the body and soul characteristics of our current incarnation. Our temperament, for ex., goes a long way towards influencing what career we chose in life. Of course our physical constitution influences all sorts of life decisions as well.
Steiner wrote:When somebody goes through life with great attentiveness to everything, he must, in the nature of things, move about a great deal. Human beings who lead an entirely sedentary life are very difficult to study to-day from the point of view of karma, because there was no such mode of life in earlier times. It remains to be seen what men with an exclusively sedentary mode of life will be like in the next earthly life, for sedentary existences have become customary only in this age. But when, in earlier times, a man was attentive to the things in his environment, he always had to go to them; he had to make his limbs mobile, to bring his limbs into activity. The whole body was active, not only the senses which belong to the head-system. Everything in which the whole body takes part, when the human being is attentive and observant, passes over into the structure of the head of the next earthly life, and has a definite effect.
So, in general, we need to resist compartmentalizing or 'detaching' what we are involved in on a daily basis with our spiritual activity from the process of spiritual evolution itself. We make our spiritual activity more focused and steer it with greater precision during meditation, yet we are more generally trying to broaden and deepen our attentiveness to the World Content. As discussed previously, our attention usually gets interrupted by personal soul-entanglements which reflect the 'rejection' of our spiritual offerings by Cosmic Intuition. We gives ourselves the opportunity to notice this more during meditation, but it's happening all the time. We can pay attention and let Cosmic impulses inflow our consciousness on a clear starry night as well, or even during the day. When our overarching intents become less personal and more Cosmic in orientation, we begin to resonate with intents which we normally don't think of as 'our own' and therefore our aperture for meaningful attention to the WC grows. It's interesting because sometimes I find it easier to concentrate when trying to meditate outside in Nature, even with natural and cultural noises around. It's almost as if there is less 'pressure' to make something happen, and I feel the verse - "
for my yoke is easy and my burden is light". This leads me into your post from the other thread, which I have moved here for convenience, since it's related to exercises and we also had the VR discussion going on there.
Federica wrote:That “the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self” is a completely unexpected statement, for me I am at the stage of searching for a sense of it and hoping to find some idea of distinction in that sense. Certainly not that I had found anything! Also, I don’t clearly recognize any thresholds. I only have a desire to extricate myself. And from there, I fumble. Maybe I would try to visualize my body as vividly as possible from an external viewpoint, following what it was doing earlier in the day. Crossing the street, it was raining, it looked sideways to check for coming bikes. Some thoughts were hovering over these frames - the ‘film’ gets captions.
This looking back is not the usual one of recalling a memory, which we form, bring to us, and attach to ourselves, as an increment to complement the unity of our identity. Here it’s about forming a clear enough visualization to detach from, and look at as part of a flow. It could be incorporated in the series of snapshots in Cleric’s quoted post, and could weld with the other constraints. But for me all this is only at the wish-stage. I guess I am demonstrating the lack of consciousness of the act you speak of.
Coming to the film trailer, I paused reading immediately, and watched first. I couldn’t guess the intuition you gathered, much less the purpose of the example. But I understand. Wishing to separate from the physical body means searching for a shared spiritual landscape, and feelings can also be traced back to their original common source. Paying attention to the gestures that operate that deepening is what you did with those feelings, and what I haven’t done with my exercise.
The description of deepening in Cleric’s post is very helpful! I understand everything you say. I don’t feel the plunge, because I don’t have enough momentum. It has happened with other posts, rarely, but never at first or second reading. More on returning after a while, after having lost the detailed memory of previous reading. When rediscovering the idea at that point, with only a general understanding of the direction but no details, the conscious attention can feel new and light, and roll on the landscape, until it plunges. In fact, this only happens because of the invisible support of the preparation work.
You must sense something to extricate yourself
from if you have the desire to extricate, right? We all have a difficult time objectively assessing our own situation, since we are merged into it. Very few people would make this comment - "
I will be reading this post again going forward, and hopefully the degrees of freedom will have evolved by then." This by itself shows an intuitive grasp for what is being spoken of which most people lack - usually it never occurs that revisiting the same content will increase its depth of meaning for us as our cognition evolves. Or, with the move trailer, I gave you very little go on, but you still permeated that content with your understanding. (the film example was likewise pointing to the discussion about our 'inner disposition' towards phenomena, which may normally repel or disgust us to some extent, allowing for more inward archetypal understanding).
The main issue I think is one of
expectation, which is also an issue for me and practically everyone who has started on the path. Our normal self we identify with always expects something to happen to it and bring about its elevation, transformation, higher realization, etc.. In that process, it views what's
actually happening to it, in terms of gradual understanding and lucidity of spiritual principles as you are gaining here - pulling together seemingly disparate avenues of thought - as a temporary means to that higher end. Yet the means and the end should become increasingly united in our consciousness, like the thinking and the will (perception). I'm not speaking of the conceptualization here - we may very well verbalize to ourselves, 'I know it's not fruitful to expect any reward for my efforts and that the path of greater concentration and understanding is itself the path to spiritual consciousness', but the question is whether our inner being is also allowing those thoughts to penetrate more deeply into our spheres of feeling and will. What Cleric mentioned on the other thread in regards to 'detachment' or 'separation' during concentration-meditation is very important in that regard. It can also be applied to our non-meditative life.
With regards to outer experiments one does while going about the day (of course not while driving or anything similar), I think your differentiation exercise can be useful. It can be a way of internalizing the TC spectrum which Cleric has highlighted for us in various ways. For ex. in a recent post:
To gain even deeper intuition of the telos of our flow of metamorphosis, we have to seek sensitivity for our inner life of sympathies, antipathies, desires. For example, the desire to have a glass of wine is part of that telos, isn’t it? It curves the way our states of being metamorphose towards a certain direction.
...Our inner life is weaved of such forces that externally steer the streamline of our becoming (depicted as ‘lateral’ forces in the image). Through concentration of our spiritual activity we can resist these forces and as a result we become conscious of them and corresponding new degrees of freedom. This is at the basis of one of the exercises in HTKHW, where we have to deny to ourselves some small desire. For example, next time I feel like having a glass of wine and see myself reaching for the bottle, I can say “I’ll skip this time.” The goal here is not to deprive ourselves and be miserable but to find the experience of us differentiating from the desire. In this way it becomes an objective force in our soul life, that we are ordinarily completely merged with and flow along. By differentiating we come to know another ‘me’ which has the inner strength to steer the streamline in novel ways.
So as we go about our day, we can make an exercise out of concentrating on the overarching intents we are engaged in - to begin with, the ones we know as 'our own' intents - and differentiating from the flow of desires, feelings, thoughts, and perceptual states which is structured by those intents in a fluid stream of becoming. These are the states of being which we must endure for our intent to be realized - instead of intending the Idea, 'go to the store', and immediately realizing that intention with our higher strata of intuitive consciousness, there is an arrested state of the Idea's evolution where our inspired, imaginative, and physical consciousness must work through the inner-outer 'bureaucracy' before it is fulfilled. We must negotiate a whole range of impulses, desires, feelings (sympathies-antipathies), thoughts, and perceptual structures to consciously fulfill the Idea. By becoming more conscious of this process itself, we resonate with the archetypal activity which is responsible for maintaining the bureaucracy and therefore navigate it with increasing ease (while also adopting that responsibility for ourselves).
Steiner wrote:In the first kind of vision the soul's inner working on the organism is revealed. In the second the soul penetrates to the will. But an inner activity must precede the outward manifestation of the will. Before the arm can be raised, the creative current must flow into it so that in its metabolic processes, which run on quietly, processes are inserted that are clearly the result of feeling. Feeling is a willing that remains enclosed within the human being, a willing that is arrested at its inception.
The processes inserted into the body for feeling and willing reveal themselves for the second stage of vision as processes that are in opposition to those that support life. They are destructive processes. In the constructive processes life prospers; but the soul withers in them. The life of the body, which itself is built up by the soul, must be broken down so that the nature and activity of the soul can unfold out of the body.
To spiritual vision the working of the soul on the body is like a memory of something that the soul had first to accomplish before it could exist in its own activity.
Thereby, however, the soul experiences itself as a purely spiritual being that has let the forming of the body take precedence to the soul's own activity in order to have the body become the basis for the soul's inherent, purely spiritual development. The soul first devotes its creative effort to the body so that, after this has been done sufficiently, the soul can manifest itself in free spirituality.
And this development of the soul begins already with thinking that results from the perception of the senses. When one perceives an object, the soul commences its activity. It shapes the corresponding part of the body in such a way that it becomes adapted for developing, in the form of thought, a mirror image of the object. In experiencing this mirror image, the soul beholds the result of its own activity.
Note that such an exercise only makes sense if we remain connected with the first-person meaningful experience of those desires, feelings, thought-perceptions we are working through within the overarching Idea. Otherwise we simply envision them as abstract entities apart from our core being, which we try to fit into some model of that being. It is much easier said than done when we are immersed in the sensory spectrum, which is why these things only work if we are simultaneously deepening our cognition through the spheres of feeling and willing with the archetypal exercises and meditations.