Retracing Spiritual Activity (Part VI)

[Federica]

Speaking of 'convolutions', I came across this great video in connection with the Moiré patterns. Around 4 min, she discusses its mathematical description via the Fourier transform and then explains what "convolution" means in that context. I wasn't previously aware of this technical term, rather using "convolution" as simply a synonym for complicated folds, but it's interesting to know it also has technical usage that fits with the Moire visualization of spiritual involution. (I suspect Cleric has been aware of all this from when he first introduced the terms )

Aha

Yes, well explained in the video, how versatile this idea is. There are even websites to Fourier-transform any image into any other, through a Moiré pattern! And we know by now that a Moiré pattern of Cleric's and Ashvin's writings is not only entirely possible but also exquisite in its results, with plenty of practical applications too (except cryptography).
I would estimate that the interfering patterns of ideas result from a pitch self-similarity between the two of probably... 30%

[Federica]

Yes, well explained in the video, how versatile this idea is. There are even websites to Fourier-transform any image into any other, through a Moiré pattern! And we know by now that a Moiré pattern of Cleric's and Ashvin's writings is not only entirely possible but also exquisite in its results, with plenty of practical applications too (except cryptography).
I would estimate that the interfering patterns of ideas result from a pitch self-similarity between the two of probably... 30%

To be clear, I just wanted to say that, in a sense, it is true that you two are working as if you were one, at least to some extent!

[Cleric]

To be clear, I just wanted to say that, in a sense, it is true that you two are working as if you were one, at least to some extent!

Indeed, our latest essays converge in a very similar way, but this is only because we're investigating the same axis, so to speak. It's like awakening to the fact that we have a spinal cord, we move along it and put the experiences into words. This is the same thing as what someone recently quoted about PoF, where Steiner says that at a certain point when one gets a good orientation in the matters, they could write their own PoF which would follow much the same axis. In a sense, we not only clump together some ideas, but we are tracing our meditations. Every chapter speaks of something that is found along the way. So, the inner lawfulness of the depth axis not only determines the contents as some chaotically floating blobs, but also, when the axis is traversed smoothly, the way the contents metamorphose is non-arbitraray, just like we are bound to pass through the same atmosphere layers if we are to gradually rise with a balloon. For this reason, I believe anyone who begins to gain inner orientation within the depth of being, will soon be able to write their own progression of essays that will look similar. This is not because we copy each other but simply because we're moving through shared archetypal patterns, that are naturally traversed in meditation.

(I'll add a few words on the other thread soon but it's a little harder to find the time lately)

[Federica]

Yes, Cleric, I know you are not copying each other. I was just trying to be humorous

(Thank you, anyhow the other thread can wait indefinitely, there's so much already there to work with!)

[Cleric]

Yes, Cleric, I know you are not copying each other. I was just trying to be humorous

(Thank you, anyhow the other thread can wait indefinitely, there's so much already there to work with!)

Humor noted (more than 30% )

But indeed, it was a strange experience for me while reading Ashvin's essay and reading things almost in the same patterns in which I have laid them down in some drafted essays that I have never shared here. For a moment I was "Wait, have I actually posted it?" But then realized that we're simply tightly following the same gold vein. And this is great! Because it in another way testifies for everything we are talking about.

[Federica]

Yes, Cleric, I know you are not copying each other. I was just trying to be humorous

(Thank you, anyhow the other thread can wait indefinitely, there's so much already there to work with!)

Humor noted (more than 30% )

But indeed, it was a strange experience for me while reading Ashvin's essay and reading things almost in the same patterns in which I have laid them down in some drafted essays that I have never shared here. For a moment I was "Wait, have I actually posted it?" But then realized that we're simply tightly following the same gold vein. And this is great! Because it in another way testifies for everything we are talking about.

I see. Yet it's so interesting to me how it's also possible to follow the same gold vein, though in a way that speaks less to the scientifically minded, and more to the literary minded, like ML very convincingly does in "the world that doesn't exist and what to do about it" where language is directly exposed, rather than the metaphors of science.

Imagine further, however, that from my perception of the other, I form a representation of him, as a model cast from a mould, or like the imprint of a seal in wax. Just as I can then remove the model from its mold and the imprint from the seal, so I can imagine this person as a representation in my consciousness irrespective of, and in abstraction from, his relation to me as a “you” and through which his “I” is mediated to me. Now I can refer to him as “he” or an “it,” simpliciter. Yet notice that the grammatical third person is experientially last to arrive and follows on the coattails of the other persons as an echo follows the cry of a gull or a “splash” follows a pebble cast into a well.

Suppose, however, that I forget the common origin of all things and begin to seek for it among this “third-person” world of shadows—this model of abstract representations that I project as husks of my perceptual encounters. Suppose I begin to imbue the latter with the seal of my gnoseological authentication and go on to develop an entire method and program of research dedicated to ratifying and promulgating—under the imprimatur of “science”—the absolute reality of this exclusively third-person conceit, to which first and second-person aspects are regarded as epiphenomenal appendages.

It will, I think, be clear that what has come to seem most real to me is in fact most illusory and this “physical world” that I imagine to exist around me, and which I imagine to have pre-existed my arrival by eons untold except by illustrious physicists and astronomers, in reality never existed at any time except in my imagination and the collective consciousness of this generation and as a jewel on Lucifer’s belt of lies.

PS: Ashvin, btw, next time you object to the "wasteland of perception" I will appeal to ML's illusory world that never existed at any times, other than as Lucifer's lie

[AshvinP]

PS: Ashvin, btw, next time you object to the "wasteland of perception" I will appeal to ML's illusory world that never existed at any times, other than as Lucifer's lie

Max, however, isn't referring to the qualia of sensory experience, like the stones, plants, animals, and humans we perceive around us, but the theoretical abstractions that were conjured up as 'explanations' and reified, like atoms, particles, forces, energy fields, and so forth. Clearly, the latter are illusory insofar as they are taken as independent realities that are working 'behind' the phenomenal appearances. I think he would say the latter are symbols revealing spiritual reality in direct proportion to the life and strength of cognition that approaches them. Or as I stated in the essay:

In that sense, the perceptual modifications are only ‘illusions’ when the spirit fails to continue retracing the effect to other facts, including the fact of its own inner activity, but instead confuses the perceptual experience with some ‘final state’ of reality. Simply put, no phenomenon is something other than what it appears to be, neither is it only what it appears to be.

[Federica]

PS: Ashvin, btw, next time you object to the "wasteland of perception" I will appeal to ML's illusory world that never existed at any times, other than as Lucifer's lie

Max, however, isn't referring to the qualia of sensory experience, like the stones, plants, animals, and humans we perceive around us, but the theoretical abstractions that were conjured up as 'explanations' and reified, like atoms, particles, forces, energy fields, and so forth. Clearly, the latter are illusory insofar as they are taken as independent realities that are working 'behind' the phenomenal appearances. I think he would say the latter are symbols revealing spiritual reality in direct proportion to the life and strength of cognition that approaches them. Or as I stated in the essay:

In that sense, the perceptual modifications are only ‘illusions’ when the spirit fails to continue retracing the effect to other facts, including the fact of its own inner activity, but instead confuses the perceptual experience with some ‘final state’ of reality. Simply put, no phenomenon is something other than what it appears to be, neither is it only what it appears to be.

Neither was I, when speaking of wasteland of perception (by the way, is a stone or a plant a quale of sensory experience? These are concepts to which many qualia can be related). Rather, I was speaking of the perceptual-memory picture, which is a wasteland in the sense that it's the past picture of cosmic interconnected gestures.

In anycase, let me point to something Steiner stated, which has 'fortuitously' come to my help today. Perhaps it will settle the question of the appropriateness of the concept of "waste" for the perceptual-memory tableau. Interestingly, I’ve clicked on the Youtube suggestion to listen to this lecture for entirely separate reasons. Namely, RS Press Audio titled the video rendering of the lecture: “Stars as colonies of spiritual beings”, and that's why I've pressed play, since the colonies of star beings is the topic of my latest question on the other thread. Regardless, it says:

We human beings, too, were in the warmth of ancient Saturn.
Then evolution went forward. Out of the warmth, air was precipitated, water was precipitated, and at length the solid element. All these are remnants, precipitated, cast out by humanity in order that it might attain its further evolution. The whole solid mineral world belongs to us. It is but a relic that has remained behind. So, too, the watery and airy elements. Thus the real essence of our Earth is not what we have in the kingdoms of Nature, and not even what we carry in our bones and muscles (for these too are composed of what we have thus cast out and afterwards absorbed again). Our own souls are the real essence, and everything else is in reality more or less a semblance, a remnant, a waste product, or the like.


Karmic Relationships IV Lecture VII,

PS: Regarding what ML is referring to in the essay, I will obviously not attempt to guess what he would say (of course you can, because of your friendship) however, from what is written in the essay, the following can be gathered:

What ML is speaking of is a formed “representation of him [another person I relate to], as a model cast from a mould, or like the imprint of a seal in wax”, that is a conceptualized, intellectualized thought-perception. It's in this general sense, that the word “model” is used. Of course, scientific models such as atoms, particles, etcetera are sub-categories and, if you will, elaborations of the intellectual “model cast from a mould”. However, I don't gather that ML is referring exclusively and specifically to atoms, particles and other scientific abstractions. In the essay, “this model of abstract representations that I project as husks of my perceptual encounters” is pointed to independent of and upstream of the reference to the work of "physicists and astronomers".

[AshvinP]

PS: Ashvin, btw, next time you object to the "wasteland of perception" I will appeal to ML's illusory world that never existed at any times, other than as Lucifer's lie

Max, however, isn't referring to the qualia of sensory experience, like the stones, plants, animals, and humans we perceive around us, but the theoretical abstractions that were conjured up as 'explanations' and reified, like atoms, particles, forces, energy fields, and so forth. Clearly, the latter are illusory insofar as they are taken as independent realities that are working 'behind' the phenomenal appearances. I think he would say the latter are symbols revealing spiritual reality in direct proportion to the life and strength of cognition that approaches them. Or as I stated in the essay:

In that sense, the perceptual modifications are only ‘illusions’ when the spirit fails to continue retracing the effect to other facts, including the fact of its own inner activity, but instead confuses the perceptual experience with some ‘final state’ of reality. Simply put, no phenomenon is something other than what it appears to be, neither is it only what it appears to be.

Neither was I, when speaking of wasteland of perception (by the way, is a stone or a plant a quale of sensory experience? These are concepts to which many qualia can be related). Rather, I was speaking of the perceptual-memory picture, which is a wasteland in the sense that it's the past picture of cosmic interconnected gestures.

In anycase, let me point to something Steiner stated, which has 'fortuitously' come to my help today. Perhaps it will settle the question of the appropriateness of the concept of "waste" for the perceptual-memory tableau. Interestingly, I’ve clicked on the Youtube suggestion to listen to this lecture for entirely separate reasons. Namely, RS Press Audio titled the video rendering of the lecture: “Stars as colonies of spiritual beings”, and that's why I've pressed play, since the colonies of star beings is the topic of my latest question on the other thread. Regardless, it says:

We human beings, too, were in the warmth of ancient Saturn.
Then evolution went forward. Out of the warmth, air was precipitated, water was precipitated, and at length the solid element. All these are remnants, precipitated, cast out by humanity in order that it might attain its further evolution. The whole solid mineral world belongs to us. It is but a relic that has remained behind. So, too, the watery and airy elements. Thus the real essence of our Earth is not what we have in the kingdoms of Nature, and not even what we carry in our bones and muscles (for these too are composed of what we have thus cast out and afterwards absorbed again). Our own souls are the real essence, and everything else is in reality more or less a semblance, a remnant, a waste product, or the like.


Karmic Relationships IV Lecture VII,

PS: Regarding what ML is referring to in the essay, I will obviously not attempt to guess what he would say (of course you can, because of your friendship) however, from what is written in the essay, the following can be gathered:

What ML is speaking of is a formed “representation of him [another person I relate to], as a model cast from a mould, or like the imprint of a seal in wax”, that is a conceptualized, intellectualized thought-perception. It's in this general sense, that the word “model” is used. Of course, scientific models such as atoms, particles, etcetera are sub-categories and, if you will, elaborations of the intellectual “model cast from a mould”. However, I don't gather that ML is referring exclusively and specifically to atoms, particles and other scientific abstractions. In the essay, “this model of abstract representations that I project as husks of my perceptual encounters” is pointed to independent of and upstream of the reference to the work of "physicists and astronomers".

Right, I meant the colors, sounds, textures, etc. that the kingdoms present to us, not necessarily any ideas we attach to them. Through spiritual science, we know that there are at least 12 senses, such as the concept sense, speech sense, and ego-sense. When I perceive another human being, I also perceive the fact that she bears an ego, she is a spiritual agency like me. Inner development is really about purifying all the 12 senses from the encrusted soul habits that obscure the archetypal spiritual relations that they are always conveying to us.

The terminology is not what I take issue with. Calling the flow of normal perception-memory in modern times a 'wasteland' is not a big deal. As stated before, I try to focus on the patterns of comments and the frequent issues or confusions that crop up through them. Particularly the comments surrounding the brain and how we might 'make sense of it' was what brought my attention back to this issue of the 'wasteland of perception' and suggested to me there might be more of a subtle disconnect between the spiritual and the perceptual.

The main point I would make here is simply that we don't need to look for fixed rules and descriptions of spiritual evolution. If we are just using 'wasteland' as an evocative metaphor for dead thinking that characterizes the modern age, that's fine. But if it becomes too much of a crutch, a go-to symbol for us to orient toward all perceptual experience, then it becomes misleading. It is especially tempting with many of Steiner's lectures because he will state current conditions of evolution quite unequivocally in some places, even though he also cautions against taking them as fixed formulas in many other places. For ex:

This vital change, this most important happening, is not so easy to describe, for our language has been made fundamentally for the purpose of reproducing outer sense reality in the soul. This makes it difficult for us to describe precisely, or adequately, something that does not belong to sense reality, but to supersense existence. Often one has to make use of comparisons—not abstract ones but such as you are well acquainted with in spiritual science, where one phenomenon of life is placed by the side of another so that one will throw light on another. If such comparisons are used it must at the same time be made very clear that only flexible thinking, thinking that does not stamp the concepts, the words, into a set shape, in really compatible with the sense of what is presented.

I would maintain Max's essay, in this case, focuses on the theoretical fictions built up around sensory reality to 'explain' it away via modern scientific habits of thinking that ignore the real-time intentionality of the perceiver. He had a recent conversation about the theory of evolution as well, which I recommend.

[Federica]

I would maintain Max's essay, in this case, focuses on the theoretical fictions built up around sensory reality to 'explain' it away via modern scientific habits of thinking that ignore the real-time intentionality of the perceiver. He had a recent conversation about the theory of evolution as well, which I recommend.

To a repeated absolute statement of opinion with no argumentation or response to what I've indicated, there's not much one can say, other than: okay, Ashvin