On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

[findingblanks]

I realized I'm getting paranoid, as if you will find any clarifying questions to be missing the point. So, rather than assume, let me ask you this:

Are we on the same page that if we were both in a T&K study group and a participant said something like, "I was working with dgwp last night and this incredibly intense mysterious being - hard to describe but it was blue bulging movement/mass coming towards me with harmonous intent -- was clearly interested in aspects of the environment that were equally mysterious, as if growing fruits were evolving in real time and the being was both relishing in odd interactions with this and also moving closer to me..."

That you and i would both
1) appreciate the description and experience as such
2) and see various reasons why this isn't matching even the most basic characteristics of what Steiner conceptually defined as dgwp

I'm wanting to both respect your desire to not worry about how dgwp is understood, while also establishing that there are some characterizations that you would find problematic in terms of a reader really being able to use the tool for its purpose. Thanks.

[AshvinP]

I realized I'm getting paranoid, as if you will find any clarifying questions to be missing the point. So, rather than assume, let me ask you this:

Are we on the same page that if we were both in a T&K study group and a participant said something like, "I was working with dgwp last night and this incredibly intense mysterious being - hard to describe but it was blue bulging movement/mass coming towards me with harmonous intent -- was clearly interested in aspects of the environment that were equally mysterious, as if growing fruits were evolving in real time and the being was both relishing in odd interactions with this and also moving closer to me..."

That you and i would both
1) appreciate the description and experience as such
2) and see various reasons why this isn't matching even the most basic characteristics of what Steiner conceptually defined as dgwp

I'm wanting to both respect your desire to not worry about how dgwp is understood, while also establishing that there are some characterizations that you would find problematic in terms of a reader really being able to use the tool for its purpose. Thanks.

yes, in that case, I would have plenty of reasons to think the person wasn't following the intuitive movements of Steiner in T&K whatsoever.

[findingblanks]

That's a relief. Yeah, for me I have that same experience when I hear one reader describe dgwp as THE starting point, the direct experience from which the first insights are being gained versus other readers talking about it as if it is a hybrid of direct and indirect experience.

But at least I get to hear you agree that the example I gave would cause you to pause and dialog about the concept itself with that person. My fear (and what I think I've seen) is that if the concept is even slightly misunderstood, that misunderstanding will show up as blind-spots in the development of higher cognition. There is no way the person in the example above would be able to recognize the role her filters are playing in what she thinks is something free of filtering. This isn't to even mention that she obviously hasn't grasped that dgwp is not an experience itself. But that is extreme. So I think that smaller, less obvious misunderstandings would lead to less obvious formation of blind-spots.

I have no desire to talk about blind-spots in this thread. I simply wanted to punctuate why I have any concern at all about how accurately we should share the same understanding of dgwp. I'm very happy to assume we are on the same page and go from there.

Thanks.

[AshvinP]

That's a relief. Yeah, for me I have that same experience when I hear one reader describe dgwp as THE starting point, the direct experience from which the first insights are being gained versus other readers talking about it as if it is a hybrid of direct and indirect experience.

But at least I get to hear you agree that the example I gave would cause you to pause and dialog about the concept itself with that person. My fear (and what I think I've seen) is that if the concept is even slightly misunderstood, that misunderstanding will show up as blind-spots in the development of higher cognition. There is no way the person in the example above would be able to recognize the role her filters are playing in what she thinks is something free of filtering. This isn't to even mention that she obviously hasn't grasped that dgwp is not an experience itself. But that is extreme. So I think that smaller, less obvious misunderstandings would lead to less obvious formation of blind-spots.

I have no desire to talk about blind-spots in this thread. I simply wanted to punctuate why I have any concern at all about how accurately we should share the same understanding of dgwp. I'm very happy to assume we are on the same page and go from there.

Thanks.

There is a possible issue with the way the bold is phrased, but I think we have discussed this before, so I will only elaborate on it briefly here (and again, if it doesn't apply or isn't helpful for orientation in some way, you can ignore it). This is why I used the example of the imaginatively overlaid color in the OP. I am sure you would agree that imaginatively overlaying the color red on a white surface, for ex., is a valid experience itself, and an experience that even serves an important function. It only becomes an 'illusion' or a 'blind spot' if we forget that this state is occurring within the context of certain constraints that 'outweigh' the imaginative experience, such as the sensory color of white (sensory colors are, of course, still imaginative experiences, but just with more substantiality). In other words, we mistake the state of redness for some 'raw experience' that can be isolated from the underlying sensory state.

That is analogous to your person in the example (or any lesser confusion about the experience of DGWP). She has an imaginative experience, which is just as valid an experience as anything else that happens when working with DGWP, but has no basis for placing that experience within a wider inner context (which is the 'blind spot' you mention). Instead, she takes it as some raw experience in itself that tells her about the 'nature of cognition' or whatever. This is always a risk in our spiritual pursuits and is born of importing the same conceptual habits that we use in ordinary sensory experience to make judgments about that experience. We habitually isolate what we are experiencing from all the inner factors that brought us into the state of experiencing it in that particular way.

So, yes, I think it is very important to understand the DGWP tool as a way to resist ordinary conceptual habits and gradually sensitize to the inner context through which our perceptual states unfold, beginning with our assumptive habits of thinking. That way we also avoid the blind spots.

[findingblanks]

I'm glad you brought up your example of overlay because I like it a lot. The place it does not overlap for me regarding DGWP is that the analogy would be more like the following:

1) Imagine having dinner with your family and a new neighbor who is a married bachelor.
2) Just imagine this as clearly as you can.


Imagine a group of people has been given this exercise and are sharing rich descriptions of what the dinner is like, the voice quality of hte people, the smells, the exciting and poignant stories being told. Each person describes how they imagine the hair on the married bachelor, his skin color, how he seems to treat people.

I can imagine so much richness and real experiences being had in this by all of those people.

And I could also imagine one person saying something like, "I really like this exercise, but I'm curious why nobody is talking about what we've had to do in order to actually grasp the meaning of 'married bachelor'"

In my development working with DGWP, I've moved from being an enthusiastic member of the first group, to a relatively lonely (but increasingly less so over the last 10 years) member of the second group. And that guy who brings up what it requires to visualize an married bachelor could also become very interested in, 1) why nobody was talking about that aspect of the instructions, and, 2) the possible consequences of overlooking it.

Your example of overlaying colors is rich and useful, for me, in how sharply it points to
1) the real world utility in overlaying representations onto our sensory experience
2) the difference between finished representations-perceptions versus semantic aspects of meaning that are not obviously paradoxes.

To be clear, I think there is nothing at all problematic with what you say about the utility of overlaying colors; and I take your point about the problems that happen if we forget which colors are imaginative and which ones are really there.

Thanks!

[Güney27]

"Concepts cannot be derived from perception. This is apparent from the fact that, as man grows up, he slowly and gradually builds up the concepts corresponding to the objects that surround him. Concepts are added to perception." (GA 4)

What would it take to verify the above? Would we need to investigate every single perceptual experience to figure out where the conceptual element came from? Or would one single instance of a perceptual experience in which the corresponding concepts arrive from an 'orthogonal direction', i.e. from within our intuitive activity, serve to validate this experiential principle?

Unless we believe that cognitive-perceptual experience is continually changing in its underlying lawfulness, sometimes allowing for concepts to arise from perceptions and sometimes allowing for concepts to incarnate through our intuitive activity, then we have to conclude a single instance is sufficient to heighten our attention to what is always happening for all perceptual experiences. The only question then becomes when/how it happened, i.e. as the result of 'past' intuitive activity or 'present' intuitive activity?

Our thinking has been habituated to feel, for example, that if we add the concept of ‘redness’ to another concept of ‘blueness’, we get the concept of ‘purpleness’. Yet careful attention to living experience reveals that is not the case – the concept of ‘purpleness’ only appears as a flash of insight from mysterious depths when we encounter the corresponding perceptions that anchor and kindle our intuitive activity. We only feel the perceptions already possess the concepts because this incarnational process already occurred during our instinctive development. Neither can the concept of ‘twofoldness’ be reduced to two concepts of ‘oneness’ that we add together, but must arise as a flash of intuitive insight concerning all things that come in pairs.

Likewise, we can imagine writing a letter on a sheet of paper with certain ideas and intimate feelings. Then we put the paper in an envelope and seal it. Now we can place this letter somewhere and anytime our gaze glances over it, it acts as a rich symbol that anchors everything that we have expressed there. We should really try to feel how practically none of that inner richness can be seen by just staring at the sealed letter, for example, if someone else were to look at it. The inner contents come from the opposite direction of the perceptual image of the letter, from within our memory intuition of steering our intuitive activity through meaning that we condensed into written form. Is there any reason to doubt that all of perceptual reality is of the Logos-nature of a letter?

What happens once we realize this experiential principle applies to all conceptual relations that we have woven into the ordinary perceptual world around us and within us through intuitive activity? Then we may feel the only way to become more sensitive to our intuitive activity that structures perceptual experience is to unwind these conceptual determinations through our imagination.

"As we have seen in the preceding chapters, an epistemological investigation must begin by rejecting existing knowledge. Knowledge is something brought into existence by man, something that has arisen through his activity. If a theory of knowledge is really to explain the whole sphere of knowledge, then it must start from something still quite untouched by the activity of thinking, and what is more, from something which lends to this activity its first impulse. This starting point must lie outside the act of cognition, it must not itself be knowledge. But it must be sought immediately prior to cognition, so that the very next step man takes beyond it is the activity of cognition. This absolute starting point must be determined in such a way that it admits nothing already derived from cognition....

Only our directly given world-picture can offer such a starting point, i.e. that picture of the world which presents itself to man before he has subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, before he has asserted or decided anything at all about it by means of thinking. This “directly given” picture is what flits past us, disconnected, but still undifferentiated." (GA 3)

Do we think Steiner is simply providing us a metaphysical assertion, an informational communication like he is describing a landscape to us over the phone, or rather is he prompting us to do something inwardly to 'reject existing knowledge' and experience the 'starting point' that leads into the activity of cognition? In other words, the above-quoted paragraph is analogous to the image right below. When we see the image, we won't assume it intends to give us third-person pictures of people doing asanas so we can memorize them, but rather it is giving us symbols that can anchor our first-person experience of going through the same physical motions. Likewise, Steiner is providing us with symbols of 'thought-asanas' to anchor our first-person experience of the same intuitive movements he went through. We only realize the value of these asanas if we effortfully move our intuitive activity through the various formations that are offered, without analytically dissecting them into third-person pictures about the 'nature of cognitive experience'.

Are we led in this way to some illusory reality, since we are trying to imaginatively eliminate the conceptual determinations that we actually find interwoven in our ordinary experience? Take a look at an object with a uniform white or black surface. Now use your imaginative activity to perceive another color overlaid on top of the surface, like red, blue, green, etc. Although we may have a dim sense of this imaginatively overlaid color, we must admit that the sensory color 'outweighs' it. Does this mean the imaginative overlay is an illusion, some state that doesn't correspond to reality? No, there is no reason to conclude that. Our imaginative state with the overlaid color is just as much an experienced reality as the conceptual state with only the sensory color. All that this experience indicates is that our imaginative state is unfolding within the context of a conceptual-sensory state that 'outweighs' it. Nevertheless, the imaginative state still serves a valid function in orienting us to reality, namely the reality of our own activity - the limitations and possibilities of that activity within the context of more 'heavy' constraints. We would never discover this inner reality if we didn't effortfully move our imaginative activity but simply remained passive and observed the sensory state as it is given to us.

When we unwind the conceptual determinations, what are we becoming more inwardly sensitive to? Philosophers from Aristotle to Kant arrived at the conclusion that there must be 'categories' that structure our cognitive perception in various interesting ways. For Aristotle, these were substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, doing, having, and being affected. For Kant, these took on a more refined conceptual form. Yet for all these philosophers it wasn't conceived that we can experience these categories more intimately, not just as abstract mental pictures that we imagine "structure our experience", but as real-time 'curvatures' along which we can experience our mental, emotional, and sensory states of being unfolding. In other words, can we experience the intuition of these categories in greater purity? The only way to become intimately aware of such constraints is to resist them. If we are entirely submerged in water and flowing along with the current passively, we will never become conscious of the water and our relation to it. Likewise, if we are free-falling within a vacuum.

Only when we begin resisting the current in some way do we create the conditions for becoming conscious of this medium through which our states unfold. It is the same principle for the inner life. We have to resist the conceptual determinations we habitually make out of the perceptual flow to become more conscious of our conceptually determining activity, the intuitive 'categorical' mediums through which our perceptual states unfold. As we can see, there is nothing very exotic or complex about the above. It may even seem trivial and boring at first, like it's putting an end to all our interpretive fun, so we look for more 'nuanced' ways of interacting with the text. Yet the real fun begins when we resist our habitual determinations and participate with Steiner in the thought-asanas. Then we learn about the 'nature of cognition' in an intuitively experiential way that is completely unsuspected from the perspective of standard intellectual philosophy and science.

This kind of phenomenology can lead people to the faith in the higher worlds, because it sheds light upon the things that prevent us from it (materialism, skepticism etc.)
It’s very important for our time. Just a little realization that I wanted to share with you. Please keep up with this important work.

[AshvinP]

I'm glad you brought up your example of overlay because I like it a lot. The place it does not overlap for me regarding DGWP is that the analogy would be more like the following:

1) Imagine having dinner with your family and a new neighbor who is a married bachelor.
2) Just imagine this as clearly as you can.


Imagine a group of people has been given this exercise and are sharing rich descriptions of what the dinner is like, the voice quality of hte people, the smells, the exciting and poignant stories being told. Each person describes how they imagine the hair on the married bachelor, his skin color, how he seems to treat people.

I can imagine so much richness and real experiences being had in this by all of those people.

And I could also imagine one person saying something like, "I really like this exercise, but I'm curious why nobody is talking about what we've had to do in order to actually grasp the meaning of 'married bachelor'"

In my development working with DGWP, I've moved from being an enthusiastic member of the first group, to a relatively lonely (but increasingly less so over the last 10 years) member of the second group. And that guy who brings up what it requires to visualize an married bachelor could also become very interested in, 1) why nobody was talking about that aspect of the instructions, and, 2) the possible consequences of overlooking it.

Your example of overlaying colors is rich and useful, for me, in how sharply it points to
1) the real world utility in overlaying representations onto our sensory experience
2) the difference between finished representations-perceptions versus semantic aspects of meaning that are not obviously paradoxes.

To be clear, I think there is nothing at all problematic with what you say about the utility of overlaying colors; and I take your point about the problems that happen if we forget which colors are imaginative and which ones are really there.

Thanks!

Thanks for this interesting comparison. I think one of the functions of the color overlay metaphor is precisely to orient to how 'married bachelors' exist within our imaginative experience.

For ex., we could adapt your example to imagine having dinner with the family in the dining room and the living room, at the same time. We could ask people to describe the rich experiences they imagine are taking place at this dinner, including all the details of the rooms. But then one person says, "I'm curious why nobody is talking about what we've had to do to grasp the meaning of simultaneous dinner in two different rooms".

From the spatial-sensory perspective, this is indeed a paradox and, if we are limited to that perspective, we would be right to call out the possible consequences of overlooking this aspect of the imagination. Yet we know that, from the ideal (imaginative) perspective, this aspect is not so problematic. There is no spatial dimension to our meaningful inner experiences (including sensations before we apply a quantitative conceptual abstraction to their qualitative experience). Our ideas can encompass multiple spatial locations as something whole, for ex. all the rooms that integrate as our intuition of the 'house'.

In other words, when we move 'orthogonal' to the horizontal sensory perspective along a vertical axis, we move into more meaningfully integrated experience, and this is precisely the function of the DGWP imaginative tool as well. The 'horizontal' plane of ordinary sensory content is weaved of infinite polarities - hot/cold, inner/outer, dark/light, male/female, etc. Is it possible that these all precipitate from an imaginative space of inner activity where the polar distinctions are less sharply contrasted, more meaningfully integrated? Perhaps the function of DGWP is precisely to sensitize our thinking consciousness to such a space in which our activity weaves, where meanings that are normally 'contradictory' start to overlap. Unlike our physical body and concepts tied to it, our imaginative activity has the degrees of freedom to travel along this vertical axis.

We don't need to decide whether this is actually the case right now, but I am wondering whether you see the logic here and, if so, what are your thoughts about it? Could it shed a different kind of light on the DGWP tool?

[AshvinP]

This kind of phenomenology can lead people to the faith in the higher worlds, because it sheds light upon the things that prevent us from it (materialism, skepticism etc.)
It’s very important for our time. Just a little realization that I wanted to share with you. Please keep up with this important work.

Thanks, Guney!

[findingblanks]

The doubled dinner party example, for me, is still something that can be imagined in a way that doesn't demand changing the meaning of a word. And it doesn't ask us to simply slap a label upon a representation. It is exactly as you describe it and a very great exercise and way of showing how we can push into imaginative realms.

But, for me, it isn't the same as saying, "We must begin by intensely visualizing a color that is completely invisible, at now time can there be a visual percept during this exercise and we can't take our first step until this is grasped."

I am not imagining a married bachelor if I picture a man and then label him 'married bachelor.' I'm not imagining a married bachelor if I change the fundamental meaning of married or the fundamental meaning of bachelor. For me, this is not the same as developing complexly polaric represenations.

"Perhaps the function of DGWP is precisely to sensitize our thinking consciousness to such a space in which our activity weaves, where meanings that are normally 'contradictory' start to overlap."

I hear you there. To me, 'where meaning overlaps' violates Steiner's criteria for DGWP being that which is devoid of meaning. That said, if we just took your wonderful exercise and called it something else, I would 100% agree that there is real value in it. I'm only saying that I don't see how it matches up to Steiner's criteria for a conception of 'picture' that is filled with entities but utterly free of any meaning, not an experience of this but a concept, like imagining a married bachelor or a perfectly round triangle. To be clear, I think both of those are very useful meditations.

"We don't need to decide whether this is actually the case right now, but I am wondering whether you see the logic here and, if so, what are your thoughts about it? Could it shed a different kind of light on the DGWP tool?"

Yes, once I let go of DGWP being a picture of the world that presents itself to us before we have subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, then I can let DGWP mean any interesting and useful experience. For instance, I'm ready to proceed from here with the definition or characterization of DGWP that you'd like to go with. From there, we can see what unfolds.

[AshvinP]

The doubled dinner party example, for me, is still something that can be imagined in a way that doesn't demand changing the meaning of a word. And it doesn't ask us to simply slap a label upon a representation. It is exactly as you describe it and a very great exercise and way of showing how we can push into imaginative realms.

But, for me, it isn't the same as saying, "We must begin by intensely visualizing a color that is completely invisible, at now time can there be a visual percept during this exercise and we can't take our first step until this is grasped."

I am not imagining a married bachelor if I picture a man and then label him 'married bachelor.' I'm not imagining a married bachelor if I change the fundamental meaning of married or the fundamental meaning of bachelor. For me, this is not the same as developing complexly polaric represenations.

"Perhaps the function of DGWP is precisely to sensitize our thinking consciousness to such a space in which our activity weaves, where meanings that are normally 'contradictory' start to overlap."

I hear you there. To me, 'where meaning overlaps' violates Steiner's criteria for DGWP being that which is devoid of meaning. That said, if we just took your wonderful exercise and called it something else, I would 100% agree that there is real value in it. I'm only saying that I don't see how it matches up to Steiner's criteria for a conception of 'picture' that is filled with entities but utterly free of any meaning, not an experience of this but a concept, like imagining a married bachelor or a perfectly round triangle. To be clear, I think both of those are very useful meditations.

"We don't need to decide whether this is actually the case right now, but I am wondering whether you see the logic here and, if so, what are your thoughts about it? Could it shed a different kind of light on the DGWP tool?"

Yes, once I let go of DGWP being a picture of the world that presents itself to us before we have subjected it to the processes of knowledge in any way, then I can let DGWP mean any interesting and useful experience. For instance, I'm ready to proceed from here with the definition or characterization of DGWP that you'd like to go with. From there, we can see what unfolds.

Alright, I'm following your reasoning here. Before we move on, I'd like to try one more example and see if it potentially fits better with the spirit of DGWP for you.

What if we look at it from the opposite direction? What if DGWP is about imaginatively unwinding the contradictions, the 'married bachelors', that are already interwoven in ordinary experience through our assumptive conceptual habits? For example, it's hard to deny that ordinary experience presents itself as a sharp contrast between self and not-self, between what is "me" and what is "not me". Yet isn't this sharp contrast of ordinary experience also a 'married bachelor'?

Philosophers have banged their heads up against precisely this contradiction for hundreds of years and ultimately concluded, by the necessity of this assumed sharp contrast, that objective knowledge of the "not-self" is impossible. There was no error in their reasoning and in fact, their reasoning must lead them to this epistemically nihilist conclusion once the assumptive sharp contrast is made. Yet it's easy to see that the conclusion also blows up the entire theory of knowledge through which the conclusion was reached - the theory inevitably ends up relying on some objective knowledge of the "not self" to conclude knowledge of it is impossible.

This is just one example of how we live with married bachelors in our ordinary experience, even at the most basic level of "me" and "not me", without realizing it because we haven't closely examined all the conceptual acts and assumptions which frame that experience. To imagine there is a "not-self" that somehow impinges upon the "self" from "without" is already a sort of performative contradiction in the same sense as imagining an invisible color.

Then the question arises, how would we go about unwinding those implicit assumptions of ordinary experience? It seems nonsensical to imagine a meaningless state of amalgamated impressions, another performative contradiction. But why does something "still quite untouched by the activity of thinking" need to be a "meaningless" state? Couldn't it be undifferentiated, disconnected, etc. yet still be meaningful? Perhaps the meaning would be nothing like that which we are familiar with, i.e., which comes through the operations of conceptual activity, but it would still be meaningful. I think perhaps many readers are assuming that the DGWP must equate to "meaningless", but that is never explicitly stated.