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

[findingblanks]

Hey there. Not quite sure where we need to fine-tune our language and shared experience in order to go forward. Cleric's example pointed to the way we can experience are attention being pulled this and that way. You seem to be agreeing of the importance of recognizing the present moment explication process of insights and changes and recognitions. What feels like the most relevant question or direction to you from here?

[findingblanks]

I think I've expressed my way of understanding percepts enough for you to know that I see the organs as partial representations of aspects of our deep subjectivity. In fact, all perceptual 'structure' is a representation of ways of being. Which doesn't change the point of your analogy, I'd say.

[Cleric]

Hey there. Not quite sure where we need to fine-tune our language and shared experience in order to go forward. Cleric's example pointed to the way we can experience are attention being pulled this and that way. You seem to be agreeing of the importance of recognizing the present moment explication process of insights and changes and recognitions. What feels like the most relevant question or direction to you from here?

Hi FB,

If I may interject here, I think the conversation will focus on a deeper core if we examine the implicit boundaries of the phenomenology you describe.

In particular, the patch-phenomenology leads us to a kind of soulscape, where everything is exactly as you describe it - a dynamic flow, where nothing of our inner process can be cognized as fixed, or primary, or in isolation. You gave good principal points in your last few posts, I won't repeat them here. It is a true phenomenological psychology (psyche=soul).

The question that lingers in the background, however, is whether our patch can expand to know intimately (in the way we know our own thinking process/attentional activity) something of the wider World Process within which we are embedded. Or our patch is a local formation that can only know its inner representations?

You have answered this question in conversations in the past. For example, you have said that the ideas about the spheres of which spiritual science speaks, may or may not be real. In other words, they may be only representations in Steiner's local patch that he took too seriously. Has anything in your views changed in recent years in this respect?

As a therapist, I guess your main goal is to gain intuitive orientation within the dynamics of the soulscape. I suspect that you don't even need to consider things like karma and reincarnation in your work. And that's fine, there's plenty of work that can be done without involving these things.

Yet, what is your principal position on these questions? How far this phenomenological psychology can go? What can be known in this way as a fact of existence and what remains only representations of speculative things and processes beyond the horizon of our patch? Are Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition only gradations of how much faith we throw into our representations (i.e. to what degree we believe these representations correspond to metaphysical 'truths')?

[findingblanks]

"The question that lingers in the background, however, is whether our patch can expand to know intimately (in the way we know our own thinking process/attentional activity) something of the wider World Process within which we are embedded. Or our patch is a local formation that can only know its inner representations?"

Continuing to improvise the different language we are all bringing together, I'll say that the patch is an aspect of the world-process. We could say there is an extreme end which is highly associated with my most superficial aspects, say I'm imagining what my favorite superheros breath smells like. This could be contrasted with the experience of beginning to actually perceive the archetypal plant while practicing Goethean science.

My imagination of the fictional characters breath doesn't contain as much world-process, we might say. That said, I don't think of the patch as 'expanding'. Dennis once told us there was a lecture in which Steiner said something like, "If you could actually experience what is happening when you put on a jacket, you would immediately be initiated."

In this sense, I think the whole is in each 'part', and I think a careful and close attention to any patch can reveal the whole. But I don't say that as a practical methodology for learning about the cosmos I only say it to help underline why I don't think in terms of expanding a patch to cover the world-process. It is certainly a polarity in which the extremes contain each other in bizarre ways.

"You have answered this question in conversations in the past. For example, you have said that the ideas about the spheres of which spiritual science speaks, may or may not be real. In other words, they may be only representations in Steiner's local patch that he took too seriously. Has anything in your views changed in recent years in this respect?"

I always try to emphasize that it is about degrees of objectivity. Sure, I obviously think Steiner was capable of being just flat wrong. And, I've shared enough hopefully to show I have plenty of examples in which I think he was at his peak of phenomenological discovery and objectivity. But the most interesting parts to me are the questions about how his experiencing could have been shaping the content of his experience in ways he did not notice. Yes, I know he included himself as an example of his description of 'exact clairvoyance.' Yes, I know he said he would never share any reserach until he had studied it for years and years and years. I hope most of us can see that those measures and his certainty wouldn't preclude that he was not aware of absolutely everything regarding his experience.

"Yet, what is your principal position on these questions? How far this phenomenological psychology can go? What can be known in this way as a fact of existence and what remains only representations of speculative things and processes beyond the horizon of our patch? Are Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition only gradations of how much faith we throw into our representations (i.e. to what degree we believe these representations correspond to metaphysical 'truths')?"

I'l come back to these. But my main position is that we are the whole and cognition is participatory, that time-space are representations of an eternal living dynamic; therefore reality is inherently changing but not in the way we'd represent it via any kind of perception. This means that cognition is an act of carrying forward these dynamics to various degrees. An understanding can be only 23% 'accurate' and yet deeply carry evolution forward. In fact, I think very often it is simply because insights are deep and real in this way that they tend to be taken as exact truths.

[AshvinP]

Hey there. Not quite sure where we need to fine-tune our language and shared experience in order to go forward. Cleric's example pointed to the way we can experience are attention being pulled this and that way. You seem to be agreeing of the importance of recognizing the present moment explication process of insights and changes and recognitions. What feels like the most relevant question or direction to you from here?
...
I think I've expressed my way of understanding percepts enough for you to know that I see the organs as partial representations of aspects of our deep subjectivity. In fact, all perceptual 'structure' is a representation of ways of being. Which doesn't change the point of your analogy, I'd say.

Interestingly enough, what Cleric asked was the direction I was going as well. As we know, there are basically two approaches that consider it an absurdity to know the deep subjectivity (which for ex. participates in intending/ideating biological processes) in the same way we know our 'local' attentional activity. Those are materialism and BK's idealism (we could explore the reasons why they consider it absurd if this is questioned). Perhaps these approaches fall into the 23% accurate category and could hypothetically carry evolution forward in mysterious ways, but we have to admit that, at least in the short-term, they act as positive blockers to any attempt at knowing the deep subjectivity. For them, the idea of becoming more cognitively sensitive to those deep intuitive movements is like finding the whole noumenal Cosmos hidden within a glass mirror - it is absurd to dig into the mirror of our meta-cognitive life and find either the material, psychic, or spiritual foundation of existence. At best, we can break the mirror and feel nebulously at One with this foundation. In other words, the prospect that that Whole is, in all concreteness, indeed within each part, is considered perhaps a nice thought but not something to take too seriously.

Whether Steiner got things wrong is one question, but the deeper question is whether there is anything he got right about the Deep Subjectivity, not based on his preferred representations or speculations, but by attuning his consciousness to the deeper intuitive movements and knowing them in the same way we know our intuitive gestures when ordering and manipulating mental symbols? I will throw that question out there for now and would ask, if you decide to respond, to include a specific example. It can be literally anything from his later spiritual scientific lectures. Exploring this question at least helps us get a sense of what you feel is 'allowed' under the framework of spiritual phenomenology and what must necessarily fall beyond its purview within representational/speculative territory.

PS - I love that potential Steiner quote! If you happen to dig up the reference, let me know.

[findingblanks]

"Perhaps these approaches fall into the 23% accurate category and could hypothetically carry evolution forward in mysterious ways..."

I think Steiner, Barfield and even non-Anthroposophists have done a fairly great job showing how materialism was absolutely necessary for the next step of human beings freedom. And this is only one way in which it was grasping reality to an important degree. Bernardo's work, to me, is merely a set of arguments against physicalism and for a general idealism, the kind Steiner was promoting in the 80s and 90s. I don't think anything BK says beyond his basic model has much relevance beyond interesting conversation.

I think trying to use a general set of arguments like BK's as a method for Goethean science is misunderstanding the context in BK's work has value. And I certainly don't think we need to use this post to explore that context.

I think Steiner was incredibly objective in his various descriptions of the way in which the I and the essence of reality are inherently united. I think many of his experiences of dead people were largely objective, to the degree that information was exchanged. I believe his observations of how children develop were wonderful and based on a very sensitive understanding and perception of metamorphosis. I think that regardless of how much his Luicifer/Ahriman perceptions were distorted (I'm not making a specific argument about that), he was objectively observing two fundamental aspects of inherent experiencing which require the central living impulse to be balanced.

[Cleric]

In this sense, I think the whole is in each 'part', and I think a careful and close attention to any patch can reveal the whole. But I don't say that as a practical methodology for learning about the cosmos I only say it to help underline why I don't think in terms of expanding a patch to cover the world-process. It is certainly a polarity in which the extremes contain each other in bizarre ways.

Then, if this is not it, what in your view would be a practical methodology for learning about the Cosmos? If we eradicate the intuitive sense of scale, of expansion and contraction, of encompassing and encompassed, we are left in pure relativity where the whole and part collapse into a bizarre and indistinguishable single scale. But then, if an inner experience belonging to the Sun patch is indistinguishable from say, the mental image of a coin in my local patch, how do we ever make any useful sense of this condition? Is there any wonder that we immediately dismiss most of Steiner’s communications as “mistaking representations for realities?” Forget Steiner – how can we ourselves draw anything of value from such a condition? Is there anything that distinguishes the true archetypal plant from a mere mental image of it? In our developed clairvoyant consciousness, is there anything that we can consider as real and factual, or it is all a synonym for loosened imagination that hypothesizes how the mental image of an archetypal plant somehow propels the growth of a mental image of an instantiated plant? And if someone then says "You are simply mistaking representations for realities - your 'archetypal plant' is in no way different than any other mental image in your loosened mind", do we really have anything to complain about?

[AshvinP]

I think many of his experiences of dead people were largely objective, to the degree that information was exchanged.

I was hoping for something a bit more specific here, but maybe we can expand on the above. If I asked you whether recent biologists have gotten anything right or provided valuable insights, you would probably respond with a link to specific experiments and results. After all, we are dealing with a science here, even if it expands to account for not only the flow of sensory perceptual phenomena but also psychic and spiritual phenomena in their harmonic relations.

As you know, Steiner wasn't too interested in channeling dead people to convey information to us (like most mediums do), but rather elucidating the objective inner processes that make sense of the phenomenon of communicating with departed souls, i.e. how incarnated souls can resonate with the intuitive curvatures in which disincarnate souls are experiencing their states of being, and likewise, illustrating how we ourselves can participate in those objective processes to re-establish an open dialogue with the higher worlds. In that sense, what distinguishes spiritual science from natural science is that it asks us to participate in the method and experimentation by which supersensible facts are discovered, corroborated, and linked together into a closely-knit web of logical links. It doesn't leave us in ignorance of these methods and utterly dependent on the 'experts' to know what is 'true' about the World we live in, but stimulates us to take a creative role in unveiling that truth and thus leaves us free of external dependence.

So returning to the dialogue with departed souls, Steiner elucidates how we can modulate our linguistic-thinking curvature to better resonate with the conscious perspectives of those departed souls, for example by learning to think and communicate intuitive experiences in a more fluid, temporal, pictorial, and verb-like manner. For example:

At first we can only consider in how far this life of the dead changes in intercourse with human beings living on the earth. With regard to the relationship of the living towards the dead it is, to be sure, so extraordinarily difficult to bring anything into human consciousness because what we experience there is certainly remarkably different from what can be experienced here within the physical circumference of the earth. Human beings are accustomed to form their ideas within the physical circumference of the earth must be corrected in the light of our experience with discarnate souls. In these, we experience in an extraordinarily living way the relationship of the dead to human speech.

At first, however, it is difficult to understand how the fact works which I have indicated here in those recent lectures in which I said to you that nouns are hardly understood by the dead. (The Social Question as a Question of Soul: The Inner Experience of Speech. 28-30 Mar. 1919. Dornach.) I have described to you how the other parts of speech are understood by the dead, but there are also, nevertheless, distinctions within these. It is clearly perceptible that human speech, as it is spoken here on the earth, is becoming less and less intelligible to the dead. Certainly the dead understand verbs: they also understand prepositions. They understand everything in which we are compelled to develop pictorial representations. But, generally, the ability to comprehend what can be grasped in speech, the understanding of it, is becoming ever more lost to them.

I realize Cleric already asked some questions so I won't add any more right now. This is just something to contemplate and add your thoughts at some point if you want to. The above should also hint at how our phenomenological method, which starts with more proximate curvatures of experience, can expand and overlap with participating in the experimentation of spiritual science at a level that gives true knowledge of the Cosmos and its manifold objective relations.

[findingblanks]

"But then, if an inner experience belonging to the Sun patch is indistinguishable from say, the mental image of a coin in my local patch, how do we ever make any useful sense of this condition?"

I'm not sure we are speaking the same language. I'll have to take time and try to understand the meaning behind some of the terms we are using. I don't find anything I've said in the presuppositions of your question and the following. Not blaming you at all. I just realize that unless I can communicate in a basic way to you, you won't have the chance to ask questions that line up with a shared understanding. I'll try to look into this when I can. In short, I'm not sure what I've said that indicates everything is indistinguishable.

[findingblanks]

" The above should also hint at how our phenomenological method, which starts with more proximate curvatures of experience, can expand and overlap with participating in the experimentation of spiritual science at a level that gives true knowledge of the Cosmos and its manifold objective relations."

Right, the reason I don't say that spirtiual science is a sham is because I believe it is an actual process. What you've said above doesn't conflict with anything I've said. If it seems so, it's simply because we are still trying to understand each other.

Maybe this is just about degrees. The fact that I don't believe the experiential aspects of spiritual science, down the road, will match up with what we read in much of Steiner might be all this is about.

You might be somewhat happy that I acknowledge Steiner was having objecive experience. You might be puzzled why I would think it was all over the map in terms of degree. And, of course, we'd both acknowledge that thousands of his claims live in the area where most folks say, "We'll have to wait and see." I'm fine with all of that.

If the real issue is that I simply don't see him having 'exact clairvoyance', I'm not sure we need or want to dive into that. The only way I can see that being interesting at all is if you have your own reasons for spotting patterns of errors in his work and you'd like to explore your ideas on that. If your basic view is, "Of course he could get some things wrong and he wasn't perfect, but considering the massive increase in objectivity he offered, it's hard to know why we should put too much attention on trivial aspects of his work," I respect that. If you don't have your own passionate hunches regarding Steiner's blind-spots, I'm not sure if this conversation is where we should talk about why I think Steiner kicked off something that was mutated in ways that will need (and are being) to be carried forward in ways that will appear drastically different.

I'm happy to talk about phenomenology, to talk about what we notice inwardly while meditating, what it is like to 'subtract' concepts from perceptions. If the desire is to switch to a conversation that investigates a difference of opinion regarding Steiner's objectivity, maybe we stop for a bit and we can consider how we'd like to frame that in a a new post?