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

[findingblanks]

Ashvin, here is a meta-comment/question:

Are you able to directly experience the way your shadow is operating in you (a bit differently in the last few days) in your communications? I'm perfectly fine if you are clear that your shadow isn't activiated. I can tell you in detail when I began to sense more shadow activity in the communications, and I can tell you in detail how mine perked up to those fluctuations. I understand that some people do not want a conversation to make this shift and begin examining what is happening underneath the logical and very sincere discourse. But there has been a shift. It is very interesting. And it has taken up more of the actual content than all of the sincere answers that are about to be taught, from everybody here.

Anyway, regardless of where this goes, I will be tracking the way your communications have evolved and very specific points. I've very much appreciated how you were conducting the conversation.

Steiner was able to recognize when he was in contexts where it was fine for him to not get overly techincal. He could say, "Angels can not act freely" and such. My questions were more in the spirit of being able to speak from such a place.

Yes, I stand by my strong sense that all of us are capable of misunderstanding Steiner, our own experience, and each other. I am doubtful when people suggest or explicitly claim they have the answers, especially if they can acknowledge that they are still working towards the first stage of exact clairvoyance.

"To be fair, you followed that with some equivocations about how these can be useful symbols to meditate on and come alive in some way, but it all remains vague and nebulous."

I love when this charge only goes in one direction, and noticing when this charge always tends to happen. At least I have qualified why we are remaining 'vague' to each other. You (again, the shadow begins to dance) only speak of me being 'vauge' as if you have no grasp on what is happening in our attempts to understand each other.

I wouldn't mind if you would describe your own personal and specific investigations of Old Sun. Seriously, a few paragraphs of what you are learning when you research Old Sun would actually help me get more a of a feel of what you mean when talking about your clairvoyant understandings of it. I'd love to hear you describe what aspects of Old Sun you are struggling to perceive and which aspects were the first you directly experienced and began to research. Things like that. I don't agree with you about my being vague and I think you sort of cherry-pick what counts as vauge and what doesn't.

EIther way, sense this conversation suddenly widened and began to include a more personal (not in a mean spirited way) tinge about who knows more and who is really not getting it, a small detour in which you describe your clairvoyant research of Old Sun would be helpful.

In the meantime, I propose we keep tracking what's actually going on. And: I'm always happy to go back to where we started.

If you believe that my perception of an added shadow element are simply wrong or projections, let's just ignore what I've said. I'm happy to go on and simply stay on the level of outer discourse. My desire to introduce the notion of personal shadow might be a roadblock; just as other's desire to change the topic might as well. I'm game for however this needs to unfold, even if that requires 'blaming' me for any of the shifting of this post's context. I know you would never blame me in a conventional or direct sense, hence my use of quotes. We can just call it educating or guiding me in the right direction.

[findingblanks]

For anyone reading who also is okay with the widening of context:

For those who have the capacity to research angelic beings, I'm curious if you'd say that an angel can distinguish a mountain from a valley, or river from riverbank. I know there is a lecture where Steiner addresses this in simple words and a rather simple explanatory frame. I hope to track it down. In the meantime, I'd benefit from hearing other researchers descriptions and responses. I ask this fully knowing that even if you believe an angel can make such a distinction, the phenomenology of the distinction requires a very different outlook than our typical understanding and experience.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, here is a meta-comment/question:

Are you able to directly experience the way your shadow is operating in you (a bit differently in the last few days) in your communications? I'm perfectly fine if you are clear that your shadow isn't activiated. I can tell you in detail when I began to sense more shadow activity in the communications, and I can tell you in detail how mine perked up to those fluctuations. I understand that some people do not want a conversation to make this shift and begin examining what is happening underneath the logical and very sincere discourse. But there has been a shift. It is very interesting. And it has taken up more of the actual content than all of the sincere answers that are about to be taught, from everybody here.

Anyway, regardless of where this goes, I will be tracking the way your communications have evolved and very specific points. I've very much appreciated how you were conducting the conversation.

Steiner was able to recognize when he was in contexts where it was fine for him to not get overly techincal. He could say, "Angels can not act freely" and such. My questions were more in the spirit of being able to speak from such a place.

Yes, I stand by my strong sense that all of us are capable of misunderstanding Steiner, our own experience, and each other. I am doubtful when people suggest or explicitly claim they have the answers, especially if they can acknowledge that they are still working towards the first stage of exact clairvoyance.

"To be fair, you followed that with some equivocations about how these can be useful symbols to meditate on and come alive in some way, but it all remains vague and nebulous."

I love when this charge only goes in one direction, and noticing when this charge always tends to happen. At least I have qualified why we are remaining 'vague' to each other. You (again, the shadow begins to dance) only speak of me being 'vauge' as if you have no grasp on what is happening in our attempts to understand each other.

I wouldn't mind if you would describe your own personal and specific investigations of Old Sun. Seriously, a few paragraphs of what you are learning when you research Old Sun would actually help me get more a of a feel of what you mean when talking about your clairvoyant understandings of it. I'd love to hear you describe what aspects of Old Sun you are struggling to perceive and which aspects were the first you directly experienced and began to research. Things like that. I don't agree with you about my being vague and I think you sort of cherry-pick what counts as vauge and what doesn't.

EIther way, sense this conversation suddenly widened and began to include a more personal (not in a mean spirited way) tingue about who knows more and who is really not getting it, a small detour in which you describe your clairvoyant research of Old Sun would be helpful.

In the meantime, I propose we keep tracking what's actually going on. And: I'm always happy to go back to where we started.

If you believe that my perception of an added shadow element are simply wrong or projections, let's just ignore what I've said. I'm happy to go on and simply stay on the level of outer discourse. My desire to introduce the notion of personal shadow might be a roadblock; just as other's desire to change the topic might as well. I'm game for however this needs to unfold, even if that requires 'blaming' me for any of the shifting of this post's context.

I started by presenting some basic phenomenological considerations in the hopes this would help clear up some misunderstandings surrounding the aims of PoF and also lead us to exactly where we are now. Remember, spiritual phenomenology is an interactive experience in which the object of our investigation becomes our own soul constitution, particularly the way we think through domains of living experience. It's not about some hypothetical soul constitution, but our real-time constitution. Just like concentrated meditation first reveals to us all the inner factors that drag our attention away from its theme, the conceptual phenomenological exploration should lead us to greater clarity about unexamined thinking habits that we previously were insensitive to. If we look at the progression of comments, we will see how some of these habits began to reveal themselves once we began discussing the inner constraints that modulate our real-time thinking movements. That's why I came to a halt and began speaking about 'numbing agents' in an effort to direct attention toward what I perceived to be the issues. Of course, sometimes we need to 'dance around' the issues for a while and gently steer into their vicinity, but eventually, we need to confront them squarely.

The thing is, we have already been discussing the inner reality of Saturn, Sun, Moon through our phenomenological exploration, albeit in a very brief, rudimentary, and segmented way. In other words, what I have been presenting so far is what I have learned through my 'research' of this archetypal context in which our Earthly existence unfolds. There is much more learning/research to do, of course, and I am only presenting the most basic considerations, pointing attention along what inner axis you (and others) can freely explore this intimate context which is always present and active in the here and now. But if you haven't already noticed this overlap, then I ask you to contemplate why that is. This is why I spoke of the 'severing' earlier - this exploration should naturally lead us to become more and more attuned to how our structured and lawful inner experience overlaps with what is artistically depicted through initiatic science. But this won't be possible until we stop assuming we are already attuned to that overlap and the latter simply speaks of our familiar and well-known experiences in a more exotic language colored by various training and expectations.

So now that I have said the 'research' of Old Moon and Angelic consciousness, for example, is already embedded within the threads of this post, maybe you can tell us if you perceive that overlap anywhere and where/how. I could go back through the pages and give you some quotes and try to make the overlaps explicit, but I already know how that will end up - in short, in that way, we won't make any progress in resolving the core issues that have emerged.

[Cleric]

Cleric, I'll come back and read your posts when I have figured how to make at least my basic notions graspable to you. I know you think you know them. But your questions betray that. I know you don't agree. Ashvin has reflected back basic understanding (which does NOT mean agreement) of many of these things. This allows us to continue speaking. As long as you feel certain that you are understanding me, and, from that certainty, ask question which presuppose a point-of-view I don't share, I am not "smart" enough to both re-articulate myself to you in a more helpful way and entail a response in that re-articulation that then not only rephrases your question but addresses it. I can't do that. That's on me.

One more example, which I know you won't understand; not because you are dumb. No way! But something does block you from recognizing this:

"Now the basic frustrating question again: do you entertain at least as a possibility, that something like the experience of a Sun sphere (or anything else communicated from Initiatic science) may seem implausible not because you have widened your conscious horizon so much that it now contains everything that the initiates of the past lived through and you see that there’s nothing of value that deserves to be called a Sun sphere of the Cosmically expanded being, but because you are looking for these experiences in a particular plane of experience where they can never be found to begin with?"

You chose the word 'implausible'. Is it possible for you to do something very very boring? If so, please show me where I have ever said that 'something like' the experience which Steiner translated as 'Sun sphere' is implausable. I've said the opposite. But, as you know, details matter. You didn't ask me a quesiton that reflected my claims that Steiner is usually interacting with reality. You somehow presuppose that I've suggested there is no experience at all that corresponds to what Steiner terms 'Sun sphere.'

For me to answer your questions, I have to assume your premises, which I don't. The whole, "Why did you stop beating your wife" thing, but in the context of long sentences that make up to four or five such presuppositions. Ashvin also struggles with trying to figure out where he and I aren't understanding or agreeing. But he will often ask one question about that spot in a very specific manner that allows for conversation. The multi-embedded presuppositions of things I haven't said might be an esoteric 'trick', but my hunch is that you and I could have a conversation if it was in smaller chunks and you didn't assume so much. I have no doubt that Steiner's experiences (and those of the traditions in which he developed them) of the planetary spheres reflects an objective interaction with reality in various ways.

OK, FB. I admitted that I’m pushing the conversation a little, but that’s only because I’m trying to face directly the central questions. Yet these attempts feel a little like this:



Anyway. As Ashvin suggests, we really need to get back to the basics. Let’s start with what clairvoyance means to you (since you often use that term). We can distinguish at least two broad categories. The first would be clairvoyance which acts like an additional physical sense but receiving its impression by means different than any of the known particles and waves. For example, if someone can consistently guess the object hidden in a box, this would show that their inner experiences somehow non-locally grasp something about the wider world in ways different than the ordinary sensory pathways. We know that these kinds of things are actually of very little interest for serious spiritual research. The reason is that clairvoyance of such a kind is like a synonym for a superpower, which the lower self wouldn’t hesitate to use for its own advantage. Thus, morally oriented spiritual research is much more concerned with elucidating the structure of man himself, such that the lower self can be overcome.

The other category would be about things that cannot be so easily delineated in the sensory world. Probably the simplest example is the problem of death. This question cannot be resolved by only resorting to the bodily interface. Neither by sixth-sensing the contents of a box.

We can put the first category aside. True knowledge of the second category is actually far more important and urgent for man. It’s enough to recognize how much mischief is caused on Earth because of the YOLO (you only live once) mentality.

So from your experience through all these years, would you say that your clairvoyance (or that of others) has brought about some clarity about existence after the loss of the physical body? Not simply by reinforcing our religious faith in some form of afterlife through anecdotal reports, NDEs, and so on, but in a rigorous and exact way. For example, in previous conversations, you said that from your perspective it is fully possible that the higher-order spheres of Cosmic consciousness may as well not exist at all. Thus they are more or less only a conjecture stimulated by certain experiences, which, however, may turn out to have nothing to do with higher-order spheres. We can only say that if the concepts of these spheres are fully abstract (that is, disconnected from concrete experiences). It is different if I tell someone “What if the inner experience of color doesn’t exist?” That person will naturally say “Well, in that case, my present experience would have to become completely different, a whole bandwidth of my experience would have to disappear.” The experience wouldn’t be affected by the elimination of ‘color’, only if the latter is something completely abstract. Then it is indeed all the same whether this ‘color’ exists or not – nothing changes in our experience. In this sense, would you say that the idea of continued existence after death is for you, of the same rank as the idea of a higher sphere? In other words, does it exists only as an abstract conjecture? Would you say “I don’t really know, maybe everything ends at the moment of death and that wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” On the other hand, if you feel that clairvoyance gives us some ‘exact’ knowledge on this question, can you share what kind of experiences these might be?

[findingblanks]

"OK, FB. I admitted that I’m pushing the conversation a little, but that’s only because I’m trying to face directly the central questions."

Do you see that I have pushed the conversation a bit in order to face directly central questions?

[findingblanks]

Either of you (or anybody here), feel free to just write one question you'd like me to respond to in order for you to get a better sense of things. And just know: the extent to which your question presupposes numerous other things and views and intricacies, is the extent to which we'll need to take a lot of time to unpack meaning.

But go for it. A short question that is 'boring' in the sense that it isn't showing off secretly in any way.

[AshvinP]

Either of you (or anybody here), feel free to just write one question you'd like me to respond to in order for you to get a better sense of things. And just know: the extent to which your question presupposes numerous other things and views and intricacies, is the extent to which we'll need to take a lot of time to unpack meaning.

But go for it. A short question that is 'boring' in the sense that it isn't showing off secretly in any way.

Cleric did that in the last post, so let's start with that.

[Cleric]

For anyone reading who also is okay with the widening of context:

For those who have the capacity to research angelic beings, I'm curious if you'd say that an angel can distinguish a mountain from a valley, or river from riverbank. I know there is a lecture where Steiner addresses this in simple words and a rather simple explanatory frame. I hope to track it down. In the meantime, I'd benefit from hearing other researchers descriptions and responses. I ask this fully knowing that even if you believe an angel can make such a distinction, the phenomenology of the distinction requires a very different outlook than our typical understanding and experience.

Yes, the context in which we ask the question and expect its answer is even more important than the answer itself. For example, if we pose that question and brood over it in our meditation, and eventually feel a surging “Yes”, we may say: “There! My exact clairvoyance gave me an answer to my question.” However, someone else meditating may intuit a resounding “No”. Then conflict arises: who is right? It’s clear that the problem issues because the question is grasped in a completely abstract way. It is not much different than asking “Does the flying spaghetti monster feel arousal when it strokes its ventral spaghetto?” This is building abstractions upon abstractions. Such things can be comprehended only when livingly followed in their manifold relations.

In our age, the soul can only feel satisfied in its thirst for knowledge if it can approach the inner experience that it is questioning. Furthermore, this can only happen in a satisfactory way not if we simply try to imagine a mockup inner experience of an Angel (although this is the necessary starting point) but actively seek to merge with the consciousness of a living Angelic being.

This suggests that before we can ask about what the Angel experiences in the mountain or valley, we need to first find a point of contact with its consciousness – a domain of our inner life where the activity of the Angel and our meditative concentration begin to overlap, like tuning forks that approach a common resonant frequency. This activity lies at a different scale of our soul life. We can approach this activity only if we have first made an effort to know our own ordinary flow of being as unfolding within the deeper curvatures of soul life. It is there that we can find the modulating activity of the Angel. If we expect to hear the Angel’s intuitive life as some intellectual voice side-by-side with our own, we’ll be waiting in vain. If our intellectual life can be likened to the arranging of ice cubes within a stream of water, then our deeper soul life and the activity of the Angel can only be found in the deeper intuitive activity that curves the flow. As long as we focus entirely on our crystalline thought forms, the streamlines of the deeper soul life remain completely outside our consciousness. For this reason, to know the flow-bending activity of the Angel, we must first approach this activity within the depths of our soul.

When we merge with the Angelic consciousness, this is not something that we achieve one-sidedly. In a sense, when we meditate in a prayerful and sacred mood, willing to know something of the higher worlds, allegorically speaking, the Angel says “Here’s a human being that is willing to become concentric with me.” Then the Angel’s inner experience approaches ours, they resonate and form a concentric chord, so to speak. Now we experience, something of the intuitive life of the Angel as it swirls the images in our inner space. At the same time, however, the Angel also gains something from the experience. Since the Angel doesn’t have corporeal organs and a nervous system, the solid Earthly environment normally passes right through its consciousness. However, when we are concentrated in meditation, our soul vortex reaches into the depth of the brain. Thus the Angel, when it unites with this vortex, can also feel as if reaching down into the mineral realm. The more we have musically attuned the vertical gradient of our being, the more the higher beings can relate the Earthly experiences to their higher-order flow-bending activity. This is a very important truth to comprehend. Normally, higher beings bend the streams of destiny according to their higher-order intuitive intents meant to move the evolutionary development forward, but as they follow this activity into the human perspectives, it feels as if it sinks into a darkened abyss. They can no longer trace the details of sensory life there. This is especially true for human souls that entertain completely materialistic life. The sensory and cognitive life of such an ego feels to the Angel like dim buzzing and mumbling. The Angel still strives to modulate healthy streamlines in our soul body (mainly at night) but in our ignorance we continuously oppose and undermine that work. Thus, part of our evolutionary task is to make our bodily inner life, fractally (musically) self-similar to the higher flow-bending orders of existence. This leads not only to our consciousness growing into the higher spheres but correspondingly, the higher beings can reach deeper into the Earthly stratum (because it now becomes more vertically coherent).

Saying all this is needed in order to realize that the Angel doesn’t see the World as we do. In fact, only human beings see the World as we do. What is this seeing? What do we really see? Think of the screen that you are looking at right now. You may open a photograph of a beautiful landscape. We say “I see a landscape.” Yet, in another sense, what we see are pixels shining with different intensities and colors. Moving deeper, we can say “But even these screen pixels are only a picture in my consciousness. What I really experience is an inner space of phenomenal ‘pixels’ – color pixels, auditory pixels, tactile pixels, and so on. The ‘bandwidth’ of pixels of which we feel our memory and mental images to be weaved of, may be called etheric spectrum. Normally, in our human experience, these etheric pixels closely replicate the qualities and dynamics of the more inert truly sensory pixels. In other words, our inner etheric experience is largely shaped similarly to our inner bodily experience. Remember – we know these ‘bodies’ only from within. Our third-person picture of a physical human body only exists as an arrangement of innerly experienced sensory color pixels.

At our present human stage, we need special exercises if we are to loosen and expand this inner etheric spectrum beyond the physical kernel. For an Angel this is different. Since its existence is not anchored in a localized bodily sphere, its etheric experience is consequently quite different. We can only understand that if we consider that our inner etheric experience is not an opaque sphere, but more like a domain within greater etheric space, where our “I” can find the reflection of its intuitive activity. This domain is a continuous part of the Cosmic inner space, it’s only that in our ordinary consciousness, only parts of this space shine as phenomenal pixels, while the periphery is dark. To understand the Angel’s perspective we should conceive how the ‘spotlight’ lighting up the etheric space closely shaped around the physical kernel, begins to widen and lights up more and more of the Earthly inner space (with which the former has always been continuous anyway). Normally, we most readily perceive the etheric reflections of our inner activity in the head region. The Angel can reflect its existence in much greater domains of the Earthly etheric sphere. What our etheric brain is to our thinking, is what the whole Earthly etheric spectrum is to the Angel’s activity. The inner perspective of the human etheric spectrum is only a small portion of the wider perspective. Symbolically, we can imagine the human perspectives as vortices of inner experience, forming an Earthly sphere:



Of course, this cannot be grasped in a purely 3D sense (the post will become too long if I’m to describe all the possible pitfalls that such an illustration can cause if taken wrongly). Yet it tries to convey that the Angelic consciousness can in a sense dip into and out of these vortices, grasp them in groups, and so on. These inner spaces are experienced from the ’same side’ as we do, except that the Angel is free to expand and reflect its existence into a far greater sphere, within which our limited perspectives are embedded.

Now we are finally approaching a position to tackle the main topic. It will take us too far to go into full details but we should at least mention that this etheric life can only be grasped as one of continuous metamorphosis, as a form of creative Cosmic thinking (think more of intuitive sculpting and forming activity and not about arranging puzzles of intellectual tokens). As such, we may say that the mountain and the valley are somehow present in the Angel’s consciousness. In our embodied existence we grasp only something like a ‘standing wave’ of the dynamic process. For the Angel, however, these processes are continuous streams of intuitive activity. More specifically, it feels that the etheric Earth largely reflects the intuitive activity of still higher beings, those of what is known as the Second Hierarchy (Spirits of Form, Movement, and Wisdom). These details are not important at this time. The goal is only to point out that the etheric spectrum feels to the Angel as supported by the activity of still higher-order intuitive activity than its own.

So what does the etheric mountain and valley (whose mineral standing wave we can touch and see with our likewise mineral organs) feel like to the Angel? Things are so deeply interrelated that we can approach the question from many angles. Let’s consider what these things feel to a human being. What happens when we climb up high in the mountains and look at the busy town down in the valley, how cars and trucks move like dots along the roads, how the chimneys of factories puff smoke? We may feel temporarily lifted above the routines of daily life, which can give us a more encompassing view on things. This is something so distinctive that it has a name – the overview effect, although it is mainly meant for the experience from outer space (the wiki article is worth looking through).

So in a way, there’s a polarity. In the valley we slumber in our personal lives, dragged by the flow of daily life. In the mountains we have great conditions for spiritual work, to widen our horizons, see things in their manifold relations, and so on.

From a geological perspective, mountains emerge where we have oppositely moving plates.



In the higher-order flow, these can be traced to higher intuitive activities that work constructively against each other in order to produce a rich inner landscape. Consider how most interesting things usually happen at the meeting of streams. The Mandelbrot boundary, the flow of turbulence, biological life – they all manifest at the fractal-like boundary between poles which in isolation are simple and uninteresting. As such, the mountains can be seen as emerging into loci of intensely interfering archetypal intuitive activity. Compared to other regions of the etheric Earth, they feel like coral reefs – teeming with intense spiritual life. In comparison, a valley or a desert, are less interesting (like a bleak ocean floor in comparison to the reef).

Thus, the elemental processes that an Angel experiences when it makes the mountain etheric domain into what our human etheric body is for us, are highly intense and interesting. They are like concentrated hubs of intuitive archetypal and elemental activity. In comparison, a valley feels more featureless.

The key thing to realize is that these etheric Earth domains are not approached as we approach a rock from the side. Instead, as a rough analogy, we should consider how we can move our attention within different parts of our head. If we are sensitive enough, we’ll be able to recognize that we think different kinds of thoughts when we feel ourselves in the front or the back of the head. These are all experiences in inner space. It’s analogous for the Angel, except that we should imagine how our head-space expands and can potentially become as large as the Earth and beyond. Then, just like we can move our attention between the back and the front of the head, and experience different kinds of thoughts there, so the Angel can align its experience with different domains of this expanded ‘Earth-head’. Then, domains of elemental activity, whose decohered standing waves we recognize through the senses as ‘mountains’, feel in a certain way – the archetypal processes have specific intents, in a way they serve as fountains of ideas. This is connected with the fact that the adepts have been traditionally associated with the mountains. There they have good conditions to connect with the evolutionary flow intended in the higher orders of the flow, and then adapt these intuitions into knowledge that can be brought down into the valleys to ‘irrigate’ the hearts and minds of men.

We can follow a similar thread also about the rivers. In any case, it should be obvious how answering such a one-line question requires a whole essay or even a book. Most importantly, we should notice how we need to connect intuitions from the most diverse fields of sensory and supersensible life if we are to form a holistic grasp on reality. Of course, I could have easily answered in a single word “Yes” but what would people make out of this?

In summary, we can say that the Angel does not see the Earthly realm through mineral sensory organs. Yet it lives within the innerly experienced elemental processes of the Earth organism and there’s a very definite distinction between different geological features, biomes, and so on. On the other hand, it can be said that other Earthly features which are not cohered with intuitive processes at other scales, would be unrecognizable for the Angel. For example, the elemental processes constituting a computer running ChatGPT and generating a comedy or a tragedy, would feel equally murky.

[findingblanks]

And so could you describe the process of 'locating' the particular angel you used to participate in order to respond to this question; the process of that interaction and which mountain and valley specifically did this angel observe?

[findingblanks]

"Would you say “I don’t really know, maybe everything ends at the moment of death and that wouldn’t surprise me a bit.” On the other hand, if you feel that clairvoyance gives us some ‘exact’ knowledge on this question, can you share what kind of experiences these might be?"

No, I would not. My experience mixed with my understanding mixed with my studies indicate that the human experiences after death vary greatly, much more than Steiner indicated; however, I am 100% convinced that what Steiner described was drenched with reality from many different angles, and 'angels'