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

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Some Anthroposophists believe Steiner is correct in claiming that we can not take the first step forward until we vividly imagine all experience as relationless percepts. There are presuppositions as to why this seems like the only way the cognitive path can begin.

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For some people, it isn't enough that somebody has direct evidence of the reality of spiritual science. If that person doesn't share the forms, ideas, practices, and conclusions of the Steiner narrative, you will notice an endless loop of 'teachings'. One of the indicators that this has to do with a fixation is that you won't seem them reflect back accurately all of the shared overlap (it will be distorted or ignored altogether) and you will notice consistent distortions of very simple statements made by the other person. It has a dance-like quality.

But it can be reflected back to these people in different ways: for instance...My personal experience is that Rudolf Steiner carried forward an essential spiritual impulse that allowed humanity to begin transforming natural science into a science in which the spiritual world can reveal itself more fully, deepening our understanding of the cosmos. Steiner's contribution was so epic and required such brilliance and depth that it generated a living seed impulse that I have no doubt will continue implanting itself in various cultural streams. The spiritual perceptions Steiner experienced were highly refined and objectively fashioned via his careful approach to researching reality. Both theoretically and personally, I live in the conviction that this is the case.

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Some people don't realize that it is impossible to imagine a married bachelor. They think that by changing the meaning of one of the terms, they are then succeeding in the imagination. Constraints of all kinds are build into the nature of reality, not as limitations but as expressions of realities unqiue nature.

There is no meaningless experience. The passion you put into having one promises a more meaningful one down the road. What we typically call meaningless is merely a synonym for pointless or uninteresting or unfulling. In that sense, yes, you can have a meaningless experience at work, or you can say that "asdljf;aldsj lasdfjd;lafj asldkjf;kd dlskj fldf lasdjf" is a meaningless set of symbols.

But that isn't literally meaningless. It is important to realize that The Logos is already happening in your experiencing, even if you've convinced yourself that you are aware of a 'place' untouched by meaning. Some say that we must grasp reality before it has been affected by thinking. They have unnoticed presuppostions that make this absolutely obvious to them. They say that if we do not grasp reality in this way, our first steps will be infused with error, not seeing the errors infused with this mistaken belief.

But, and this is important: you can have a very meaningful experience if you regularly practice trying to eliminate the so-called concepts from your perceptual field. You can, eventually, directly recognize what is actually happening that isn't the peeling away of elements that had been added to so-called perception. This can be an immensely hygentic experience.

Either way, you can learn to study angels directly. I know, I know...many people didn't call them that or subjectly perceive them as the other people. Doesn't matter. This is evolution.

[AshvinP]

One of the indicators that this has to do with a fixation is that you won't seem them reflect back accurately all of the shared overlap (it will be distorted or ignored altogether) and you will notice consistent distortions of very simple statements made by the other person. It has a dance-like quality.

Speaking of which, we look forward to you contemplating Cleric's exquisuitely crafted phemomenology of spiritual perception and trying to reflect back to us what he conveyed. If you are truly interested in the nature of etheric perception, not just having a definition but experiencing it yourself, that meditative effort will work wonders. It will help elucidate so much of Steiner's artistic descriptions of spiritual realities as well, like you are encountering a whole new individuality and his brand new corpus of works.

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I come into these sections during small breaks in daily activity. When I have longer periods designated for reading, I have materials stacked up. It will take a special arrangement of variables to make it so that during a longer break, I'll be reading that post. But I will if and when I can. Other creative options would include Cleric or you or ChatAhri to take the amount of time it would require to carefully read and digest it to make it much more concise. I know you well enough to know I should probably make explicitly clear that I'm not suggesting it was too long. This is contextual and since you all are encouraging me to take a chunk of time to act creatively and deeply, I'll say that there are so many options, and I'll have given you context for why it might be a while.

[Federica]

Luckily, the weekend is upon us

[AshvinP]

I come into these sections during small breaks in daily activity. When I have longer periods designated for reading, I have materials stacked up. It will take a special arrangement of variables to make it so that during a longer break, I'll be reading that post. But I will if and when I can. Other creative options would include Cleric or you or ChatAhri to take the amount of time it would require to carefully read and digest it to make it much more concise. I know you well enough to know I should probably make explicitly clear that I'm not suggesting it was too long. This is contextual and since you all are encouraging me to take a chunk of time to act creatively and deeply, I'll say that there are so many options, and I'll have given you context for why it might be a while.

Allow me to quote your friend Seth Miller from his thesis:

[This joke is an] exemplification of the current human epistemological dilemma: we humans havethe capacity to see beyond our current epistemology, but lack the habit of doingso. Additionally, there is something implicit in the joke that fulfills a very important esoteric tenet: that the potential to transform our perspective (from crazy to sane [[first order]] or out of the crazy/sane duality altogether [[second order]]) is facilitated best through contact with some being whose perspective is other than our own, not just in terms of its content, but in its second-order level, the level of the process, of the coming-into-being. In other words, it is through encountering and engaging with someone else’s world that our own is changed.

Bill won't convince himself, by himself, that he is not crazy; there is nothing in the world of Bill-as-helicopter (the first-order level) that necessitates any shift away from this perspective. What would benefit Bill is not just information about the fact of a second-order level to his situation, but engagement with the second-order level in a performatively significant way. This is a subtle point, but is worth explicit repetition: it is not enough to have first-order knowledge of the second order; what invites lasting epistemological transformation is a recursion between first-order knowledge of the second order on the one hand and the second-order performance of that knowledge on the other. The second-order performance/engagement of the first-order knowledge (knowledge that is about the second order!) is what closes the loop between the two levels, and which yields new capacities for seeing and being.

If we understand this distinction between first and second order, this 'subtle point' that bears repeating, as concretely as possible, it should quickly dawn on us why such inner explorations of spiritual activity cannot be summarized with a list of first-order points. All the deep value comes by participating with our intuitive movements through the second-order processes that are at first mysterious to us. This is how the insights really land home and take root within our soul, as we experience our activity weaving beyond its familiar degrees of freedom, its comfortable perimeter of first-order meaning. This is also related to why meditative symbols should not be taken from our familiar experiences but can be adopted from 'some being whose perspective is other than our own'.

I'm sure you know this quote as well.

We spoke of the possibility of bringing about catharsis by a great variety of methods. A person has gone a long way toward achieving it if, for example, he has taken in and experienced the content of my Philosophy of Freedom with such inner participation that he has the feeling, “Yes, the book was a stimulus, but now I can reproduce the thoughts it contained by my own effort.” If a reader takes the book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of himself—in the composer's sense, naturally—the book's organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis in him. For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn't make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that one later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog's hind legs where the front ones belong. The book is a living organism, and to work one's way through the thoughts it contains is to undergo an inner training. A person to whom this has not happened as a result of his study need not conclude that what I am saying is incorrect, but rather that he has not read it correctly or worked hard and thoroughly enough.

I know Cleric wouldn't put his posts anywhere near Steiner or PoF, but he is clearly illustrating the same core movements and insights of the latter and, in a sense, it is even more explicitly artistic. It has illustrated pictures, characters, fictional dialogue, colored fonts, and so forth. These precise spiritual ideas can truly be experienced as works of art that 'stir the waters' at a profound feeling depth of our invisible intuitive being. In fact, this whole point on second-order participatory understanding was already embedded within the dialogue itself:

But here’s the thing: you cannot ‘imagine’ that activity. In your current state you can re-imagine the pictures that I’ve drawn but you can’t imagine the way in which I have produced them. The inner activity through which I produced the images cannot be imagined, it must be lived through and this living through is at the same time the direct experience of its reality... When we look at the symbols ‘2 + 3’ we don’t see contained in them what they can do, in what relations they exist, etc. If that was the case, the child would be the first to perceive them. Instead, it is only in the living experience of our ideal activity that these things can be explored. 

A living soul has sequenced intuitions of ideal relations (ideal constraints on inner activity, including the proximate common obstacles to seriously exploring the ideal relations) into pictures and verbal forms through inner activity. We can surely re-imagine these pictures and forms, we can summarize them in a list via ChatGPT, but what we can never do in that way is live through the same inner activity and intuit the same constraints and ideal relations. That lived experience is not contained in the perceptual forms. Just as we cannot live through the experience of learning to ride a bicycle by summarizing the steps involved, by reimagining pictures of those steps. Instead, we must activate our will and live through the steps described.

Finally, if we are much more comfortable starting with a summary, the best summary to work with is the one the same living soul condensed from the same intuitive movements and placed at the end

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Missed the point. Seth's quote:

"This is a subtle point, but is worth explicit repetition: it is not enough to have first-order knowledge of the second order; what invites lasting epistemological transformation is a recursion between first-order knowledge of the second order on the one hand and the second-order performance of that knowledge on the other."

Comes from his integration of Eugene Gendlin's work with Steiner's. It has nothing to do with my suggestion that all comments can be creatively summarized. Steiner mentioned the importance of this practice. But of course you had to lift it into a Teaching context. Great work.

Anyway, I stand behind the Truth that you could be creative in that way. So could I!

[AshvinP]

Missed the point. Seth's quote:

"This is a subtle point, but is worth explicit repetition: it is not enough to have first-order knowledge of the second order; what invites lasting epistemological transformation is a recursion between first-order knowledge of the second order on the one hand and the second-order performance of that knowledge on the other."

Comes from his integration of Eugene Gendlin's work with Steiner's. It has nothing to do with my suggestion that all comments can be creatively summarized. Steiner mentioned the importance of this practice. But of course you had to lift it into a Teaching context. Great work.

Anyway, I stand behind the Truth that you could be creative in that way. So could I!

Where did Steiner mention the practice of 'creatively summarizing' phenomenological or spiritual scientific works? I am curious to see that.

Anyway, I hope you understand that SM's thesis, which I have worked through very recently, is centered exactly around how aesthetic and spiritual epistemology cannot be properly understood when reduced to its mere informational content, which is exactly what we do when we hope for some kind of condensed summary that could be produced by feeding the text to an algorithm. It would be the same as asking for a condensed summary of Faust or asking AI to produce a condensed summary of Beethoven's symphonies with only a few of the musical phrases. This is the opposite of creative, aesthetic, and living, it's simply indolent, unartful, and dead.

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"I hope you understand that..."

Seth's thanking me in the thesis is somewhat connected to his belief that I grasp that. But, hey, Seth can always be wrong, too. Part of why Seth and I get along so well is because we are very deeply aware of the way we distort experience and how that is baked into the cake. But he thanked lots of people for different reasons in how that amazing thesis turned out.

Steiner: Yes, I've had to find ways to say that in many less words.
Friend: Really???
Steiner: Yes. You are never forced to remain with one way you've expressed something.
Friend: But what if I said it perfectly?
Steiner: Let's take a walk.

........

I think there is one lecture (maybe around 1915 period), in which Steiner talks about reducing a long bit of one's writing or thinking into successively smaller units and noticing how the meaning of each word changes with each metaphorphosis of expression. There is a Kuhlwind workbook in which I believe he points to that lecture as a great example of his own meditation advice regarding this practice.

And while it is not directly an example, when Steiner talked about how as the century progressed philosophers would be able to say in a few sentences what he (and others) needed entire books to say, it points to an aspect of this kind of process.

But, there are people for whom things are fixated and sacred. I would never demand that Cleric change one word of his masterpieces. It was simply part of a conversation in which you were continuing to tell me what I needed to do. I agreed. And I made a mere suggestion. Hands off! I'm stepping back in full respect of the Master.