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

[Güney27]

Thank you ashvin.

I can really resonate with your counting Metapher from Clerics last essay series. One thing I notice is how certain impulses pop up in consciousness, like for example the impulse of scrolling trough social media mindlessly, while reading long phenomenological essays like here on the forum. Trough out our whole daily consciousness these impulses pop up. One thing I noticed is that they don’t appear in full articulated sentences, but more in single words or sometimes pictures, that drag us in another state of the experiential flow. But even if they appear without being completely articulated, they have a clear meaning.

Most of the time these impulses are of a selfish nature, pleasure seeking so to say. It’s rare that these impulses are of a loving, humble or sacrificial nature. It’s true that at this point I can’t say something about the deeper origins of these impulses. They just appear like the 5 sound, in the example above. There is some dynamics that can be found tough. I understand why in spiritual streams they called it animal nature. If RS (or anyone else) says that these impulses are the intents of elementals, his experience must differ from my observations at this time. So how can we approach the depth of these impulses?

That's great, Guney! You are clearly becoming more inwardly sensitive through concentrated thinking. Notice how, when you read long phenomenological essays, you intend a flow that conflicts with the wider World flow, i.e. all the other things that you could be attending to that would bring you sensual pleasure, satisfy your usual preferences, align with your normal habits, etc. The wider World flow then drags against your concentrated study and, assuming you don't let it immediately carry you away each time, that resistance feeds back as living thoughts that heighten your sensitivity to the inner constraints of the World flow (beginning with your proximate soul constraints).

We could also remember the clay pot metaphor. As long as our thinking is passive, we are immersed in the imaginative panorama (clay substance) and discern the lowest common denominator of meaning conveyed by the World flow. We rely on the concepts educated into our sensory organism through basic natural and cultural development. We will our bodily movements and this feeds back on us as the sensory panorama which, for the most part, feels like a morphing pot that has nothing to do with our hand movements (and we hardly even question the relationship). Our thoughts simply imitate the sensory flow as a commentary on it. When we begin actively intending our thinking in a certain direction, however, the mental pictures that feedback start to be reflected in the imaginative panorama, i.e. we begin to spiritually 'see' (as a negative image) inner aspects of the World flow.

This most clearly happens in philosophy, theology, and science and what feeds back on the resistance of active thinking are 'laws', 'principles', 'doctrines', etc. that cohere the sensory appearances across time. The natural scientists resist the usual curvature of flowing along with sensory impressions and associated 'subjective' feelings and instead concentrate their thinking to propose hypotheses, set up experiments, analyze the results, and so on. In that sense, since the very dawn of thinking, gaining insights into the World flow has always been an exercise in meditative resistance. The impulse of modern initiation is to simply extend and intensify that exercise within the domain of the spiritual activity that is presupposed in all other domains of inquiry.

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is that one starts from completely normal human experiences, that one has a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and develops these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must of course have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must pay attention to thoroughly ordinary normal experiences, which, however, we are not very much interested in observing carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character.

In a sense, you have already answered your own question. True knowledge of the deeper inner constraints always comes via catharsis, purifying the soul life of its selfish impulses (like the pride of feeling that ordinary experiences are already well understood). This only sounds like asceticism to those who cannot suspect a purification via concentrated intuitive thinking. It is a highly creative endeavor. We know exactly what the goal is and have a clear sense of how we will reach it, i.e. by intensifying the very same meaning we experience when we willfully resist the usual curvatures to study spiritual science and this feeds back on us as ordinary insightful thoughts (but now understood symbolically since we are somewhat conscious of the intuitive condensation process). The rest is practically creative techniques based on our individual, freely evaluated circumstances.

You have become more inwardly sensitive to a common habitual curvature that I also share with you (and I am sure many others do as well). When the Facebook notification pops up while I am reading an essay or lecture, I am amazed at how much attractive pull it exerts on my attention. The only way to deepen our sensitivity and unveil the inner nature of such constraints is renunciation. If we continue to let that selfish impulse drag our attention away while we are reading, when we still have visual support in the text, it will certainly do so during meditation, when we lack that support. We should use these opportunities to gradually make mini-exercises, like committing to not checking social media during certain times of day, or not stopping the essay for at least 15 or 30 min. of unbroken reading.

The reality is that, through our mental concentration, we will only grow more and more sensitive to these inner flaws and we may feel quite helpless to transform them for quite some time. But at the same time, we can take heart that our Spirit is growing into the depths of the World process. The very fact that these curvatures we have become conscious of are beyond our mental control helps us concretely feel how they belong to the unified World process that drives existence, rather than only being 'subjective' factors that exist 'in our mind'. The inner constraints are no longer a mere psychological theory but a living fact of our experience. And since we have become sensitive to them within ourselves, we will also more easily notice how they constrain the flow at more expansive spacetime scales. This should Inspire us to continue our concentration and renunciation efforts with ever-replenishing strength.

Yes, I noticed that there is a thinking habit in our time, that tend people towards thinking that these impulses are just subjective, and have nothing to do with the real world. These prejudices must become conscious and must be understood. These is the first step for me and I still have to wrestle with them.

But still, I must admit that these experiences don’t let me intuit, that these impulses are the activity of other conscious beings. That’s still an abstract claim in a certain way for me, maybe you became conscious of it. If it is so I would love to hear about the experiences.

Did Steiner uses the term Astral-body, because the term body implies a certain structure, and is grasped by people easily?

[AshvinP]

Yes, I noticed that there is a thinking habit in our time, that tend people towards thinking that these impulses are just subjective, and have nothing to do with the real world. These prejudices must become conscious and must be understood. These is the first step for me and I still have to wrestle with them.

But still, I must admit that these experiences don’t let me intuit, that these impulses are the activity of other conscious beings. That’s still an abstract claim in a certain way for me, maybe you became conscious of it. If it is so I would love to hear about the experiences.

These things will certainly start as abstract - we will feel like our ideas about 'spiritual beings' or 'elemental beings' that constellate our lower soul impulses are just pointing to some other reality that will eventually be unveiled through more 'direct' experiences. Yet the process of making the abstract more concrete is deconditioning from this very expectation, this seeming discontinuity between our thoughts about spiritual beings and the reality of those beings (this also ties in with the inner continuity of natural science and spiritual science, as discussed on the other thread).

Let's focus on the times when you are working through an essay and social media begins to drag your attention away. Even at a mostly intellectual level, we can try to permeate this whole process with our thoughts. Instead of describing it from the outside as some mechanistic psychological process, however, we should try to live into the experience as much as possible and see what meaning naturally feeds back. Try to vividly put yourself in that situation and contemplate its inner qualities for a bit.

Now if I ask you to trace this social media impulse to its origins, what kind of thoughts emerge for you? In what direction do these thoughts point, to what inner or outer factors? I'd invite you just to make a list of some of the thoughts that begin swirling when you livingly contemplate this whole situation and why the social media impulse feels like it overrides your intent to remain concentrated in the essay, and then share it here.

Did Steiner uses the term Astral-body, because the term body implies a certain structure, and is grasped by people easily?

I can't say I know why Steiner chose to remain with that traditional term, although I think he may have also referred to it as 'soul body' (not sure about that). Personally, I prefer soul body in our times, although "astral" clearly has deep resonance with the starry world.

I think the most important thing is for us to begin grasping 'body' in its first-person phenomenological sense, which requires more effort than grasping it as a third-person picture of some structure, physical or more ethereal. And I think that's what Steiner expected of his listeners/readers as well - some terms must be used to make these differentiations and explore their manifold relations, and these symbols always serve as invitations for us to stretch our imaginative muscles, our inner space, and begin exploring the corresponding inner scales of experience. In that sense, Steiner did not want to make things "easier" for people to grasp, such that they can remain with old passive habits of thinking and feel like they have understood everything.

I remind of this quote:

Life is made up of many different realms, and every one of them calls for a different kind of scientific approach. But life itself is a unity, and to the extent that science devotes itself to exploring separate areas it loses sight of the living oneness of the cosmos. We must have a science concerned with discovering in the separate scientific fields elements capable of leading us back again to that living wholeness
…
A similar situation exists in the art realm. A composer works according to the rules of composition. Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked, and in their hands scientific method became artistic technique. This endows abstract thinking with concrete individual life; ideas become living forces. When this happens, it means not merely knowing about things but transforming knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism, and our true, active consciousness lifts itself above the level of a merely passive taking-in of facts.

[Güney27]

Yes, I noticed that there is a thinking habit in our time, that tend people towards thinking that these impulses are just subjective, and have nothing to do with the real world. These prejudices must become conscious and must be understood. These is the first step for me and I still have to wrestle with them.

But still, I must admit that these experiences don’t let me intuit, that these impulses are the activity of other conscious beings. That’s still an abstract claim in a certain way for me, maybe you became conscious of it. If it is so I would love to hear about the experiences.

These things will certainly start as abstract - we will feel like our ideas about 'spiritual beings' or 'elemental beings' that constellate our lower soul impulses are just pointing to some other reality that will eventually be unveiled through more 'direct' experiences. Yet the process of making the abstract more concrete is deconditioning from this very expectation, this seeming discontinuity between our thoughts about spiritual beings and the reality of those beings (this also ties in with the inner continuity of natural science and spiritual science, as discussed on the other thread).

Let's focus on the times when you are working through an essay and social media begins to drag your attention away. Even at a mostly intellectual level, we can try to permeate this whole process with our thoughts. Instead of describing it from the outside as some mechanistic psychological process, however, we should try to live into the experience as much as possible and see what meaning naturally feeds back. Try to vividly put yourself in that situation and contemplate its inner qualities for a bit.

Now if I ask you to trace this social media impulse to its origins, what kind of thoughts emerge for you? In what direction do these thoughts point, to what inner or outer factors? I'd invite you just to make a list of some of the thoughts that begin swirling when you livingly contemplate this whole situation and why the social media impulse feels like it overrides your intent to remain concentrated in the essay, and then share it here.

Did Steiner uses the term Astral-body, because the term body implies a certain structure, and is grasped by people easily?

I can't say I know why Steiner chose to remain with that traditional term, although I think he may have also referred to it as 'soul body' (not sure about that). Personally, I prefer soul body in our times, although "astral" clearly has deep resonance with the starry world.

I think the most important thing is for us to begin grasping 'body' in its first-person phenomenological sense, which requires more effort than grasping it as a third-person picture of some structure, physical or more ethereal. And I think that's what Steiner expected of his listeners/readers as well - some terms must be used to make these differentiations and explore their manifold relations, and these symbols always serve as invitations for us to stretch our imaginative muscles, our inner space, and begin exploring the corresponding inner scales of experience. In that sense, Steiner did not want to make things "easier" for people to grasp, such that they can remain with old passive habits of thinking and feel like they have understood everything.

I remind of this quote:

Life is made up of many different realms, and every one of them calls for a different kind of scientific approach. But life itself is a unity, and to the extent that science devotes itself to exploring separate areas it loses sight of the living oneness of the cosmos. We must have a science concerned with discovering in the separate scientific fields elements capable of leading us back again to that living wholeness
…
A similar situation exists in the art realm. A composer works according to the rules of composition. Music theory is a body of knowledge that one must have acquired before starting to compose, and in composing, the laws of composition are made to serve life, to create something absolutely real. Philosophy is an art in exactly the same sense. Real philosophers have always been conceptual artists. The ideas of humankind were the artistic medium in which they worked, and in their hands scientific method became artistic technique. This endows abstract thinking with concrete individual life; ideas become living forces. When this happens, it means not merely knowing about things but transforming knowledge into a real, self-controlling organism, and our true, active consciousness lifts itself above the level of a merely passive taking-in of facts.

To be honest, I never really contemplated their characteristics while they manifest. Most of the time, I try to bend them into a more harmonious way, according to my ideals. But when I ponder more about them, I would say, that they seem to pop up, independent of my own activity. I don’t intend them. I only recognize them. They seem to try to get me into a different path of experience, and they temptation is pleasure so to say. I’m not really sensitive by now to the finer details of their manifestation.

That is all I can say by now.

[AshvinP]

To be honest, I never really contemplated their characteristics while they manifest. Most of the time, I try to bend them into a more harmonious way, according to my ideals. But when I ponder more about them, I would say, that they seem to pop up, independent of my own activity. I don’t intend them. I only recognize them. They seem to try to get me into a different path of experience, and they temptation is pleasure so to say. I’m not really sensitive by now to the finer details of their manifestation.

That is all I can say by now.

Alright, so this is part of the issue. Consider for example how many times in these essays Cleric cautioned against understanding 'intuitive curvature' or 'condensation' in an externalized, caricaturized way. Some people may feel, "ok ok, I got it the first 2 or 3 times you made this same point, let's move on already!" But that simply misunderstands the nature of these thinking habits that contextualize our real-time inner activity. Cleric had to permeate that whole habitual process with his living thoughts, perhaps for many years, and only on that basis could he condense the metaphors, examples, etc. that help the readers resonate with the inner nature of this archetypal thinking habit. When we follow his same living thought-movements through the portals of the various artistic descriptions, over and over again, we also permeate the underlying habit with our living thoughts. Only in that way do we come to know it more concretely and, therefore, attain the degrees of freedom to resist and modulate it.

We can do the same kind of thought-permeation independently as soon as we grow more sensitive to these inner impulses. This is also why Steiner placed at the foundations of spiritual science, his epistemic works that engaged directly with philosophical and scientific thinking. If we can't permeate our inner movements with living thoughts during the course of ordinary philosophical-scientific thinking (which is the default thinking for most people today), we certainly won't be able to during the course of concentrated meditation. The higher realities, the coherent perspectives within the World flow, that constrain our inner movements will continually elude us. For example, if we see a friend walking down the street somewhere and we aim to know the reasons why, it is not enough to just notice he is walking, wearing certain clothes, moving in a certain direction, etc. We need to permeate our observations with many different thoughts about his inner life - his ideas, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, etc.

In the case of the social media impulse, our living thoughts should similarly lead us in the direction of the inner lives of other souls. After all, what is "social media" except the collective manifestation of modern humanity's desires, motivations, passions, and ideas? Perhaps we belong to a certain group with certain people that particularly attract our attention. Some of them elicit antipathy, others admiration, others we really want to impress, others we really want to 'prove wrong' about something, etc. When the notification pops up on our phone and see a user handle, we instinctively steer through panoramic scenes that reflect our various interactions, feelings, and thoughts concerning the other soul. We dream through these scenes, however, and only awaken when we think, "Oh, I need to check this notification", or simply switch our attention from reading the essay to following the notification. (we shouldn't conceive this as a strictly linear temporal process - it's more that the impulsive curvature 'hovers above' all our mental states when seeing the notification and switching tracks)

The key thing is that the meaning we explore in our living thoughts is the same meaning we will more intensely and purely experience through higher cognitive development. Imagine how you can watch a movie and get completely absorbed in particular characters and their storyline. You start to feel like you are vibrating in resonance, so to speak, with all of their displayed emotions and ideas via the images and dialogue, without explicitly thinking about it in clear-cut concepts. This meaning is not essentially different from the meaning you attain more dryly and prosaically by thinking about the characters, analyzing their situations and dialogue, etc. It is simply that, in the former case, you are participating in that meaning with a more expansive depth of your whole being, instead of only floating on the surface with intellectual thoughts.

Even with the latter, we can trace the social media impulse to the soul lives of other beings, and we must do this if we want to prepare the grounds for a more purified experience of that same meaning. We need to establish as many cognitive points of contact as possible between our inner life and the inner lives of all the beings who are implicit in our flow of experience, like the souls on social media. Through that thought-permeation process, the default gap between our abstract thoughts about 'spiritual beings' who modulate ordinary experiences, and our intimate experience of such beings and their inner lives, will gradually close. We will start to feel more and more how our delaminated inner life could only be what it is through the ongoing activity of many other beings - elemental, human, and archetypal - across various scales of spacetime.

[Güney27]

To be honest, I never really contemplated their characteristics while they manifest. Most of the time, I try to bend them into a more harmonious way, according to my ideals. But when I ponder more about them, I would say, that they seem to pop up, independent of my own activity. I don’t intend them. I only recognize them. They seem to try to get me into a different path of experience, and they temptation is pleasure so to say. I’m not really sensitive by now to the finer details of their manifestation.

That is all I can say by now.

Alright, so this is part of the issue. Consider for example how many times in these essays Cleric cautioned against understanding 'intuitive curvature' or 'condensation' in an externalized, caricaturized way. Some people may feel, "ok ok, I got it the first 2 or 3 times you made this same point, let's move on already!" But that simply misunderstands the nature of these thinking habits that contextualize our real-time inner activity. Cleric had to permeate that whole habitual process with his living thoughts, perhaps for many years, and only on that basis could he condense the metaphors, examples, etc. that help the readers resonate with the inner nature of this archetypal thinking habit. When we follow his same living thought-movements through the portals of the various artistic descriptions, over and over again, we also permeate the underlying habit with our living thoughts. Only in that way do we come to know it more concretely and, therefore, attain the degrees of freedom to resist and modulate it.

We can do the same kind of thought-permeation independently as soon as we grow more sensitive to these inner impulses. This is also why Steiner placed at the foundations of spiritual science, his epistemic works that engaged directly with philosophical and scientific thinking. If we can't permeate our inner movements with living thoughts during the course of ordinary philosophical-scientific thinking (which is the default thinking for most people today), we certainly won't be able to during the course of concentrated meditation. The higher realities, the coherent perspectives within the World flow, that constrain our inner movements will continually elude us. For example, if we see a friend walking down the street somewhere and we aim to know the reasons why, it is not enough to just notice he is walking, wearing certain clothes, moving in a certain direction, etc. We need to permeate our observations with many different thoughts about his inner life - his ideas, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, etc.

In the case of the social media impulse, our living thoughts should similarly lead us in the direction of the inner lives of other souls. After all, what is "social media" except the collective manifestation of modern humanity's desires, motivations, passions, and ideas? Perhaps we belong to a certain group with certain people that particularly attract our attention. Some of them elicit antipathy, others admiration, others we really want to impress, others we really want to 'prove wrong' about something, etc. When the notification pops up on our phone and see a user handle, we instinctively steer through panoramic scenes that reflect our various interactions, feelings, and thoughts concerning the other soul. We dream through these scenes, however, and only awaken when we think, "Oh, I need to check this notification", or simply switch our attention from reading the essay to following the notification. (we shouldn't conceive this as a strictly linear temporal process - it's more that the impulsive curvature 'hovers above' all our mental states when seeing the notification and switching tracks)

The key thing is that the meaning we explore in our living thoughts is the same meaning we will more intensely and purely experience through higher cognitive development. Imagine how you can watch a movie and get completely absorbed in particular characters and their storyline. You start to feel like you are vibrating in resonance, so to speak, with all of their displayed emotions and ideas via the images and dialogue, without explicitly thinking about it in clear-cut concepts. This meaning is not essentially different from the meaning you attain more dryly and prosaically by thinking about the characters, analyzing their situations and dialogue, etc. It is simply that, in the former case, you are participating in that meaning with a more expansive depth of your whole being, instead of only floating on the surface with intellectual thoughts.

Even with the latter, we can trace the social media impulse to the soul lives of other beings, and we must do this if we want to prepare the grounds for a more purified experience of that same meaning. We need to establish as many cognitive points of contact as possible between our inner life and the inner lives of all the beings who are implicit in our flow of experience, like the souls on social media. Through that thought-permeation process, the default gap between our abstract thoughts about 'spiritual beings' who modulate ordinary experiences, and our intimate experience of such beings and their inner lives, will gradually close. We will start to feel more and more how our delaminated inner life could only be what it is through the ongoing activity of many other beings - elemental, human, and archetypal - across various scales of spacetime.

In the case of the social media impulse, our living thoughts should similarly lead us in the direction of the inner lives of other souls. After all, what is "social media" except the collective manifestation of modern humanity's desires, motivations, passions, and ideas? Perhaps we belong to a certain group with certain people that particularly attract our attention. Some of them elicit antipathy, others admiration, others we really want to impress, others we really want to 'prove wrong' about something, etc. When the notification pops up on our phone and see a user handle, we instinctively steer through panoramic scenes that reflect our various interactions, feelings, and thoughts concerning the other soul. We dream through these scenes, however, and only awaken when we think, "Oh, I need to check this notification", or simply switch our attention from reading the essay to following the notification. (we shouldn't conceive this as a strictly linear temporal process - it's more that the impulsive curvature 'hovers above' all our mental states when seeing the notification and switching tracks)

This I can’t confirm, I can’t think that on top of the Impuls of switching tracks into social media. But I don’t experience the dreaming in that case. Is it your experience that when the impulse pops up, that you experience all these things?

For me it’s more a sympathic feeling that arise. It’s more easy to be lazy, than to be concentrated and participating in phenomenological essays.

[Cleric]

This I can’t confirm, I can’t think that on top of the Impuls of switching tracks into social media. But I don’t experience the dreaming in that case. Is it your experience that when the impulse pops up, that you experience all these things?

For me it’s more a sympathic feeling that arise. It’s more easy to be lazy, than to be concentrated and participating in phenomenological essays.

Guney, the expanded insights come gradually in time. For example, the realization of being lazy and easygoing is already a step toward vision. Think of it this way. Imagine that you are writing a novel and you are developing a character. Or you are filling the character sheet for a Dungeons & Dragons session. There are some skills, special abilities, and so on. These greatly determine how the character can act and react in the journey, and thus the pathways of experience. Our living character is weaved of inner contextual layers that largely funnel our life's journey in a similar way.

Now the above realization about laziness is only a momentary and very superficial assessment but as you become capable of beholding a more integral picture of your life's journey, such moments can flash memories of different times when this same easygoingness has manifested. It runs like a thread that ties together these episodes. Conversely, this same thread can also be seen in the way it can run through future episodes.

There's nothing mystical in these realizations. We're not talking about some grand visions. These are all tiny bits of realizations about the curvatures of our flow. It's about awakening to a feeling element that drives something common in the episodes.

These realizations can only come in a fruitful way when we discover that there are different characters that intermingle in our perspective. For example, we may never realize the easygoingness if we haven't tried to focus on the essays. The latter belong to the forces of a different character. So, we may say that we're not a simple DnD character but have superimposed 'character sheets'. One character chases the ghostly images and sensory experiences of world things. Another strives to be a worker for the Divine Idea at the core of the whole evolutionary scenario. So you see, it's not so much about seeing some elemental visions. Recognizing the most proximate qualities of these characters, how they manifest, what paths they bend into, is already seeing. Intuitions of the higher-order curvatures enter consciousness when they become relevant to our journey. In a similar way, you can never 'see' the mathematics of general relativity if this hasn't become a relevant part of your journey.

[AshvinP]

This I can’t confirm, I can’t think that on top of the Impuls of switching tracks into social media. But I don’t experience the dreaming in that case. Is it your experience that when the impulse pops up, that you experience all these things?

For me it’s more a sympathic feeling that arise. It’s more easy to be lazy, than to be concentrated and participating in phenomenological essays.

We don't experience this soul domain in a clear way precisely because we are dreaming through it, so instead we only sense it as vague feelings that we may verbally encode as "this is something sympathetic for me", "this is due to laziness", etc. I remind of Cleric's example of turning on the lamp.

It's important to remember that the more clearly experienced intuitive insights into these deeper soul curvatures will never arrive as experiences that confront us from without, quite independently of our inner activity. Consider the following:

***

https://www.natureinstitute.org/ronald- ... nd-science





What the viewer will recognize in this representation cannot be exactly predicted, but we can be fairly sure that it will appear as either a rabbit or a duck. The ambiguity of the design allows the viewer to see one or the other, but not both at the same time. If my suggestion of rabbit/duck ambiguity has not produced the dual perception for the reader, then any remaining difficulty can usually be overcome by taking control of the representation and understanding the eye to gaze to the right (resulting in the rabbit), or to the left (resulting in the duck).

The shift is quite reminiscent of the “double-take,” with the difference that, unlike the ordinary situation in which the second take will permanently replace the first, here each appearance is equally liable to give way to the other. Thus ambiguous diagrams, by making it possible to repeat the shift of representation at will, allow us to examine how the thing is done. That it calls for activity on our part, rather than merely passive reception, is the first and most important lesson. Actually this is a lesson that everyday experience should teach us, for when we experience the double-take we immediately assign the first appearance to our own mistake of recognition — i.e., something we have done. It follows that the second take, or the correct appearance, is also our own doing, and since we took credit for the first we ought to have similar credit for the second.

In order to investigate the point the reader can try governing the way he or she sees Figure 1. How is the shift performed? One can shift the gaze of the eye, or sometimes just thinking of the rabbit while seeing the duck is enough to let it happen. It seems obvious — or actually “feels” obvious — that we must look at the figure in a specific way if we are to recognize it. (The fact that we can “see” the direction of a glance at all, by the way, reveals a striking act of organization, which we perform easily at any moment of the day.) Notice that when the shift happens the paired appendages seen as ears on the rabbit shift to upper and lower beak on the duck. And the fur of the rabbit, only suggested in the rendering, becomes the feathers of the duck, also merely suggested. Fur and ears belong together, just as feathers and beak belong together, but the first pair belongs to the rabbit, the second pair to the duck. In both cases the parts are plastic to the recognition of the whole, and their identity, for our perception, apparently follows from the identity of the whole rather than leading to it.
...
Of course we normally have no sense of this activity on our part, for it must be in place before we become conscious of any figure at all. Yet obviously the rabbit or duck that we saw first was already looking right or left, the organization of the glance and that of the entire physiognomy being impossible to separate. It appears that as we focus our eyes we also focus our minds, although this latter activity is an unnoticed aspect of mental life. Thus we had already made an intentional proposal by the time we saw, or visually recognized (for this is the same thing) anything. There was an unconscious preparation for this perception, which preparation has been brought to our conscious attention in our exercises.

***

We can experiment with this for a while to get a good feel for our intentional activity that shifts between two more holistic inner configurations which are only later analyzed in terms of their parts, as described above. This whole situation is an example analogous to our dreamy imagistic consciousness of the soul domain, and our decohered verbal encoding of that holistic flow by which we report to ourselves "this is sympathetic", "this feels to stem from laziness", etc. Notice how we can never perceive the intentional gestures that switch between rabbit/duck like we can perceive the visual components of either. It is rather something we live into and gradually start to work with more actively, knowing the texture of those gestures from within. We can also notice how one brief experiment with the rabbit/duck won't give us a whole lot of inner sensitivity for those deeper gestures - rather it is one of many symbolic portals we will need to utilize over and over again before developing that sensitivity (of course, Cleric's recent meditative exercises lead in this same direction in a more explicit and systematic way). Again, we also need to permeate the whole situation with our thoughts (or, likewise, follow the thought-movements of others who have investigated these inner realities), like Brady did above.

We are always experiencing these deeper gestures throughout the day, for example when our inner activity is dragged by some impulse. That is why we refer to them as e-motions. It's only when we concentrate our activity, however, that we gain the basis to become more sensitive to these continual inner movements. Then we begin to co-create the higher experiences instead of only expecting them to arrive from some other direction. Notice how, if we notice the social media impulse and start permeating it with living thoughts, we are once again concentrating our inner activity. We are no longer concentrated on the essay, true, but at least we are not flowing passively with the social media curvature. Instead, we can try to focus on and live through the inner qualities of this curvature and see what meaningful thoughts feed back, and we can elaborate those thoughts further to some extent. We should develop trust in our Spirit to work outside the confines of what we currently imagine is possible, the 'denied space and time' that normally squishes our inner activity from all sides. 

The main thing is becoming more sensitive to the inner depth axis (the superimposed 'character sheets') along which we are traveling, even if we aren't clearly aware of what will be found along the journey. That is the most important aspect of my current experience - concretely feeling this inner axis around which the scenes of my life revolve, even if I know there is infinitely more intensity and purity at which I can experience this depth. In fact, that knowledge stops becoming something that is 'mocking' us, making us frustrated or envious, and is rather experienced as the greatest hope, since we know with certainty it will unfold in due course. Discerning the inner axis should inspire faithfulness and patience to continue our active efforts into the deeper gestures. I'm not interested in any mystical visions or hearing voices, but only in expanding intuitive insight through the depth of the elastic soul tensions that coincide with Cosmic-scale curvatures of destiny. 

[Federica]

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.

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.

Lately I've felt inspired to direct attention to the angelic realm. The way I do it is to always start with gratitude. As Steiner said somewhere, if in the evening we properly reflect on the past day, we should always find out a way in which we received care and orientation from that realm, during the day. This attention may translate in more or less spectacular (from our viewpoint) ways. While I am far from sensing this constant manifestation of the angelic realm with continuity, I certainly feel - and try to express daily - deep gratitude, for the support provided by the natural elements, and also with respect to specific events, which were particularly easy to notice. These events are both of the life-saving accident-saving type, and of the more 'trivial' (but astonishing) coincidental, sensory alignment type.

I am mentioning that now in order to recall a lecture I have been revisiting several times in recent days:"What the Angel is doing in the astral body of Man", in connection with this illuminating post from Cleric (which I guess one can also thank FB for ). In particular, I am thinking of the three specific picture flows that the Angel is working to bring to our conscious attention, as much as possible:

• That we are more and more able to see the spiritual nature of every human being we meet, so that that idea of man being the most developed among animals will dissolve and be replaced by the experience of community in spirit, resulting in a shared feeling environment;

• That the mediation of any particular external church will not be needed or relevant anymore, once our connection with the spiritual world becomes self-evident as inner experience;

• That we can grow within ourselves the seed of Spiritual Science - all the above is achievable through development of normal thinking activity into higher cognitive modes. Higher cognition lays as a possibility in us, that manifests if we decide to cultivate that seed, to steer our activity along that eventline.

Of course, I am recalling this angelic work firstly to myself, who still have bistable-like difficulties with stabilizing attention on the three pictures, rather than on the split within humanity, the Eighth sphere, and similar questions.

In connection with these pictures, I have stumbled upon a very nice NDE account, which, I believe, speaks clearly of angelic activity, perhaps not in terms of clear cognition, but in terms of caring angelic activity, and emerging feelings connected to the first picture Steiner speaks of in the lecture. This is a half an hour video, surely not a must watch, but I just thought it was nice enough to share:

[Cleric]

Lately I've felt inspired to direct attention to the angelic realm. The way I do it is to always start with gratitude. As Steiner said somewhere, if in the evening we properly reflect on the past day, we should always find out a way in which we received care and orientation from that realm, during the day. This attention may translate in more or less spectacular (from our viewpoint) ways. While I am far from sensing this constant manifestation of the angelic realm with continuity, I certainly feel - and try to express daily - deep gratitude, for the support provided by the natural elements, and also with respect to specific events, which were particularly easy to notice. These events are both of the life-saving accident-saving type, and of the more 'trivial' (but astonishing) coincidental, sensory alignment type.

I am mentioning that now in order to recall a lecture I have been revisiting several times in recent days:"What the Angel is doing in the astral body of Man", in connection with this illuminating post from Cleric (which I guess one can also thank FB for ). In particular, I am thinking of the three specific picture flows that the Angel is working to bring to our conscious attention, as much as possible:

• That we are more and more able to see the spiritual nature of every human being we meet, so that that idea of man being the most developed among animals will dissolve and be replaced by the experience of community in spirit, resulting in a shared feeling environment;

• That the mediation of any particular external church will not be needed or relevant anymore, once our connection with the spiritual world becomes self-evident as inner experience;

• That we can grow within ourselves the seed of Spiritual Science - all the above is achievable through development of normal thinking activity into higher cognitive modes. Higher cognition lays as a possibility in us, that manifests if we decide to cultivate that seed, to steer our activity along that eventline.

Of course, I am recalling this angelic work firstly to myself, who still have bistable-like difficulties with stabilizing attention on the three pictures, rather than on the split within humanity, the Eighth sphere, and similar questions.

In connection with these pictures, I have stumbled upon a very nice NDE account, which, I believe, speaks clearly of angelic activity, perhaps not in terms of clear cognition, but in terms of caring angelic activity, and emerging feelings connected to the first picture Steiner speaks of in the lecture. This is a half an hour video, surely not a must watch, but I just thought it was nice enough to share:

Thanks for sharing, Federica!

This is a good reminder that ultimately our cognitive expansion should lead us into the fullness of reality, which includes everything that the good religious souls through the ages instinctively opened to. Our ability to grasp in manifold concepts the depth of inner life doesn't in the least reduce its richness to dry tokens - on the contrary, it only increases its resolution and meaningfulness. Of course, this is transparently obvious for anyone who has taken even the most preliminary steps in these experiences. Only when standing outside this inner life, can one accuse higher development of being mere intellectualism.