Saving the materialists

[Federica]

In general, whenever we isolate a part of the perceptual spectrum and point toward that part as specifically derailing our conscious thinking efforts, I feel that something is off - we are subtly redirecting attention from the responsibility of our own selfish and myopic soul tendencies (which exert their derailing influences equally in the verbal and pictorial spectrum) toward the perceptual spectrum itself, which is merely the instrument of our soul life.

Why didn't you raise a similar objection when Cleric described verbal language in terms of protein sequencing and H bonds? I don't suggest any redirection of responsibility. On the contrary, the responsibility of spiritualizing language is made concrete and directly operable, both from the way of feeling (as described in the addition to my last post) and from the way of thinking (because through imaginative cognition the vertical connection with meaning is made more robust, hence we better preserve ourselves from the sensory spell of language). It's our lacking thinking-feeling processing of language that perpetuates the spell. So there is a clear responsibility: through spiritual development we acquire the means to make our activity more robust, to avert the delusions lurking in our modern relationship with language. By the way, I doubt it is exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum.

Cleric wrote:

Necessarily, our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word. The speaker assumes certain ideal form with their "I" which is then sequenced into words. Those reading can reconstruct the ideal form if the string of letters is folded in the proper way.

(this is a fantastic anchoring symbol, thanks for reminding me!)

This is exactly what I am speaking of when I say the verbal forms, no matter how they are sliced and diced, are not intrinsically associative and derailing, but rather embed unsuspected value when we reorient our perspective through the purification of the most proximate soul constraints, i.e. refolding the string of letters in the proper way to intuit the "secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word." To my recollection, Cleric has never spoken of a special sub-cycle of the planar thinking cycle in which the verbal sequences exist and exhibit inordinate attractive power that necessarily derails our thinking. He does not speak of another parallel 'way of feeling' by which we can purify the soul depths, rather the unveiling of feeling-richness within the Word is the natural consequence of higher thinking development (I realize we have spoken of BD/OMA before as a more feeling-based approach, but also that this by itself is only appropriate for a more limited spectrum of modern souls, whereas for most of us it will only bear fruits when built on the foundation of philosophical-scientific thinking development). It is always our thinking that purifies the soul depths and, for those who have already developed verbal thinking through Western culture, it is the best tool for getting a grip (i.e. ice skates metaphor) within our volatile passions, desires, vanities, etc. That is, of course, what we are doing here and now on this forum. The protein picture above, for example, works so well as an anchoring symbol precisely because it is accompanied by the strings of letters reflecting the ideal form of Cleric's "I" which sequenced the words, when encountered by readers who have also done some work toward purifying mechanical thinking habits.

Are you noticing any difference between these perspectives on verbal thinking?

By the way, I doubt it's exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum, for the simple reason that languages are expression of folk souls. As such they comprise specific soul tendencies: an additional layer of "derailing influences", on top of the personal egoistic ones. This is in addition the the faculty of language to favor in our mind an associative, dreamy flow. If you say that pictorial symbols and linguistic symbols are equally derailing, you directly oppose everything I have so far proposed about language (that you previously described as "interesting").

When we speak about "language" at the depth of the folk souls, we can't isolate that to either verbal or pictorial. Language at that scale, where there are group soul tendencies, apply equally to verbal, pictorial, gestural, etc. So, yes, in that sense I am directly opposing what you are so far proposing about language. I think you are focusing too much on your thoughts about "derailment", rather than trying to intuit the depth structure of the soul constraints through which such derailment happens. It just seems to happen more with verbal forms because those are the forms we are most familiar with utilizing in our modern thinking.

I agree. The verbal forms are not “intrinsically” associative and derailing. They are associative and derailing only in their predominant use in our epoch. And they can be redeemed through spiritual development.

Your recollection is correct, Cleric never mentioned an additional cycle, that’s only my proposition. However the protein metaphor does evoque that the primary structure - the linguistic form in its sequential, most sensory transliteration - flattens out the original meaning. It takes apart the density of meaning and puts it in diluted sequences. These linguistic sequences are smeared out in spacetime and follow their primary-structure specific modular architecture. It’s a modular encoding.

What I wrote above:

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.


is actually another way to describe the same thing as the protein metaphor. Strangely, you cut off of Cleric's quote precisely the sentence where the pictorial symbol was mentioned and represented. But even in the amputated quote: do you see, in the protein metaphor, that the pictorial symbol is one level up closer to the Word, compared to the word symbol?

This makes it clear from one more angle that it cannot bear the same derailing influences as the verbal symbol, as you argue. Do you see it?

It doesn’t help that you keep repeating that thinking is the primary way, and that language is not intrinsically derailing. I agree with that, you have repeated that dozen times by now. Language is a code, and can be decoded - once again from the side of thinking and from the side of feeling, and yes, this comes from spiritual development of thinking activity, and, in parallel, from cultivation of the beauty and meaningfulness of sound and tone in language, because, as Cleric just said "we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation". So the feeling side is still very useful to address, through cultivation of sound and tone in language.

Beyond that, what I invite you to notice is that there is no contradiction between what I wrote and anything Cleric has written about language.

[Federica]

And so I find the cycle most estranged from our human scale to be the life and death cycle. I definitely can’t get any phenomenological sense of continuity of consciousness/memory beyond this one present life I’m living. I know, of course, that this is possible with enough spiritual development, but I am looking at the ‘natural’ human scale in our time, which I suppose I represent more or less. Up next, the daily cycle. I find it to be the most comfortable, the one in which continuity of consciousness is at the highest.

We need to be clear what 'natural' implies. If it is about at what scale adults in our age find their consciousness to be most predominantly treading, then yes, your observation is correct. An adult consciously programs mainly the daily routine. We say "I'll get a breakfast, then I have some emails to write, then I'll need to go to the bookstore and maybe grab a lunch with Suzy." If asked about the greater rhythms, like the Arabs the person may say "Tomorrow never comes" - it's of no use to make detailed plans for longer timespans, except in the broadest lines, because things are so uncertain nowadays. On the other hand, when asked about the smaller rhythms, they are too volatile, too uncontrollable. Even the conversation with Suzy was probably mostly small talk, piling up verbal depictions of daily happenings.

We need to keep in mind that this 'natural' scale can change with age and also can be different from person to person. For example, a small child lives much more in the moment-by-moment consciousness of play, without much concern about meals, clothing, etc. which are taken care of for him. The astronomy professor may be living all day in the mental images of the Big Bang and the billions of years of cosmic evolution. If it was not for his dear wife to make him meals and do his laundry, he would have to spare some processing time also for such trivialities.

So to repeat, as far as your observation is concerned, it is in place. Adult people feel that the 'inputs' to the game of existence mainly concern the navigation of the daily rhythm. However, when we speak of 'natural' rhythm in the cognitive evolutionary sense we should make a simple observation: even when we plan our daily routines we still do that at the ticking scale of our real-time thinking. This is what I attempted to illustrate here:



It all amounts to differentiating between the thinking process itself and what is being thought about. When we find it natural to live in thoughts about the daily rhythm it means exactly that - the scaled mental images of happenings at a daily scale constitute the language that we feel most fluent in.

As long as we are in ordinary consciousness and use our bodily instruments (brain) for support, whatever intuitive scale we project into, the sequencing of scaled mental images ticks at a certain rate which is comparable to the rate at which we speak/think. We can call this rate 'natural' because it is more or less the same regardless of whether we think about astronomical evolution, daily routines, or whizzing electrons. This is also why in concentration we begin by attuning to this rate. It is here that we can begin uniting with our deeper being, who projects thoughts into all scales.

It is interesting that when you came to the forum you argued for something else. You were drawn by the idea that time - as far as we experience it as thoughts about past and future (and the mental engineering of our daily rhythm certainly falls in here) - is in a sense unreality. Reality was to be found in the present moment. You have gone a long way since then, and gradually the intuitive curvatures of time along which the ever-present moment transforms (the Taylor series analogy) gained reality too. As said, it is completely true that most adults are predominantly conscious of curving the daily rhythm. The tighter rhythms have become completely habitual (semi-automatic), such as everyday movements, opening a door, washing, dressing up, talking, thinking, etc. But this 'natural' situation is in a way unnatural, it's kinda off center. This is reflected in secret ways in the fact that we have Earth with a tilted axis, that the heart is slightly offset from the center, and so on. In completely harmonic evolution, man would very gradually evolve from the natural ticking rate of mental images. He wouldn't have to make daily plans because the Angelic beings would instill them unto man until he could curve his daily rhythm in harmony with the planetary rhythms. Our evolutionary scenario, however, is such that there are competing 'parents', so to speak. Thus, simply letting go and expecting that we'll be cared over, doesn't work. Man curves his path of being in the presence of conflicting inspirations. Thus we become prematurely responsible for taking conscious control of curving our path at different scales, according to our understanding and ideal.

Curving our path at the daily rhythm (speaking in a completely secular sense), while being completely without control over our mental flow, is still an off-center situation. Now, we can do a lot of spiritual work on harmonizing our inner activity across scales even if we do not take the path that runs right through the core of thinking spiritual activity. We can do this by following the teachings of BD and OMA, for example. These give many advice that lie precisely in the organizing of the daily patterns, yet they are based on an understanding of the vertical resonances. It seems that those who are willing to tackle the mystery of man head-on (that is, to tread the path of Initiation), are still relatively few. This, of course, doesn't mean that the remaining greater part of humanity is doomed. Initiates can distill guidelines for living which are scaled thoughts from all levels tested in practice, and those who have at least a little faith can quickly see whether these guidelines lead their path for good. Those who want to walk such a path with greater awareness and understanding even before they have attempted some of the advice, can only do so by going through their thinking being. Then, such teachings are still of the greatest value because we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation. They have all been distilled by Initiates who faced many trials in life and at the price of many difficulties, found ways to overcome the obstacles. The great thing about going through the path of cognitive development is that when we read about these living techniques we often quickly see why and how they can be effective.

With all that said, as living beings here on Earth, we are responsible for having a conscious approach to all rhythm scales of our flow. This doesn't mean that we should or can determine them single-handedly. Prayer is always the way to seek resonance with the 'parents' that we have chosen. As such, it is natural that we need to organize our daily rhythms, and this may even take a lot of our processing time. I mean that in the sense that we shouldn't imagine we can focus entirely on our real-time thinking and expect that everything else will fall into place by itself. But as far as reaching toward the true stages of higher consciousness, in our meditations we should always first find the ticking rate at which all our thinking ticks and then fully synchronize with that rate. It is from within this kernel that gradually the inner nature of the higher rhythms is grown into. Just because we think comfortably about higher scale rhythms (such as the daily), doesn't mean that our spiritual being lives natively at that scale. Instead, our intellectual being lives in the scaled mental images of greater timespans, while the thinking process that does the thinking at its native ticking rate still remains somewhat instinctive. To make this explicit, thinking all day God, God, God... - the infinite curvature there could be - doesn't change the fact that the pronunciation of these thoughts still happens at our ordinary intellectual rate. In this extreme case, it is easy to see that one practically loses all means to know the Spirit that manifests in the thinking at the intellectual rate. In other words, reaching a higher state of being is not the same as thinking primarily of the greatest rhythms, for ex., Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc. For this reason. To find our true being we can only do by closing the distance at our ordinary thinking ticking rate, through concentration in the seemingly simplest thoughts. I think it could be better - at least in the start - that these thoughts are not scaled images of other rhythms but keep us right in the real-time flow - that is, we need to concentrate on the thought directly in its imaginative content in the here and now.

Thanks, Cleric, for this synthesis and context. It's very useful because, as many times experienced, just remembering an idea in its sequenced unfolding gives no guarantee the idea is fruitfully known, and recapitulations offer additional chances to probe it and gain a fuller grasp.

[AshvinP]

I agree. The verbal forms are not “intrinsically” associative and derailing. They are associative and derailing only in their predominant use in our epoch. And they can be redeemed through spiritual development.

Your recollection is correct, Cleric never mentioned an additional cycle, that’s only my proposition. However the protein metaphor does evoque that the primary structure - the linguistic form in its sequential, most sensory transliteration - flattens out the original meaning. It takes apart the density of meaning and puts it in diluted sequences. These linguistic sequences are smeared out in spacetime and follow their primary-structure specific modular architecture. It’s a modular encoding.

What I wrote above:

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.


is actually another way to describe the same thing as the protein metaphor. Strangely, you cut off of Cleric's quote precisely the sentence where the pictorial symbol was mentioned and represented. But even in the amputated quote: do you see, in the protein metaphor, that the pictorial symbol is one level up closer to the Word, compared to the word symbol?

This makes it clear from one more angle that it cannot bear the same derailing influences as the verbal symbol, as you argue. Do you see it?

...

Beyond that, what I invite you to notice is that there is no contradiction between what I wrote and anything Cleric has written about language.

As I remember it, this discussion about sub-cycles originated in the context of LLM and how you felt it is 'perfectly useless' to try and gain any insight about the structure of thinking through the meaningful patterns of word associations. The sub-cycle emerged as your explanation for why this entire strata of word associations is disconnected from genuine intuitive meaning. I think both Cleric and I addressed this issue at some length, for example he wrote:

As long as the texts on which LLMs have been trained are produced by thinking beings, it is natural that the weightings of words should reflect something of the ideal relations

To which you responded, "Well, Steiner says the following (which he calls nominalism later in the lecture)" and followed by a quote from Steiner. Cleric responded to this as well:

It is true that much of the training data may come from Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and FHM, but it is also trained on the Bible and all religious and philosophical literature (including anthroposophical) so it's natural that the statistics may have distilled some of the higher-order linguistic centers (even if only their flattened projections)

You seemed to agree after that, or at least you didn't say anything to the contrary in your next comment. Yet in these recent comments, you have started to imply the same thing about the associative word strata reflected in LLM - "However, what happens is that, once the precipitated verbal forms are out there in the world of senses, they tend to become captive to the horizontal, sensory layer, and to attract other word-symbols by association (basically the essence of what LLMs highlight)... This frequency (the same rendered by LLMs) is not a direct expression of meaning, because of the largely subconscious flow within which the associations are rooted (as in your weather example). The frequency is largely the expression of dreaming junctures within the trains of thought. What the word-symbols do in this situation is, they crystallize those unconscious junctures. They are out there, available for meaning-less use."


Now I realize we can speak of it this way without implying some absolute metaphysical discontinuity, and indeed I also spoke of the level of indirection that is introduced in our modern philosophical-scientific thinking (which of course is primarily anchored in verbal forms) in the new essay. It is not a direct expression of the intuitive meaning we are steering through, in the sense that it has convoluted into unstable oscillations and complicated reflections which obscure that meaning, as long as our attention is merged with the perceptual content of our associative thoughts and remains insensitive to the thinking process itself.

But again, I don't think that makes the intuitive meaning incarnated in the sound ether (inner voice) intrinsically more derailing than meaning incarnated in the light ether (pictorial) or in the warmth ether (gestural). You mentioned the folk souls - we can easily see how a constraint like our temperament can exert derailing influences regardless of what part of the etheric spectrum we are using to anchor the intuitive meaning. Our temperament doesn't change based on whether we think in words, pictures, or gestures. So I think this is an aspect of your argument here that is not only inaccurate, but can become positively misleading if we are not careful.

The reason why is because we have to remember that the pictorial strata of spiritual activity, which we can say developed on Old Moon, is less spiritually conscious than the verbal strata that developed on Earth. With the latter, we have been linked consciously into more of the intuitive depth structure, even if most people still live only in the flattened projections of that structure via abstract philosophy and science. Through that verbal strata, we will be able to purify the pictorial strata and reintegrate it into the fully conscious life (which will only fully manifest at the Jupiter stage). We simply need to imagine what it would be like to investigate the intuitive meaning of Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc. if we relied only on pictures. Why couldn't these revelations of modern initiation be presented by Steiner as a book of pictures? Of course, we can use pictures to complement our verbal thinking, but we can also imagine relying solely on the latter and still getting heightened sensitivity to these aspects of the depth structure.

Consider Cleric's previous comment to me:

So I guess it's a question of even finer distinction and differentiation. For example, it feels to me that one can still enter some form of an Imaginative state even without the experience of tone. This is obviously true in a visionary state. What one cannot know, however, is Inspirative cognition, the inner life of the spiritual world. That's why Steiner calls Inspiration inner hearing. This is the Music of the Spheres. Of course, we are not speaking about perceptual sound but about the fine 'vibrations' of meaning within which our soul lives. What we called sound ether is the more perceptual counterpart of this. In the tone of inner activity we can more intimately comprehend how the inner life of the Cosmos is superimposed.

So when you say "Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards." I'm inclined to say that we can do that to some extent even without verbal anchors but we cannot do it unless our soul lives, even if still instinctively, in the Inspirative world of ideal tone. This is the decisive factor. If we have that, we'll find a way to express that musicality even with hand gestures, even if with greater difficulty and with a lesser chance of conveying the deeper experiences to another soul. Experiencing our spiritual activity in the inner voice brings us closer to consciousness of the Inspirative world, yet we should remember that the latter instills the Logoic order to all ethers.

A whole lot of interesting insights are contained here, of course, but I am simply focusing on how the inner voice has become the modern person's best means of getting a refined feeling for the meaningful consonances and dissonances of the Inspirative world (instead of only the imaginative/soul world where we live in pictures) and also sharing the fruits of that insight with others, which is of course critical for spiritual evolution. What we should focus on first and foremost is purifying the soul life which derails all forms of the etheric spectrum, such that we can more directly live in the meaningful currents of the contextual Logoic order through those forms. I have actually experienced many times when it was precisely the associative word combinations of the inner voice or outer speech that helped awaken me to various inner soul conditions that needed torque. As we work on our cognitive sensitivity through phenomenological exploration and concentration exercises, this strata of frequency-based word associations can become a powerful reflecting mirror for the soul life that we wouldn't have otherwise.

It doesn’t help that you keep repeating that thinking is the primary way, and that language is not intrinsically derailing. I agree with that, you have repeated that dozen times by now. Language is a code, and can be decoded - once again from the side of thinking and from the side of feeling, and yes, this comes from spiritual development of thinking activity, and, in parallel, from cultivation of the beauty and meaningfulness of sound and tone in language, because, as Cleric just said "we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation". So the feeling side is still very useful to address, through cultivation of sound and tone in language.

I simply don't understand what it means to cultivate something (in a sense, learning a new skill), anything, "parallel of thinking". When I want to live into the deeper archetypal feeling gestures of tone, I need to extend my living thinking into the experience and continually condense the meaning into recursive concepts. The latter do not need to be analytical or abstractly reflective in any way, it doesn't need to be an endless chatter of commentary. If I want to live into the moral virtues and devotional practices like prayer, in a way that leads to continual development in these areas, it's the same thing. All of this is rooted in living thinking which makes us more sensitive to the meaningful feedback from the intuitive context, and which as I keep saying, grows archetypal feeling from its soil as a natural consequence. We can't be satisfied with just any feeling that pops into consciousness when we perceive the World Content (like anger, frustration, envy, repulsion, and so on) - we are interested in becoming more sensitive to the Inspired feelings within that content, and that sensitivity is cultivated by living thinking.

[Federica]

It’s been the same discussion pattern a few times now:

1. You attack my propositions with a challenging question

2. I address the question precisely, to show why and how I still propose what I propose

3. At which point, you abandon it, to start a new attack from another angle

---

The last iteration:

1. You try to turn against me my own reference to Clerics protein structure metaphor of language, arguing that one is wonderful, while my proposition is failure

2. I precisely show you how the two are fully compatible, and how your contention - word-symbols and pictorial symbols hold the same associative/derailing potential - is plain incompatible with the protein metaphor, where pictorial symbols are found one level up closer to the Logos, the Word, compared to world-symbols. I ask you: “Can you see it?” I ask you: “Do you see that your contention is incompatible with Clerics illustration?”

3. To which, you avoid answering. You simply let it fall, to rehash old/already solved lines of attack instead.

---

I cannot cope with these methods, Ashvin. And I don't want to fall into discussions of the kind we had last year. I am still open to the possibility of being mistaken, but you have not begun to show that such possibility is real with regard to my proposition about the cycle of language. Therefore, if these remain your methods, I prefer to resign the discussion.

[AshvinP]

2. I precisely show you how the two are fully compatible, and how your contention - word-symbols and pictorial symbols hold the same associative/derailing potential - is plain incompatible with the protein metaphor, where pictorial symbols are found one level up closer to the Logos, the Word, compared to world-symbols. I ask you: “Can you see it?” I ask you: “Do you see that your contention is incompatible with Clerics illustration?”

My response was precisely an answer to this question. I am showing how you are incorrect that pictorial symbols are found "one level up closer to the Word" (and so did Cleric's post). Both the revelations of spiritual science, and our own phenomenological experience (once we have developed more inner sensitivity to the strata), can reveal you are incorrect about that. If we want to put it in very abstract and discursive way, we can say the pictorial thinking strata is one level down from the verbal thinking strata, and one level up from verbal is the synthesis from that thesis-antithesis of supra-psychic (Imaginative) consciousness. But what good does it do if we simply state our propositions in this way without leading the reader through the underlying thought movements? (and I think you confuse simply stating your proposition that something is incompatible, with various different trains of words, for "showing me" it is incompatible) I took the latter approach in my last post and you simply couldn't recognize that.





The common upside down triangle or 'bathtub' picture, of course, shouldn't be taken to mean the lower stages are less evolved - it's quite the opposite. Even though we are aliasing more and more of the intuitive context through these involving stages, our individual consciousness is emerging and attuning more and more self-consciously to its true essence as the Logos. It's enough to think about when we daydream today in pictures versus when we are in some associative discussion about intellectual questions. Are we really going to say the latter is contained within a lower sub-cycle of the former, where we are more awake? Is the daydream any less associative?

I also mentioned many other problems for your proposition in the last post. Are you willing to confront these problems for your sub-cycle proposition or will you avoid them by "resigning" now, only to rehash them again later?

[AshvinP]

I agree. The verbal forms are not “intrinsically” associative and derailing. They are associative and derailing only in their predominant use in our epoch. And they can be redeemed through spiritual development.

Your recollection is correct, Cleric never mentioned an additional cycle, that’s only my proposition. However the protein metaphor does evoque that the primary structure - the linguistic form in its sequential, most sensory transliteration - flattens out the original meaning. It takes apart the density of meaning and puts it in diluted sequences. These linguistic sequences are smeared out in spacetime and follow their primary-structure specific modular architecture. It’s a modular encoding.

What I wrote above:

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.


is actually another way to describe the same thing as the protein metaphor. Strangely, you cut off of Cleric's quote precisely the sentence where the pictorial symbol was mentioned and represented. But even in the amputated quote: do you see, in the protein metaphor, that the pictorial symbol is one level up closer to the Word, compared to the word symbol?

This makes it clear from one more angle that it cannot bear the same derailing influences as the verbal symbol, as you argue. Do you see it?

Here are some more thoughts just to make the relation of my other responses to the above more explicit. We should be clear that Cleric never says "the pictorial symbolis one level up closer to the Word", as if that symbol hangs in isolation from the entire meaningful context, explicated in word-symbols, in which it was placed. What the pictorial symbol does is simply give us a way to more easily live into the implicit depth of the word-symbols which are already there and are absolutely necessary for projecting the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures onto the objective perceptual plane.

This points to something we have both been ignoring to some extent, which is that we can't neatly separate "language" into words, pictures, etc. as if they are all independent of one another, and we sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. Even when we speak of "mental images", in the broad sense this means imaginative replicas of any bodily experience, whether visual, audial, tactile, etc. These are always overlapping to some extent - we shouldn't imagine that when we think in pictures about our future plans, for example, that the inner voice is completely absent, only that it has receded out of focus. If we are sensitive enough, we can still sense the reverberations of this inner voice spectrum within the pictures as well.

Nevertheless, we can still discern a certain gradient and asymmetry within these imaginative replicas which incarnate intuitive meaning, and I think the last post from Cleric that I quoted does a great job of briefly outlining that. It's easy enough to see that one does not need the pictorial symbol to resist the derailing soul influences and intuit the meaningful folded structure of the word sequences, whereas one absolutely needs the word sequences themselves. Imagine if there was only a string of pictorial symbols floating around, with maybe a word here and there! How well could we resonate with the folded structure then?

In all cases, what makes the difference between intuiting the folded structure of the linear sequences, whether pictorial or words, whether E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t or , is the relative impurity or purity of our various soul factors, our thinking habits and expectations, our preferences, desires, etc. We can easily be led astray by pictorial symbols (as I think many spiritualists are) when those factors remain impure. When we are able to purify even some of that soul constellation, the fact that word-based language "decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts" becomes our greatest asset for developing more refined sensitivity to the intuitive meaning we are exploring. We can only speak of words "creating" a horizontal cycle that holds the mind in relative captivity when we are still flowing with the classically conditioned soul habits. It is the latter which actually creates the conditions for captivity which can just as easily influence our thinking in words or in pictures.

This is why we need to be careful of throwing out theoretical propositions about these cycles and sub-cycles, and instead try to trace how these complex influences will be expressed within our living experience on the path of inner development. This is such a subtle trap that we see over and over again, and it's truly hard to point attention to it. The content of our thoughts can be exactly the same as what we have read in Steiner, Cleric, or someone else, but the context in which those thoughts appear can be something quite different. This is why Cleric said we need to distinguish clearly between what we are thinking about and what we are doing with thinking activity itself. In what ways are the former closely aligned with the latter or working in opposition to it? The word-based thinking that we use here is precisely a means of bringing them closer into alignment, which also should be complemented with the pictorial element but its critical evolutionary function cannot at all be replaced by the latter.

I once again remind of Cleric's indication:

Now this shouldn't make us think that linguistic thinking was an evolutionary mistake. For our evolutionary scenario it was completely necessary. And it is only through the hierarchical structure of linguistic cognition that we can gradually move towards the even deeper spiritual fractal-levels of reality. In that sense, we haven't yet even utilized the full significance of the spoken word.

So it's not about simply abandoning verbal thinking but uniting its hierarchical structure of meaning with pictorial thinking...

Another important distinction to make is that the meaning is not confined to the word. This is relatively easy to grasp through the fact that we can say 'table' or we can imagine a table. In both cases we live in the same meaning. It's more challenging with higher order concepts like, say, 'generosity'. We don't have a direct sensory perception that corresponds to generosity, like we have for a table. To make a picture of it we have to be mobile, we have to imagine, for example, a whole scene - a person that gives something with best intentions to others. It is clear that some insight is needed here. If the purely sensory layer of this scene is presented to someone else, they may not grasp that it is the quality of generosity that is portrayed. Thus, even if non-verbally, we still need the concept of generosity. For this reason language shouldn't be despised, as it allows us to move through this hierarchy of concepts. Only through this depth of intuition we can proceed from the flat sensory pictorial thinking towards Imagination.

[Federica]

Here are some more thoughts just to make the relation of my other responses to the above more explicit. We should be clear that Cleric never says "the pictorial symbolis one level up closer to the Word", as if that symbol hangs in isolation from the entire meaningful context, explicated in word-symbols, in which it was placed. What the pictorial symbol does is simply give us a way to more easily live into the implicit depth of the word-symbols which are already there and are absolutely necessary for projecting the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures onto the objective perceptual plane.

Clearly, your "as if" is only your "as if". I never said or implied that pictorial symbols hang in isolation. That they don't hang in isolation is implied in the protein metaphor, as well as in the elephant one. And what they do is not to simply give us an easy way to live in the depth of word-symbols. Words are way easier. Pictorial symbols are a level of depth upstream the word-symbols. They are the bonding elements of the "secondary structure" of meaning. When we live in pictorial symbols, the words are not already there. Consider this description of how the pictorial symbols are upstream the word-symbols, which later crystallize from pictorial scenes:

if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

This is an example, it doesn't cover all cases, but surely illustrates how the more volumetric, condensed pictorial flow precedes the word flow, though we are not used to sense it. BTW, in the example, we can also hint at the tertiary structure of meaning. Another thing that appears is that the word symbols are necessary only at times, when conceptual hierarchy is required by the specific thought concatenation we want to express (but note that even the concept of generosity can be expressed nonverbally). On the contrary, the imaginative flow is always there, and always necessary, though not always conscious. Obviously, what you say that articulated, layered, abstract communications often require verbal encoding is true. Still, we don't always need to operate a full descent into horizontal, flattened sequencing. Verbal encoding is the most sense-drenched projection of meaning onto the sensory plane. Pictorial symbols are also sensory, but lack the auditory aspect. Most importantly, they lack the combinatory character of alphabetic language (that only sound and tone can redeem). This combinatory aspect of alphabet language contains an additional threat for the intellect, on top of the personal soul constraints. This is something you don't seem to have noticed in what I proposed: surely the personal soul constraints affect both pictorial and verbal thinking, however verbal thinking adds an extra challenge, in that it locks thought into sensations twice as strongly.

You ask for a phenomenological recap. We can use the example of illumination in the quote above. We first have the meaningful insight. This can even be without imaginative element (tertiary structure). If one is less sensitive, one senses it once it has become imaginative: a pictorial scene or frame is inwardly perceived. This visual-only symbol is "like a hydrogen bond", as Cleric said. We can experience how it condenses in itself, without expressing them, a multiplicity of potential word-symbols. Notice: the exact words could be many, arranged in various ways. The pictorial symbol structures that potential in a concisely meaningful volumetry. It has an extra inner-dimension, and one less outer dimension, compared to the various discursive word-symbol sequences that could unfold from it. As you say, words are often necessary to express complex ideas, but we should be clear there is a price to pay for this further descent into the encoding/senses. Verbal is indeed more intelligible than pictorial symbols, more versatile, more fitting the complexity of sequential reasoning, but it is also - when taken as a mere thought expression tool - more diluted in spacetime, more discursive, more dialectic, more flat, more dead. All this is a first-person experience. One antidote to these risks is to become more sensitive and conscious of the inner volumetry at the level of the imaginative symbol/flow upstream the flow of words.
And so yes: when we do that, we are closer to the Word, we are in imaginative flow, rather than in discursive flow. In the protein metaphor, we are one level up closer to the one meaning of the protein.

This points to something we have both been ignoring to some extent, which is that we can't neatly separate "language" into words, pictures, etc. as if they are all independent of one another, and we sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. Even when we speak of "mental images", in the broad sense this means imaginative replicas of any bodily experience, whether visual, audial, tactile, etc. These are always overlapping to some extent - we shouldn't imagine that when we think in pictures about our future plans, for example, that the inner voice is completely absent, only that it has receded out of focus. If we are sensitive enough, we can still sense the reverberations of this inner voice spectrum within the pictures as well.

As I said, the metaphors I used imply the non separateness. But I don't agree that the inner voice is always present. Surely you will say I am not sensitive enough to hear it. But what if the sensitivity is about not allowing the verbal encoding to happen? Letting it happen is clearly the path of non resistance. Moreover, we know from experience that words are not always a necessity: even better than the case when a word escapes us, we can think that there are innumerable worded ways to express a future plan, as potential crystallizations of the pictures/imaginative flow. A whole potential of expressions is available - not that we are forced to one single inner voice path that is immanent in the pictures. BTW, this fact of experience is another way to realize there may be other factors that could make the word sequence crystallize in a form rather than another, as an extra element of distortion, beyond the personal soul factors.

[AshvinP]

Here are some more thoughts just to make the relation of my other responses to the above more explicit. We should be clear that Cleric never says "the pictorial symbolis one level up closer to the Word", as if that symbol hangs in isolation from the entire meaningful context, explicated in word-symbols, in which it was placed. What the pictorial symbol does is simply give us a way to more easily live into the implicit depth of the word-symbols which are already there and are absolutely necessary for projecting the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structures onto the objective perceptual plane.

Clearly, your "as if" is only your "as if". I never said or implied that pictorial symbols hang in isolation. That they don't hang in isolation is implied in the protein metaphor, as well as in the elephant one. And what they do is not to simply give us an easy way to live in the depth of word-symbols. Words are way easier. Pictorial symbols are a level of depth upstream the word-symbols. They are the bonding elements of the "secondary structure" of meaning. When we live in pictorial symbols, the words are not already there. Consider this description of how the pictorial symbols are upstream the word-symbols, which later crystallize from pictorial scenes:

if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

This is an example, it doesn't cover all cases, but surely illustrates how the more volumetric, condensed pictorial flow precedes the word flow, though we are not used to sense it. BTW, in the example, we can also hint at the tertiary structure of meaning. Another thing that appears is that the word symbols are necessary only at times, when conceptual hierarchy is required by the specific thought concatenation we want to express (but note that even the concept of generosity can be expressed nonverbally). On the contrary, the imaginative flow is always there, and always necessary, though not always conscious. Obviously, what you say that articulated, layered, abstract communications often require verbal encoding is true. Still, we don't always need to operate a full descent into horizontal, flattened sequencing. Verbal encoding is the most sense-drenched projection of meaning onto the sensory plane. Pictorial symbols are also sensory, but lack the auditory aspect. Most importantly, they lack the combinatory character of alphabetic language (that only sound and tone can redeem). This combinatory aspect of alphabet language contains an additional threat for the intellect, on top of the personal soul constraints. This is something you don't seem to have noticed in what I proposed: surely the personal soul constraints affect both pictorial and verbal thinking, however verbal thinking adds an extra challenge, in that it locks thought into sensations twice as strongly.

You ask for a phenomenological recap. We can use the example of illumination in the quote above. We first have the meaningful insight. This can even be without imaginative element (tertiary structure). If one is less sensitive, one senses it once it has become imaginative: a pictorial scene or frame is inwardly perceived. This visual-only symbol is "like a hydrogen bond", as Cleric said. We can experience how it condenses in itself, without expressing them, a multiplicity of potential word-symbols. Notice: the exact words could be many, arranged in various ways. The pictorial symbol structures that potential in a concisely meaningful volumetry. It has an extra inner-dimension, and one less outer dimension, compared to the various discursive word-symbol sequences that could unfold from it. As you say, words are often necessary to express complex ideas, but we should be clear there is a price to pay for this further descent into the encoding/senses. Verbal is indeed more intelligible than pictorial symbols, more versatile, more fitting the complexity of sequential reasoning, but it is also - when taken as a mere thought expression tool - more diluted in spacetime, more discursive, more dialectic, more flat, more dead. All this is a first-person experience. One antidote to these risks is to become more sensitive and conscious of the inner volumetry at the level of the imaginative symbol/flow upstream the flow of words.
And so yes: when we do that, we are closer to the Word, we are in imaginative flow, rather than in discursive flow. In the protein metaphor, we are one level up closer to the one meaning of the protein.

This points to something we have both been ignoring to some extent, which is that we can't neatly separate "language" into words, pictures, etc. as if they are all independent of one another, and we sometimes use one and sometimes use the other. Even when we speak of "mental images", in the broad sense this means imaginative replicas of any bodily experience, whether visual, audial, tactile, etc. These are always overlapping to some extent - we shouldn't imagine that when we think in pictures about our future plans, for example, that the inner voice is completely absent, only that it has receded out of focus. If we are sensitive enough, we can still sense the reverberations of this inner voice spectrum within the pictures as well.

As I said, the metaphors I used imply the non separateness. But I don't agree that the inner voice is always present. Surely you will say I am not sensitive enough to hear it. But what if the sensitivity is about not allowing the verbal encoding to happen? Letting it happen is clearly the path of non resistance. Moreover, we know from experience that words are not always a necessity: even better than the case when a word escapes us, we can think that there are innumerable worded ways to express a future plan, as potential crystallizations of the pictures/imaginative flow. A whole potential of expressions is available - not that we are forced to one single inner voice path that is immanent in the pictures. BTW, this fact of experience is another way to realize there may be other factors that could make the word sequence crystallize in a form rather than another, as an extra element of distortion, beyond the personal soul factors.

I think you are mostly comparing apples to oranges here. We agreed to stick with discussing the phenomenological experience at the intellectual scale, where we work with imaginative replicas of bodily experiences. The whole question is in what ways we can leverage the verbal or pictorial replicas to scale the contextual hierarchy of meaning. But now you are speaking of the Imaginative scale of spiritual activity (the more holistic 'pictorial scenes') and comparing that to the intellectual scale of sequential gestures (words, pictures, physical, etc.). When we grow into the Imaginative scale, it especially makes no sense to partition the mental images and compare them to each other, since they are all interwoven. This is atavistically projected in the phenomenon of synesthesia, for example, where tones/words may evoke colors and textures and vice versa. And obviously the icons we use on our posts are not already at that Imaginative scale, right?

The whole question is how do we most effectively grow into the Imaginative scale, from where we are at now? That scale should not be confused with our intellectual scale of pictorial gestures. It's interesting how you previously jumped on me for mentioning psychedelic/mystical experiences in a semi-positive way, yet now you are basically implying that such pictorial experiences automatically bring us into the secondary/tertiary structure of meaning, deeper toward the Word. Otherwise your argument above doesn't hold. Such experiences can only give us genuine insight into the depth structure if we have already explored that depth through living concepts, which as we have been saying, is only possibly for modern man through the anchoring of word-symbols and the strengthening of concentration. This is how we get a grip within the volatile soul flow and begin to 'comb' its currents, to purify the factors that continually collapse the Imaginative+ scales into the fragmented and sequential cognitive flow.

This is what Cleric is speaking about in the lamp example. Let's remember the whole basis of the exercise is sensing clearly how we pronounce the words and then slowing it down even more, allowing the intuitive depth embedded in the 'modular architecture' of the word-symbols to become more transparent. This is how we truly grow more sensitive to the Imaginative 'wavefunction' from which all the sequential replicas collapse. We need to clearly sense the difference between our ordinary dream life, which is highly pictorial yet remains super dim, instinctive, and selfish (to the extent we experience a 'self') to the utmost degree, and our waking life, that is dominated by the inner voice (which is usually how conscience expresses itself), and where we finally get a grip. Through that grip, if we can remember some of these dream experiences, we can try to understand how they reflect our deeper soul flow and gradually work on modulating the latter. If we want to talk about extra risks or extra distortions, the biggest extra risk and distortion for modern spiritual seekers is trying to bypass the grip of the word-scale and instead live in the impure pictorial flow, which can only be understood as spatial, sensory-like objects and 'beings'.

It's interesting this just hit my inbox from Matt Segal:

I began by referencing a conversation that Simon was recently involved in convened by Tim Adalin (Voicecraft about the question “Is the earth enough?”). I invited Simon to share any lingering ideas or questions from those conversations. Simon reflects that the second episode was packed with “a lot of broad frameworks for thinking about the world,” and by the end of it he was quite full, trying to feel into what still seemed relevant for him. He explains that he is drawn to the question of the direct experiencing of concepts such as the noosphere or “earth’s consciousness.” If the universe is alive and everything has an interior, how might we communicate with these beings?

Simon then introduces the topic of nonphysical astral beings by talking about Carl Hayden Smith, who is involved in “DMTx” explorations, an extended DMT experience that Simon describes as “super sci-fi” yet “very, very real.” He calls it “a form of space travel” that is totally different from the materialist framework. He finds it exciting that, rather than building computer interfaces, people are “installing psychotechnological interfaces or energetic interfaces” for human consciousness to communicate with what some esoteric traditions call astral beings.

This is what happens when people fail to understand that, in our ordinary word-based thinking, we are already probing the contextual architecture of meaning and we only need to make that more and more conscious. And such things will only become more and more common for people longing for spiritual experience. We can easily mistake the pictorial flow of our own soul life for "higher realities closer to the Word" if we are not absolutely clear that, only in our strengthened thinking that weaves in living concepts, can we bring intuitive depth to the pictorial flow. Otherwise we fall into the trap that Steiner mentions over and over:

Thus, a human being who is not careful with regard to this may even see thousands and thousands of pictures from the Akasha Chronicle; yet, even so, if he does not apply the test as to whether or not these pictures are obliterated through an absolutely active sight, these Akasha pictures, in that case—no matter how many facts they may reveal—can be looked upon only as pictures of man's own inner life. It might happen, for instance—I repeat, it might happen—that someone who sees nothing more than his own interior, projected in very dramatic pictures, imagines these to be events, let us say, which extend over the entire Atlantean world, through whole generations of humanity. ... And, all the while—no matter how seemingly objective—this might, under certain circumstances, be merely a projection of his own inward being.

We need to realize that all the more integrated spiritual forces have been flattened into the word-layer, just like the brain. Our living thinking efforts will also instill more depth into our pictorial gestures, but it's obvious that 99% of the time, most of us will need to rely on the word strata to thoroughly explore spiritual scientific revelations, i.e. the structure and dynamics of our spiritual activity. I have a book that compiles a bunch of esoteric pictures by a 16-17th century occultist, Robert Fludd. Even at that time, there were probably few who could leverage such pictures to explore the spiritual depth. This is why the new initiatory impulse was given in extensive word sequences. It is why the only way we could have this discussion, here and now, and kindle intuitions about various gradients of meaning, is via such sequences. We need to honestly confront where we are at now in evolution, in our 'sense-drenched' state of existence - we will only reach the folded structure of the "I" through the word sequences which have been given new life and are thus spiritualized.

[Cleric]

Maybe we can explore this topic by investigating a thought like "I am". Of course, not in an abstract sense but as the real-time contemplation of how we produce the words and how they reflect the affirmation of our existence. It seems to me that trying to experience this in a pictorial way or with sign language feels less intimate. We can devise some exercises to investigate this. For example, we can imagine moving the beads of an abacus for some time. There's no need to do real calculations, only that for some time we completely suppress our inner voice and are engaged in picturing moving the beads. If then we produce a verbal thought, it kinda feels as if a part of us has been so far muted in the background. In other words, there's something of our "I"-ness that remained unknown until we spoke.

As it has been established, both verbal and pictorial thoughts can flow dreamily and flatly. The point is that in our inner voice - others may disagree and share their experience but this seems to be mine - we feel our innermost activity expressing in a more intimate way. And it is not even so much about the words themselves but rather the experience of the "I"-activity in vibrating tone phenomena.

So in my experience, it is possible to seek this more intimate "I"-activity where the modulation of any sound can be experienced as a kind of "I am"-experience (for example the vowels exercise). When we begin to awaken more deeply in this innermost activity it becomes possible to experience even light and color phenomena as if we vibrate them into existence through our "I"-force (cymatics analogy). Probably one way to tread a middle ground between these experiences is to experiment with thoughts like "I am roundness", "I am squareness", etc., where it's not so much that we need to pronounce the words, but in a sense, we should feel that we support the shape of our inner being through the same "I"-force through which we vibrate our ordinary verbal thoughts. In a way, we need to feel that this form in which we shape ourselves is radiated and supported through the same force as that which can be shaped into speech. I'll have to think of better ways to lead to the experience since it takes more practice to loosen the default bodily shape and be able to give our own inner geometry.

But in a nutshell, It seems to me that this is at the core of the debate here. We need verbal thinking because we can better find our "I"-force there which experiences itself in the modulation of tone, which is more intimate than light and warmth. But from then on, we can use that "I"-force to modulate also the pictorial aspects. Then, these aspects are clearly experienced as being radiated and supported through the same "I"-force through which we radiate speech.

[AshvinP]

But in a nutshell, It seems to me that this is at the core of the debate here. We need verbal thinking because we can better find our "I"-force there which experiences itself in the modulation of tone, which is more intimate than light and warmth. But from then on, we can use that "I"-force to modulate also the pictorial aspects. Then, these aspects are clearly experienced as being radiated and supported through the same "I"-force through which we radiate speech.

Thanks for these helpful indications, Cleric. My experience with the "I am" / abacus exercise is similar to what you describe, the latter is initially experienced more dreamily as if the "I" is muted (not nearly as extreme as regular dreams, but closer), whereas the former feels more intimate, proceeding from the innermost being (even if the latter still feels veiled through several convolutions).

I hope it's also clear from my posts that we shouldn't one-sidedly ignore bringing that "I" force into our pictorial life, which is certainly a natural consequence of our efforts. Obviously that is why we use so many pictures in the posts here, including words that are intended to evoke concrete imagery which can then be translated into the ideal life, such as 'intuitive curvature', 'folded structure', ''pendulum swings', and so on. All of these pictorial aspects can be critical for making our spiritual concepts more recursive, more artistically symbolic of the mostly invisible first-person experiential flow (once we have somewhat purified the idolatrous soul tendency).

I am curious, have you noticed a significant change in the percentage proportion, outside of meditation (i.e. at the intellectual scale), that you rely on verbal vs. pictorial support for exploration of the supersensible throughout the years of inner development? I am sure the two have become much more intertwined for you over the years, and probably you have gradually learned to weave more in pictures when making plans and so forth. But if you are interested in exploring various concepts of spiritual science, do you often do this with wordless pictures, mostly words, or both, and has that proportion been evolving in a clear direction?