"Enlivened by love for our neighbor, we realize this life only if we are able to bring this principle in us, as instruments - though not worthy instruments - of the Logos." - Massimo Scaligero
As we have already seen, the skill of spiritual sight is not developed to float off into exotic visions or attain profound, blissful, peaceful feelings, as is common in modern mystical or psychedelic practices. Instead, it is cultivated to begin seeing our familiar perceptions, thoughts, memories, soul qualities, and capacities, i.e. our entire sense of ‘who I am’ and ‘what reality is’, in a higher Light. With that higher (more integrated) perspective, we can start transforming the most suffocating constraints on our spiritual activity and aligning that activity with our freely chosen, fully human ideals. In that way, the task of knowledge becomes something fundamentally different from what it used to be when we lacked the inner organs of sight, which was mostly an accumulation of facts out of curiosity or purely self-interested goals. We don’t observe the constraints as static objects, but the process of knowing them simultaneously transforms the knower from the inside-out. We then realize that the act of thinking (not necessarily the content of thinking) has always been an expression of self-sacrificial love. It is the intimate domain of life where Divine Love, in its native essence, first becomes manifest in our experience.
When we actively think, we renounce our interest in the sensations and feelings which give us immediate pleasure and instead try to explore what ideas, feelings, and impulses are animating other souls as individuals and collectives. As we discussed in Part I, by renouncing-resisting the personal soul curvatures we normally flow along with, our inner activity drags against the World flow and that feeds back as mental pictures about the inner factors that are always implicit in our thinking inquiries. These inner factors are the reality of ‘other minds’ and their activity which is superimposed on our present state. In that sense, all philosophy, science, and daily thinking inquiries are a means of probing the inner lives of other perspectives, whether we are aware of that fact or not. By developing more intimate knowledge of these other perspectives, we start to become more sensitive to how our activity influences their states, i.e. how it diminishes or furthers their potential for harmonious development. Instead of simply theorizing about how we need to be more loving of our fellow beings ‘on paper’, we expand the soul force of Love through our knowledge of the inner threads connecting us with all other beings.
As discussed previously, the main reason we are so insensitive to our real-time thinking activity is precisely because it sacrificially divests all of its energy into the objects of its perception, i.e. various sensory perceptions and concepts about the nature of its existence. That fact of experience is also reflected in most languages. For example, we often omit the “I think” when pronouncing judgments on various phenomena. We say, “That table is made of high-quality wood” while the “I think” remains unacknowledged and implicit, quietly merged into the background. Whereas when it is a matter of feeling, we explicitly say, “The scent of that wood makes me feel at peace”. In our feeling experience, how we feel takes front and center stage. It is similar with our wants, desires, and so on. Only in the act of thinking does the object of our inner activity become the primary factor of interest, i.e. the qualities, feelings, and ideas of other soul perspectives. Our self-sacrificial thinking thereby becomes insensitive to the inner gestures made in the act of exploring the inner lives of other perspectives through such sensory and ideal phenomena.
In his short essay Das Ding (“The Thing”), Martin Heidegger uses the example of a jug that holds and pours wine, not by virtue of its material constituents but by virtue of its ‘empty space’, to point attention toward the loving and self-sacrificial essence of our invisible spiritual activity.
(1)The gift of the pour is a libation for the mortals. It quenches their thirst. It enlivens their efforts. It heightens their sociability. But the gift of the jug is also at times given for consecration. If the pour is for consecration then it does not appease a thirst. It appeases the celebration of the festival on high. Now the gift of the pour is neither given in a tavern nor is the gift a libation for mortals. The pour is the oblation spent for the immortal gods. The gift of the pour as oblation is the authentic gift. In the giving of the consecrated oblation, the pouring jug essences as the giving gift. The consecrated oblation is what the word “pour” actually names: offering and sacrifice. “Pour” [Guß], “to pour” [gießen], in Greek reads: χέειν, Indogermanic: ghu. This means: to sacrifice. Sufficiently thought and genuinely said, where it is essentially performed pouring is: donating, sacrificing, and therefore giving. Only for this reason can pouring become, as soon as its essence atrophies, a mere filling up and emptying out, until it finally degenerates into the ordinary serving of drinks. Pouring is not a mere gushing in and out.
Even as late as the Middle Ages, the process of thinking was experienced as a loving act of consecration, a returning of the imaginative ‘substance’ to the Divine beings who originally provided it, now enriched with uniquely human experiences and qualities. The Scholastic philosophers did not feel thinking as a mere ‘gushing in and out’ of personal thoughts, rather as a sacred and devotional act. This sacred context in which our thinking flows has been obscured by intellectual vision in the modern age, clouded by habitual soul tendencies. We have flattened out (aliased) that context over the neurosensory system, encompassed it as mere perceptual content to be analyzed with our fragmented thoughts, and thus imagine it is now well understood (or doesn't need to be understood). That leads to the decadence of the institutions, events, rituals, festivals, capacities, objects, etc. that we experience in the ordinary course of life since we can no longer concretely feel the loving and holistic inner gestures that brought the natural environment, cultural institutions, and soul capacities into existence and which sustain that existence.
The myth of Sisyphus artistically images this decadent self-experience of modern intellectual thinking, i.e. how we keep instinctively pushing our mineralized thoughts toward the spiritual reality that we thirst for, but we never feel satisfied that we are getting any closer. In our mere intellectual movements, it feels like we are stuck in a closed loop of abstract reflection upon the inner perspectives that shape the World around us (which no longer feels ‘inner’ but ‘outer’). Indeed, many scientists today have resigned to the feeling that there are no universal ‘laws’ or underlying realities to be found behind perceptual experience, and have instead embraced feeling that the best we can do is to mimic the perceptual dynamics through something like function optimization (taking a function with millions of coefficients and tweaking them until the function fits the training data). Recent successes in machine learning have only further reinforced the idea that this is the only fruitful way forward for attaining practically significant knowledge. Yet, as we have already seen, we only keep shoving the intellectual boulder up the hill in this way because we don’t suspect that the thinking process by which we shove the boulder can itself be investigated.
It is because our boulder-shoving movements are merged into the background and, thus, we take them for granted, that the possibility of investigating them isn’t suspected. What we take for granted more than anything else in modern times is our inner thinking voice, by which we try to understand and orient within the flow of existence. Our spiritual activity normally feels closely identified with this inner voice in a similar way as it identifies with the physical body, but unlike the latter, it has no cognitive distance from the inner voice such that its dynamics can be reflected upon. When we intend to think about some question or communicate some meaning, a torrent of audial thoughts is sprayed out and we don’t pause to question (or experience) why or how this is possible, from whence these thoughts are condensing. We have lost all sensitivity to the volitional and emotive currents shaping our mental pictures, such as the vowels and consonants through which we embody and express our thoughts. The following clip can help illustrate these deeper implicit currents.
Such illustrations can heighten our sensitivity to the fact that, concealed within the depth context of our mental pictures such as the inner voice, are inexhaustible sources of Life, Light, and Love. Even the simple intentional act of speaking or moving from point A to point B is made possible by continuous streams of sacrificial spiritual activity. Such processes feel to happen quickly and locally, and are therefore attributed by the intellect to bodily mechanisms. The reality, however, is that all the secrets of our spiritual existence are embedded within the stages of this process which we feel to be taking place in the blink of an eye every time we think a thought, speak a word, or move a limb. Entire worlds of experience are at work in the translation from inner gestures and mental pictures to bodily processes and physical movements, which is elementally reflected in the distinct, irreducible, yet overlapping warmth, gaseous, fluid, and solid organizations of the body. We are continually drawing upon this inexhaustible reservoir of the Spirit to plan our days, communicate meaning, and complete our tasks.
(2)Suppose you have two glasses of water before you; one empty, the other half full. Now suppose we pour water out of the half-full glass into the empty one, and imagine that the half-full glass becomes fuller and fuller be cause of what we are doing. The materialist would consider this kind of thing foolish; but, my dear friends, with a concept suitable for meditation it is not a question of its reality but of whether it is one which will form ideas in the soul. Just because it relates to nothing real, it can direct our senses away from reality. It may be a symbol especially for that soul-process which we describe as the mystery of love. The process of love is something like that half-full glass from which man pours into the empty one, and which thereby becomes fuller and fuller. The soul does not become more empty, it becomes fuller in the same measure in which it gives; and in this way that symbol may have great significance.
When we think about phenomena and convey our thoughts to other souls, or we listen to thoughts conveyed by other souls, that doesn’t diminish the phenomena like a physical resource is diminished when we consume it or give it to others. For example, no matter how many people are contemplating the meaning of a beautiful sunset, the quality of that meaning will not be reduced. Our closed-loop, mechanical intellectual gestures will certainly lead to exhaustion and even more extreme forms of physical degeneration, but the Source they draw upon can open the loop and imbue these gestures with a new life when their sacred context is made ever-more conscious. We won’t recover that sacred context by running away from rigorous thinking, as is attempted in many mystical and spiritualistic practices, but only through more artistic, ennobled, and intensified thinking that rightly understands itself, i.e. that can sense what is going on ‘underneath the hood’ of its finished mental pictures. We transition from being end-users of spiritual experience to creative engineers within its dynamic flow.
As we pursue spiritual sight, we do not seek to contort our mental pictures into various configurations that can ‘explain’ our first-person experience, as we do in most modern philosophical and scientific inquiries. Instead of projecting our mental pictures into explanatory realities ‘behind’ the things of experience, we say Res Ipsa Loquitur, “the thing speaks for itself”, and trace that speech entirely within our experience. We retrace our finished mental pictures into the meaningful context through which their meaning shines forth. The mental pictures are then understood as symbolic glyphs pointing back at the inner dynamics through which they are formed. To use another symbol to anchor the symbolic nature of our mental pictures, the latter can be understood as an alchemical recipe. When followed in thought with the proper devotional, concentrated, and methodical activity, they set deeper inner currents in motion. These recursive mental pictures simultaneously convey ideas about our depth context and help develop the inner skills by which the ideas can eventually be experienced as inner realities. Those intimate experiences and their practical consequences in our lives, in turn, confirm the validity of the ideas conveyed.
It is a transformative process by which we seek to know the capacity through which we know, attend to the activity through which we attend, and prayerfully seek insights into the intuitive essence of prayer (the same essence as thinking and imagination). This inner transformative experience in our thinking requires us to be continuously energetic and active. Normally we are asleep within our depth context or merely dreaming through it in our dim mental pictures. For example, we can try to focus on our life of feelings, to sense our underlying mood and the emotive currents on which our thoughts are usually carried like leaves on a stream. We will only experience this meaning as nebulous undulating waves, much like we usually experience the imagistic meaning of our dreams. If we are naturally sensitive to such things or have started pursuing the path to spiritual sight, we may also feel the meaning of our feeling-rich dream experience ‘hovering underneath’ our waking life; the feeling currents reverberating as after-images superimposed on our experience. That dreamlike narrative context for our waking experience is always there, influencing our thoughts and decisions.
Awakening Thinking at a Deeper Scale
In that sense, the human individual, at any given time, exists along the full spectrum of this meaningful context, i.e. all the factors that constrain the movements of spiritual activity from the most personal to the most transpersonal; from momentary thoughts and opinions to more stable and transpersonal character traits, temperaments, etc., all the way to the living processes and the very ‘spatiotemporal’ fabric of the Universe that all beings share in common. By ‘spatiotemporal’, we mean whatever mysterious inner factor allows us to exist as a coherent perspective going through a stream of development in a ‘world’ shared with other perspectives. We are normally only awake within a narrow ‘aperture’ of that depth context while remaining dreaming or asleep to the remainder. The latter is what we dimly conceive of as the ‘external world’, the ‘subconscious’, and the domain of ‘future potential’ into which our spirit is growing. It is everything that we feel happens to us instead of happening by virtue of our inner activity. We can use the following symbol to anchor our intuition for how our present thinking perspective relates to its inner depth context.
The broadest cone represents the total field of universal potential, the radiant white Light of infinite possible experiences superimposed. All conceivable inner states of existence - colors, sounds, smells, tastes, thoughts, feelings, impulses, etc. - and configurations of those states can be differentiated from this Light. Now we can imagine that the Divine Perspective responsible for maintaining the coherency of this intuitive potential sacrifices its absolute control, such that certain irregularities arise in the potential and allow for new perspectives of existence to take shape. If we imagine the total intuitive potential as an unbroken thinking stream of sound that reflects its Divine Will, ‘aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa’, the sacrificial act leads to new modulations within that stream, ‘aAaAaAaAaAa’. A new perspective, concentric with the Divine, now recognizes its activity in these modulations of the primordial stream. In that sense, the Divine sacrifices perfect control over the intuitive stream and allows unknown intuitive movements to wobble it. Through this Divine technique, new ‘phase-spaces’ of experience arise in which perspectives experience their existential stream of becoming.
The narrowed orange aperture is a constellation of such perspectives that wobble the inner Light/Sound such that their spiritual activity creatively shapes the natural Earthly environment, including the human soul environment (it accomplishes this without the mediation of physical technology). Their spiritual activity shapes and steers ideas, feelings, and impulses shared across many human souls. In these soul-scale wobbles, they recognize their activity and attain self-consciousness. The narrowest pink aperture symbolizes the human individual whose inner and ‘outer’ environments are the collective wobbles of all other perspectives. Our active thoughts are like the finishing touches (the jagged lines) on the intuitive meaning that has been ‘filtered’ through the wobbles (constraints) of countless other perspectives and painted on the perceptual canvas. In these finishing touches, the jagged thoughts, we awaken at the intellectual-sensory scale to our existence as unique perspectives of the Whole intuitive potential (which is always more than the sum of its wobbles).
We then use these jagged thoughts to try and understand the constraints on our activity and the possibilities afforded to our activity by all other perspectives. Yet the depth context is aliased into only those qualities of the Whole that can be captured by the fragmented movements of our jagged thoughts, which are generally quantitative properties of objects and their transformations as measured by quantitative time. Thus we only conceive the inner constraints constellated through other perspectives as uniform ‘laws of nature’, ‘psychological mechanisms’, and so on. We begin conceiving the meaningful depth context as a linear sequence of events extending back into the already-receded past and forward into the unknown future, which we can then survey, link together, and try to anticipate with our jagged thoughts. Through impatience, ignorance, and corresponding intellectual habits discussed in previous essays, we blind ourselves to the immanent presence of the meaningful context in our thinking states and instead work solely by manipulating the jagged, aliased thoughts.
The question then naturally becomes, how do we expand our narrow aperture of thinking consciousness and awaken deeper within the intuitive Light that shapes the ‘finishing touches’ of our mental pictures? Our efforts so far have laid the foundation for that awakening, as we have used symbolic concepts and illustrations to loosely probe and live into our intuition of the inner constraints. In this way, we gradually accustom our imaginative organization to remain focused and attentive in the absence of jagged sensory impressions and corresponding thoughts. If we try to sense how this type of conceptual exploration has been different from the type of intellectual activity we engage in ordinary philosophic and scientific inquiries, how we have had to patiently stretch and strain our spiritual activity in unsuspected directions through a novel palette of inner experiences, then we already have an intimate sense of the inner axis along which further progress is to be attained. In other words, we have become familiar with a deeper scale of inner activity than intellectual activity which produces and clicks together ‘explanatory’ mental pictures like puzzle pieces.
We can imagine that the intuitive meaning we are steering through is normally reflected by our bodily organization (neurosensory system) into these sequential mental puzzle pieces. Through more focused, symbolic, non-sensory conceptual exploration, it is like we are fashioning a more integrated mirror, which exists at a deeper scale, to reflect the corresponding intuitive meaning we are steering through. We can imagine this more integrated mirror is embodied in our rhythmic system. By characterizing it as ‘non-sensory’, it is not intended that we avoid observing or discussing sensory experiences, but rather we use such experiences as symbols for the invisible movements of spiritual activity within the intuitive depth. When we try to think about the breath invisibly moving through our body, for example, we must use such symbols anyway. We aim to bring ordinary sensory experiences and jagged thoughts into concentric alignment with invisible intuitive movements, as also suggested by the image above. In the reflection of this more integrated mirror, we are no longer so interested in the content of our thoughts and perceptions, but in the implicit gestures by which that content is born.
Consider how many physical movements you make with your hands, arms, legs, and feet over a day, week, year, and lifetime. If we were to let our attention follow each frame of these momentary movements - a fist opening and closing, an arm reaching this way or that way, a leg stepping up, and so on - we would only attain the meaning of fragmented frames that feel unrelated. There would hardly be any coherent narrative to speak of. All of these limb movements are also animated by mysterious metabolic combustion processes, which we can only imagine as something like static noise (recall the sound of the arm-moving experiment). Yet if we let our attention zoom out to the deeds that were accomplished through those movements over longer timespans, the biography reflected in such deeds, we begin to sense a narrative tapestry coming together. It is a similar zooming out of attention from our momentary perceptions and thoughts that we seek through the deeper scales of activity. That is not done to ignore the metabolic perceptual frames, but to experience how even these momentary meanings fit into a holistic story.
Imagine you have developed an intense rash that covers your entire torso and arms. Try to experience vividly how this rash itches and burns, how it continually forces your spiritual activity to attend to its sensation even when you are trying to focus on something else. When you direct your attentional movements to this rash and mental pictures feedback on those movements, they convey to you that scratching the rash will only make the situation worse, it will only prevent the rash from healing. Yet these ghostly mental pictures feel like trying to stop an elevator door from closing with only your fingertip. You repeat to yourself over and over, “Scratching the rash will only make it stay around for longer!” but, alas, you end up scratching it anyway for some short-term relief. Can we say you know that scratching the rash will make it worse if you are unable to resist scratching it? Perhaps you are aware of it at the superficial scale of the intellect, but this scale is not deep enough to translate into practically transformative knowledge.
We can apply that situation to our efforts at attaining spiritual sight. What we aim to attain sight of, to begin with, are the ‘soul rashes’ that make the intellect feel itchy and lead it to habitually scratch out thoughts about the ‘nature of reality’, 'the ‘explanation of experience X or Y’, ‘how reality works’, the ‘reasons for why I think, feel, and act the way I do’, and so on. To resist scratching these itches, i.e. flowing along with the habitual pathways of spiritual activity, we should reach a deeper scale of activity that remains concentrated and present in its intent. In the case of a physical rash, we should resist the physical movements that correspond to ‘scratching’ based on our intent to heed the knowledge of how scratching only makes it worse, and in the case of soul rashes, we should resist the habitual imaginative movements that correspond to continually collapsing the present flow of activity into linear sequences of jagged mental pictures. Indeed, if we were to focus the intuition of our daily intellectual movements into an animated picture, it would probably look like someone who cannot help but erratically scratch and inflame their rashes.
Consider all the thoughts which flutter in and out of consciousness when we are brushing our teeth, taking a shower, walking on a trail outside, and other similar physical activities we do on autopilot. These are either stimulated by sensory events or are associative trains of thoughts that arise endogenously within our soul life. In either case, these constantly unfolding associative thoughts act to dull out the invisible gestures we are making when engaging in those activities. Our modern technological environment only reinforces the conditions by which we remain insensitive to the inner gestures. For example, if we use an electric toothbrush, we simply move our hand to one spot and let it vibrate, then another, then another, etc. When we accelerate or decelerate our car, we push a tiny bit on the gas pedal or brake. When we type, we slightly press on the keys, and so on. The corresponding inner soul movements are still there, i.e. the movements corresponding with the intent and desire to groom ourselves, go somewhere, communicate, etc., but we simply have no smooth, concentrated, and continuous activity through which to detect them.
Instead, we only have our dead, jagged thoughts which have been collapsed by scratching the soul rashes. This fact becomes evident to us when we try to resist the fluttering thoughts and intervene within the deeper life of inner gestures. For example, if we are walking down the street, we may notice how often our gaze is turned downward, how we are hunched over, how we avoid eye contact with the people who pass by us, and similar outer tendencies born of our inner disposition. If we notice these things and try to walk with an upright stance and gaze, to meet a passerby with eye contact and a smile, and so on, then we become aware of how autonomous these tendencies are. We don’t feel like they can be easily adjusted by our intellectual scale wishes and thoughts. Thus it dawns on us that a deeper scale of presence and concentrated effort is needed to lay hold of such tendencies and creatively refashion them.
(3)Now what kind of reader approach did The Philosophy of Freedom count on? It had to assume a special way of reading. It expected the reader, as he read, to undergo the sort of inner experience that, in an external sense, is really just like waking up out of sleep in the morning. The feeling one should have about it is such as to make one say, “My relationship to the world in passive thoughts was, on a higher level, that of a person who lies asleep. Now I am waking up.” It is like knowing, at the moment of awakening, that one has been lying passively in bed, letting nature have her way with one's body. But then one begins to be inwardly active. One relates one's senses actively to what is going on in the color permeated, sounding world about one. One links one's own bodily activity to one's intentions. The reader of The Philosophy of Freedom should experience something very like this waking moment of transition from passivity to activity, though of course on a higher level....When one suffuses one's thinking with active soul life, one realizes for the first time that thought is just a leftover and recognizes it as the remains of something that has died. Ordinary thinking is dead, a mere corpse of the soul, and one has to become aware of it as such through suffusing it with one's own soul life and getting to know this corpse of abstract thinking in its new aliveness.
What precedes this corpse of abstract thinking? We can grow our sensitivity to the life of that thinking through the portal of simple exercises. For example, we can close our eyes and imagine we are grasping a ship’s wheel, somewhat as pictured above. Now we begin smoothly engaging our spiritual activity such that we turn the wheel in either direction. Our concentrated activity is anchored at the center of the wheel (which feels to be around the root of the nose, in between the eyes). We should resist following the wheel movements with our physical eyes, rather the wheel revolves around our central anchor of concentration and our eyes are relaxed and uninvolved. Our facial muscles should be as relaxed as possible, so we don’t feel too much strain in the forehead or eyes (it will be difficult to avoid such strain at first). It is most important that we feel the wheel is turning as the result of our spiritual activity, i.e. our inner imaginative ‘turning gesture’. Even if we have no vivid image of a wheel, we can lucidly sense the smooth turning gesture, and it may even be easier without a vivid image since the latter can also become a distraction from the inner gestures.
Once we have worked with the turning gestures for some time, we can also imagine there is resistance in turning the wheel and, moreover, the tension continues to build the further it is turned, such that if we loosen our concentrated spiritual activity for even a moment or two, wandering with our thoughts like we normally do while brushing our teeth, the wheel will roll back to its original position and all the turning will be undone. Again, the vividness of the image is not so important but rather the underlying feeling of this meditative situation into which we have placed ourselves. All of what we are discussing now should be used to simply build up that situational feeling in which our activity is unfolding. The inner stakes can be heightened if we imagine we are steering a vessel with our spiritual activity and that, by turning the wheel with concentration, we are keeping our vessel aligned properly with torrential waves. If we wander with our thoughts and lose concentration, our vessel is overtaken by those waves and capsized.
Such imaginative concentration exercises are utilized to develop a new inner skill, and like any skill, it will require patience and persistent practice. In this situation, however, we are aiming to intimately experience and perfect the very the smooth and concentrated imaginative gestures by which all other skills are learned and perfected. If we manage to make one full rotation of the wheel in both directions without losing the tension, we may already sense our inner gestures becoming more ‘weighty’, feeling a bit more like the physical experience of turning a wheel with resistance. These are the same inner gestures by which we are always directing our attention to various domains of meaning and condensing that meaning as symbolic thoughts. Thus we are gradually bringing the life we experience only in sensory perceptions, impulses, and emotions into our experience of thinking, feeling the latter as something like a sense organ that perceives invisible meaning. Our thinking organization starts to become like the tentacles of an octopus that can probe and mimic its meaningful environment.
(4)The conception grows wider and wider and I enlarge and explain it : the piece is almost ready in my mind even when it is a long one, so that later I take it in at one glance, like a beautiful picture or a handsome man, and hear it in my imagination not consecutively, as it has to be expressed, but as it were all together, as a whole. It is a perfect feast! The whole invention and elaboration seem to occur in delightful, profound sleep, but best of all is this survey of everything at once.
Through our prolonged concentrated state, the aperture of our conscious perspective grows around the central image or theme. Right now, you are reading the words in this sentence and the meaning you perceive is implicitly structured by that of the paragraph in which it is embedded, which is structured by the section, which is structured by the whole essay, by all similar phenomenological essays you have worked through, and so on. All of that intuitive background context is immanent in any given present state of reading, as we discussed before. Your lucid focus, however, only encompasses one word or short phrase at a time, while what you just read in the previous sentence or paragraph has become a dim intuitive background noise, like the conversation of other tables at a restaurant. Imagine if the meaning in focus at the center of your momentary reading state began to stabilize and densify, such that more and more of the dim background context also came into focus. It would be as if the meaning of multiple sentences and paragraphs was grasped simultaneously with the same degree of lucid focus you normally only have with the few words you are currently reading.
Another inner experiment toward this ‘perfect feast’ can be done by observing a physical seed and imagining its stages of development, which is the archetypal symbol for the rhythms of life processes. We imagine a planted seed and how it sprouts, shoots the stem upwards and the roots downwards, begins to unfold leaf by leaf, produces its flowers and fruits, and then synthesizes the whole development in new seeds. These seeds then fall into the soil and restart the process. This exercise prepares us for spiritual sight within the living strata of our thinking. When we do the above exercise, just like the wheel, it's not so much about the visual imagination of the plant but about what makes the plant grow. Our imaginative activity makes the plant grow. We feel the whole process from beginning to end as a holistic intuition and, through our willed activity, we unfold the imaginary life of the plant in time. This dynamic and polar tension between the holistic idea and the willed unfoldment of the idea is the essential factor that prepares us for spiritual sight. We aim to spiral these two poles into closer experiential proximity with one another.
If we imagine the sight of this higher life-world as something akin to physical seeing, only with ‘finer’ and more ethereal 'colors' overlaying our physical perceptions, we are still in the domain of fantasy (or, at best, a decadent visionary clairvoyance). Etheric perception reveals the life forces, not as an additional finer layer of sensory perceptions, but as something similar to the experience of what we are doing when we make the imaginary plant grow. In other words, we perceive an imaginative-willing element in Nature (including our soul nature) that animates its forms with the clear awareness that it is not due to our momentary intents and gestures. Historically, Goethe introduced this idea into wider philosophical and scientific circles with his perception of the Urpflanze (archetypal plant), although at his time, as in ours, it was generally not understood. What Goethe perceived was the living will element in his thinking activity that also manifests within the life processes of Nature. These two are then understood as one and the same within the deeper scale in which our thinking has awakened.
Seeing the Truth in a New Meditative Light
What we see is not some exotic new reality but a heightened cognitive sensitivity to the reality we are always living through. We can take a look around our living space, for example, and try to make a holistic survey of how things are arranged, i.e. whether they are sloppily arranged, unarranged, how things have been tended to or neglected, what tasks have been completed or procrastinated, etc. Our holistic intuition of that survey acts as a feeling-imbued symbol for previous inner activity and tendencies that have now become our outer environment. It anchors our intuitive orientation to the flow of existence within our living space and we continually rely on that orientation, without explicitly analyzing each object in the space or thinking about the situation in clear-cut concepts, for feedback on how to conduct our activity such that we move closer to to the ‘ideal’ living space (within certain broader environmental constraints). If we are at all interested in personal development, we naturally feel like we should gradually lessen the differential between the current space and its ideal configuration.
It is along that same inner axis that we discover the archetypal intuitions of the ideals toward which the natural kingdoms are striving through collective humanity’s imaginative activity. Only in this way do we cultivate a sense of responsibility for stewarding these kingdoms toward their Ideal which coincides with the fully human Ideal. That sense of responsibility first takes shape in our imaginative life by which we transduce our higher intuitions into conceptual reasoning and illustrations such that they can be shared with others. We don’t get rid of our mental pictures, our inner voice, but take more creative responsibility for how they are condensed from our intuitive depth context and how they function to steer our activity within that context toward the collective Ideal. Thus we begin to feel that, in the weavings of our intellectual and imaginative life, we are not mechanically patching perceptions and concepts together to reach ‘truth’, but we are partaking in and interacting with the experiential flows of a Cosmic living organism.
What is normally discerned as truth or error by our intellect is gradually understood by the imagination as more akin to order and disorder, harmony or disharmony, health or illness. That is, the mental pictures we normally click together when exploring meaning to try and sense whether they feel consonant (truth) or dissonant (error), we recognize as something akin to bone fragments belonging to a living thought-organism that was previously out of focus. This is the organic landscape of meaning we are always probing in our intellectual inquiries, but normally we only awaken at the scale of the bone fragments and manipulate those fragments. Now, upon awakening at a deeper scale, we are no longer interested in only how the fragments click together between themselves, but how they help us discern and navigate the rhythmic processes of the holistic organic context in which our lives unfold. These are not only the rhythms of the sensory world, but also those of our own soul life - our passions, impulses, desires, etc. - and we gradually become sensitive to how the former closely modulates the latter.
(5)But the kind of thinking which should be used for the cognition of higher worlds and which is gained with the aid of the exercises I have described, is one which I might call morphological thinking, one in which we think in forms.
This way of thinking is not limited to space; it lives within the medium of time, in the same way thinking lives within the medium of space. This thinking does not link up one thought with the other; it sets before the soul a kind of thought-organism. When we have a conception, an idea or a thought, we cannot pass over at will to another. Even as in the human organism we cannot pass over at will from the head to any other form, but must first pass over to the neck, then the shoulders, the thorax, etc., even as in an organism everything has a definite structure which must be considered as a whole, so the thinking which I characterised as morphological thinking must be inwardly mobile. As stated, it lives within the medium of time, not of space. But it is inwardly so mobile that it produces one form out of another, by constantly growing and producing an organic structure.
It is this morphological way of thinking which should be added to the ordinary way of thinking. It can be attained through exercises of meditation which are described in principle in some of my books. These exercises strengthen and intensify thinking. The morphological way of thinking, the thinking activity which takes its course in forms and pictures, enables us to reach the first stage in the knowledge of super-sensible worlds, namely the stage described in my books as imaginative knowledge.
Imaginative knowledge does not as yet supply anything pertaining to an external world. To begin with, it leads only to man’s self-knowledge, but it is a far deeper knowledge of self than the one which is ordinarily reached by self-contemplation. This imaginative knowledge brings forms into our consciousness, forms which are experienced just as livingly as any sense-perception.
In this way, we begin to approach the organic contextual forms that structure our experience as works of art. Artistic thinking restores some feeling for the concrete reality of sensory experience to our normally ghostly thoughts. To see the ‘formal causes’ (or ‘a priori categories’) of experience as works of art is to relax and soften our gaze, to resist analyzing and dissecting the form into particular elements. Imagine the last time you were at a stoplight and stopped focusing on the road, instead drifting into a daydream until the light changed green and you snapped back into sensory focus. We can seek an analogous state of softened focus while also maintaining fully alert consciousness and inner strength of activity (like the energetic activity we experience when we do mathematical operations). That doesn’t mean we forsake all content of thinking, just like the artist doesn’t forsake perceptual content but utilizes it in a more immersive and participatory way.
In fact, that is the way we initially experience themes of meditation. When we first begin concentrating on a theme, for example, the growing plant, we will find a deep intuitive feeling connection is already present. The first few moments of our meditation may feel alive and richly imbued with such an intimate connection to our soul life. Yet for most people, this fades within a matter of seconds due to our distracting explanatory thoughts or the reverberations of past feelings and events. In many cases, we may not even register that the connection existed. Thus we are always recapitulating the Fall of humanity from paradise in our meditations. Simply by intending the meditation, we have brought our personal soul life into closer and more intimate contact with the story of collective humanity. The art of imaginative concentration is to recover this initial ‘Edenic’ state and prolong its experienced meaning, which naturally intensifies the experience as well.
(5)One turns to a content that can be immediately had as an image. Such an image must correspond to an inner objective experience. Therefore, it must be drawn from a text of Spiritual Science or one of traditional wisdom, or else suggested by a spiritual instructor. For example, “Terrestrial gold is the mineral trace of the Sun.” It is not a matter of analyzing the concept of “gold” or of “Sun,” nor of rationally analyzing the relationship between them but, rather, of assuming the image as it directly manifests in the words, that is, of receiving the immediate resounding of these words within the soul. The three forces of the soul—thinking, feeling, and willing—in their pure state, are simultaneously recalled in this immediate resounding.
To meditate is to nourish, contemplatively, the element of life by which the image initially arises in consciousness. Meditation does not demand any reflection; like concentration, it, too, is essentially a simple operation. It is not to argue. It is not to analyze by means of thoughts, or to investigate in order to discover hidden meanings but, rather, to contemplate by imagining or to imagine by contemplating the assumed content, until arriving at the calm perception of the image-synthesis or the feeling that corresponds to it. Nothing more. Since the image-synthesis and the corresponding feeling usually rise up immediately, there is no other task but to let them live within the soul. As soon as they die down, the art of the spiritual practitioner is to renew again its rising moment for a given number of minutes, so as to impregnate the soul with it.
We have been preparing our soul for this impregnation by the Spirit throughout the essays insofar as we resisted treating the concepts, for example, the concept of “inner constraints”, as elements that we needed to reflect on and abstractly interpret in some way. Hopefully, we understood such concepts as relatively immediate expressions of inner experiences that we can sense, even if only dimly, just as our inner voice feels like an expression of the ideal states we are exploring at any given time. Meditation is simply a natural extension of this phenomenological method which can propel our inner activity into deeper scales of the living contextual organism and make the inner constraints on that activity more lucid. It is not simply a technical skill we develop but it involves the gradual perfection of the whole human organism, spirit, soul, and body. Through this intuitive method of inner development, the thinking activity by which we navigate our daily experiences finally realizes itself as self-sacrificial Love, as an instrument of the Logos through which all things were made.
CITATIONS:
(1) Rudolf Steiner, GA 150
(2) Rudolf Steiner, GA 257 (III)
(3) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
(4) Rudolf Steiner, GA 79 (26 Nov. 1921)
(5) Massimo Scaligero, A Practical Manual for Meditation
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