Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

On the theme of bridging anthroposophical understanding for the benefit of the intellect, I'm just pinpointing this Steiner quote for later - from GA 128/3:

"it would nevertheless be extraordinarily interesting, since not everybody is capable of becoming clairvoyant, if such facts could be accepted by external physiology, accepted, let us say, as possible ideas, so that people would say: “I will for once imagine that what is attained by means of the inner clairvoyant eye is, after all, not such complete nonsense as it is often supposed to be. On the contrary, I shall neither believe nor disbelieve this; but I shall let it remain as an idea presented to me, and shall then investigate what external physiology can point out, whether, out of all that is asserted by occultists, anything whatever can be substantiated by showing clearly that it is actually confirmed by external observation.”"

It would also be extraordinarily interesting if my cat could decide to go on a fasting regimen

Let's also look later in that lecture:

We can try, at least, to let such things work upon us; and, if we allow them to do so in ever-increasing number, one new fact after another comes to light till it becomes impossible after a time to say, in the light and easy manner in which we so often hear a superficial solution proposed: “Here are some of these visionaries dreaming that the old myths and sagas contained the pictorial impress of a deeper wisdom!” If a man hears two or three, or let us say even ten, such “correspondences” presented, as these so often are presented in literature in a wholly superficial way, it is of course quite possible for him to oppose the idea that there is a deeper wisdom contained in the myths and sagas than in external science; that mythology leads us deeper into the foundations of things and of Being than do the methods of natural-scientific study. But if he allows such examples to work upon him again and again, and then becomes aware that, throughout the whole extent of the thought and feeling of men and of peoples, it is verified that in pictorial conceptions everywhere and always, over all parts of the earth, anyone with a very accurate observation and devoted interest in sagas and myths may find the metamorphoses of a deeper wisdom, then he will be able to understand why certain occultists can with justice say as they do: “He alone really comprehends the myths and sagas who has penetrated into human nature with the help of occult physiology.”

What does it mean to let such things work on us again and again, in contrast to the intellect being presented two or three or ten such correspondences? This is the question we should answer by inquiring into our own inner process and noticing what we had to do (and let go, in the sense of 'negative knowledge') before the conceptual symbols truly began to work on us.

[Federica]

The one you indicate is definitely one angle of the question - among plethora of other angles. Another one angle would be the cat question for example. But you shall not go around twisting people's arms to make them do what you have decided they should do, because that's what you would do. Please, Ashvin, do not make the mistake of indulging in that kind of forcible preaching. You are needed in much higher capacities than that.

[AshvinP]

The one you indicate is definitely one angle of the question - among plethora of other angles. Another one angle would be the cat question for example. But you shall not go around twisting people's arms to make them do what you have decided they should do, because that's what you would do. Please, Ashvin, do not make the mistake of indulging in that kind of forcible preaching. You are needed in much higher capacities than that.

This is what Eugene would also respond when we emphasized how the human soul has arrived at the time when it needs to start swimming with its spiritual activity, IF it desires to expand intuitive orientation to the lawful contextual dynamics and harmonize with them. He would begin accusing us of preaching, tyranny, dictatorship, and so on, when we questioned Godel's candy shop of options to attain higher knowledge of spiritual reality. I am sure that when he responded in this way, you had no problem spotting that it was steered by a reactive-defensive tendency of the intellect to avoid diving through the pinhole of cognition.

Last year, he even proposed (via Kim) that the concept of 'energy' could be analytically used to describe how higher beings influence the Earthly spectrum. In that discussion, Cleric put it quite nicely (as also to Guney recently):

KM says how the Creator forms in his mind an image of what kind of world he wants to create and then goes on with its realization. Now you may say that I'm nitpicking, that these are simplified descriptions and shouldn't be taken too literally. But that is exactly the point - it makes a world of difference in what way we simplify things... The main idea to be extracted from all this is that if we really want to approach the primal reality, we need to concentrate on the process of intuitive movements manifesting into perceptible thought images... Now on the surface, one may say that the above is just a different way of conveying what also KM says. The thing however is not so much in the words chosen for the description but how this description urges us to place ourselves differently in the World Process.

So your 'angle' to save the materialists is nothing new, it is simply what the intellect has been striving to do for centuries now, imagining there must be a more indirect approach to gain confidence in its spiritual reality (which even you pointed out to Eugene in the linked comment). The selective snipping of Steiner's lectures does not change this fact, either. We are only safe when we freely orient to these questions through the introspection of our cognitive process, because as Cleric said to Guney, PoF and spiritual science emerge as a matter of course through that introspective process. Beyond that, it simply makes no sense that we could approach the content of SS without prejudice before we have become sensitive to what the intellectual prejudices are and how to address them, which obviously requires the phenomenology of thinking.

It is not dogmatic to recognize that, beneath the superficial intellectual gestures, we share much of the same soul-spiritual structure and depth-dynamics, and how understanding the latter brings human souls into harmony of thinking, feeling, and willing. Yes, it is truly a strait and narrow way and there are few who find it, but on this way, there is inner certainty and abundant life. Dogmatism in life emerges when the entrenched intellect refuses to transform itself and demands a way to be shown its higher reality through a simple linear progression of mental states that draw from past experiences and concepts. This is when we get the rationalist attitude, reductionist science, religious apologetics, and so on.

[Federica]

It would be nice, Ashvin, if you could mind resisting decorating your posts with the usual deformations some time. In the meantime, Steiner's wish, which you have called a selective snippet, gets only clearer in the larger context of the full lecture, lecture cycle, and entire corpus of Steiner works. Still, it's hard to unsee its crystal-clearness even when taken as standalone "snippet":

It would nevertheless be extraordinarily interesting, since not everybody is capable of becoming clairvoyant, if such facts could be accepted by external physiology, accepted, let us say, as possible ideas, so that people would say: “I will for once imagine that what is attained by means of the inner clairvoyant eye is, after all, not such complete nonsense as it is often supposed to be. On the contrary, I shall neither believe nor disbelieve this; but I shall let it remain as an idea presented to me, and shall then investigate what external physiology can point out, whether, out of all that is asserted by occultists, anything whatever can be substantiated by showing clearly that it is actually confirmed by external observation."

I'll give now a real-life exemple of how to concretely start building that bridge, in the words of a present-day anthroposopher, who has not let those wishes of Steiner's unheard and unworked. One would expect that you appreciate his work - I'm referring to Christoph Hueck - based on your past comments, though I believe you may now attempt to argue something along the lines that what he means has nothing to do with building a bridge towards spiritual science for intellectual thinking and natural science (good luck if this is your direction).
Let us not snip anything: the entire presentation (autotranslate available) is the best way to realize how he's guiding the audience through the forming and connecting of unfamiliar concepts. As he says at the beginning (1:30): "I have spent my entire life with the question of how to actually understand the bridge between anthroposophy and natural science".

[AshvinP]

I'll give now a real-life exemple of how to concretely start building that bridge, in the words of a present-day anthroposopher, who has not let those wishes of Steiner's unheard and unworked. One would expect that you appreciate his work - I'm referring to Christoph Hueck - based on your past comments, though I believe you may now attempt to argue something along the lines that what he means has nothing to do with building a bridge towards spiritual science for intellectual thinking and natural science (good luck if this is your direction).
Let us not snip anything: the entire presentation (autotranslate available) is the best way to realize how he's guiding the audience through the forming and connecting of unfamiliar concepts. As he says at the beginning (1:30): "I have spent my entire life with the question of how to actually understand the bridge between anthroposophy and natural science".

Federica,

Why don't you trust your own inner process anymore? Every time I point attention to ways of exploring that inner process and probing the contours of the 'bridge' in that way, you deflect back to quotes from Steiner et al. as an appeal to external authorities. I'm sorry, but it is the image of unfreedom. This is like arguing with a fundamental Christian - whenever we try to point attention to the holistic evolutionary principles reflected in the Biblical narrative, the fundamentalist will selectively quote verses (interpreted by the intellect) and say, "See, scripture is crystal-clear, there is no such 'evolution of consciousness' or 'higher cognition' described. I can never unsee this crystal clearness of the verses." It doesn't dawn on them that the clearness of scripture can only depend on how we place our perspective within the experiential World process.

It's interesting that, on another thread, Eugene started on this same line of reasoning about how we need to build the bridge to deeper spiritual knowledge. Unfortunately, the subject dropped after a few comments.

Fair enough, it's good that you admit that.

Science, arts, speculative philosophy and other things in life all have their place and role. You cannot take materialists and draw them straight into spiritual science or any other spiritual practice or teaching. They need to go by steps, starting right from the point where they currently stay - from their speculative worldview, and walk them step-by-step out of their speculative materialism. Their speculative materialistic views need to be first dispelled by the same tool - by philosophical speculative rational discourse. Only then, once they drop it, they can become open to explore further practical paths to go deeper. This (addressing materialism on the speculative level) is what Bernardo is doing and this is what this forum was supposed to help with. I believe, with all limitations of his approach and his philosophy, Bernardo is doing a fantastic job of bringing millions of people out of the delusion of materialism.

The bold part is unviable and you know it

You can't walk out of abstract metaphysics (no matter if they are physicalist or idealist) by thinking in their channels, any more than you can draw figures on a flat sheet of paper and hope that at some point they will emerge in the Z direction.

Expecting that one must first drop their materialistic habits before they are free to consider deeper reality is a fallacy that attains many different forms in life. The most common is the general understanding that one can engage in spiritual life only after they have secured their material life and thus they finally have the free time for other things. However, if this is our ideal, as life often teaches us, we never reach that point of security. It always seems that there's something more to be secured and thus we keep postponing inner work for better days, when the economy is better, when there's peace, etc. Such a view proceeds from a completely erroneous understanding of what the spiritual dimension of our existence is. It sees spirituality as some exotic leisure time hobby that people can give their time to after retirement (only if they are still healthy and well in the head, that is). In fact, it is precisely in hardships and suffering that we can know and find the true value of real spiritual life.

Thus, the bold is precisely a recipe for speculating indefinitely and bouncing in the loops of closed formal systems of metaphysical thought. This traversal of mental states lying on a closed flat surface can never give us the certainty: "Aha, so by looping through this pattern of mental states, I feel confident enough that the Z direction is real and now I can finally allow my being step there and explore novel states of being." This can never do. We can only understand the true spiritual dimension of existence when we realize that we already partake in it while we are thinking metaphysically, when we understand our thinking activity as ropes hanging from a higher stratum of existence, dragging in the dust below. The shapes in the dust are what we call thought perceptions. We move these thought ropes instinctively and contemplate their dusty feedback. It is impossible to analyze the shapes in the dust and find there 'proof' that the ropes exist (one can always lift their hands and say 'the dust shapes simply come and go on their own). We can only find the spiritual reality of the ropes when we begin to exercise our inner intuitive activity, when we begin to move the ropes (which are the 'fibers' of our own spiritual being) in novel ways and perceive the feedback, the degrees of freedom and constraints. It is these inner movements that expand as new levels of consciousness.

If we are to extend this metaphor a little, it can be said that the ropes do not start from us. They hang from even deeper strata of being (coming from behind the back of our head, so to speak) and our Earthly self modulates their movement. The deeper movements of the ropes we can understand only when we find the humility to allow higher levels of self to glimpse through our Earthly perspective - which reciprocally means that our intellectual ego also glimpses through their perspective and can forge concepts, since for a moment we are resonantly attuned as one.

So in a nutshell, we can't dispel materialism or any form of metaphysics by a clever configuration of dust devils. Neither can we do that by putting ourselves in a fuzzy inexplicable state that is simply the edge of falling fast asleep. We can only make an evolutionary step forward when we realize that Truth can't be found in any particular dust configuration but in the awakening of our inner being that is active along the depth of the thinking process. If we can't awaken to our inner being within the movement of the thought fibers, we'll be expecting in vain our deeper self to manifest from some lateral direction that we can't even conceive.

I will try to listen to the Hueck lecture soon. But I have already quoted the introduction of his book on evolution, which makes it clear how he imagines and pursues the bridge from natural to spiritual science. That whole book is an introspective exercise that helps us pay attention to our inner movements while contemplating facts of the evolutionary process. Indeed, I can't unsee the book that I just read from Hueck a month ago. Its method of pursuing the bridge couldn't be any clearer, at least for anyone who is already versed in the phenomenology of thinking.

"In palaeoanthropology, the early upright walking beings are not spoken of as humans, but as apes (‘Pithecus’); the status of a human being is only conferred when the brain is of a particular size. By this attribution, one transfers the humane to consciousness and not to the activity of the will, which always precedes the reflective faculty. The essential difference between humans and animals, however, lies in the origin of will activity – in humans freely determined from within, in animals instinctively determined from the outside – and only secondarily in different cognitive abilities! Thinking is also based on an inner, intuitive will activity. Not only in erection and action, but also in cognition, the will is always primary. Only it is easily overlooked, for one lives within one’s own will activity; one simply carries it out without observing it. If one takes into account the will working in cognition, one is led to a new conception of evolution, indeed to a new and much more real knowledge of man and the world in general. In conscious activity one experiences the will as a self-supporting, spiritual reality. Materialism only survives because the autonomous will is so little activated and therefore remains unnoticed.

When the autonomous will becomes inwardly conscious, self-consciousness arises. It is the conscious will that looks at itself – as a spiritual force in man – in true self-knowledge.{206}

He who conceives of himself as ‘I’ finds a fact more true and irrefutable than any other in the world. With all other cognitions, empiricism and theory must first be put together. This always leaves a residual uncertainty about their actual fit. In self-knowledge, this uncertainty is completely overcome; in it, empiricism and theory are the same, they appear as one. The ‘I’ is the source of the will. It creates itself by knowing itself, and it knows itself by creating itself. “The I cannot be shaken.”{207}

In order to avoid an obvious misunderstanding, it should be expressly pointed out that the ‘I’ does not mean the ‘ego’-conception. This is only a bodily mirrored representation, not a reality. The real ‘I’ lives in activity, it is a being of will and as such is initially free from referring back to itself. It is active attention, attentive activity. Precisely because it lives before its reflection, it remains unnoticed as a spiritual being in ordinary consciousness, for “active bringing forth and contemplative confrontation do not get along with each other” (Rudolf Steiner).

He who discovers (awakens) himself as a spiritual ‘I’ can no longer think that he has arisen from a ‘non-I’, from matter or lower organisms. He must think the whole evolution anew."

Hueck, Christoph J.. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time (pp. 187-188). epubli. Kindle Edition.

[Federica]

You are being nothing less than dishonest with your reply, therefore I will not bother commenting until you correct it yourself. Let's see if you will ever be able to do it.

[AshvinP]

Here is Hueck eloquently expressing how to pursue and pariticipate the true Bridge in crystal-clearness

"Mayr is right insofar as life eludes observation if one looks for it like an object. Precisely because life flows continuously, it cannot be a single thing (or a force acting only presently). If one wants to grasp the flow of life like its parts, one reaches into the void. One must participate in the process of life, follow it and grasp it, if one wants to understand it. Then one finds out that there is an intimate connection between the organisms and oneself, a bridge which leads to the reality of the living.

This bridge is what we are talking about here. It will be seen that it is related to the experience of time, indeed that it is virtually ‘made of time’ [see video feedback meditation, etc.]. For we live in time. And the qualities of time can only be grasped inwardly; it is not an externally visible phenomenon (for the change in the position of the sun, the advance of the hands of the clock are only spatial changes). Through the inner observation of time one can recognize what life is. Time lived and experienced is the medium that connects life and cognition.

We are usually not fully aware of the flow of life. We see the small avocado plant today and the somewhat larger one tomorrow – but we do not see the living development that lies in between. However, it is possible to consciously ‘dive’ into this development process. One can actively imagine the changing organism and thus comprehend its development. Such observation of nature, not just observing and noting, but actively participating, opens an inner field of experience in which the living and transforming forces of the organic can be observed and explored. How this observation is possible, and to which results it can lead is described here in detail.

A procedure in which the research contents only appear through the activity of the observer seems to contradict the conventional view of natural science, which aims precisely at the elimination of all subjective influences. However, this objection cannot prevent one from carrying out the inner observations oneself. One can proceed as in an empirical science, even if one produces the facts to be observed oneself. Of course, one must be as conscientious in doing so as in any other science. One must strictly adhere to the phenomena, strive for the greatest possible freedom from contradiction in the explanations, the results must be intersubjectively reproducible and permit predictions which in turn can be confirmed by observation, and so on.

We do not want to presuppose theories about life and its forms, but simply turn to biological phenomena with an open mind and answer our own questions ourselves. We look at all biological phenomena: from living organisms to their organs, metabolism, and genes, to the fossils that tell of their evolution. In doing so, we challenge common explanations, however familiar they may be. We want to illuminate and explore the preconscious knowledge about living things that implicitly underlies all biological knowledge. We are interested in how life, organic development, and evolution are thought. We want to develop and ground a morphology of evolutionary thought through introspective empirical observation."

Hueck, Christoph J.. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought (p. 19). epubli. Kindle Edition.