Federica wrote: ↑Fri May 15, 2026 7:29 pm
Thanks, Ashvin.
First, to really try and rule out any misunderstandings on this topic, let’s be precise and note that the bold is incorrect. The other day, you did
not characterize exactly what I outlined above. Rather, you posted
this characterization, which is incompatible with the outline above (and with my previous outlines). However, if this is clarified now, that’s all that matters. I will just repeat the important part: I know that there’s only one way to participate in the reality of any phenomena, and this is not by representing them in pictures. This said, the observation of how insensitive people can be to the possibility of unexpected, non representational modes of cognition, when these are presented upfront - no matter how skillfully and gracefully expressed - leads to the necessity to explore what other communication methods may exist. And indeed, it appears that the duality of man, and man's soul constitution, allow for an alternative.
We can begin by keeping in mind that mental pictures must be used in any case. Essays are expressed in discursive language made of such pipelines - inevitably. The particular feature in your essays is that the pictures conceptually represent the necessity to move past ...themselves. No matter how much progressive and perfectly contextualized the
conceptual walkthrough is, this is a sharp turn, to say the least, which usually leaves the reader dazed, or in discomfort. Usually one ends up off track. The sharp turn is missed, and once off track, lost in the undergrowth, many souls feel: “I see no path here, no ground, no way forward”. Now, I believe that a solution to that is to
initially use the inevitable mental pictures to reflect the world, rather than the process of cognition. Not in a traditional fashion, but using what Steiner often called “new concepts” - concepts that become available and deeply comprehended only from the standpoint of higher cognition, but can elicit intuitions and feelings of recognition in any soul, at all soul levels (we know through spiritual science that this is completely possible). Not that the existence of unexpected cognitive means has to be kept secret, of course. It should be laid in the background that the full circle can only be achieved by the development of specific inner powers, but at least the mind is not rushed into a hard turn for which many have neither the soul endurance nor the range of mental motion. On the other hand, practical life and the physical world are already at the core of everyone’s attention. Thus an insight-provoking, reflected perspective on an applied topic provides something new and stimulating for the mind to grip to, as a kind of
conceptual lifebelt. Once this is introduced, the conceptual context would become more favorable to the necessary turn 'northwards'. Now it is in order to go deeper in the understanding of the archetypal idea constellated by the newly contemplated concepts and insights that unfamiliar cognitive efforts to come can be intended, not in order to take a hard leap into the conceptual void. Again, there’s a natural capacity to sense specific truths that can be beneficially leveraged here, on top of the existing interest in understanding the world. These two ‘assets’ are often available to leverage, but are missed out on, if the mental pictures point head-on to the necessity of transcending themselves. This is a much higher demand on the soul, because there's nothing in sight it can cling to. The proposition is to journey into the void, straight in (here one should refrain from the psychologist reflex, "Ok, this is how
she must be experiencing the essays", in case it comes to mind).
So there are two differences between what I am proposing and the "usual stance of seeking answers in intellectual life". Firstly, there's nothing usual in it. Yes, the approach makes use of mental pictures which are captured by the intellect (the same happens in your essays) but the content of these pictures should be anchored to new concepts, not usual ones. The second difference is the goal. The goal is not to dwell indefinitely within the intellectual domain, but only as long as necessary to create a
'conceptual lifebelt' that makes the necessary introduction of new cognitive methods more gradual, progressive, and less of a leap into completely unchartered territory. The idea of saying something even vaguely in favor of chemical methods of cognitive exploration is very far from me - as you surely know. However, I believe that such experiences, once they are there, may provide a kind of (very costly) conceptual 'lifebelt'. What I propose is to leverage instead the human interest in the natural and cultural world, and the objective soul capacity for intuiting truths, to build a much healthier conceptual lifebelt, as a preparation for the phenomenological bypassing of the world of representation. In conclusion, I wouldn't say that we can speak of procrastination. Procrastination implies that the procrastinator is aware of what is being procrastinated. From your standpoint, it is a fully justified concept. But a random reader cannot procrastinate a task whose nature and significance is beyond their radius of comprehension.
I fully understand that you disagree with this view and why, and even sympathize with many of the reasons behind your standpoint. But you think that the phenomenological pipelines are the only ones that help us
gradually decondition from reductive thinking. We have to ask: is this really the case? In fact, what I am proposing would like to provide precisely such gradual progression - a gradual deconditioning which I seriously doubt is generally attainable through phenomenological pipelines. For you they have worked like that, but this doesn't indicate that the same is the general case. In fact, my admittedly limited but not insignificant experience (and I guess yours as well?) shows the opposite. Despite all your efforts to make the phenomenological pipeline gradual and progressive, it doesn't seem to be experienced as such, at least not when expressed in the
pure form pursued in the current essays, no matter how impressively formed and awe-some they are - and I truly think they are. I believe that these essays have and will continue to have a powerful impact on very few individuals, but many would benefit from an approach anchored in applications, to begin with.
Regarding the Kabuki theater of intellectualism and Steiner's quote - I think I see clearly enough what that points to. My way to express that here across threads has been by speaking of the imminent death of epistemology and then philosophy (and I was glad to recently come across a lecture - I can't remember which one now - where Steiner speaks quite clearly of how future philosophy can only be Anthroposophy). I hope I have clarified enough how my viewpoint has nothing to do with maintaining intellectualism, but rather with using the inevitable conceptual means (which your essays have to use too) along a more gradual trajectory, a trajectory that attempts to take advantage of some available assets within the current human organization.
It looks like our views on this topic are simply diverging further. I think we have covered the main points before, i.e., that there is endless room for refinement
within the phenomenological pipelines (PPs), how we can smooth out their gradients, how we can customize them to speak to aspects of the outer world that interest people, and so on. But in all cases, they need to be
direct portals to inner experimentation if there is any hope of gradually deconditioning from reductive thinking, which is always a result of real-time thinking and its participation in navigating the flow remaining in the blind spot.
I think it is very problematic to lower the standards for the 'sense of truth' in this way, practically reducing it to what the average intellectual person does when overcoming one particular addiction, one particular reductive belief, and so on, as they string together highly convincing mental images. The sense of truth for spiritual realities in our time can no longer be drawn from the standard pipelines shaped by the bodily organization or cultural institutions, but require an orthogonal type of effort. Steiner also spoke often about how the new spiritual scientific impulse can grow in the soul precisely
because it invites more strenuous inner activity from the soul than it is familiar with or imagines possible at any given time. As we have said before, it continually raises the bar instead of 'teaching to the test'. The former is the very vehicle of inner transformation. It allows the soul to
experience itself overcoming the 'limits to knowledge', rather than simply talking about how it may be possible.
The newness of concepts, whether game metaphor IO concepts, chess-themed concepts, or more standard occult scientific concepts, always comes through this transformation of the cognitive perspective that is navigating the conceptual territory. At the content level, there are, in fact, no new concepts available to the intellect. This is a spiritual scientific observation. Any concepts related to higher realities, such as the subtle structure of the human organization, have already been explored and elaborated by dozens, if not hundreds, of thinkers over the centuries. Just as we don't expect to find brand new, never-before-experienced colors and sounds when moving from one part of space to another, we shouldn't expect new concepts to take shape from any standard pipelining of existing experiences and concepts in one part of imaginative space or another. The truly new concepts emerge from the old concepts being perceived with a transformed and inverted perspective.
If we are speaking of what we can know from experience, I think it only makes sense to stick with
our intimate experience of working with the PPs. Why other people have not shown interest can only be speculation and inference, which may be well-reasoned and partially correct, but we can’t say these inferences are on par with our certain inner experience. We are only in a position to even have such a discussion because we were fortunate enough to work through the PPs from the outset. That means our intuitive context when working with the 'alternative pipelines' (APs) is also
much different from that of someone who lacks the same prior experimentation. I think that is a huge factor in why you are convinced these APs can serve the same function as the PPs and lead in the same direction. We are all familiar with the phenomenology of spiritual activity, but it takes more time to also begin exploring a phenomenology of the phenomenology, so to speak. It takes more time to get a good sense of what these PPs actually contribute to our healthy orientation and understanding as we explore the APs, and how that would be completely lacking for someone without prior exposure.
As we have also discussed before, when we express certain difficulties that are faced by others in the PPs, we are invariably expressing how it feels to us as well. I don't think this is a controversial assertion, but rather self-evident. It is undeniably the case that these PPs are inwardly demanding for all of us; they are continually pushing our imaginative boundaries to their limits and inviting them to cross those limits. Anyone a little bit sensitive to these things can feel the immense difference between the cognitive modalities that are adopted in one case or another. In fact, that is one way we know it is working to decondition our past-facing, reductive thinking! It is like if you do a gut cleanse - you know it's working to clear out all the muck by the temporarily strenuous and destabilizing conditions the body goes through.
For example, we can compare the PPs to the pipelining in
this article (since I know you are familiar with it). We can feel a certain ease and comfort wash over us when working through the latter that is never quite present when working through the PPs. There is a sense that we can follow along quite smoothly and that we don't need to freeze all of our interesting intellectual contemplations to inwardly experiment. Yet such articles continue to talk
about phenomenology rather than directly engaging with it and helping the soul come to know the Ahrimanic, Luciferic, and Christic as they come to expression in its intimate inner process. In a certain sense, the more explicit references are made to such influences as a part of painting some broader argument, the less we are dealing with a truly phenomenological and transformative pipeline. It is akin to running an inner commentary
on our meditation while attempting to meditate. Sometimes this happens so subtly that we can hardly tell the difference, but the difference is there, and it is a huge one that precludes a genuine deconditioning and inversion of perspective within the flow. Not everyone needs to devote all efforts to constructing PPs, of course. And we shouldn’t expect that to be the case. But we need to remain crystal clear on where the differences reside and how all pipelines cannot be equated with one another and considered as leading to the same horizon of an inverted perspective. The article above, for example, can support that inversion for only those of us who have already independently explored the PPs. And I think it is the same with the lectures on human physiology and so forth.
We should also recognize that entertaining the AP approach can have consequences; it can lead to confusion and disorientation toward the inner dynamics. For example, there was the thread where you began commenting on the law of conservation of energy and how certain physical demonstrations may undermine that. I think there is similar misorientation with the discussions on human physiology. Just to be perfectly clear, I am
not singling you out as uniquely misoriented in this domain. At first, I also felt that such physical demonstrations might point toward the inflow of mysterious spiritual activity and the creation of new matter from nothing. I was also holding out that hope. As mentioned before, I was also lured in by Cowan's arguments, which I shared with Eugene, as support for "the heart is not a pump". And you may remember that I once created a Facebook post that was aimed at listing all of the modern scientific discoveries that seem to support Steiner's supersensible research. So you see, I can suffer from the same misorientation and the same consequences, making the same mistakes. Looking back, I can recognize how there was zero chance that someone with FB-style suspicions about the supersensible research would be swayed by these surface-level pipelines that correspond that research with natural scientific research. So I try to honestly confront these mistakes and learn from them.
I don't expect you to change your mind on this topic; I am simply offering some more general observations. I think that, as usual, with consistent inner experimentation and
time, we grow more sensitive to the constraints on our intellectual life and the living soul currents that are truly running the show with the APs. Then we naturally begin to perceive the desperate need for the PPs and that there cannot be any dual track between the APs and PPs; they must become one and the same. They must both act as direct guidelines for consistent inner experimentation. Otherwise, we can be sure that one is leading in the opposite direction from the other, not toward the same destination.
It is always various ways of approaching the central topic, or the center of the central topic, because that is what is habitually neglected in our time, and that is what the intellect continually tries to rationalize away with its 'other approaches', its 'other converging pipelines', and so on. That is why our essays always focus on the same cognitive methodology and its refinement, which we (and Steiner) perceive as the one and only way of advancing spiritual scientific understanding and thus improving practical outcomes.
