On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

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.

Thanks for these adds. Indeed, we have discussed these things previously as well. I would just highlight that I am not attached to the view that the necessary awakening of a significant group of human beings may benefit from a more gradual approach than the purely phenomenological pipelines. This is my current view. Perhaps it will change in the future, I don't know.
One more thing - I agree with your feeling about the article by Thomas Joseph Brown. By the way, the article is not an example of the type of communication I imagine, although I do appreciate it and it does give me hope that a certain thirst and alertness is being felt from more and more directions. The article provides a high-level overview and doesn't go into any depths in any of the topics touched upon, which would be necessary in order to evoke intuitions and enthusiasm the way I was intending it above. I would say that, beyond Steiner, presentations, workshops, essays by Hueck and Klocek are closer examples, or Thomas Joseph Brown's much more specific work on the nature of water.

[AshvinP]

One more thing - I agree with your feeling about the article by Thomas Joseph Brown. By the way, the article is not an example of the type of communication I imagine, although I do appreciate it and it does give me hope that a certain thirst and alertness is being felt from more and more directions. The article provides a high-level overview and doesn't go into any depths in any of the topics touched upon, which would be necessary in order to evoke intuitions and enthusiasm the way I was intending it above. I would say that, beyond Steiner, presentations, workshops, essays by Hueck and Klocek are closer examples, or Thomas Joseph Brown's much more specific work on the nature of water.

Well, Brown's work on the nature of water seems to be an even starker example of the APs that I find problematic. We can take a look at this AI analysis of a passage from his post, for example - https://share.google/aimode/PPKBC9WYFNsbAgk2N

The reason I am using these AI analyses is that the whole purpose of these APs is to pique the interest of the average intellectually inclined soul who is asking the deeper questions but not ready to delve into the PPs, into concentration and meditation. Isn't that so? The AP should gradually build confidence in the soul to take the deeper steps, based on solid scientific findings that reveal something of the deeper spiritual dynamics influencing the focal plane. But I think we can see from such analyses that this simply isn't the case, and it will never be. It will never be the case that the scientific community suddenly wakes up and says, "Oh wait, it turns out that none of our ideas in physics, chemistry, and so on, rooted in sensory observation and intellectual-mathematical analysis, can properly account for these properties of pendulums, water, motor nerves, blood flow, etc. It seems there are mysterious dynamics at work that demand a supersensible explanation." And those who partially take that route, like Levin with the sorting algorithms, are falling into superstition and are rightly looked upon with suspicion by their colleagues who are still thinking soundly in that domain.

I think it is also important to feel how the intellectual soul is left in the same state with these APs pointing to spiritual realities as it is left when confronting the results of standard scientific publications. Since it is not doing the experimentation, it can never be certain whether those experiments were conducted reliably, depending on many unknown factors, whether their results were interpreted correctly, depending on the soul state of the experimenter and those who publish the findings, whether some experimental results are not being prioritized while ignoring other results, and so on. (and this is tightly related to the Steiner quote on intellectualism shared previously). Even if it were conducting the physical experiments, many of these uncertainties would remain. All of that shifts dramatically with the PPs, where we are the ones doing the experimentation and observing the inwardly certain results. Our soul state is a part of the experimentation and observations, and is rendered increasingly transparent.

On top of that, if the soul has not worked through the PPs and developed a sensitivity to alternative cognitive modalities, then there is no possibility of suspecting the idea that the interpreted results could be 'incorrect' on one level and 'correct' on another. It cannot say to itself, "These published findings may not be technically accurate in describing the focal plane dynamics, but they could be symbols for imaginative realities that are just as concrete and help us to read those focal dynamics, bringing their significance into a relationship with the wider contextual flow". Such ideas are not even within the palette of possibilities without prior inner experimentation through the PPs. Holding this tension between the scales of observation doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to do. Then the soul is left no choice but to query AI and conclude that an AP like Moore's post is a 'new age' style jumble of partially accurate observations and references with myopically focused and prejudiced interpretations.

[Federica]

Well, Brown's work on the nature of water seems to be an even starker example of the APs that I find problematic. We can take a look at this AI analysis of a passage from his post, for example - https://share.google/aimode/PPKBC9WYFNsbAgk2N

The reason I am using these AI analyses is that the whole purpose of these APs is to pique the interest of the average intellectually inclined soul who is asking the deeper questions but not ready to delve into the PPs, into concentration and meditation. Isn't that so? The AP should gradually build confidence in the soul to take the deeper steps, based on solid scientific findings that reveal something of the deeper spiritual dynamics influencing the focal plane.

No, it isn't so at all. It's not about picking the interest of people in an intellectual way. I mentioned the nature of water as a loose example. I didn't attend Brown's workshop on the topic and I didn't even read the Substack post to the end. Obviously much of that - like the rest of "fringe" research on the nature of water - is considered unscientific by current standards. The goal is not to analize spiritual scientific "discoveries" that mainstream science "will have to agree with". In short, the goal is not what your FB old post was about (I didn't know you had that purpose in the past). The goal is to present applied topics in an intuitive, symbolic way, that provides insights into the nature of the world and/or the nature of humanity. The best examples are found in Steiner of course. For example (let's avoid for once physiology and chemistry topics) I was reading yesterday in "The karma of untruthfulness", last lecture, how the search for an ideal political system is connected to the understanding of matter versus spirit, and how the emergence of Marxism is entirely aligned with a culture that rejects the spirit, etcetera. This theme could certainly be elaborated further. So, the goal is to evoke insights, treating the intellect as simply a vessel for the insights. Not to use the intellect as normally intended in the general present-day understanding of knowledge. And the lack of "readiness" for concentration and meditation is not a hypothesis. It's what I have seen on repeat a consistent amount of times by now. People don't get it. They see that exercises are recommended, but they don't understand that the exercises are to develop qualities that completely transform how knowledge is acquired. They see them as accessories.

I think it is also important to feel how the intellectual soul is left in the same state with these APs pointing to spiritual realities as it is left when confronting the results of standard scientific publications. Since it is not doing the experimentation, it can never be certain whether those experiments were conducted reliably, depending on many unknown factors, whether their results were interpreted correctly, depending on the soul state of the experimenter and those who publish the findings, whether some experimental results are not being prioritized while ignoring other results, and so on. (and this is tightly related to the Steiner quote on intellectualism shared previously). Even if it were conducting the physical experiments, many of these uncertainties would remain. All of that shifts dramatically with the PPs, where we are the ones doing the experimentation and observing the inwardly certain results. Our soul state is a part of the experimentation and observations, and is rendered increasingly transparent.

I think we are missing an important point here. When a natural scientist sets up and does experiments to verify a certain hypothesis or theory, that's when the bliss of the initial scientific intuition gets trivialized and deprived of its beauty and life. That's when the purity of the initial insight gets polluted with the inevitable personal choices and endless compromises that steer the execution of the experiment, making it dependent on sympathies, antipathies and all sort of disturbing conditions. That's when science becomes unscientific. By immediately submitting the scientific insight to test - instead of holding it and humbly working it in meditation for deepened understanding - the scientist oversteps the proper role of the intellect. That rushed, coercive gesture is a dissonant, ugly gesture. In a sense, the phenomenon is being violated. So, the point is, doing the experimentation offers nothing in terms of reliability, protection against unknown factors, guarantee of right interpretation, or anything of that kind. It is simply an illusion that doing experiments provides safety in that way. Even mainstream science in recent years has begun to realize this greatly embarrassing methodological flaw (you may have heard of the replicability crisis, or replication crisis, especially but not only in biomedical sciences). All of the uncertainties you mention remain, once the experiments are done, and my point is, in a big way, they remain because the experiments are done. The uncertainties are introduced by the experiments. The experiments, as they are conducted nowadays, are the instrument by which the intellect abuses its function and precludes all possibilities to go from the concepts to the archetypal idea that supports them. Yes, inner experimentation is the goal, and I believe that working meditatively with a world question or a scientific one - the nature of water, the nature of democracy, the nature of neurasthenia, the nature of biological collective intelligence, or whatever - can be a powerful motivator to begin to realize the necessity and power of inner experimentation. I am reminded that physicist Arthur Zajonc, whom we mentioned here a while ago, used to apply a similar method. And there surely are more insightful ways to artistically present truths in any domains, not to come up with "alternative findings" aimed at competing with other findings through intellectual means as currently intended, but aimed at developing admiration for the beauty of phenomena and a sense for the harmonious coherence and order that hint at the existence of a deeper level of understanding. Then the experienceable traces of that coherence may progressively clarify that, in order to reach deeper understanding, randomly steered, isolated inquiry of individual phenomena can't lead to the bottom of any question, and that only an overarching inner method can.

On top of that, if the soul has not worked through the PPs and developed a sensitivity to alternative cognitive modalities, then there is no possibility of suspecting the idea that the interpreted results could be 'incorrect' on one level and 'correct' on another. It cannot say to itself, "These published findings may not be technically accurate in describing the focal plane dynamics, but they could be symbols for imaginative realities that are just as concrete and help us to read those focal dynamics, bringing their significance into a relationship with the wider contextual flow". Such ideas are not even within the palette of possibilities without prior inner experimentation through the PPs. Holding this tension between the scales of observation doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to do. Then the soul is left no choice but to query AI and conclude that an AP like Moore's post is a 'new age' style jumble of partially accurate observations and references with myopically focused and prejudiced interpretations.

Again, the goal is not to propose new findings to feed the current overstepping intellectualized experimental process. That's a failing metric anyway, more and more questionable even from a mainstream perspective. The idea is to kindle in the knowledge-seeking soul the light of intuition about a specific topic, as an instrument to highlight the value of inner experimentation. The forms of these intuitions are not supposed to mimic the usual language and rituals of present-day scientific research. Rather they can be metaphoric, base on analogy, symbolic - artistic, in a word. The difference is that they don't keep methods and 'field research' separate (as the PPs do). In a certain sense, it could be argued that the PPs are a fast track for the few who are able to follow, but they keep the scales of observation in tension, since in the PPs experimentation has its own methodology for object. While in the APs, the scales are brought together, because inner experimentation is first introduced as a means to penetrate the elusiveness of world phenomena, in harmony with the great order that struck the appropriately guided intuitive mind at any level of development.

[AshvinP]

Well, Brown's work on the nature of water seems to be an even starker example of the APs that I find problematic. We can take a look at this AI analysis of a passage from his post, for example - https://share.google/aimode/PPKBC9WYFNsbAgk2N

The reason I am using these AI analyses is that the whole purpose of these APs is to pique the interest of the average intellectually inclined soul who is asking the deeper questions but not ready to delve into the PPs, into concentration and meditation. Isn't that so? The AP should gradually build confidence in the soul to take the deeper steps, based on solid scientific findings that reveal something of the deeper spiritual dynamics influencing the focal plane.

No, it isn't so at all. It's not about picking the interest of people in an intellectual way. I mentioned the nature of water as a loose example. I didn't attend Brown's workshop on the topic and I didn't even read the Substack post to the end. Obviously much of that - like the rest of "fringe" research on the nature of water - is considered unscientific by current standards. The goal is not to analize spiritual scientific "discoveries" that mainstream science "will have to agree with". In short, the goal is not what your FB old post was about (I didn't know you had that purpose in the past). The goal is to present applied topics in an intuitive, symbolic way, that provides insights into the nature of the world and/or the nature of humanity. The best examples are found in Steiner of course. For example (let's avoid for once physiology and chemistry topics) I was reading yesterday in "The karma of untruthfulness", last lecture, how the search for an ideal political system is connected to the understanding of matter versus spirit, and how the emergence of Marxism is entirely aligned with a culture that rejects the spirit, etcetera. This theme could certainly be elaborated further. So, the goal is to evoke insights, treating the intellect as simply a vessel for the insights. Not to use the intellect as normally intended in the general present-day understanding of knowledge. And the lack of "readiness" for concentration and meditation is not a hypothesis. It's what I have seen on repeat a consistent amount of times by now. People don't get it. They see that exercises are recommended, but they don't understand that the exercises are to develop qualities that completely transform how knowledge is acquired. They see them as accessories.

I think it is also important to feel how the intellectual soul is left in the same state with these APs pointing to spiritual realities as it is left when confronting the results of standard scientific publications. Since it is not doing the experimentation, it can never be certain whether those experiments were conducted reliably, depending on many unknown factors, whether their results were interpreted correctly, depending on the soul state of the experimenter and those who publish the findings, whether some experimental results are not being prioritized while ignoring other results, and so on. (and this is tightly related to the Steiner quote on intellectualism shared previously). Even if it were conducting the physical experiments, many of these uncertainties would remain. All of that shifts dramatically with the PPs, where we are the ones doing the experimentation and observing the inwardly certain results. Our soul state is a part of the experimentation and observations, and is rendered increasingly transparent.

I think we are missing an important point here. When a natural scientist sets up and does experiments to verify a certain hypothesis or theory, that's when the bliss of the initial scientific intuition gets trivialized and deprived of its beauty and life. That's when the purity of the initial insight gets polluted with the inevitable personal choices and endless compromises that steer the execution of the experiment, making it dependent on sympathies, antipathies and all sort of disturbing conditions. That's when science becomes unscientific. By immediately submitting the scientific insight to test - instead of holding it and humbly working it in meditation for deepened understanding - the scientist oversteps the proper role of the intellect. That rushed, coercive gesture is a dissonant, ugly gesture. In a sense, the phenomenon is being violated. So, the point is, doing the experimentation offers nothing in terms of reliability, protection against unknown factors, guarantee of right interpretation, or anything of that kind. It is simply an illusion that doing experiments provides safety in that way. Even mainstream science in recent years has begun to realize this greatly embarrassing methodological flaw (you may have heard of the replicability crisis, or replication crisis, especially but not only in biomedical sciences). All of the uncertainties you mention remain, once the experiments are done, and my point is, in a big way, they remain because the experiments are done. The uncertainties are introduced by the experiments. The experiments, as they are conducted nowadays, are the instrument by which the intellect abuses its function and precludes all possibilities to go from the concepts to the archetypal idea that supports them. Yes, inner experimentation is the goal, and I believe that working meditatively with a world question or a scientific one - the nature of water, the nature of democracy, the nature of neurasthenia, the nature of biological collective intelligence, or whatever - can be a powerful motivator to begin to realize the necessity and power of inner experimentation. I am reminded that physicist Arthur Zajonc, whom we mentioned here a while ago, used to apply a similar method. And there surely are more insightful ways to artistically present truths in any domains, not to come up with "alternative findings" aimed at competing with other findings through intellectual means as currently intended, but aimed at developing admiration for the beauty of phenomena and a sense for the harmonious coherence and order that hint at the existence of a deeper level of understanding. Then the experienceable traces of that coherence may progressively clarify that, in order to reach deeper understanding, randomly steered, isolated inquiry of individual phenomena can't lead to the bottom of any question, and that only an overarching inner method can.

On top of that, if the soul has not worked through the PPs and developed a sensitivity to alternative cognitive modalities, then there is no possibility of suspecting the idea that the interpreted results could be 'incorrect' on one level and 'correct' on another. It cannot say to itself, "These published findings may not be technically accurate in describing the focal plane dynamics, but they could be symbols for imaginative realities that are just as concrete and help us to read those focal dynamics, bringing their significance into a relationship with the wider contextual flow". Such ideas are not even within the palette of possibilities without prior inner experimentation through the PPs. Holding this tension between the scales of observation doesn't seem like a reasonable thing to do. Then the soul is left no choice but to query AI and conclude that an AP like Moore's post is a 'new age' style jumble of partially accurate observations and references with myopically focused and prejudiced interpretations.

Again, the goal is not to propose new findings to feed the current overstepping intellectualized experimental process. That's a failing metric anyway, more and more questionable even from a mainstream perspective. The idea is to kindle in the knowledge-seeking soul the light of intuition about a specific topic, as an instrument to highlight the value of inner experimentation. The forms of these intuitions are not supposed to mimic the usual language and rituals of present-day scientific research. Rather they can be metaphoric, base on analogy, symbolic - artistic, in a word. The difference is that they don't keep methods and 'field research' separate (as the PPs do). In a certain sense, it could be argued that the PPs are a fast track for the few who are able to follow, but they keep the scales of observation in tension, since in the PPs experimentation has its own methodology for object. While in the APs, the scales are brought together, because inner experimentation is first introduced as a means to penetrate the elusiveness of world phenomena, in harmony with the great order that struck the appropriately guided intuitive mind at any level of development.

Right, and I suppose the central question of this discussion is how our mental pipelines on any topic can be approached in an intuitive, symbolic way. I think those who receive the presentation can only develop such insights through prior experimentation with PPs. It seems you are underestimating how much your prior experimentation contributes to your capacity to approach Steiner's lectures (or any other supposed "APs") and fathom what he is speaking about in the intuitive, symbolic way, to approach the content with meditative gestures that 'hold the phenomena humbly'. That's not something which any aspect of normal life or education prepares us for. The person without such prior experimentation would not even understand what that means or why it would be important, but would instead see it as a smokescreen for being 'gaslit' with "pseudoscience". This is the 'phenomenology of phenomenology' that I referenced before. With time, we grow more sensitive to what these PPs contribute to our whole orientation within the flow and how exactly that orientation would be lacking without them.

As the discussion progresses, it seems the APs you are characterizing increasingly resemble the PPs of the cognitive methodology. That is what Hueck, Zajonc, et al. are primarily interested in, and their phenomenological exercises are no less unfamiliar or demanding than the game metaphor, the chess metaphor, etc. On the other hand, you seem to be implying that the inverted-meditative stance and perspective can be first applied to the most out-of-phase phenomenal outputs of the natural and social worlds as a motivator for the soul to eventually approach the most in-phase outputs of our imaginative life, whereas I see it the complete opposite way around. Naturally, everything in modern culture directs the intellect toward studying those out-of-phase outputs, so most souls will begin applying their HHU there. Yet the purity of initial insight is polluted precisely when attention languishes in this domain of indirectness, because the soul's stubborn habits, sympathies and antipathies, preferences, prejudices, and so on remain in the blind spot and thus inevitably hijack the concentrated flow.

If the phenomenology of spiritual activity teaches us anything, it is that we first need to closely observe our cognitive life to develop the meditative palette by which we can approach the wider flow with similar gestures. That is because the dynamics of our cognitive life, the only spectrum of experience where we can become familiar with the output flow from its spiritual side, are self-similar to the spiritual dynamics shaping the wider flow. The field research we conduct in our intimate imaginative space naturally translates into the capacity to conduct field research in the natural and social domains. By increasing resonance in the former domain, we naturally develop it in the latter as well. If we can't learn to meditatively and humbly hold the phenomenal outputs in our imaginative rehearsal space with a delicate balance of activity and receptivity, we will never manage to do so for the outputs of the wider natural-social flow without polluting the experimentation. The latter immediately brings into focus a much more complex, collective mesh of interfering intents that will swamp our concentrated state without sufficient cognitive preparation.

Related to that, the following Steiner lecture is really worth contemplating. It may be the lecture with the most references to HHU, which we are generally familiar with. The excerpts below, however, make it clear what we're truly implying with HHU and the only way it can take shape in our time. Everything becomes quite explicit here, so I think we need to try to keep this in our intuitive context when contemplating all other lectures that present detailed findings and appeals to HHU.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/En ... 18p01.html
"When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity.
...
These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy.
...
We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.
...
This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’."

I will also share an example that may suggest some overlap between our views on this topic. I think the following brief post hints at the direction in which PPs can be utilized more directly in applied fields of the social landscape, like education. I am sure it could be expanded with more concrete guidelines for inner practice and examples of how the cognitive transformation can be expressed in the classroom setting. Notice how the tone is centered around raising the bar for teachers and students alike. It is about emphasizing how the true insights that can stimulate practical applications will only come through a transformation of the soul's perspective on the content being communicated and learned, through free spiritual activity that has been weaned off of its complete dependence on the thoughts conveyed by sensory existence.


"WHAT IS THE HEART OF THE WALDORF METHOD?

The more I understand Waldorf methodology, the more I fathom its essential and far-reaching nature.
As a eurythmist, one learns to consciously perceive forces streaming in from the periphery as the impetus for movement. Eurythmy’s deepest value is this living spiritual activity which becomes available to an audience, who, when their hearts unite to this inflow of movement are given new forces - fresh spiritual forces for their life and destiny.

A teacher is meant to become an artist in a very similar way, unfolding an activity that is NOT playing out instruction from mere memory or from anything pre-finished, but arising from out of a living spiritual activity that receives, for its intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations, the actual, real, forces flowing from the individualities’ of the students.

This state of consciousness and its resulting consequences have only ever come into being in my classes when I disembark from what I already know, and decide to create something out of nothing. My sense is that many teachers are only dimly aware of this possibility, as few are able to describe or demonstrate it to new teachers in training. I think striving teachers arrive at it again and again as a kind of grace that helps them meet situations or challenges or opportunities, but it is another step to recognize and venture deliberately into an activity that could be prefaced in the following way: “I will to unfold my lesson, in my every word and in my every gesture in such a way that I am DISCOVERING what I am saying and what I am doing as I say it and as I do it.” [this is also a great way to characterize the experience of constructing and presenting PPs]

This state of activity frightens people away because it truly requires stepping into the unknown, and all that one has made of oneself, that is “finished” in oneself seems to disappear entirely from view. But through a courageous persevering through this “eye of the needle” the True magic of Waldorf education begins to reveal itself.

“What is the true magic of Waldorf education,” one might ask?

It is nothing less than the blossoming, in the children, of the anticipated new clairvoyance of which Steiner prophesied.

Certain conditions must be met in order for this blossoming to occur and the destruction of Europe in WWI and II violently shredded the soul atmosphere which would need be the “ground” upon which this new capacity could sprout. It requires so much intentional sobriety, tenderness, and selflessness to establish this atmosphere in a world-climate that is fiercely antagonistic to it, so violently and hastily affixed to materialism as it is. But children really have a chance if they have not been too numbed or damaged, to tread one step higher into the realm where the future lives, where Christ lives, in the Light that can begin to radiate perceptibly from human souls.

This is really the foundation and promise of Waldorf education, I wish more people were interested in learning it.

~ Anthony"

(I also don't think it's a coincidence that Anthony is one of the few, perhaps the only, members of the Facebook group that seems very attuned to the PoF cognitive methodology)

[Federica]

Right, and I suppose the central question of this discussion is how our mental pipelines on any topic can be approached in an intuitive, symbolic way. I think those who receive the presentation can only develop such insights through prior experimentation with PPs. It seems you are underestimating how much your prior experimentation contributes to your capacity to approach Steiner's lectures (or any other supposed "APs") and fathom what he is speaking about in the intuitive, symbolic way, to approach the content with meditative gestures that 'hold the phenomena humbly'. That's not something which any aspect of normal life or education prepares us for. The person without such prior experimentation would not even understand what that means or why it would be important, but would instead see it as a smokescreen for being 'gaslit' with "pseudoscience". This is the 'phenomenology of phenomenology' that I referenced before. With time, we grow more sensitive to what these PPs contribute to our whole orientation within the flow and how exactly that orientation would be lacking without them.

As the discussion progresses, it seems the APs you are characterizing increasingly resemble the PPs of the cognitive methodology. That is what Hueck, Zajonc, et al. are primarily interested in, and their phenomenological exercises are no less unfamiliar or demanding than the game metaphor, the chess metaphor, etc. On the other hand, you seem to be implying that the inverted-meditative stance and perspective can be first applied to the most out-of-phase phenomenal outputs of the natural and social worlds as a motivator for the soul to eventually approach the most in-phase outputs of our imaginative life, whereas I see it the complete opposite way around. Naturally, everything in modern culture directs the intellect toward studying those out-of-phase outputs, so most souls will begin applying their HHU there. Yet the purity of initial insight is polluted precisely when attention languishes in this domain of indirectness, because the soul's stubborn habits, sympathies and antipathies, preferences, prejudices, and so on remain in the blind spot and thus inevitably hijack the concentrated flow.

If the phenomenology of spiritual activity teaches us anything, it is that we first need to closely observe our cognitive life to develop the meditative palette by which we can approach the wider flow with similar gestures. That is because the dynamics of our cognitive life, the only spectrum of experience where we can become familiar with the output flow from its spiritual side, are self-similar to the spiritual dynamics shaping the wider flow. The field research we conduct in our intimate imaginative space naturally translates into the capacity to conduct field research in the natural and social domains. By increasing resonance in the former domain, we naturally develop it in the latter as well. If we can't learn to meditatively and humbly hold the phenomenal outputs in our imaginative rehearsal space with a delicate balance of activity and receptivity, we will never manage to do so for the outputs of the wider natural-social flow without polluting the experimentation. The latter immediately brings into focus a much more complex, collective mesh of interfering intents that will swamp our concentrated state without sufficient cognitive preparation.

Related to that, the following Steiner lecture is really worth contemplating. It may be the lecture with the most references to HHU, which we are generally familiar with. The excerpts below, however, make it clear what we're truly implying with HHU and the only way it can take shape in our time. Everything becomes quite explicit here, so I think we need to try to keep this in our intuitive context when contemplating all other lectures that present detailed findings and appeals to HHU.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA196/En ... 18p01.html
"When things that have been illumined in this way—instead of being merely thought about, as is generally the case—are put into words, they are entirely comprehensible to the healthy human reason. And even the Initiate, if he has not developed his reason in the right way, gains nothing whatever from his super-sensible experiences. When someone to-day—please take what I am now saying as a really serious matter—has learnt to think in a way perfectly adapted to meeting the demands of school examinations, when he acquires habits of thought that enable him to pass academic tests with flying colours—then his reasoning faculty will be so vitiated that even if millions of experiences of the super-sensible world were handed to him on a platter, he would see them as little as you could physically see the objects in a dark room; for that which makes men fit to cope with the demands of this materialistic age darkens the space in which the super-sensible worlds come towards them.

Men have become accustomed to think in the one and only way that is possible when thinking is based on the bodily functions. This kind of thinking is ingrained in them from their youth onwards. But healthy human reason does not unfold on bodily foundations; it unfolds in free spiritual activity. And even in our Elementary Schools to-day children are educated away from free spiritual activity. The very methods of teaching hinder the development of free spiritual activity.
...
These great concerns of the life of humanity are clearly to be discerned in the most seemingly trivial facts of life. But in one respect our whole life of perception and feeling must change if we want so to orientate healthy human reason that it functions in the right stream of Spiritual Science. Let me repeat: The whole of our life of soul must change in one particular respect if our healthy human reason is to function within the stream of spiritual life that is to be brought to mankind through Anthroposophy.
...
We ray forth this ego from the spiritual world. We must learn to feel this ego, to feel that we have within us the ego behind which stand the Hierarchies, just as the body, composed of elements of the three kingdoms of nature, is behind the ego that is an image only. We must pass out of the passive experience into activity in the fullest sense. We must learn to feel that our real ego is brought into being out of the spiritual world. And then we also learn to feel that the mirror-image of our ego is brought into being for us out of the body that belongs to physical existence.

This is a reversal of the usual feeling, and to this reversal we must habituate ourselves. That is the important thing—not the amassing of facts and data. They will be there in abundance once this reversal of feeling has been experienced. Then, when thinking is active in the real sense, those thoughts are born which can fertilise social thinking. When the ego is allowed to remain a mirror-image, thinking can take account only of those social matters which are (as I said yesterday) merely the outcome of changes in phraseology. Only when man is active in his ego can his thoughts be truly free.
...
This living grasp of the self (Sicherfassen) must again be achieved. But it goes against the grain, because people to-day prefer to move about on crutches instead of using their legs. Their ideal is to have what they are to think conveyed to them by the outer, material facts. It is unpleasant for them to realise that thinking in the true sense must be experienced in free spiritual activity, because it means tearing themselves away from the convenient things of life, from all props, all crutches in the life of soul. Whenever things are said from the standpoint of a kind of thinking that has nothing whatever to do with the sense-world, but in complete freedom creates out of intuitions, people do not understand it. My Philosophy of Spiritual Activity was not understood because it can be grasped only by one who is intent upon unfolding really free thoughts, one who is truly and in a new sense a ‘Master of the Liberal Arts’."

I will also share an example that may suggest some overlap between our views on this topic. I think the following brief post hints at the direction in which PPs can be utilized more directly in applied fields of the social landscape, like education. I am sure it could be expanded with more concrete guidelines for inner practice and examples of how the cognitive transformation can be expressed in the classroom setting. Notice how the tone is centered around raising the bar for teachers and students alike. It is about emphasizing how the true insights that can stimulate practical applications will only come through a transformation of the soul's perspective on the content being communicated and learned, through free spiritual activity that has been weaned off of its complete dependence on the thoughts conveyed by sensory existence.


"WHAT IS THE HEART OF THE WALDORF METHOD?

The more I understand Waldorf methodology, the more I fathom its essential and far-reaching nature.
As a eurythmist, one learns to consciously perceive forces streaming in from the periphery as the impetus for movement. Eurythmy’s deepest value is this living spiritual activity which becomes available to an audience, who, when their hearts unite to this inflow of movement are given new forces - fresh spiritual forces for their life and destiny.

A teacher is meant to become an artist in a very similar way, unfolding an activity that is NOT playing out instruction from mere memory or from anything pre-finished, but arising from out of a living spiritual activity that receives, for its intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations, the actual, real, forces flowing from the individualities’ of the students.

This state of consciousness and its resulting consequences have only ever come into being in my classes when I disembark from what I already know, and decide to create something out of nothing. My sense is that many teachers are only dimly aware of this possibility, as few are able to describe or demonstrate it to new teachers in training. I think striving teachers arrive at it again and again as a kind of grace that helps them meet situations or challenges or opportunities, but it is another step to recognize and venture deliberately into an activity that could be prefaced in the following way: “I will to unfold my lesson, in my every word and in my every gesture in such a way that I am DISCOVERING what I am saying and what I am doing as I say it and as I do it.” [this is also a great way to characterize the experience of constructing and presenting PPs]

This state of activity frightens people away because it truly requires stepping into the unknown, and all that one has made of oneself, that is “finished” in oneself seems to disappear entirely from view. But through a courageous persevering through this “eye of the needle” the True magic of Waldorf education begins to reveal itself.

“What is the true magic of Waldorf education,” one might ask?

It is nothing less than the blossoming, in the children, of the anticipated new clairvoyance of which Steiner prophesied.

Certain conditions must be met in order for this blossoming to occur and the destruction of Europe in WWI and II violently shredded the soul atmosphere which would need be the “ground” upon which this new capacity could sprout. It requires so much intentional sobriety, tenderness, and selflessness to establish this atmosphere in a world-climate that is fiercely antagonistic to it, so violently and hastily affixed to materialism as it is. But children really have a chance if they have not been too numbed or damaged, to tread one step higher into the realm where the future lives, where Christ lives, in the Light that can begin to radiate perceptibly from human souls.

This is really the foundation and promise of Waldorf education, I wish more people were interested in learning it.

~ Anthony"

(I also don't think it's a coincidence that Anthony is one of the few, perhaps the only, members of the Facebook group that seems very attuned to the PoF cognitive methodology)

Ashvin, you seem to oscillate between: “the difficulties you see people have must be your difficulties” and “you underestimate how much your prior experimentation contributes to your capacity to approach Steiner's lectures". Anyway, I don't think my view has changed now. It’s still about using applied knowledge as a tool, and perhaps you now see that I don’t mean it in the standard intellectual sense. The remaining point of disagreement may be this: I don't feel that everyone would feel gaslit and dragged into pseudoscience, when appropriately presented with these applied pipelines. Even if, indeed, formal education diseducates the mind to approach the world holistically, the mind - even undeveloped and uneducated - is still able to sense the power of truthful intuitions. But you don't believe this is possible. Yet, the basis for this conviction is phenomenological, and we can find support for it in many of the essays and metaphors on this forum, for example we can think of the superposed Moiré patterns and how their rhythmic alignment regularly allows light to shine through all the layers. Of course there will always be the easily gaslighted and the hardcore materialists, but that’s not the point, is it? We are interested in those who feel a certain dissatisfaction with the common ways of pursuing knowledge.

By the way, let’s take Zajonc as an example, since I believe you read the book “Catching the light”. Is that correct? I haven’t read it yet, but I have it here with me, and I am overviewing the chapters right now. At first sight, it doesn’t seem to have any phenomenological introduction. This book may very well be a perfect example of what I mean. You say that Zajonc was primarily interested in the PPs and in cognitive methodology, but from the book (I also remember an interview on Youtube) it seems that he simply dives into the history, the physics and the intuition of light phenomena, approaching the topic with the help of analogies, quotes from the Bible and other metaphors. It looks like a great illustration of what I mean. At the same time, it doesn’t seem that his students were feeling gaslighted and deluded by this approach. Even if the phenomenal outputs of the natural and social worlds are the most out-of-phase, while the phenomenal world of thinking is the most in phase and in principle the most accessible, we can't but notice that people do not grasp this logic. I agree that it is logical, but we must face the fact that such logic only appears with sufficient clarity after a certain familiarity with phenomenology has been developed. And indeed, safe rare exceptions, people do not get it. World phenomena are out of phase, but at least they constitute a familiar interest that can catalyze and maintain attention to the necessary inner work. I agree that meditative work cannot be successful without phenomenology of the spirit, but there should be a way to introduce it as a specific tool for the understanding of a worldly output, using that output as a catalyzer to develop sensitivity for the inner progress. To be more specific, why not take a closer look at Zajonc’s book?

Naturally, everything in modern culture directs the intellect toward studying those out-of-phase outputs, so most souls will begin applying their HHU there. Yet the purity of initial insight is polluted precisely when attention languishes in this domain of indirectness, because the soul's stubborn habits, sympathies and antipathies, preferences, prejudices, and so on remain in the blind spot and thus inevitably hijack the concentrated flow.

As I see it, things are not necessarily as stated in bold. There are different ways of languishing in the aftermath of the insight, so to say If the student’s mind is open to the possibility of refraining from flattening and coercing the insight (for example about the nature of light as illustrated in the book) into experimental constraints - in which an abundance of limitations forces the mind into a depressing sequence of arbitrary choices - then the working of habits, sympathies and antipathies is hindered. As Klocek usually says, the student should instead bring the insights, and the related open questions, into sleep. Into sleep and/or into meditation, following the teacher’s guidance, trying some recommended exercises before experimentation is set in motion. Not exercises on pure thinking, but meditative exercises focused on the particular phenomenon in question. If the student is able to give the mind the benefit of the doubt and follows this route (granted that not everyone will be able) then the stubborn habits you speak of are kept under control. Later, the group can set up experiments that will not be shaped by an arbitrary intellect unduly operating from the blind spot, but will be shaped in the light of the further insights emerged from the humble attempts to entertain a form of dialogue with the beings standing behind the phenomena in question. In this way, the students may “tear themselves away from all crutches”, to use Steiner's expression. They may enter a shared spiritual field of activity where the real forces of Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions are received from higher powers, to paraphrase Anthony’s words.

So I think that the "meditative palette" and the applied question can be developed side by side, organically, instead of following the rigid logic: phenomenology of spiritual activity first, applied phenomena of the wider flow second. Thank you for both quotes, they do make a lot of sense!

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, you seem to oscillate between: “the difficulties you see people have must be your difficulties” and “you underestimate how much your prior experimentation contributes to your capacity to approach Steiner's lectures".

These aren't mutually exclusive - the latter naturally flows from the former. What I've characterized as the 'phenomenology of the phenomenology' is simply what naturally develops when we consistently engage in inner experimentation, and our intuitive orientation to the inseparable role of our mental flow within the primary flow begins to expand. If we experience many difficulties with this experimentation, on the other hand, we may remain with a solid sense of what it means to 'engage in phenomenology' - what sort of method is used, how our cognitive process can be felt and described, the characteristic qualities of that process, and so on - but that sensitivity may not yet have expanded to the deeper level of how the phenomenological orientation is continually shaping our intuitive context when approaching the World Content. We are continually meeting thresholds of inner development in that sense, and even sub-thresholds within the thresholds, and each such threshold requires a new sort of inverted effort to cross.

Again, I never implied that the difficulties are unique to you. It is self-evident that we all face enormous difficulties when trying to shift from the standard intellectual perspective that the course of sensory life has shaped in our mental flow towards a phenomenological orientation in that flow. It is obvious that this is experienced as inconvenient, unfamiliar, and demanding by all of us, without exception. In fact, I often feel like I almost deserve a reward after working through the PPs, as if I need some relief and am entitled to some passive entertainment or lighter intellectual contemplation. These are all completely expected reactions that we go through (and if we haven't grown sensitive to these feelings yet, we surely will over time). As Cleric expressed in the essay, we can't experiment a few times and then 'get it' for all time, as we seem to do with our intellectual knowledge. We have to approach the inner dynamics and summon the corresponding effort afresh each time, which is highly inconvenient from our modern-day perspective and corresponding standards.

I think we can simply trust that if we persist in these efforts, our whole perspective of the flow will shift over time - it will reach a new equilibrium, so to speak. Our idea of 'what the PPs are, what they invite, how they contribute, how they stand in relation to APs, etc.' will evolve. We will still experience the difficulties, but we will have a better sense of why they are necessary and how our voluntary engagement with them transforms our soul life, contributing to the 'reversal of feeling' that Steiner mentioned. This reversal of feeling can only arise from strenuous inner activity that unfolds without dependence on the physical organism, and the weaning of that dependence can only come through pure thinking exercises (where the spiritual world comes into the 'lightest' contact with the bodily organism).

Anyway, I don't think my view has changed now. It’s still about using applied knowledge as a tool, and perhaps you now see that I don’t mean it in the standard intellectual sense. The remaining point of disagreement may be this: I don't feel that everyone would feel gaslit and dragged into pseudoscience, when appropriately presented with these applied pipelines. Even if, indeed, formal education diseducates the mind to approach the world holistically, the mind - even undeveloped and uneducated - is still able to sense the power of truthful intuitions. But you don't believe this is possible. Yet, the basis for this conviction is phenomenological, and we can find support for it in many of the essays and metaphors on this forum, for example we can think of the superposed Moiré patterns and how their rhythmic alignment regularly allows light to shine through all the layers. Of course there will always be the easily gaslighted and the hardcore materialists, but that’s not the point, is it? We are interested in those who feel a certain dissatisfaction with the common ways of pursuing knowledge.

I think the bold is important to focus on. The key question is how the rhythmic alignment arises. The alignment that arises as a matter of course, without any sense-free cognitive effort, is exactly what Steiner expressed as being educated out of us and is practically impossible to experience anymore except in the rarest of karmic circumstances. In other places, he mentions that the age up to which our natural organization contributes to our spiritual development has been steadily decreasing (and is now around 21-28 or perhaps even less, I believe). That is another way of describing the same phenomenon: the decreasing natural alignment between our imaginative subflow, tightly conditioned to the physical organism, and the deeper spiritual rotations. We can indeed verify all of this phenomenologically as we become more sensitive to how erratic our inner flow is - how often we lapse in concentration, wander in our mental flow, free-fall through daydreams, get hijacked by strong emotions, and so forth. We may eventually realize that there are almost no moments in the day when we attain natural alignment (without engaging PPs). As Cleric put it on that thread - "There are still so many human beings who live in permanent Moiré chaos of spiritual phenomena, never sensing a conjunction of the spiritual depth."

This is the reality of our misaligned situation that we need to honestly confront: the 'urgency of our times' that Steiner was stressing 100 years ago. We can imagine how much more urgent the situation has become since then, as the intellectual soul has been swamped further by mechanical, dehumanizing tendencies and technologies that reinforce those tendencies. All of that makes the natural alignments even less likely. There is simply no justification to put any faith in the Light shining through natural alignments of the Moiré patterns anymore. We are no longer evolving under that 'old covenant'. Everything now depends on bringing the alignments about through self-conscious thinking-will, which, because of its sensitivity to its real-time steering, remains active while simultaneously becoming attuned and receptive to the deeper spiritual rotations and the grace of higher revelations that come into focus through the co-created alignment.

By the way, let’s take Zajonc as an example, since I believe you read the book “Catching the light”. Is that correct? I haven’t read it yet, but I have it here with me, and I am overviewing the chapters right now. At first sight, it doesn’t seem to have any phenomenological introduction. This book may very well be a perfect example of what I mean. You say that Zajonc was primarily interested in the PPs and in cognitive methodology, but from the book (I also remember an interview on Youtube) it seems that he simply dives into the history, the physics and the intuition of light phenomena, approaching the topic with the help of analogies, quotes from the Bible and other metaphors. It looks like a great illustration of what I mean. At the same time, it doesn’t seem that his students were feeling gaslighted and deluded by this approach. Even if the phenomenal outputs of the natural and social worlds are the most out-of-phase, while the phenomenal world of thinking is the most in phase and in principle the most accessible, we can't but notice that people do not grasp this logic. I agree that it is logical, but we must face the fact that such logic only appears with sufficient clarity after a certain familiarity with phenomenology has been developed. And indeed, safe rare exceptions, people do not get it. World phenomena are out of phase, but at least they constitute a familiar interest that can catalyze and maintain attention to the necessary inner work. I agree that meditative work cannot be successful without phenomenology of the spirit, but there should be a way to introduce it as a specific tool for the understanding of a worldly output, using that output as a catalyzer to develop sensitivity for the inner progress. To be more specific, why not take a closer look at Zajonc’s book?

Naturally, everything in modern culture directs the intellect toward studying those out-of-phase outputs, so most souls will begin applying their HHU there. Yet the purity of initial insight is polluted precisely when attention languishes in this domain of indirectness, because the soul's stubborn habits, sympathies and antipathies, preferences, prejudices, and so on remain in the blind spot and thus inevitably hijack the concentrated flow.

As I see it, things are not necessarily as stated in bold. There are different ways of languishing in the aftermath of the insight, so to say If the student’s mind is open to the possibility of refraining from flattening and coercing the insight (for example about the nature of light as illustrated in the book) into experimental constraints - in which an abundance of limitations forces the mind into a depressing sequence of arbitrary choices - then the working of habits, sympathies and antipathies is hindered. As Klocek usually says, the student should instead bring the insights, and the related open questions, into sleep. Into sleep and/or into meditation, following the teacher’s guidance, trying some recommended exercises before experimentation is set in motion. Not exercises on pure thinking, but meditative exercises focused on the particular phenomenon in question. If the student is able to give the mind the benefit of the doubt and follows this route (granted that not everyone will be able) then the stubborn habits you speak of are kept under control. Later, the group can set up experiments that will not be shaped by an arbitrary intellect unduly operating from the blind spot, but will be shaped in the light of the further insights emerged from the humble attempts to entertain a form of dialogue with the beings standing behind the phenomena in question. In this way, the students may “tear themselves away from all crutches”, to use Steiner's expression. They may enter a shared spiritual field of activity where the real forces of Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions are received from higher powers, to paraphrase Anthony’s words.

So I think that the "meditative palette" and the applied question can be developed side by side, organically, instead of following the rigid logic: phenomenology of spiritual activity first, applied phenomena of the wider flow second. Thank you for both quotes, they do make a lot of sense!

There are many thoughts that I have on the above, which I began writing about. However, I would like to pause to ask for clarification on something that is confusing me in this discussion, which centers on building bridges to intuitive spiritual understanding for wider swaths of humanity.

In what sense would you say that meditative exercises focused on particular phenomena are more accessible than the 'pure thinking' methodology and less demanding of time, effort, trust, and so on from the novice intellectual soul? I simply experience it the other way around. Even now, if someone asks me to pick up a pencil and start closely observing the form of leaves, tracing them, comparing them, holding the images meditatively, etc., for example, I am much more hesitant to work with such an exercise than any of the cognitive PPs. I experience a similar hesitation even with the holy week exercises that you shared from Klocek, as another example. Obviously, I have a much better orientation to such exercises than a completely novice intellect, but there is still a general feeling of hesitation about their reliability and value, whereas I experience none of that with the explicitly cognitive PPs (they are all a means of intuitively observing our cognitive process, in a broader sense). Do you experience these differently in relation to the latter?

[Federica]

Ashvin, you seem to oscillate between: “the difficulties you see people have must be your difficulties” and “you underestimate how much your prior experimentation contributes to your capacity to approach Steiner's lectures".

These aren't mutually exclusive - the latter naturally flows from the former. What I've characterized as the 'phenomenology of the phenomenology' is simply what naturally develops when we consistently engage in inner experimentation, and our intuitive orientation to the inseparable role of our mental flow within the primary flow begins to expand. If we experience many difficulties with this experimentation, on the other hand, we may remain with a solid sense of what it means to 'engage in phenomenology' - what sort of method is used, how our cognitive process can be felt and described, the characteristic qualities of that process, and so on - but that sensitivity may not yet have expanded to the deeper level of how the phenomenological orientation is continually shaping our intuitive context when approaching the World Content. We are continually meeting thresholds of inner development in that sense, and even sub-thresholds within the thresholds, and each such threshold requires a new sort of inverted effort to cross.

Again, I never implied that the difficulties are unique to you. It is self-evident that we all face enormous difficulties when trying to shift from the standard intellectual perspective that the course of sensory life has shaped in our mental flow towards a phenomenological orientation in that flow. It is obvious that this is experienced as inconvenient, unfamiliar, and demanding by all of us, without exception. In fact, I often feel like I almost deserve a reward after working through the PPs, as if I need some relief and am entitled to some passive entertainment or lighter intellectual contemplation. These are all completely expected reactions that we go through (and if we haven't grown sensitive to these feelings yet, we surely will over time). As Cleric expressed in the essay, we can't experiment a few times and then 'get it' for all time, as we seem to do with our intellectual knowledge. We have to approach the inner dynamics and summon the corresponding effort afresh each time, which is highly inconvenient from our modern-day perspective and corresponding standards.

I think we can simply trust that if we persist in these efforts, our whole perspective of the flow will shift over time - it will reach a new equilibrium, so to speak. Our idea of 'what the PPs are, what they invite, how they contribute, how they stand in relation to APs, etc.' will evolve. We will still experience the difficulties, but we will have a better sense of why they are necessary and how our voluntary engagement with them transforms our soul life, contributing to the 'reversal of feeling' that Steiner mentioned. This reversal of feeling can only arise from strenuous inner activity that unfolds without dependence on the physical organism, and the weaning of that dependence can only come through pure thinking exercises (where the spiritual world comes into the 'lightest' contact with the bodily organism).

I definitely experience all sorts of difficulties and limitations including all the ones you mention. But that was not the point. The difficulty I was talking about is when one does not realize that a PP invites an approach entirely different than any intellect-feeding pipeline. One still expects that the end goal is to take away contents to reflect upon, and that the exercises are merely for consolidation and agility, like they are in general in intellectual apprehension. It seem you are continually pushing the discussion away from the original thread. If you want to discuss the experienced difficulties on the spiritual path we certainly can, in another thread.

I think the bold is important to focus on. The key question is how the rhythmic alignment arises. The alignment that arises as a matter of course, without any sense-free cognitive effort, is exactly what Steiner expressed as being educated out of us and is practically impossible to experience anymore except in the rarest of karmic circumstances. In other places, he mentions that the age up to which our natural organization contributes to our spiritual development has been steadily decreasing (and is now around 21-28 or perhaps even less, I believe). That is another way of describing the same phenomenon: the decreasing natural alignment between our imaginative subflow, tightly conditioned to the physical organism, and the deeper spiritual rotations. We can indeed verify all of this phenomenologically as we become more sensitive to how erratic our inner flow is - how often we lapse in concentration, wander in our mental flow, free-fall through daydreams, get hijacked by strong emotions, and so forth. We may eventually realize that there are almost no moments in the day when we attain natural alignment (without engaging PPs). As Cleric put it on that thread - "There are still so many human beings who live in permanent Moiré chaos of spiritual phenomena, never sensing a conjunction of the spiritual depth."

This is the reality of our misaligned situation that we need to honestly confront: the 'urgency of our times' that Steiner was stressing 100 years ago. We can imagine how much more urgent the situation has become since then, as the intellectual soul has been swamped further by mechanical, dehumanizing tendencies and technologies that reinforce those tendencies. All of that makes the natural alignments even less likely. There is simply no justification to put any faith in the Light shining through natural alignments of the Moiré patterns anymore. We are no longer evolving under that 'old covenant'. Everything now depends on bringing the alignments about through self-conscious thinking-will, which, because of its sensitivity to its real-time steering, remains active while simultaneously becoming attuned and receptive to the deeper spiritual rotations and the grace of higher revelations that come into focus through the co-created alignment.

As I specified two posts above, with the alignment of the patterns I mean the possibility of sporadic flashes of intuition. There is no question of natural emergence or higher cognition, doing efforts once and for all, of operating under the old covenant, atavistic clairvoyance or anything similar. Yes, we experience a highly erratic flow and everything else that you describe. But the possibility of flashes of intuition is still fully there. That's what was being discussed. Yes, man is regressing in age and currently achieves natural development at the age of about 27. This means that the physical organization does not support spiritual maturing beyond what can be developed by that age. The latter must be taken care of outside of the physical body through individual efforts. But this has little to do with the surging of intuitions in the soul.

There are many thoughts that I have on the above, which I began writing about. However, I would like to pause to ask for clarification on something that is confusing me in this discussion, which centers on building bridges to intuitive spiritual understanding for wider swaths of humanity.

In what sense would you say that meditative exercises focused on particular phenomena are more accessible than the 'pure thinking' methodology and less demanding of time, effort, trust, and so on from the novice intellectual soul? I simply experience it the other way around. Even now, if someone asks me to pick up a pencil and start closely observing the form of leaves, tracing them, comparing them, holding the images meditatively, etc., for example, I am much more hesitant to work with such an exercise than any of the cognitive PPs. I experience a similar hesitation even with the holy week exercises that you shared from Klocek, as another example. Obviously, I have a much better orientation to such exercises than a completely novice intellect, but there is still a general feeling of hesitation about their reliability and value, whereas I experience none of that with the explicitly cognitive PPs (they are all a means of intuitively observing our cognitive process, in a broader sense). Do you experience these differently in relation to the latter?

If this discussion continues, I really expect that the questions I asked above will eventually be addressed precisely. Because there's where I made the gist of this entire viewpoint the most explicit and concrete.
If you experience it the other way around, I think you are part of a small minority. Given the hesitations you describe, how were you able to work through Klocek's "The Seer's Handbook"? And what about the exercise of intently observing a growing plant, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, or "The Plant Between Sun and Earth"? Did you do the exercises in the Seer's Handbook? I don't recall that you mentioned any such hesitations when we discussed the book years ago. I personally don't have these hesitations. I am usually happy to try exercises of that kind (of course much depends on the context). I would say I am equally interested in the pure thinking exercises and the ones centered in specific world phenomena. Perhaps this is because I have never been convinced by materialism in my life. I don't come from that conceptual background. I think that many people find exercises based on world phenomena more accessible, because many already have an interest in understanding those phenomena. I explained that above. Conversely, almost nobody has an interest in discovering higher cognition, just because very few have a concrete sense of what it even is - and reading the essays of this forum is rarely a solution to that lack of sense, as I have unfortunately noticed many times. This is why I think that exercises on world phenomena are generally more accessible. It's not even a mere opinion. I's enough to observe how people generally do not get or do not make it through your and Cleric's essays.

[AshvinP]

I definitely experience all sorts of difficulties and limitations including all the ones you mention. But that was not the point. The difficulty I was talking about is when one does not realize that a PP invites an approach entirely different than any intellect-feeding pipeline. One still expects that the end goal is to take away contents to reflect upon, and that the exercises are merely for consolidation and agility, like they are in general in intellectual apprehension. It seem you are continually pushing the discussion away from the original thread. If you want to discuss the experienced difficulties on the spiritual path we certainly can, in another thread.

The discussion of the difficulties was not in response to that point, but to your comment about the oscillation between two seemingly contradictory assertions. I wanted to clarify how they naturally fit together, which should give us a bit of a deeper perspective on what we are doing through phenomenology.

In any case, what you say above is exactly why I think the PPs are the only viable way to transform the perspective on what it means to acquire knowledge, to 'explain' the phenomenal flow, and so on. The solution is not to leave the soul in its default expectations and hope it somehow evolves out of them, as if by magic, but to confront those expectations more directly and make them transparent. Cleric, of course, has refined the art of doing that to a very great extent in the essays. Any non-phenomenological pipelines, on the other hand, which don't directly invite the soul to confront their implicit assumptions and expectations, simply cannot help the soul render those aspects of the flow more transparent.

As I specified two posts above, with the alignment of the patterns I mean the possibility of sporadic flashes of intuition. There is no question of natural emergence or higher cognition, doing efforts once and for all, of operating under the old covenant, atavistic clairvoyance or anything similar. Yes, we experience a highly erratic flow and everything else that you describe. But the possibility of flashes of intuition is still fully there. That's what was being discussed. Yes, man is regressing in age and currently achieves natural development at the age of about 27. This means that the physical organization does not support spiritual maturing beyond what can be developed by that age. The latter must be taken care of outside of the physical body through individual efforts. But this has little to do with the surging of intuitions in the soul.

Yes, and as I specified in the last post, the possibility of these 'sporadic flashes of intuition', or 'surging intuitions in the soul', which can actually orient it in the proper direction within the flow, is practically non-existent. I was not talking about the natural emergence of higher cognition. I am talking about the most basic orientation that begins inverting our cognitive perspective within the flow, so that we have any chance of expanding intuition of the phenomenal dynamics. These sporadic flashes of intuition are what are otherwise known as intellectual thoughts. Obviously, relying on our experience of those thoughts and their combinations, no matter how coherent and convincing they feel, will never be sufficient to attain even the most basic orientation needed in Steiner's time, and is well past due in our time.

If this discussion continues, I really expect that the questions I asked above will eventually be addressed precisely. Because there's where I made the gist of this entire viewpoint the most explicit and concrete.
If you experience it the other way around, I think you are part of a small minority. Given the hesitations you describe, how were you able to work through Klocek's "The Seer's Handbook"? And what about the exercise of intently observing a growing plant, in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, or "The Plant Between Sun and Earth"? Did you do the exercises in the Seer's Handbook? I don't recall that you mentioned any such hesitations when we discussed the book years ago. I personally don't have these hesitations. I am usually happy to try exercises of that kind (of course much depends on the context). I would say I am equally interested in the pure thinking exercises and the ones centered in specific world phenomena. Perhaps this is because I have never been convinced by materialism in my life. I don't come from that conceptual background. I think that many people find exercises based on world phenomena more accessible, because many already have an interest in understanding those phenomena. I explained that above.

I wasn't able to work through the Seer's Handbook in any diligent meditative sense, only skimmed through its contents, and I can also admit that I don't spend much time observing the growth and decay of plants as indicated in KHW. I don't do many independent will exercises, either. People like me, who intrinsically lack a certain inner strength of will, could benefit a lot from many of these exercises focused primarily on the will or on particular phenomena. But the only reason I know that, the only reason I can have any intuitive orientation to the critical function of such exercises and therefore hold the practice of such exercises as a desirable ideal, is because of working through the cognitive PPs. The only reason I have a keen sense of what I am lacking in this respect, and why I am lacking it, is because of the latter. This only makes too much sense when we consider it carefully. Expanding the palette of possibilities for our intuitive navigation, and understanding what those possibilities entail, always arises through the refinement of our cognitive life through observing our receded psychological states and imaginative concentration exercises. It simply can't be any other way for the modern human constitution.

And, therefore, I don't think I am in a small minority with those hesitations, relative to the cognitive PPs. It is much more accessible to discern the value of observing and refining the intuitive cognitive flow that guides how we navigate all other aspects of life. I think that, with a minimal amount of good faith and interest in higher development, the idea of refining our intuitive navigation of life is immediately comprehensible. It is much more natural to experience the reality of our intuitive navigation at the imaginative scale and observe its characteristic dynamics if we take a few basic steps into the unknown than to observe the deeper-scale navigation animating the wider flow (like the growth of plants), which would require a much more intense systematic training of the soul faculties, much greater leaps into the unknown. Of course, all of this assumes that the aim is, in fact, to transform the soul's perspective and orientation within the flow so that it is suited for the initiation fitted to our time. If the aim is to indulge the soul in its default habits and expectations when studying 'outer phenomena', then obviously, there are a million other easier ways to do that.

As for Zajonc's "Catching the Light," I think such works can be generally grouped under the heading of 'Goethean phenomenology', which is quite prevalent in our time. It is the sort of pipelines that Matt Segall, Ashton, et al. are generally interested in fashioning as well. To be blunt, I perceive such works as a kind of buffer zone where souls hope to wait and come into more intimate contact with spiritual reality without embracing the new Impulse of higher cognitive development. It is viewed as the part of Steiner's work that offers the path of least resistance, which fits quite snugly within the context of academia, publishing books, giving conferences, and so on. That is already a warning sign that we are buffering the higher Impulse, in my view. And I don't see people who are focused on fashioning these GPs generally making any serious efforts toward the cognitive transformation that is needed.

Let me be clear, such works can be quite valuable for those of us who have already begun inverting our perspective through the cognitive PPs, because all pipelines find their true value from such a perspective that knows what to look for and how to look for it. That's why I wouldn't hesitate to recommend such books to those on this forum, providing additional context on why they are important and how they fit into our broader phenomenological considerations. Yet, for many reasons already discussed, I think it is misguided to expect that we can start with such pipelines, which are indeed more accessible to the default intellectual habits of our time, and evolve a smooth transition to higher cognitive development from there. When a lot of seeking souls are already tending toward a certain mode of intellectual development within the buffer zone, even within movements like Anthroposophy, there is no need to indulge and reinforce it further, and much need to offer healthy alternatives that render this buffering tendency transparent.

Conversely, almost nobody has an interest in discovering higher cognition, just because very few have a concrete sense of what it even is - and reading the essays of this forum is rarely a solution to that lack of sense, as I have unfortunately noticed many times. This is why I think that exercises on world phenomena are generally more accessible. It's not even a mere opinion. I's enough to observe how people generally do not get or do not make it through your and Cleric's essays.

Yes, this is the recurring theme of your viewpoint. When stated this way, it really sounds like you have given up hope on the PPs as the bridge. I hope that you meant what you said before, that you are not super attached to this view, and therefore it will fizzle out over time. As we have discussed, "accessibility" in general is not the only factor. We need to consider accessibility to what in specific? If the aim is to expand access to the inversion of perspective within the flow, there is only one way to do so: through the pinhole of cognition, which co-creates the alignments necessary for higher revelations to shine through and Inspire the soul in a sustained way.

[Federica]

...

Ok, Ashvin, thanks for your reply. I think this closes the discussion, as you have now made precisely clear how you relate to the mentioned spiritual scientific works, including Steiner's Knowledge of the higher worlds. I will admit I am surprised, in a sense, by this clarification. And in another sense I'm not. I am surprised because you never before - as far as my memory goes - clearly expressed such a distrust in the power of what you call "Goethean phenomenology exercises" to lead to initiation. I recall your comments on, for example, the Seer's handbook, Catching the light, and of course Knowledge of the higher worlds, as fully commendatory and eulogistic comments. These are all books intended by the respective authors as beneficial for the novice student, not only for the one who has already developed the orientation you speak of. And yet, I can't recall anything in your comments on them, through the years, vaguely similar to the fierce opposition you are presently demonstrating to the "Goethean pipelines" view I've been characterizing. If I am not mistaken, there were only praising, positive words. Perhaps your views have changed significantly over time? I don't know. In anycase, we are now at the point that you compare these works with those of Matt Segall and Ashton Arnoldy
We should recall that the latter has openly admitted a disinterest in exploring spiritual science other than intellectually. At the same time, as an active academic, he implicitly claims and actively exercises a supposed right to present Steiner with authority in academic circles and on social media. In other words, he abuses Steiner and spiritual science. You recently agreed with this judgment here and now you are putting the works of Klocek, Zajonc, and even Steiner's famous seed exercises, on the same plane as Segall's and Arnoldy's? That's strange, Ashvin, if you ask me. Very strange.

However, in another sense, your present standpoint does not surprises me, because now it becomes clear why nothing I have pointed to has been able to budge you by even only one millimeter. I may be wrong, and I apologize if this will turn out to be the case in the future, but I want to say that the feeling I receive from your words here is one of inflexibility and also scarce positivity. I do confirm I don't feel attachment to the view that the APs may be the tool I have tried to characterize. That's the only spiritually viable way to hold a view. Do you also feel emotionally unattached to yours?

Speaking of GA10 in particular, I'd like to add one more thing. There is not the least possible ounce of doubt that, according to Steiner, the seed exercises alone - in the context of the known moral and feeling efforts - have the power to lead to the development of proper Imagination. These exercises are the substance of the first stage in "The stages of Initiation". According to Steiner, that's quite literally how to begin "to know the higher worlds". I won't go into the details of how some initial results of these exercises can orient the soul toward the reality of sense-free thinking and the necessity to work that out by means of all possible pipelines (perhaps Rodriel would, as he mentioned that he practiced precisely these exercises in the past). Nonetheless, isn't it noteworthy to entertain such a big disagreement with an author whom you otherwise seem to hold in very high regard? I guess this question may deserve contemplation.

Hence it is highly important to give the proper direction to thoughts and feelings, for then only can the perception be developed of all that is invisible in ordinary life. One of the ways by which this development may be carried out will now be indicated. Again, like almost everything else so far explained, it is quite a simple matter. Yet its results are of the greatest consequence, if the necessary devotion and sympathy be applied.

Let the student place before himself the small seed of a plant, and while contemplating this insignificant object, form with intensity the right kind of thoughts, and through these thoughts develop certain feelings. In the first place let him clearly grasp what he really sees with his eyes. Let him describe to himself the shape, color and all other qualities of the seed. Then let his mind dwell upon the following train of thought: “Out of the seed, if planted in the soil, a plant of complex structure will grow.” Let him build up this plant in his imagination, and reflect as follows: “What I am now picturing to myself in my imagination will later on be enticed from the seed by the forces of earth and light. If I had before me an artificial object which imitated the seed to such a deceptive degree that my eyes could not distinguish it from a real seed, no forces of earth or light could avail to produce from it a plant.” If the student thoroughly grasps this thought so that it becomes an inward experience, he will also be able to form the following thought and couple it with the right feeling: “All that will ultimately grow out of the seed is now secretly enfolded within it as the force of the whole plant. In the artificial imitation of the seed there is no such force present. And yet both appear alike to my eyes. The real seed, therefore, contains something invisible which is not present in the imitation.” It is on this invisible something that thought and feeling are to be concentrated.

Let the student fully realize that this invisible something will transmute itself later on into a visible plant, which he will have before him in its shape and color. Let him ponder on the thought: “The invisible will become visible. If I could not think, then that which will only become visible later on could not already make its presence felt to me.” Particular stress must be laid on the following point: what the student thinks he must also feel with intensity. In inner tranquility, the thought mentioned above must become a conscious inner experience, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and disturbances. And sufficient time must be taken to allow the thought and the feeling which is coupled with it to bore themselves into the soul, as it were. If this be accomplished in the right way, then after a time—possibly not until after numerous attempts—an inner force will make itself felt. This force will create new powers of perception. The grain of seed will appear as if enveloped in a small luminous cloud. In a sensible-supersensible way, it will be felt as a kind of flame. The center of this flame evokes the same feeling that one has when under the impression of the color lilac, and the edges as when under the impression of a bluish tone. What was formerly invisible now becomes visible, for it is created by the power of the thoughts and feelings we have stirred to life within ourselves. The plant itself will not become visible until later, so that the physically invisible now reveals itself in a spiritually visible way.

It is not surprising that all this appears to many as illusion. “What is the use of such visions,” they ask, “and such hallucinations?” And many will thus fall away and abandon the path. But this is precisely the important point: not to confuse spiritual reality with fantasy at this difficult stage of human evolution, and furthermore, to have the courage to press onward and not become timorous and faint-hearted. On the other hand, however, the necessity must be emphasized of perpetually cultivating that healthy sound sense which distinguishes truth from illusion. Fully conscious self-control must never be lost during all these exercises, and they must be accompanied by the same sane, sound thinking which is applied to the details of every-day life. To lapse into reveries would be fatal. The intellectual clarity, not to say the sobriety of thought, must never for a moment be dulled. The greatest mistake would be made if the student's mental balance were disturbed through such exercises, if he were hampered in judging the matters of his daily life as sanely and as soundly as before. He should examine himself again and again to find out if he has remained unaltered in relation to the circumstances among which he lives, or whether he may perhaps have become unbalanced. Above all, strict care must be taken not to drift at random into vague reveries, or to experiment with all kinds of exercises. The trains of thought here indicated have been tested and practiced in esoteric training since the earliest times, and only such are given in these pages. Anyone attempting to use others devised by himself, or of which he may have heard or read at one place or another, will inevitably go astray and find himself on the path of boundless chimera.

As a further exercise to succeed the one just described, the following may be taken: Let the student place before him a plant which has attained the stage of full development. Now let him fill his mind with the thought that the time will come when this plant will wither and die. “Nothing will be left of what I now see before me. But this plant will have developed seeds which, in their turn, will develop to new plants. I again become aware that in what I see, something lies hidden which I cannot see. I fill my mind entirely with the thought: this plant with its form and colors, will in time be no more. But the reflection that it produces seeds teaches me that it will not disappear into nothing. I cannot at present see with my eyes that which guards it from disappearance, any more than I previously could discern the plant in the grain of seed. Thus there is something in the plant which my eyes cannot see. If I let this thought live within me, and if the corresponding feeling be coupled with it, then, in due time, there will again develop in my soul a force which will ripen into a new perception.” Out of the plant there again grows a kind of spiritual flame-form, which is, of course, correspondingly larger than the one previously described. The flame can be felt as being greenish-blue in the center, and yellowish-red at the outer edge.

It must be explicitly emphasized that the colors here described are not seen as the physical eyes see colors, but that through spiritual perception the same feeling is experienced as in the case of a physical color-impression. To apprehend blue spiritually means to have a sensation similar to the one experienced when the physical eye rests on the color blue. This fact must be noted by all who intend to rise to spiritual perception. Otherwise they will expect a mere repetition of the physical in the spiritual. This could only lead to the bitterest deception.
Anyone having reached this point of spiritual vision is the richer by a great deal, for he can perceive things not only in their present state of being but also in their process of growth and decay. He begins to see in all things the spirit, of which physical eyes can know nothing. And therewith he has taken the first step toward the gradual solution, through personal vision, of the secret of birth and death. For the outer senses a being comes into existence through birth, and passes away through death. This, however, is only because these senses cannot perceive the concealed spirit of the being. For the spirit, birth and death are merely a transformation, just as the unfolding of the flower from the bud is a transformation enacted before our physical eyes. But if we desire to learn this through personal vision we must first awaken the requisite spiritual sense in the way here indicated.


From The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[AshvinP]

...

Ok, Ashvin, thanks for your reply. I think this closes the discussion, as you have now made precisely clear how you relate to the mentioned spiritual scientific works, including Steiner's Knowledge of the higher worlds. I will admit I am surprised, in a sense, by this clarification. And in another sense I'm not. I am surprised because you never before - as far as my memory goes - clearly expressed such a distrust in the power of what you call "Goethean phenomenology exercises" to lead to initiation. I recall your comments on, for example, the Seer's handbook, Catching the light, and of course Knowledge of the higher worlds, as fully commendatory and eulogistic comments. These are all books intended by the respective authors as beneficial for the novice student, not only for the one who has already developed the orientation you speak of. And yet, I can't recall anything in your comments on them, through the years, vaguely similar to the fierce opposition you are presently demonstrating to the "Goethean pipelines" view I've been characterizing. If I am not mistaken, there were only praising, positive words. Perhaps your views have changed significantly over time? I don't know. In anycase, we are now at the point that you compare these works with those of Matt Segall and Ashton Arnoldy
We should recall that the latter has openly admitted a disinterest in exploring spiritual science other than intellectually. At the same time, as an active academic, he implicitly claims and actively exercises a supposed right to present Steiner with authority in academic circles and on social media. In other words, he abuses Steiner and spiritual science. You recently agreed with this judgment here and now you are putting the works of Klocek, Zajonc, and even Steiner's famous seed exercises, on the same plane as Segall's and Arnoldy's? That's strange, Ashvin, if you ask me. Very strange.

However, in another sense, your present standpoint does not surprises me, because now it becomes clear why nothing I have pointed to has been able to budge you by even only one millimeter. I may be wrong, and I apologize if this will turn out to be the case in the future, but I want to say that the feeling I receive from your words here is one of inflexibility and also scarce positivity. I do confirm I don't feel attachment to the view that the APs may be the tool I have tried to characterize. That's the only spiritually viable way to hold a view. Do you also feel emotionally unattached to yours?

Speaking of GA10 in particular, I'd like to add one more thing. There is not the least possible ounce of doubt that, according to Steiner, the seed exercises alone - in the context of the known moral and feeling efforts - have the power to lead to the development of proper Imagination. These exercises are the substance of the first stage in "The stages of Initiation". According to Steiner, that's quite literally how to begin "to know the higher worlds". I won't go into the details of how some initial results of these exercises can orient the soul toward the reality of sense-free thinking and the necessity to work that out by means of all possible pipelines (perhaps Rodriel would, as he mentioned that he practiced precisely these exercises in the past). Nonetheless, isn't it noteworthy to entertain such a big disagreement with an author whom you otherwise seem to hold in very high regard? I guess this question may deserve contemplation.

You misunderstood my reference to KHW. Obviously, that work cannot be placed on the same level as any of the APs or GPs we were discussing (notice the comparison was between Catching the Light and the work of MS/Ashton). KHW is a work of thoroughly phenomenological exercises, designed to increase our sensitivity to our deeper intuitive process and make transparent our soul aspects - implicit assumptions, opinions, expectations, etc. - that continually preclude that sensitivity. It is basically a more advanced version of PoF (Steiner often mentions them together). On top of that, no work in Steiner's corpus stands isolated from other works, but everything hangs together as an organic whole. He often pointed this out himself. There is no indication that someone can pick up KHW and focus exclusively on the seed exercise, somehow developing higher faculties of perception from that alone, without developing any wider orientation to the significance of such exercises in the evolutionary process (nothing in the quote you shared indicates that). Such an isolated pursuit would only lead to more confusion and misorientation, as we see in FB's ideas about 'exact clairvoyance,' for example. (he often referred to the seed exercise, his work with it, and asked questions that revealed this underlying confusion).

If anything, I am trying to highlight how we should adopt a similar holistic approach when considering the value of various pipelines, and how the PoF-KHW pipelines (which are also direct spiritual exercises) should always take precedence because their inner function is to help us orient properly toward all other pipelines. Steiner makes that explicit here, for example:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA070b/E ... 29p01.html
"What matters is the comprehensible, the fact that one constructs such ideas from a few elements – the best ideas are those that are allegorical and do not refer to anything external and real, so that one can only persevere in the effort of holding on to such ideas. What matters is not that such thinking is true in this or that sense, but that one finds the inner peace to hold all the powers of the soul together for a time, to concentrate them on this one point, so that through this intensification this very power is strengthened immeasurably and becomes what it can be. So it is the inner calm, the application of the inner strength, the detachment from the rest of life that is important in this inner experiment. This must be considered first and foremost: that this spiritual science, unlike ordinary philosophy, does not aim to fathom this or that through thinking. This is justified in ordinary science, in everyday life, everywhere else, but it does not lead to the fathoming of that which spiritual science wants to fathom. This thinking, which leads to results in the ordinary sense, is not challenged in any way by spiritual science – because it is based on the ground of life – but for its goals, spiritual science depends on applying thinking, which is otherwise used to gain knowledge about the world, purely to develop the soul, so that it advances from its usual point of view to a different point of view. What matters is that thinking is not used as it is usually used in life, to explore something, but that it is used only to educate something in the human soul, as a means of expression.

So this different use of thinking within the human soul life is what matters. What one is accustomed to regarding thinking in ordinary science must be completely disregarded. For ordinary science, thinking serves to impart some kind of knowledge. Everything that thinking can otherwise do is not considered in spiritual science, but rather what thinking does to the human soul itself.

Now, I can only hint at the principle of what must take place in the human soul as a result of meditation for the purpose of spiritual research. You can find more details in the books, for example in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. For what I am developing here in brief is only a general outline of what represents a long journey of the soul, which must be supported by the most diverse inner, intimate processes, and which makes it necessary for the human being – for some it takes less time, for others more – to occupy himself inwardly in this way, to return to it again and again, and thus to strengthen his thinking inwardly."


In that sense, nothing needs to be developed 'side by side', as you mentioned before, because the cognitive methodology does not exclude contemplation of the phenomena of the wider flow. They do not need to be kept as separate concerns. That is quite evident when we consider the game metaphor, the chess metaphor, the phonograph metaphor, and so on, which draw on examples from many activities of ordinary life, including the inquiries of philosophy, natural science, and so on. All of these naturally entail us stretching our imagination into the outputs of the wider flow and considering their wider relations (especially as they come to expression in our daily experience). The key is that this contemplation of the wider outputs should not be arbitrarily divorced from the cognitive context in which it occurs. The wider outputs must be understood as metaphors for deeper spiritual processes that we can come into intimate contact with through our cognitive life. There's no justifiable reason, from a spiritual scientific perspective, to separate the two out into parallel tracks.  

Eventually, I hope you will realize there is no question of emotional attachment to my view because it is not a 'view', a conglomeration of speculations, inferences, and opinions, in any traditional sense. It is simply the way things are when we consider them phenomenologically and holistically, as spiritual science constantly invites us to do. Yes, the givens of our experiential flow can be quite 'inflexible' from the perspective of the soul that wants them to be something different, to be more in conformity with its default habits and expectations. But this is exactly the kind of 'inflexibility' we need in our time, just as we need a strong pillar of concentration in our meditative efforts. We should not be so easily swayed by the currents of our age to the point where we begin thinking, "reading the essays of this forum is rarely a solution to that lack of sense [for higher cognition]", because then we are beginning to turn away from the one avenue of inner development that truly carries hope for the future.