I think you need to disclose your position. I don't understand what you're struggling with. I see roughly two variants:
1) You understand and livingly experience the deep essence of spiritual activity (Thinking) as the union of phenomena and meaning, but you think that Steiner has done a lousy job of putting it into words.
2) You don't at all experience Thinking in the above way and as such you consider the whole foundation of PoF to be flawed.
I need to know which of the above positions (or if it is something not listed above, or combination of many) you assume because I'll elaborate in very different way depending on the context.
findingblanks wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:26 pm
Why did he say within itself?
I'll be able to answer in more detail when we clear the above question. At this point I can only speculate of why you have problem with the wording. One possibility (I'm only guessing) is that you're simply affected by the
spatiality, in relation to which the word 'within' is normally used. If this is the case, your own words can be of use:
"As you know, Steiner could not have been clearer that by perception he meant any inner or outer perception." In other words, if we are misled by the spatiality of visual perceptions, the 'within' can be mistaken as if we naively expect to find something spatially additional within/inside the perception we're beholding. When we consider, for example, that feeling is also perception, it becomes a little easier to understand the withinness. But as said, I can go in different directions of clarification depending on the position from which you ask the question.
findingblanks wrote: ↑Fri Jun 18, 2021 11:29 pm
No, just describe the attaching. Imagine you look over and see a duck. No big deal. Now describe each aspect that leads from there being no concept to the "search" (Steiner's term) to the 'selecting' and to the "attatching". Oh and describe how many concepts get sorted through before is picked.
I know how this conversation goes, yet I genuinely would appreciate a straight forward description.
Once again, I don't know from what position you ask the above, so I apologize if I'm projecting. It seems to me that you're doing precisely what I mentioned in the previous post. You expect to see the perception, the bucket of concepts and how thinking browses inside, takes a concept, aligns it with the perception, and repeats until a match is found. But this only shows that the essential and
given experiential nature of thinking is
avoided, and instead we want to have a
mental picture of what thinking is and what it does. It's pretty much what also the materialist does. He's little concerned with the immediate spiritual experience of thinking. He only
uses thinking to build the mental picture of neurons and hopes to find there 'explanation' of the thinking process.
This is probably the number one reason why people fail to approach PoF. Based on the contemporary
habits of mind, readers approach the text while imagining that Steiner presents them with
an intellectual model of spiritual activity. In reality, every sentence in PoF is practical guide leading us in a domain of
immediate experience. In a similar sense, a book that describes gymnastic exercises could be understood in the most weird ways unless it's grasped that every word points at something that should become actual experience of the bodily will. So in this sense, when we hear 'thinking unites perceptions with meaning', we get only a caricature if we try to imagine some floating perceptions and concepts that plug into each other.
On your example with the duck. It's clear that thinking can be habitual. The majority of our everyday perceptions are so well trodden that, much like Pavlov's dogs, the mere entering of the perception into our consciousness is effortlessly accompanied by the corresponding meaning, as if by
thinking reflex. Yet undoubtedly, there was a point in life, probably in very early childhood, when the concept of 'duck' was for the first time discovered and associated with the corresponding perceptions. That's why my example was for a plant that we've never seen before. This makes it easier to highlight the activity that we perform.
What we're speaking here is the most immediate and untainted spiritual experience that we can have. We're only describing what we find in the given. It's the simple fact that perceptions are complemented with meaning (concepts) through the spiritual process of thinking. If you disagree maybe you can tell me what role (if any) thinking plays in your view? What is it that makes the difference between a yellow blob and yellow blob complemented with the idea of 'duck'?
SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 1:10 am
You speak above of experiencing and thinking only in the transitive, externalizing aspect. Intransitive experiencig of e.g. forest does not require effort, the Forest is felt mostly at the base level of compassionate acceptance and well-being, feeling loved and spiritually nurtured.
Indeed I speak of this elementary intellectual thinking about sensory perceptions. I do that because it's the easiest place to start. If we can't experience the union of perceptions and meaning through thinking at this ordinary level, how can we expect to recognize it in the more fluid modes of spiritual activity? The effortless experience of meaning in relation to perceptions I've addressed above. I hope you would agree that things will be different if you see forest for the first time in your life. You'll be confronted with unfamiliar perceptions of green and brown and you'll have to engage in thinking in order to integrate meaning into them. I agree also that you may never go on to exert thinking in this way, and stay at the base level of compassionate acceptance of green and brown as purely spiritual-color phenomena. Note that nothing requires that this meaning (ideas, concepts) should be some dry, abstract concepts. If you are spiritually developed, you would look at the forest (for the first time) and use your spiritual activity to open up and hear what the perceptions communicate to you. You're aware that the green and brown is only a shadow of something, there's something concealed, the colors are only
symbols for something more. Where this 'more' comes from? It's obvious that it can't come from the apriori biological toolset that is common to us all. Otherwise there wouldn't be any argument about these things. The fact is that someone sees green and brown and stops there. Someone else sees the colors and thinks about trees, bark, cells, atoms. Yet someone else feels that the colors are impressions of the workings of spiritual beings - these that constitute our bodily and soul organization, those of light and those of the trees. So the biologically mediated color perception is more or less the same. What differs then? It's the atmosphere of meaning, of idea 'substance' that each individual has been able to integrate into the experience. How did this idea atmosphere come into the picture? How did it become integrated with the mere visual perceptions? Through our spiritual activity. And here I don't mean the activity only at moment of beholding the forest. We must take into consideration the whole gradual metamorphic process of tilling and ennobling our inner soil.
SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 1:10 am
Does feeling loved and nurtured require
linguistic conceptualization of "Love"? No.
Agreed.
SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sat Jun 19, 2021 1:10 am
Is feeling loved and nurtured thinking?
The
perception of the feeling (if we could consider it in isolation) is not thinking but we need thinking (again, not as rigid conceptualization but as the union of perception and meaning) if we are to be
conscious of the feeling. If we only have a floating feeling of love in spiritual space and nothing else, well... there would also be no
knowing that the feeling of love is being experienced. It's this knowing, idea 'substance' that makes the difference between supposed existence of floating feelings and actual conscious experience of the feelings. Why do we need to differentiate between the feeling and knowing? Can't we assume that every perception comes together with its knowing? Superficially we can do that but we run into troubles when we experience thinking. Even if love is no longer felt we can still think about the feeling and remember it. Now we have the ideal, knowing substance, but without the feeling perception. So we are justified to make the distinction. It can also go the other way. We may have been told about love but we may have never experienced it for ourselves. Now we begin with the
idea of love and try to approach its reality, even though the perception is not yet there. I'm not speaking of love between humans but love in the sense of nurturing of our Cosmic Mother. Not everyone has experienced this (most even consider it nonsense) but we can form an idea about this nonetheless. When it is about men and women, we have Karma in play whether we'll find someone to love and be loved. But when we speak about spiritual love, we have only inner obstacles, and as such it is in our power to reach this love. How do we do this? By employing our spiritual activity. We need to change something within ourselves, there's something blocking the way, we have conflicting or confused ideas about life, emotional paralyses. We need to work with our Thinking, Feeling and Willing for the meaningful transformation of our inner soil. But undoubtedly, the Thinking is the leader because it is what gives the
direction of F and W. We have conceived a spiritual Idea, we're looking for Cosmic Love and as such, all our thoughts, feelings and actions should be aligned with that idea if we are to reach the actual perceptions.