Philosophical Speculations

Kaje977 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 08, 2026 9:34 am It's hard to discern here, but having watched plenty of rainbolt's videos and his excellent OSINT skills, some argued that he's a "remote viewer". However, I slightly have to disagree with that notion, since I more believe it to be a very excellent combination of general knowledge (e.g. brand names, tree types, etc) and pattern recognition, etc. Actual remote viewing works differently, but in fact general knowledge, pattern recognition and combinatorial thinking may prove to be very effective in getting good RV results. But let me briefly explain what remote viewing really is.
...
But how can a person, who generally only uses their usual five senses, retrieve such fields of information? Not talking about the "how" in, what's makes us capable to do so, but (practically) showing how to do it yourself.

This is an important observation, Kaje, because it helps point our attention to how everything that falls under the label of 'extrasensory' and even 'supersensory' perception can be considered a refinement, purification, intensification, expansion, etc. of what we do in ordinary thinking (i.e. making observations, recalling observations in memory, recognizing patterns in those memory pictures, making inferences from those patterns, and so on). These things need to be demystified in our time because making the connection to the ordinary flow of cognitive experience in itself helps us orient toward these abnormal perceptive capacities in a truly healthy way, which helps us pursue and navigate toward higher human ideals.

Spiritual science can be considered the Way of demystifying abnormal capacities for our age (or conversely, a way of reintroducing a sense of mystery into our ordinary flow of experience) - it provides the inner experiences and conceptual palette that can elucidate why, for example, thinking is limited to making inferences from direct sensory impressions and memory recall in one case, and why thinking can transcend space and time and make non-local observations in another case. Instead of being focused on attaining these non-local observations in one form or another, through RV, mediumism, etc., spiritual science focuses on expanding intuitive orientation to why such things are even possible within our cognitive flow of becoming (the "how" in the first sense you mention above), through the development of higher cognitive faculties. It does lead to extrasensory perception, as something naturally embedded within the higher cognitive skills, so to speak, but its main focus is on expanding supersensory understanding of how the whole gamut of perceptual capacities, from dream consciousness to intellectual thinking to intuitive cognition, fits into the wider context of our evolutionary process and its ideal aims.

I think you may be interested in contemplating the following lecture cycle, and particularly the first lecture, where the case of Sir Oliver Lodge is recounted. It also addresses your question to Federica about the difference between the RV protocol and imaginative stretching that leads to higher cognitive perception. Here is a somewhat lengthy excerpt that gives a good feel for what the lectures address:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA079/En ... 28p02.html
"Through the medium in question, Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that his son, that is, the soul, the spirit of Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. It was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose from that on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photographs, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium, or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, “experimentum cruris.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen the photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one shows a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.
...
Let us now turn to the other case, that of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this experimentum crucis in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which second sight works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterised as follows:—

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures, that is to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it can no longer be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane, that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify the belief that a soul from beyond the threshold manifested itself in the séance room.
...
The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is that one starts from completely normal human experiences, that one has a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and develops these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must of course have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must pay attention to thoroughly ordinary normal experiences, which, however, we are not very much interested in observing carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. And here already begins for many people the “irresistibly comical effect,” that is, when one begins to say: The questions connected with man's alternating conditions of waking and sleeping must above all be looked upon as enigmas.
...
What is attained when we try to strengthen thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by strengthening thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul-life is healthily connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory-pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of being able to place before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise by our more and more bringing meditation concepts into our consciousness, and thus strengthening the soul-faculty of thinking, just as a muscle is made strong through exercise. We must reach the point of strengthening thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense-experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence, it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense-perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many, it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy which aims through its methods at penetrating into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense-perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see Red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense-perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory-thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory-process the soul simply dives down into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by imagination we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the will how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.
...
The world into which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us also to attain an inner vision of the soul-world, we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether what Professor Schleich designates as death through autosuggestion was merely an unconscious representation, or whether what was described by Sir Oliver Lodge, was “second sight.”

We can now recognise the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose independent soul is thrust out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this may be quite sufficient to cause the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision to be driven out of the physical body not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of the abnormal observations which are interesting those people to-day who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognising the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavours to rise up to the super-sensible worlds."

Kaje977 wrote: ↑Sun Feb 08, 2026 3:01 pm I wonder, what exactly differentiates the exercises given here on this forum and the CRV technique regarding RV? I mean, after all, you still have to consciously do the 'quiet' part, otherwise the technique, as a funnel, doesn't work. There is certain inner effort involved, otherwise it wouldn't bear much fruit. The fact that I can do it even without any protocols or steps, just raw RV with pen and paper, and having a target, is evidence of that. I admit, I can't really put it into words what happened internally within me that made me 'see' it (the inner process itself), but right before I started drawing and concentrating, I saw brief, flashing images and something non-visual appearing (like a lucid feeling or knowing), so basically I "knew" they weren't just fantasy, they were true and authentic, but I couldn't always draw it correctly because it felt somewhat cluttered, and I had to use my reflective thinking afterwards to make 'sense' of it and draw it. Maybe you were talking about the "inner process" itself? Or do you mean the way how the lucid knowing (I can't describe it well, but it felt like something that pierces through right into your eye (I could sense it, like if you try to move the inner space movement in your eye backwards, behind the eye socket), quite similar to the inner body stretching, but from the image itself)

Thanks for your detailed reply, Kaje. I will only focus on this question for now. It seems quite an important one.

Yes, I was talking about the inner process itself - the only process that has a chance to clarify everything, since outer events can't be understood in full clarity by themselves. They only make sense when illuminated by the light of the inner process.
I would say: the way you seem to intend "consciously", as in "doing the quite part consciously", is not the same meaning of "consciously" spiritual-scientifically intended. You were indeed reflectively conscious of a certain intention that was guiding you. But there is a deeper way in which we can be conscious, and, by the way, that the results were accurate cannot be a proof that consciousness was there. If you think about it logically, consciousness, supposed to preexist and overarch the experience, can never be proved by a posteriori results. Rather, we are in the realm of mere suppositions. I hope I will be able to elucidate that in the next paragraphs.

The difference between the spiritual-scientific exercises in Cleric and Ashvin's essays and the CRV exercises is big. However, as long as the focus is on performance/challenge for the sake of it - on succeeding with a task so it can be ticked off and one can move to the next item on the list, as you describe - it’s not so easy to notice the difference.

But let's see. If you now recall the experience of succeeding with the CRV target, you will notice that, along the entire process, you have actually only been aware of two separate series of mental pictures: first, the thoughts representing the question to inquire about and your intention to somehow identify the target, possibly completed by thought-pictures of physical sensations; and then, the target images which you have laid down on paper. This means that you (or any other remote viewer) have not been aware of walking the ideal/inner path that led you from the intention to the target image. You were exactly at the center of the endeavor, and still, you were somehow 'not there' when the intention dynamically transformed in a way that you then documented outwardly in sketch form.

In other words, you don’t consciously know through what laws, interactions, and processes you transformed so that, as a consequence, a fitting image ended up appearing to your mind. You only know that you wished to inquire about a certain question, and that somehow an image took shape in your mind’s eye, as token of a mysterious process. Logically, you were supposed to be the star of the show, but despite being the main performer, somehow the real-time process remained veiled and mysterious. In this sense, the CRV performance is not complete. One should only be able to really tick it off of the list once the entire process can be consciously traced, continuously, from A to B. When this is not achieved - and it can only be achieved through spiritual-scientific practice - we are left with a mere sketch as a delayed report of an otherwise fully unconscious inner process. It doesn't matter that the sketched may be accurate. What matters is that we have no idea why and how it is accurate, and what living interactions that we were a part of actually made that happen.

This unconsciousness is similar to the unconscious experience of our bodily will. When we pick up a book from the table, for example, we also have no continuous presence or consciousness within the process by which the intention is transformed into physical action and accomplished. We only know indirectly that a certain intention (to pick up the book) has manifested in our flow of becoming (we have become aware of its reflection in the form of a mental picture) and then we also know, through the indirection of another sequence of mental pictures, that our physical hand was approaching the book, and it was then holding it. What we are clearly conscious of are only the reflected mental pictures that monitor the entire inner process, to give us an a-posteriori report.

(That’s the nature of mental pictures anyway: they can’t achieve anything more than giving us a delayed account of some real-time activity that we don’t have the faculties to notice in the heat of the moment, despite the fact that we are totally and directly involved in it).

Basically we don’t have the first-person conscious experience of translating the intention into action. We only receive a flatten a-posteriori report, which informs us that the intention we had was actually fulfilled. Commonly, we call such experience of acknowledgment “being fully aware of picking up the book” just because we follow the report. But if we consider the matter carefully we will realize that, strangely enough, the crucial, living experience of that flow is direly missing from our consciousness. If it wasn’t for the journalistic account provided by the mental pictures, we would have no idea whatsoever that we pushed our intentional flow towards a state in which we hold the book in our hand. When we watch the news, it’s only normal that our awareness of the facts entirely depends on the reporting, but in our case we were there in person! How is it possible that we have to let the ‘news’ (the thought-pictures) inform us of an action that unfolded with us at its very center?

These are the questions that only a spiritual-scientific education can take care of, so that we progressively learn how not to sleep through such experiences. Practices like inner space stretching help bring presence at the moving threshold of unconsciousness, by progressively sensitizing the mind to an entire inner context (non local) that usually goes completely unnoticed, because of both defective attention and focus, and scarcity of thinking strength, intensity, and refinement. As Ashvin put it, spiritual science focuses on expanding intuitive orientation to why such things are even possible within our cognitive flow of becoming (the "how" in the first sense you mention above), through the development of higher cognitive faculties.

Through inner stretching and other spiritual-scientific exercises, the goal is to ensure continuity of insight, through an intuitive context in which we expand our presence/consciousness by becoming progressively more ‘dense’ in it. The goal is to really feel in there, know the process in substance, and experience its lawful, real-time becoming, by participating in the ideal landscape of being(s). The becoming that we now begin to understand from the inside out, when transduced into the physical space-time context of the particular question at stake, corresponds to an event line going from A to B, that we can trace. The whole process requires a progressive densification and sensitization of the intuitive context that continuously connects our perspective - our inner world - with its living (made of living beings) environment.

So we see that there is a big difference between flying asleep on the wings of some mysterious dynamics by which we end up waking up to a mental picture that reports us about “B”, and living through the entire real-life navigation, not even only as a passenger but as a co-pilot, once we have developed enough sensitivity to the non local spiritual landscape we always belong too, but are too insensitive to become aware of at first. Perhaps it would be helpful for you to reframe your ‘to do-lists’ so that you only allow yourself to tick off a (spiritual-scientific) exercise or practice when you have densified your intuitive context enough that each small step of the navigation feels imbued with growing consciousness, and closely participated, and you don't have anymore the experience of awakening to a successful end state - an end mental-picture.

When this is pursued, there is an extra bonus to collect along the way - a life-saving bonus. Since there is no limit to the upward expansion of human knowledge (there is no point when one can say that the expansion/densification of the intuitive context has been topped up to an upper limit) soon enough, one loses focus on achieving and ticking off results 'horizontally’ (no gaps), to go from one target to the next, and the next. Instead, one's intents are beneficially reoriented vertically, towards a deepening of understanding that comes through the practice itself. You can think of it as ascending a fractal, but a much more multidimensional one, compared to the YT fractals. Through the practice, it becomes impossible to get bored and lose interest. Instead, one becomes continually elevated and amazed by the limitless deepening of one's first-person evolution within the living spiritual landscape.