Federica wrote: ↑Wed Nov 27, 2024 11:31 pm Language can’t serve us for the purpose of knowing our own soul, as it carries out ideal work. It doesn’t help us own our unique stance in the world. For that purpose, we are left relying on our physical body. We are mostly dreaming in mere auditory perceptions, and their re-conceptualizations.
Materialism of thinking blocks the mind from realizing the spirit in everything, and be its conscious vessel. Materialism of feeling blocks the heart from realizing through language the individual quality of our own soul, and our families’ and communities’, as key complement to pure cognition. Linguage use is therefore captive to its mere sensory, prosaic aspect, becoming a sort of inventory of sound combinations and word combinations, as horizontal proxies of trains of thought. We have been verbalizing thoughts for millennia, and we keep doing it, but once some words are pressed out, the linguistic sequence may goes on, if not by itself, through habits of speech, through external or elemental influences, through lack of conscious resistance, like a sort of overarching soft-meme, in the worst cases. Poetry, for example, is a way to resist casualty of speech by shaping conscious paths for our feelings to continually flow. Poetry may break through those check valves, through the forces of conscious feeling. But today, I may say, we are captive to a feeling vantage point: we don’t fully experience feeling in language in first-person, we rather utilize symbols as per our catalogue instructions and then we let them roll under some hybrid steering. Steiner calls it the habit of "thinking in words" of contemporary man, or "thinking half thoughts", coming down to not thinking properly at all. That's why linguistic output can hardly work back into intuitive meaning: because the link of feeling, that would make for that continuous and fluid connection, has been cut, or seriously damaged, and other forces have taken hold of that flow. Words may arouse a recognition of an idea, a sort of second opinion. They lead us parallel to, or in the vicinity of an idea, and then may abruptly begin to gravitate around unknown attractors. As such, words and semantics turn out to be a disturbance to meaningful thinking, as much as they are a support to it.
There would be much more to say in other directions, and I haven't given concrete examples, but I started late and I’m already dozy. Does that make some sense nonetheless?
Yes, that all makes sense, but I think the story needs to be expanded to include what we are doing with language here and now. If we recognize this key real-time part of the story, then the red glow can only be a provisional statement that applies to the general linguistic thinker who fails to orient properly to the inner function of language ("linguistic thinker" or "linguistic cognition" is not meant to characterize thinking as such, but only a phenomenological description of the meaningful strata we experience and steer through that is linguistically structured).
The bolded words are just my cursory highlighting of linguistic concepts drawn from bodily experience, and of course I could have bolded much more. The point is that these bodily experiences that have wiggled out into the imaginative life of word-perceptions, in the context of your post, serve a symbolic function that helps us orient to our dreamy linguistic thinking, to feel our way into its implicit structure. The explicit content of "vessel", "overarching", "vantage point", "steering", etc. is no different than someone using it to describe purely physical experiences, but that same content becomes something much different in the context of your post. As Paracelsus said, sola dosis facit venenum, or as we know the Greek word pharmakon can mean both poison and remedy. Such is the nature of our linguistic thinking - if it is administered in the proper 'dose', it can heal the split that it also creates.
We should be clear that this is not an optional part of spiritual evolution - it is only through the spiritualization of language (and therefore culture) that any other domains of experience can be spiritualized as well, of course not only for lone seekers, but for broader and broader spheres of humanity as a whole. So when we employ our linguistic thinking, not to continue fossilizing and dissecting living inner gestures (the feeling imbued aspect of meaningful communication), but precisely as symbolic portals to live into those inner gestures with presence and concentration, then the exact same word-content can serve an entirely different spiritual function. Then our linguistic output most certainly works back into the intuitive meaning we are steering through (instead of only being a dry commentary on it), as I hope is evident from our real-time interaction with the many posts and essays on this forum.
It is the same principle as it is with meditation on verses and images. One person can repeat "Wisdom lives in the Light" over and over in a mechanical way and get nothing from the experience, while another person can meditate on the same word-content as a symbolic anchor for temporally expanded intuition of existence. As Cleric put it, the words can become both the symbolic anchor of that intuition and the continual playback of the intuition, spiraling together what normally remains in a bistable condition as you described in the post above. This is an absolutely necessary starting point for our higher spiritual efforts. It reveals that the language as such is not deprived of its deep feeling content, only the latter is obscured by our approach to it when we are only interested in its utilitarian aspect. It is based on our interest and intention that the language either sucks our living attention into mineralized forms that we click together on a plane parallel to our intuitive context, or propels that living attention into the depths of the intuitive context, which can then be artistically described with linguistic forms. As Steiner pointed out, those depths must be rendered in language for us to gain a lasting orientation to the underlying experiences.
We need only be prepared to think the thing out, and feel it through and through. It is this recognition by healthy human understanding, of what is given out of the spiritual world — it is not the clairvoyance, but the activity of knowledge — which provides us with spiritual eyes after death. The clairvoyant has to acquire this spiritual eye just the same as other men. For what we gain by Imaginative Cognition, what we perceive in seership, falls away and vanishes after a few days. It only does not do so if we bring it down to the standpoint of ordinary understanding, and in that case we are obliged to understand it in the very same way in which it is understood by those to whom we communicate it.
I realize we have discussed this many times before and you are already familiar with these ideas. But I think this is a critical part of the story that we need to keep in sight at all times and it will also help us orient to what other phenomenological thinkers may be doing with language, even if the particular approach is not quite familiar to us. The redemptive function is clear in poetic language, as you described, but it also must apply to philosophical and scientific language. It must apply to all scientific models, even if those models were the product of completely mechanical and associative thinking of our compressed elemental nature. Instead of just flowing along with these linguistic outputs as unquestionable carriers of meaning that direct our attention hither and thither, we make them into the object of our concentrated and phenomenological thinking. These models must be reflecting back to us something of importance about our own thinking being and it's up to us to explore what that could be.
) "...When they talk of Thought they know nothing of real thinking; for people still only think in words. Nor do they know anything of feeling. The whole field of Psychology is today 
