findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 3:50 pm
"Alright, thanks. That's an interesting weight you give. Even though it matches the NDE reports from many different lenses, do you still feel like it is only a somewhat reachable first-person experience during life, not necessarily experienced by each individual after death, and somewhat conditioned to an Anthroposophical lens?"
I think it will depend on the individual. And rather than it being 'the' experience, we see that it is a varity of experiences which show various kinds of ovelap. This matches perfectly with Steiner's explanations as to why such experiences will always reveal themselves in partiuclar ways, that the point isn't to map out 'the' pictures and sounds and sensations (spiritual, of course) that are more objective but to be able to read through whatever symbols are given to the actual occurance (which is the implcitly active side of all the different presentations). A true seer could read a very simplisitic account by a child or a foriegn culture and recognize that the person had the same intricacy of experience as a highly elaborated account.
"Yet I think we both know Steiner didn't come up with these descriptions by reviewing compilations of NDE reports like most people do today. Rather they were first-person artistic descriptions of his own experiences when developing Imaginative cognition through the appropriate inner methods, exactly as he indicates in various places."
I'm not sure we agree on the role that reading prior spiritual descriptions play in the formation of one's own coming experiences. Steiner himself does a fairly great job of explaining why you can't experience the details painted in Occult Science unless you take them up and internalize them in very specific and intense ways first. Steiner was reading occult books in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I assume he was beginning to learn why (from his lens) it was necessary for him first to take up specific ideas and images before he could confirm them direclty himself.
"Is there any reason to think the panoramic tableau is not something every single individual experiences after death as a sort of inverted, holistic, and qualitatively rich perspective on their encounters with others during life?"
Nope. Again, the reality versus the presentation will be the most important distinction that
an Anthroposophist will be able to make in the future.
"Is it conceivable to you that we can free ourselves from reliance on second-hand reports, which although pointing to something real are also conditioned by many lenses, and investigate this state we normally only experience after death, in the here and now? "
To the extent that I agree with Steiner that you MUST first study Occult Science, thinking about and meditating upon his images and ideas deeply, before you will be able to 'see' them for yourself and verify or critcize them directly -- to that extent, I don't think we will find some kind of 'pure post-death experience'. But to the extent that I don't quite agree with Steiner's view regarding the only way to verify his claims - to that extent, I do believe there can be more or less 'pure' trackings (again, not via the presentations) of post-death experience. For future readers: I've already said elsewhere that I believe the post-death experience is evolving rapidly.
Ashvin, can you reliably see the etheric body of a plant when you look at a living seed? Also, can you talk about the ways in which you, once you began to have this exact capacity, you then ensured that the etheric vision was exact? I know that mediums and such state that they simply, over time, notice that the vision is validated by the states reported by their sitters. But, as an exact clairvoyant in the Anthroposophical tradition, I assume your standards of tracking the validity of your etheric vision was a bit more sophisticated? When you first began to reliably be able to see the etheric body of plants, can you describe the process of improving it's accuracy?
Why must everything of value in this domain only arrive in the future? We can only say this if we are missing something about what is possible in the here and now via the available cognitive methods of modern initiation.
Do you think it is possible to change the very structure of timeless mathematical relations by approaching them via set theory, Lambda calculus, Turing machines, Category theory, etc.? Surely the artistic images we use to kindle our intuitive movements through the ideal relations can subtly color how we understand those relations, but a) that will be a minimal effect relative to our intuition of the objective relations (which themselves structure our artistic perceptual anchors) and b) the coloring effect will be mitigated in direct proportion to how
conscious we are of it and how conscious we are that multiple different axiomatic systems can lead us into the same 'mathematical' (spiritual) intuitions. Then we are no longer at risk of confusing our particular axiomatic basis at any given time for the only 'right' one.
GA 84, VII wrote:By truly experiencing the silence of the soul, we become able to hear spiritually what dwells in the world of Spirit. The ordinary sensory world then becomes a means for us to interpret what lives in the spiritual world... what resounds approaches me with a certain vivacity, it can give me, say, something like the color yellow gives me if I am sensitive and receptive to colors. Then I have something in the sense world through which I can express my experience in the world of Spirit. My perception is one I can describe by saying that 'it effects me as the color yellow does'. Or like the tone C or C sharp in music, or like warmth or cold. In brief, my sensory experiences offer me a means for expressing in ordinary words what appears to me in the world of Spirit. In this way, the whole sensory world becomes like a language to express what I experience in the spiritual world.
Those who seek too rapid progress do not understand this and come only to a superficial judgment. This is why patient investigators describe their experiences in terms of colors, tones, and so on. Just as we shouldn't confuse the word "table" with an actual table, so we should not confuse the world of Spirit itself... with the manner in which it is described.
As far as I know, Steiner never said that the realities depicted in GA 13 can only be approached through the particular images and symbols he used. This would be in direct conflict with the quote above and many similar ones. This is such an important principle to grasp inwardly when working through the artistic descriptions of spiritual science. It is very comfortable and convenient to simply stare at the finger pointing to inner realities and build Cosmological models, either clinging to those models as "truth" or dismissing the lawfulness of the underlying spiritual experiences because
we have cast them into superficial judgments. In other words, because our inner experiences are totally conditioned by sensory symbols, we assume Steiner's must be as well and use that as a reason to equate all that is described with some semi-subjective report that holds equal weight with NDEs, mediums, etc. It takes much more imaginative effort to
live through the symbols and experience how their finger-pointing
activity overlaps with the inner reality itself, and does so at ever-greater scales the further we purify our inner states.
The following passage is critical for us to orient toward the essence of Anthroposophical meditation:
GA 84, III wrote:Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly exact development of this thinking... The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem....
This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.
If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years, perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle—this inner activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler—not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.
Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential reality.
This is what we are trying to point attention to, which is directly relevant to your question about pursuing exact clairvoyance of the etheric plant world. The etheric spectrum
is what you call the 'lenses' which color our experience of objective ideal relations. By awakening into this spectrum through Imaginative cognition, we simultaneously become more conscious of these lenses which are, in fact, creative formative forces that structure our perception and, moreover, these
very same forces structure the rhythmic life cycles of the plant world and the external forms that are the outer physiognomy of these spiritual metamorphic cycles.
In other words, when Steiner or anyone else investigates the etheric 'death spectrum' via Imaginative concentration, the panoramic life tableau, he is investigating the lenses through which we perceive, understand, and orient to inner experiences (including sensory events), which are the
same creative forces that structure the lawful metamorphoses of the events we perceive, understand, orient to, and act upon during ordinary life. That is possible because this investigation proceeds with mathematical clarity and precision, so every single step in the process is traceable. No lens of the soul can remain hidden and opaque during this investigation. In fact, the whole aim is to render the soul lenses increasingly transparent, which also renders the lawful processes of the 'outer world' more transparent, because they are much more
united as One within the etheric spectrum.
Can you please confirm if the above is understood? Not if you agree with it, but if you at least understand how
we understand higher cognition, and how we consider any other common understanding that may be convenient to reach and familiar to our ordinary sensory experience except with more 'subtle' perceptual content, to be a fictional
caricature and therefore completely useless to work with. Such caricatures are not even remotely related to higher cognitive development as understood by Steiner or us.