Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

Of your three questions, I can only address the second and third. On the first: I haven't carefully followed the discussion about JW and I don't know Heidegger, therefore I can't say much on a few lines that I am not able to properly contextualize. In general, I would think that a remarkable quote from a phenomenologist philosopher is probably not the best example of dreaming in language, but again, I don't know the context and I can't tell.

On the weather example, I am still under the impression that we are talking about different things. Since you have not given a dialogue, featuring particular words, to illustrate that example, but only the generic flow of topics addressed, it's not possible to get a sense whether or not "mere words" have taken over the orientation of the thought flow, that is whether or not the associative attraction exerted by the word-symbols in use, has overpowered a more high-level, fully conscious, logically sustained, concatenation of thoughts. Nevertheless, beyond the weather example, I think that a dialogue entertained through visual storyboards exclusively, would work around this problem of letting word use, word associations, overpower sound reasoning, since concepts and ideas would be expressed through visual representations and pour ideal material more directly from the pictorial/intuitive flow - supposing the subjects are sensitive enough to their pictorial thoughts, and good enough at sketching to convey that flow in a compelling and dynamic way to their counterpart. The question is more complex for signed language, because some of them are pictorial, and some reproduce word-symbols through the letters of the alphabet. In this latter case, I believe the risks involved are similar to those present in spoken/written language. If the signed language has no iconicity and simply "writes" letters in the air with hand gestures, rather than with hand gestures with ink and paper, or gesturing on a keyboard, then there's no major difference. Words, and their associative attractive power, may still unconsciously influence the expressive flow, damaging the flow of meaning to variable degrees.

The point is that, no matter what verbal dialogue is associated with the intuitive meaning steered through in the weather example, the particular words are not the determining factor for whether it becomes dreamy and associative. Actually the forms in which we anchor that intuitive meaning can certainly modulate the flow of dialogue, but I think you have things somewhat backwards to begin with - if anything, a dialogue about high-level intellectual or existential questions would be much more dreamy if anchored in pictorial storyboards, because our ordinary cognition is not 'in focus' within the pictorial strata to the same extent as our ancestors. This is why we would need to add all sorts of caveats for this to even be a practical possibility for a sustained dialogue. We need to imagine how the people already developed pictorial skills, for example, which probably would have required extensive verbal instruction (if it wasn't a natural talent). For the pictures about the weather, industrial civilization, global warming, etc. to convey any refined and objective meaning, the people would have already had to thoroughly explore the verbally embodied concepts. Otherwise they would simply be dreaming their way through personal ('subjective') feelings associated with the pictures.  

Generally, we need to recognize how much power we are investing in the 'word-layer' when we speak of it possessing its own attractive power, its own spellbinding magic. We are ceding way too much of our spiritual sovereignty to the perceptual spectrum, similar to modern philosophers and epistemologists who postulate fundamental limits to knowing (as JW implicitly does). What counts is always our own inner cognitive development, which of course implicates not only thinking but our whole soul-spiritual being. Feeling certainly plays a part in this development, particularly our prayerful devotion to our thinking pursuits and our cultivation of moral virtues - equanimity, charity, generosity, forgiveness, love, and so on. That is the path into the archetypal scale of spiritual activity, where thinking-feeling-willing become increasingly united. All of this is cultivated through phenomenological exploration (which of course requires extensive verbal sequences of the sort we have on this forum), concentrated meditation, and thinking thoroughly through various domains of experience. What matters is not the higher cognitive development of the author of verbal sequences, but the reader/hearer. If we inwardly develop our cognitive sensitivity to archetypal gestures, then we can mine them from even the most prosaically written philosophical or scientific treatises (because such gestures are always embedded in the outputs of human thinking). 

Finally, on the question of feeling language rather than thinking language, as a way to spiritual progression, there would be much to say. I was particularly referring to art forms that resound, when practiced with humility, so that they don't become mere outlets for lower nature. I believe the most direct and accessible way to spiritualize language is precisely by redeeming it through feeling (the Victoria Hanna video you recently shared is one possible entry point in this direction) whilst thinking initially gains from being set free from the attractive spell (look at this word, or, should I say, feel it) of word-symbols. With meditation and concentration, the linguistic concatenations are broken apart, only to be later re-imbued with appropriate forms, from a higher place of wisdom. Only when this starts to happen, thinking can be more easily re-pressed into language sequences, for communications that the intellect can take in. Then, the language sequences still convey something of the life of thinking. They are more free from the spell of words, and more likely to elicit fruitful intuitions in others.

On the contrary, attempting to spiritualize language from within the intellectual concatenations first, seems an herculean task without higher cognition. The development of appropriate feelings seems a more accessible, natural, and direct way. In short, it's my understanding that, for the many, the most fruitful and effective treatment of language today is to soak it with feeling, to break apart the word-symbols at their level, so to say, and let the sounds in them recover their intrinsic power. In parallel, the concentration and meditation pursuits progressively clean up the stale spells crawling within the word-symbols (words we hang from, Steiner says), from a higher level, enabling the student to consciously repurpose the worded expressions in more luminous, musical, and purer sequences. This is possible to the extent that the expression is crafted from a higher activity, taking place above the level of language. As Steiner said, through higher cognition, we have to stop thinking in language, so that we can feel language:

this is the state of affairs over a great portion of mankind. Thoughts are not there at all; men only think in words, and to think in words is no way to Michael. We only come to Michael when we get through the words to real inner experiences of the spirit—when we do not hang on the words, but arrive at real inner experiences of the spirit.

This is the very essence, the secret of modern Initiation: to get beyond the words to a living experience of the spiritual. It is nothing contrary to a feeling for the beauty of language. Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it; we begin to have it streaming in us, and out from us, as an element of feeling. That, however, is a thing to which the man of to-day must first aspire. Perhaps, to begin with, he cannot attain it in his actual speech, but through his writing. For in respect of writing, too, it must be said: To-day men do not have the writing but the writing has them. What does it mean, ‘the writing has them’? It means that in our wrist, in our hand, we have a certain train of writing. We write mechanically, out of the hand. This is a thing that fetters man. He only becomes unfettered when he writes as he paints or draws—when every letter beside the next becomes a thing that is painted or drawn ... Then there is no longer what is ordinarily called ‘a handwriting.’ Man draws the form of the letter. His relation to the letter is objective; he sees it before him—that is the essential thing.

For this reason, strange as it may sound, in certain Rosicrucian schools learning-to-write was prohibited until the fourteenth or fifteenth year of age; so that the form, the mechanism which comes to expression in writing, did not enter the human organism. Man only approached the form of the letter when his spiritual vision was developed.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Michaelm ... 13p01.html

I can say I am particularly sensitive to this linguistic spell. I learned to write very very early in life, and I know with clarity what he means, that writing starts to come from the hand and wrist. In a similar way the spoken word often comes out of the templated body itself, as if crystallized - spelled (in its two meanings).

"Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it; we begin to have it streaming in us, and out from us, as an element of feeling". Coming back to your question, I think I’ve illustrated how feeling-based pursuits can be the most direct way to spiritualize language. The side of thinking comes in parallel, but less directly, since it requires more solid higher development, to rise above the linguistics level, and then descend in it again, in purified words. As Steiner said in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, about feeling-developing exercises:

When he practices listening without criticism, even when a completely contradictory opinion is advanced, when the most hopeless mistake is committed before him, he then learns, little by little, to blend himself with the being of another and become identified with it. Then he hears through the words into the soul of the other. Through continued exercise of this kind, sound becomes the right medium for the perception of soul and spirit.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA010/Engli ... 2.html#2-1

I think you are failing to see how the feeling-richness of language Steiner is speaking about is attained from the 'side of thinking'. There is no other parallel 'side of feeling' that we need to first pursue, and in fact if we let our personal feelings guide us in the sounding of language, we are likely to go astray in orienting to the deeper spiritual meaning of the language. We are then underestimating how badly our soul currents are disorganized by default, and how likely they are to lead us astray in our feelings and sensitivities to perceptions. Our lucid sensitivity to the archetypal gestures of perceptual forms (including language), only grows when we recover archetypal feeling through the entry point of thinking, where we are most intuitively awake to the lawful flow of perceptions and where we are relatively free from lower preferences, opinions, passions, etc. (hence the ability do philosophy and science). The practice of "listening without criticism" is only possible through thinking, where we can ignore/renounce our personal sensitivities and antipathies that normally get triggered by the outer expressions of another soul's inner life. Thinking is always the entry point to let archetypal feelings grow within us. KHW makes that clear and the exercises presuppose a highly developed and dispassionate intellectual life and strength of concentration.
 

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 imagination at this difficult stage of human evolution, and further-more, 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 maintaining unimpaired and 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.

Someone who simply begins with Victoria Hanna and tries to feel their way into the language, for example, will never understand the deeper significance of what is being expressed there. They won't have the proper supersensible concepts to associate with these perceptual expressions. We can only mine so much value for higher development from such presentations because we have already livingly explored so many such concepts, and we explore them even more when presenting such things for discussion in the spiritual scientific context. Think about all of her 15.2k YT subscribers. How many of those people do you think have used her work as an entrypoint to spiritualize the intellect and its verbal artforms in ordinary life or philosophical-scientific inquiries? We need to get back to PoF 101 here, and this is why I brought up the boredom comment before.

Why would you suddenly begin emphasizing this imagined parallel feeling track of spiritualizing the World Content, when all the phenomenological essays that we have worked through here emphasize how we need to start from the exceptional state of thinking, based on the whole course of spiritual evolution? We have had a few similar discussions before, for example here, and I couldn't quite figure out what was motivating this approach then, either. Perhaps you feel the phenomenological approach does not yield enough sensitivity to our inner gestures, and therefore enough advance toward spiritual sight (higher cognition). Perhaps you experience it as 'missing something', reaching a fundamental limit if we don't add in another parallel track. This comment before seemed to point in a similar direction:

As a consequence, the common denominator among all triangles is experienced as only a verbal symbol. The sense is that the only collective element is the mere token. This is one major problem of our language habits. And, even when pictorial thinking and imagination are worked with, this imprisonment in the words-in-themselves tends to persist. It’s a pervasive linguistic modality of today, that does not just dissipate the moment the power of images is discovered. We still tend to externalize language to the space of words-in-themselves, where we use it as mere encoding of abstract, unpictured, definitional, operable concepts.

It is true that we don't suddenly dissipate all lower habits and temptations when we enliven thinking, but again the temptations are not a function of language/perception itself. Does this remind you of Eugene at all? Remember how he would say that we are stuck in the dualistic state unless we add in a more 'pure experiential' path of Oneness. Yet even with the latter, he had to admit that he could not figure out how our daily thinking experience could be spiritualized and hence he began speculating about the Demiurge that imprisons us within this strata of cognition during life on Earth. I think the 'word-layer' is functioning similarly for you, in so far as it feels like a prison whose doors can only be unlocked, not through our living thinking from within the word-layer itself, but through some other layer that we can access more directly. If that isn't the underlying feeling, why do we need to have this dual-side approach to spiritualizing the World Content?

[Federica]

...

Ashvin,

Let’s take a step back and reconnect these last two posts to what I wrote just before, that you called general principles, and generally agreed with. There, I characterized the present-day habit of dreaming in language-symbols as yet another concentric cycle of states of consciousness lying below the already tight cycle of continually awakening to our thoughts, in and out of normal distractions. The cycle of dreamy thought-flow you described in the weather example is precisely that. What I am talking about is not the same thing. As I proposed, dreaming in word-symbols lies one level below the generally distracted thought flow, exemplified in the weather small talk. It is a cycle of different nature. To contextualize the different cycles: the cycle of awakening to the next day after sleeping is the easiest to grasp at our human scale. In it, we can comfortably balance clear consciousness of the waking state with clear enough memory of the previous day-cycle. Conscious presence and memory are harmoniously balanced in this day/night cycle, we feel we master it with ease. It fits our scale nicely. From here, going upward to the life-death cycle of consciousness, we can see how we overpower our current capacities, when trying to apprehend this larger rhythm. In it, we are keenly aware of the continuity of our present life, but don’t remember our previous ones, extending beyond the death phase of the cycle. In a way, we pour our entire memory capacity into the current life-phase, so that no amount of memory is left to enliven consciousness of the life-death cycles that are not in phase. The balance of memory is out of equilibrium. The cycle is too vast for our standard human scale to comfortably handle it.

Now, going from our best fit - the day-night cycle - in the other direction, the direction of the tighter cycles of consciousness, we first find what you illustrated with the weather example, the same as what Cleric called “continually incarnating in our thoughts in a strange way”. In this smaller cycle, we lose some of our comfort. Still, we may suddenly realize we have been digressing for a while inside a distracting thought. Another way to refer to this cycle is the “will-o’-the-wisp thoughts”:

The thought-world of a man who gives himself up to a mental activity determined primarily by his physical brain appears disorderly and confused. A thought enters it, breaks off, is driven out of the field by another. Anyone who tests this by listening to a conversation between two people, or who observes himself frankly, will gain an idea of this mass of will-o'-the-wisp thoughts.

This cycle is ‘smaller’ than our comfortable, human-scale point of balance - the day-night cycle - in which we are able to pour equal amounts of memory/consciousness on each side. Instead, in this smaller cycle, we start to pour more consciousness in the apparent part of the thought flow - what appears to us as a red thread - and are drawn to let a substantial part of the cycle sink below consciousness. However, the situation is not as black and white as it is with the larger life-death cycle. We are still able to pour some saved power of attention into the ‘dead’ part of the cycle (the distracted thoughts) and so we can awaken to the fact that the thought flow has been distracted, if we are careful. Sometimes we are able to, though most of the time we just flow smoothly, or dreamingly, along the will-o’-the-wisp thought trains.

If so far we are all in agreement, we can now turn to what I called dreaming in word-symbols. As I proposed, this is yet another cycle, lying below the cycle of awakening to our thoughts (and remembering the dead ones, the receding ones, possibly noticing they were of a distracting nature). That’s why I said we are not talking about the same thing. In this even smaller cycle we have even less memory/ consciousness available to pour into the diversions facilitated through association by the word-symbols. The word-symbols should be the output of a process of transliteration of spiritual reality, pure meaning, archetypal substance, or however else you prefer to call it, into sense-perceptible forms that can be negotiated in the physical environment. They should be sensory precipitations resulting from cosmic thought filtered down through the sieves of the various folk souls, the ether, and finally the sensory perception of the single individual. This continual vertical link should be known, and continually traceable. Through physical and etheric resonance (sound), it is a feeling link, in that it can be traced back up through the characters of the folk souls. Higher up, it becomes a thinking link, as it connects to archetypal meaning substance. However, what happens is that, once the precipitated verbal forms are out there in the world of senses, they tend to become captive to the horizontal, sensory layer, and to attract other word-symbols by association (basically the essence of what LLMs highlight).

So for example, the thought distractions first drive the flow dreamingly from weather conditions to, say, climate change. This in turn crystallizes some associations of word-symbols. Once the symbols are out there, in their linguistic, spelled-out form, they acquire horizontal power by linking with one another, not on the basis of fully willed and logical reasoning, but on basis of frequency of associated use. This frequency (the same rendered by LLMs) is not a direct expression of meaning, because of the largely subconscious flow within which the associations are rooted (as in your weather example). The frequency is largely the expression of dreaming junctures within the trains of thought. What the word-symbols do in this situation is, they crystallize those unconscious junctures. They are out there, available for meaning-less use. Future trains of thought are susceptible to these endless micro-derailments. They get constantly attracted into unconscious junctures, through the entrypoint of specific word-symbols - memes if you will.

In this way, the word-symbols become the amplifiers, the consolidators of the dreaming-in-language flow. The flow forgets the vertical, meaningful threads and proceeds horizontally, in a purely sense-based manner, be the sensory stimulus auditory or visual. In both cases, the physical body becomes the main driver: the physical ears and voice, the wrists and hands, the eyes. This involves both the speaker/writer and the listener/reader, though each of them can entertain their own dream, along their personal associative paths. Compared to the dreaming flow you talk about, this dreaming in linguistic symbols happens on a smaller scale, below the order of magnitude of an assembled reasoning, and it’s even less conscious. Almost the entire volume of consciousness/memory is poured into the aliased thought train, and the word-symbols are let to operate their various attractions from the bottom. Within the tetris metaphor we could say that not only do we fail to see the blocks coming from behind, but also, once they have fallen into place, we are captivated by their color and shape and we dreamily stare at them.

Coming to your further critiques, I agree with you that a dialogue in storyboard form is improbable, would require exceptional skills, initial verbal instructions, etcetera, but it was your own suggestion to take it as an exemple. A similar concept that really exists is the so called live scribing, where a meeting or workshop is held in presence of a graphist who creates a storyboard in real time, to document the discussion or presentation-flow in visual form. This existing technique is interesting, but results in a mix of written language and pictures. If we improbably imagine a similar endeavor but only restricted to pictures, drawn by highly skilled practitioners, then yes, we would obviously have difficulties expressing many refined ideas, but whatever is pictured would be preserved from the horizontal attraction of word-symbols.

To illustrate, think about times when you are searching for a word. Let’s say you need to say “elephant” in your discussion, but the word escapes you. You see the animal clearly in your mind’s eye, but the corresponding word just doesn’t come. If you have paper and pen available at that moment, you can very effectively replace the missing word with a quick sketch and move on with whatever reasoning you were expressing. If you do, the need to come up with the missing word is entirely bypassed, because the sketch replaces it perfectly. Now, if the word-symbol doesn’t enter your mind at all, you are also preserved from all verbal associations that could have entered your train of thought by the attractive force of the word-symbol “elephant”. LLM-style frequencies, recent memes, sayings, other undetected associations, could have steered your flow horizontally, through the sensory layer. But if you don’t connect with the word, you are preserved from all that. That’s why I say, a more pictorial flow preserves from the micro derailments facilitated by the sense-heavy, linguistic forms.

This said, I agree with you that, when we develop along the path of living thinking, we become more sensitive to all sorts of reality, inner and outer, which includes language, thus we can mine more meaning from all types of expressions, including linguistic expressions. This is done from a higher level of wisdom. In other words, we can enter a meta-consideration of linguistic expressions. Certainly this is so. Sensitivity is progressively developed for all scales of activity, and just as we start to imbue with consciousness/memory the larger cycles of life and death, we do so in the smaller ones as well. the continuous awakening to thoughts, and the smallest: the liminal weaving from within one word-form into the next.

Lastly, regarding your critique that I am creating a dualism between feeling and thinking (and all your related speculations into my supposedly Eugene-like psycho mechanisms) I remind you that I stress the importance of feeling within the context of the spiritualization of language in particular. This is because of the objective feeling substance in which language is rooted. I am not saying feeling should be a general cognitive approach, on a par with thinking, and somehow alternative to it. I completely agree with the PoF 101 reminders and the quote. But they are off topic. I hope I have now clarified why. Also, the feelings in language that I refer to are certainly not arbitrary and personal feelings. I agree those would only open the way to whatever personal biases the lower self is entangled with. And I agree that Hanna’s subscribers have very meager chances of making any spiritual progress on the sole basis of her demonstrations. The attention we should pay to feeling in language only works within the context of phenomenological spiritual development.

This being said, I don’t agree that “the feeling-richness of language Steiner is speaking about is attained from the 'side of thinking'”. The sound of every vowel and consonant, every combination thereof, every linguistic tone, pace, pitch, harmony evokes specific (not personal or arbitrary) feelings that we need to rediscover, through the genius of language and its various characters expressed through the various folk souls. I think we could hardly find it expressed more clearly in Seiner. I have many more Steiner quotes I could use, but for now I would stay with the ones I brought here. How would you explain or paraphrase these particular sentences, and also maintain that Steiner tells us to develop the feeling for language “from the side of thinking”?

Thoughts are not there at all; men only think in words, and to think in words is no way to Michael. We only come to Michael when we get through the words to real inner experiences of the spirit—when we do not hang on the words, but arrive at real inner experiences of the spirit.

This is the very essence, the secret of modern Initiation: to get beyond the words to a living experience of the spiritual. It is nothing contrary to a feeling for the beauty of language. Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it; we begin to have it streaming in us, and out from us, as an element of feeling.

[AshvinP]

...

Ashvin,

Let’s take a step back and reconnect these last two posts to what I wrote just before, that you called general principles, and generally agreed with. There, I characterized the present-day habit of dreaming in language-symbols as yet another concentric cycle of states of consciousness lying below the already tight cycle of continually awakening to our thoughts, in and out of normal distractions. The cycle of dreamy thought-flow you described in the weather example is precisely that. What I am talking about is not the same thing. As I proposed, dreaming in word-symbols lies one level below the generally distracted thought flow, exemplified in the weather small talk. It is a cycle of different nature. To contextualize the different cycles: the cycle of awakening to the next day after sleeping is the easiest to grasp at our human scale. In it, we can comfortably balance clear consciousness of the waking state with clear enough memory of the previous day-cycle. Conscious presence and memory are harmoniously balanced in this day/night cycle, we feel we master it with ease. It fits our scale nicely. From here, going upward to the life-death cycle of consciousness, we can see who we overpower our current capacities, when trying to apprehend this larger rhythm. In it, we are keenly aware of the continuity of our present life, but don’t remember our previous ones, extending beyond the death phase of the cycle. In a way, we pour our entire memory capacity into the current life-phase, so that no amount of memory is left to enliven consciousness of the life-death cycles that are not in phase. The balance of memory is out of equilibrium. The cycle is too vast for our standard human scale to comfortably handle it.

Now, going from our best fit - the day-night cycle - in the other direction, the direction of the tighter cycles of consciousness, we first find what you illustrated with the weather example, the same as what Cleric called “continually incarnating in our thoughts in a strange way”. In this smaller cycle, we lose some of our comfort. Still, we may suddenly realize we have been digressing for a while inside a distracting thought. Another way to refer to this cycle is the “will-o’-the-wisp thoughts”:

The thought-world of a man who gives himself up to a mental activity determined primarily by his physical brain appears disorderly and confused. A thought enters it, breaks off, is driven out of the field by another. Anyone who tests this by listening to a conversation between two people, or who observes himself frankly, will gain an idea of this mass of will-o'-the-wisp thoughts.

This cycle is ‘smaller’ than our comfortable, human-scale point of balance - the day-night cycle - in which we are able to pour equal amounts of memory/consciousness on each side. Instead, in this smaller cycle, we start to pour more consciousness in the apparent part of the thought flow - what appears to us as a red thread - and are drawn to let a substantial part of the cycle sink below consciousness. However, the situation is not as black and white as it is with the larger life-death cycle. We are still able to pour some saved power of attention into the ‘dead’ part of the cycle (the distracted thoughts) and so we can awaken to the fact that the thought flow has been distracted, if we are careful. Sometimes we are able to, though most of the time we just flow smoothly, or dreamingly, along the will-o’-the-wisp thought trains.

If so far we are all in agreement, we can now turn to what I called dreaming in word-symbols.

Thanks for this detailed elaboration, Federica. I agree it is helpful to take a step back. In doing so, I find many problematic lines of reasoning in your post and I propose to take it step by step, in the hopes the issues can become clearer. Starting with the above, we are not all in agreement. I believe the phenomenology of spiritual activity has been 'skewed upward', so to speak, in the above. The rhythm in which we are most awake and which is the 'best fit' for our current human-scale, is precisely the 'ticking' rhythm of awakening in thoughts-perceptions, not the day-night cycle.

So before we even get to whether there is phenomenological justification to add another sub-rhythm for the inner voice, we need to be clear on the reasons why the momentary thought-perception cycle is the best fit for our current human-scale. We can think about the fact that our day-night period doesn't only include our thoughts and perceptions, but also overarching goals and moods that structure our flow of becoming. Is it easier for us transform these goals and moods at our intellectual scale, or our momentary thoughts? Clearly it's the latter. Our intuitive movements are most in-phase with our near instantly manifesting thoughts (usually expressed through the inner voice). It is precisely for that reason we can reach the exceptional state and leverage it to become more sensitive to the invisible intuitive movements. At the day-night scale, on the other hand, we are dealing with more receded intuitive movements that structure our moods and daily tasks, and therefore are no longer in-phase with our current perceptions.

Another way to think about it is to consider through what cycle we are able to have this current discussion, analyzing the spectrum of cycles and assessing how they relate to one another and where we are most awakened to the intuitive meaning we are steering through. Is it not the momentary thinking-perceptual rhythm embodied in verbal forms? The whole problem of the modern age is that we always tend to forget what we are doing at the momentary thought-scale while producing thoughts imbued with meaning that point to some other scale as our 'best fit' or starting point for lucid inquiries, whether that is the 'downward' physical scale or 'upward' intuitive scale. Yet it is precisely the real-time intellectual scale, that is continually philosophizing in this way, where we are most awake and where we reach the firm point from which all other phenomena of the World Content can be illuminated.

Are we now on the same page here and, if not, I am interested to hear the reasons why?

[Güney27]

Jws comment on Steiners quote from RoP:


At this point I only have preliminary comments because I need to read the rest of the book to see where he goes with this, but I immediately see his thinking is worthy of serious consideration. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, he rightly focuses on the evolution of consciousness of Western man, and starts with the PreSocratics as the originators of philosophical thought. And as Nietzsche and Heidegger knew, that means struggling to understand the originating words of philosophy as they were thought be those early Greeks - a struggle because along the path to modernity we forgot the power of those words and obliterated the path home.

If I read him right, he marks the beginning of thinking with Pherekydes, who first saw beyond the mere felt symbol to a contemplation of nature behind it. Perhaps pointing to language as the addition to the picture as the beginning of philosophy. This would certainly have some parallel to the role of language in Heidegger. His description of man as beseeltes Wesen also hints at a parallel to Heidegger’s Dasein, but I need to read further to understand that.

Steiner proposes that Pherekydes initiated philosophy as:

auf deranderen Seite ringt sich bei ihm das Vorstellen durch das Bild durch den Mythus, zu einer Betrachtung durch, die durch Gedanken die Rätsel des Daseins und der Stellung des Menschen in der Welt durchdringen will.

This resonates strongly with me as I have always characterized real philosophy as the focus and contemplation of the nature of man and his relation to and place in the rest of existence.



The split into poetic contemplation through the picture on one side, and the drive for scientific knowledge on the other, also appears to have some similarity to Heidegger’s splitting authentic thought as poetic contemplation of nature and the reductive metaphysical determination of the objective world, under which stands the example of science. The feeling inherent in the picture vs. the cold and detached logic of science.

All of this points to the problem of individuation of the soul, free will, the nature of time, and ultimately the nature of “reality”.

I’ll comment more as I read the book.

[Federica]

...

Ashvin,

Let’s take a step back and reconnect these last two posts to what I wrote just before, that you called general principles, and generally agreed with. There, I characterized the present-day habit of dreaming in language-symbols as yet another concentric cycle of states of consciousness lying below the already tight cycle of continually awakening to our thoughts, in and out of normal distractions. The cycle of dreamy thought-flow you described in the weather example is precisely that. What I am talking about is not the same thing. As I proposed, dreaming in word-symbols lies one level below the generally distracted thought flow, exemplified in the weather small talk. It is a cycle of different nature. To contextualize the different cycles: the cycle of awakening to the next day after sleeping is the easiest to grasp at our human scale. In it, we can comfortably balance clear consciousness of the waking state with clear enough memory of the previous day-cycle. Conscious presence and memory are harmoniously balanced in this day/night cycle, we feel we master it with ease. It fits our scale nicely. From here, going upward to the life-death cycle of consciousness, we can see who we overpower our current capacities, when trying to apprehend this larger rhythm. In it, we are keenly aware of the continuity of our present life, but don’t remember our previous ones, extending beyond the death phase of the cycle. In a way, we pour our entire memory capacity into the current life-phase, so that no amount of memory is left to enliven consciousness of the life-death cycles that are not in phase. The balance of memory is out of equilibrium. The cycle is too vast for our standard human scale to comfortably handle it.

Now, going from our best fit - the day-night cycle - in the other direction, the direction of the tighter cycles of consciousness, we first find what you illustrated with the weather example, the same as what Cleric called “continually incarnating in our thoughts in a strange way”. In this smaller cycle, we lose some of our comfort. Still, we may suddenly realize we have been digressing for a while inside a distracting thought. Another way to refer to this cycle is the “will-o’-the-wisp thoughts”:

The thought-world of a man who gives himself up to a mental activity determined primarily by his physical brain appears disorderly and confused. A thought enters it, breaks off, is driven out of the field by another. Anyone who tests this by listening to a conversation between two people, or who observes himself frankly, will gain an idea of this mass of will-o'-the-wisp thoughts.

This cycle is ‘smaller’ than our comfortable, human-scale point of balance - the day-night cycle - in which we are able to pour equal amounts of memory/consciousness on each side. Instead, in this smaller cycle, we start to pour more consciousness in the apparent part of the thought flow - what appears to us as a red thread - and are drawn to let a substantial part of the cycle sink below consciousness. However, the situation is not as black and white as it is with the larger life-death cycle. We are still able to pour some saved power of attention into the ‘dead’ part of the cycle (the distracted thoughts) and so we can awaken to the fact that the thought flow has been distracted, if we are careful. Sometimes we are able to, though most of the time we just flow smoothly, or dreamingly, along the will-o’-the-wisp thought trains.

If so far we are all in agreement, we can now turn to what I called dreaming in word-symbols.

Thanks for this detailed elaboration, Federica. I agree it is helpful to take a step back. In doing so, I find many problematic lines of reasoning in your post and I propose to take it step by step, in the hopes the issues can become clearer. Starting with the above, we are not all in agreement. I believe the phenomenology of spiritual activity has been 'skewed upward', so to speak, in the above. The rhythm in which we are most awake and which is the 'best fit' for our current human-scale, is precisely the 'ticking' rhythm of awakening in thoughts-perceptions, not the day-night cycle.

So before we even get to whether there is phenomenological justification to add another sub-rhythm for the inner voice, we need to be clear on the reasons why the momentary thought-perception cycle is the best fit for our current human-scale. We can think about the fact that our day-night period doesn't only include our thoughts and perceptions, but also overarching goals and moods that structure our flow of becoming. Is it easier for us transform these goals and moods at our intellectual scale, or our momentary thoughts? Clearly it's the latter. Our intuitive movements are most in-phase with our near instantly manifesting thoughts (usually expressed through the inner voice). It is precisely for that reason we can reach the exceptional state and leverage it to become more sensitive to the invisible intuitive movements. At the day-night scale, on the other hand, we are dealing with more receded intuitive movements that structure our moods and daily tasks, and therefore are no longer in-phase with our current perceptions.

Another way to think about it is to consider through what cycle we are able to have this current discussion, analyzing the spectrum of cycles and assessing how they relate to one another and where we are most awakened to the intuitive meaning we are steering through. Is it not the momentary thinking-perceptual rhythm embodied in verbal forms? The whole problem of the modern age is that we always tend to forget what we are doing at the momentary thought-scale while producing thoughts imbued with meaning that point to some other scale as our 'best fit' or starting point for lucid inquiries, whether that is the 'downward' physical scale or 'upward' intuitive scale. Yet it is precisely the real-time intellectual scale, that is continually philosophizing in this way, where we are most awake and where we reach the firm point from which all other phenomena of the World Content can be illuminated.

Are we now on the same page here and, if not, I am interested to hear the reasons why?

Surely, if we reason in terms of ability to transform the flow of becoming, the only starting point for lucid inquiries that lead to self-transformation is the rhythm of thoughts nested inside the daily cycle. Only from there the exceptional state can be approached and the nature of reality progressively unveiled.

But we can also notice, if that rhythm really was the most awakened rhythm, we would not need to strive for an exceptional state within it, in the first place. In fact, as said, we continually awaken to our thoughts in that rhythm. Just before these continual awakenings, we were lost in objects of thought, and it's only upon the receding of the latter that we can awaken to the fact that we were that thought, we were united with it with our entire being. The exceptional state is the effortful, asymptotical quest to bring the discrepancy into phase. Unless that effort is purposefully and lawfully engaged, our natural state in that rhythm is to occasionally awaken to the already receding thought.

I agree that the daily rhythm is more receding than the cycle of thoughts, and less available for transformation, but here I consider the various cycles in terms of the continuity of consciousness we can experience at each level. I was comparing cycles on the basis of whether their ups and downs allow for a continuous sight 'beyond the hill tops', or rather create discontinuities during which clear consciousness is lacking. I am mindful of this characteristic precisely because the difficulty with word-symbols is that they easily pass through the controls of clear consciousness. From this perspective, I notice that the daily cycle is the only one in which we see beyond the hill tops, and feel a certain harmonious sequence of our becoming - our life. As a matter of fact, it is the only cycle over which we have natural continuity of consciousness, because, even though we are unconscious during sleep, on the next day we are able to reconnect the threads and seamlessly add the last receding pictures to our life trajectory. As Steiner says, the point of awakening and the point of falling asleep are the same point.

Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep.

This fact is the reason why I called the daily cycle the best fit at our human scale. It's simply because it appears to be the natural highest point. Above that cycle, consciousness and memory can’t go past not even the first hill top, and below that daily cycle, they somewhat can, but less and less reliably, as we move to the cycle of thoughts, and further on, to that of language. But all this is not to revolutionize the practice of spiritual activity, and the necessity to start inquiries from within our thinking intellect first, which is what counts most for transformation. I was simply experientially monitoring a different parameter within the human-cosmic rhythms. So I guess we can say we are on the same page?

[AshvinP]

Surely, if we reason in terms of ability to transform the flow of becoming, the only starting point for lucid inquiries that lead to self-transformation is the rhythm of thoughts nested inside the daily cycle. Only from there the exceptional state can be approached and the nature of reality progressively unveiled.

But we can also notice, if that rhythm really was the most awakened rhythm, we would not need to strive for an exceptional state within it, in the first place. In fact, as said, we continually awaken to our thoughts in that rhythm. Just before these continual awakenings, we were lost in objects of thought, and it's only upon the receding of the latter that we can awaken to the fact that we were that thought, we were united with it with our entire being. The exceptional state is the effortful, asymptotical quest to bring the discrepancy into phase. Unless that effort is purposefully and lawfully engaged, our natural state in that rhythm is to occasionally awaken to the already receding thought.

It is helps to remember the general evolution of consciousness, for example as Cleric illustrated in the pre-verbal thinking post. Our thinking initially emerges as the kind of dreaming through memory pictures, in which we can find ways to be instinctively creative. It is only when those pictures decohere into the verbal spectrum (or perhaps physical gestures, at a less refined level), that we truly awaken to our existence as thinking beings and more consciously manipulate the memory pictures to seek out creative solutions toward our aims. This is why we can say that, in the ordinary flow of experience, our verbal thinking is where we are most awake. Of course, once we are on the spiritual path and discover the exceptional state, we realize that our verbal thinking is still dreaming in relation to higher-order modes of cognitive activity. And it is true that, for most people today, ordinary verbal thinking has lapsed back into being entrained by the dreamy pictorial flow which is always there (due to passive/selfish tendencies) instead of ascending into the higher synthesis of Imaginative thinking, which can only be reached when verbal thinking is used to get a grip on the dreamy pictorial flow and purify the default selfish tendencies which it reflects. (incidentally, we could imagine an alternate history where rigorously awake scholastic thinking never lapsed back in such a way, but of course that was necessary to reach the individual ground of dead/free thinking)

The former is what you call being 'lost in objects of thoughts'. And while that is quite instinctive and dreamy compared to Imaginative thinking or even mathematical thinking (which is like 'frozen' Imagination), we have to see how it still more awakened to its true spiritual essence than our instinctive pictorial flow. That is why we can leverage it to attain the exceptional state. This rigorous 'thinking about thinking' through the grips of our verbal anchors is necessary to purify the pictorial soul flow, which allows us to ascend the gradient of spiritual activity. So in our ordinary experience, we are most awake in the thinking-perceptual rhythm which we can begin to actively direct and use as a critical anchor for our deeper intuitive movements.

I agree that the daily rhythm is more receding than the cycle of thoughts, and less available for transformation, but here I consider the various cycles in terms of the continuity of consciousness we can experience at each level. I was comparing cycles on the basis of whether their ups and downs allow for a continuous sight 'beyond the hill tops', or rather create discontinuities during which clear consciousness is lacking. I am mindful of this characteristic precisely because the difficulty with word-symbols is that they easily pass through the controls of clear consciousness. From this perspective, I notice that the daily cycle is the only one in which we see beyond the hill tops, and feel a certain harmonious sequence of our becoming - our life. As a matter of fact, it is the only cycle over which we have natural continuity of consciousness, because, even though we are unconscious during sleep, on the next day we are able to reconnect the threads and seamlessly add the last receding pictures to our life trajectory. As Steiner says, the point of awakening and the point of falling asleep are the same point.

Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep.

This fact is the reason why I called the daily cycle the best fit at our human scale. It's imply because it appears to be the natural highest point. Above that cycle, consciousness and memory can’t go past not even the first hill top, and below that daily cycle, they somewhat can, but less and less reliably, as we move to the cycle of thoughts, and further on, to that of language. But all this is not to revolutionize the practice of spiritual activity, and the necessity to start inquiries from within our thinking intellect first, which is what counts most for transformation. I was simply experientially monitoring a different parameter within the human-cosmic rhythms. So I guess we can say we are on the same page?

I don't think we need Steiner to tell us that our continuity of consciousness is much greater in the momentary thinking rhythm (which obviously he would and has, since it's phenomenologically true). How can we simultaneously say it is where we have natural continuity of consciousness, on the one hand, and that we are unconscious during sleep, on the other? The fact is that, exactly because the entire sleep period is unconscious and not even explored at the conceptual level, most people are not at all able to reconnect the threads from day to day, certainly not for more than a few days. This is why we generally have little idea why we are in a bad mood, why we are ill, why we interact with people in certain ways, why we are thinking about the things we are, etc. We completely lose sight of our receded spiritual activity over a few days and the ways in which it transforms during sleep and comes back to meet us in the perceptual flow. So we don't have continuous sight 'above the hill tops' of the day-night cycle, not at all. The only place where we have such continuous sight, to begin with, is when we actively intend to count, transform a triangle, trace our imaginary fingers, and so on. This is where we have intuitive clarity for why the immanent perceptual flow is structured the way it is, unlike the flow of daily events. We are only on the same page is this is perfectly clear.

[Federica]

Jws comment on Steiners quote from RoP:


At this point I only have preliminary comments because I need to read the rest of the book to see where he goes with this, but I immediately see his thinking is worthy of serious consideration. Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, he rightly focuses on the evolution of consciousness of Western man, and starts with the PreSocratics as the originators of philosophical thought. And as Nietzsche and Heidegger knew, that means struggling to understand the originating words of philosophy as they were thought be those early Greeks - a struggle because along the path to modernity we forgot the power of those words and obliterated the path home.

If I read him right, he marks the beginning of thinking with Pherekydes, who first saw beyond the mere felt symbol to a contemplation of nature behind it. Perhaps pointing to language as the addition to the picture as the beginning of philosophy. This would certainly have some parallel to the role of language in Heidegger. His description of man as beseeltes Wesen also hints at a parallel to Heidegger’s Dasein, but I need to read further to understand that.

Steiner proposes that Pherekydes initiated philosophy as:

auf deranderen Seite ringt sich bei ihm das Vorstellen durch das Bild durch den Mythus, zu einer Betrachtung durch, die durch Gedanken die Rätsel des Daseins und der Stellung des Menschen in der Welt durchdringen will.

This resonates strongly with me as I have always characterized real philosophy as the focus and contemplation of the nature of man and his relation to and place in the rest of existence.



The split into poetic contemplation through the picture on one side, and the drive for scientific knowledge on the other, also appears to have some similarity to Heidegger’s splitting authentic thought as poetic contemplation of nature and the reductive metaphysical determination of the objective world, under which stands the example of science. The feeling inherent in the picture vs. the cold and detached logic of science.

All of this points to the problem of individuation of the soul, free will, the nature of time, and ultimately the nature of “reality”.

I’ll comment more as I read the book.

I haven't followed this discussion in detail, but I want to say I think it's remarkable that you've been able to interest a philosopher in reading RoP. I'm glad it seems to be a fruitful reading.

[Federica]

Surely, if we reason in terms of ability to transform the flow of becoming, the only starting point for lucid inquiries that lead to self-transformation is the rhythm of thoughts nested inside the daily cycle. Only from there the exceptional state can be approached and the nature of reality progressively unveiled.

But we can also notice, if that rhythm really was the most awakened rhythm, we would not need to strive for an exceptional state within it, in the first place. In fact, as said, we continually awaken to our thoughts in that rhythm. Just before these continual awakenings, we were lost in objects of thought, and it's only upon the receding of the latter that we can awaken to the fact that we were that thought, we were united with it with our entire being. The exceptional state is the effortful, asymptotical quest to bring the discrepancy into phase. Unless that effort is purposefully and lawfully engaged, our natural state in that rhythm is to occasionally awaken to the already receding thought.

It is helps to remember the general evolution of consciousness, for example as Cleric illustrated in the pre-verbal thinking post. Our thinking initially emerges as the kind of dreaming through memory pictures, in which we can find ways to be instinctively creative. It is only when those pictures decohere into the verbal spectrum (or perhaps physical gestures, at a less refined level), that we truly awaken to our existence as thinking beings and more consciously manipulate the memory pictures to seek out creative solutions toward our aims. This is why we can say that, in the ordinary flow of experience, our verbal thinking is where we are most awake. Of course, once we are on the spiritual path and discover the exceptional state, we realize that our verbal thinking is still dreaming in relation to higher-order modes of cognitive activity. And it is true that, for most people today, ordinary verbal thinking has lapsed back into being entrained by the dreamy pictorial flow which is always there (due to passive/selfish tendencies) instead of ascending into the higher synthesis of Imaginative thinking, which can only be reached when verbal thinking is used to get a grip on the dreamy pictorial flow and purify the default selfish tendencies which it reflects. (incidentally, we could imagine an alternate history where rigorously awake scholastic thinking never lapsed back in such a way, but of course that was necessary to reach the individual ground of dead/free thinking)

The former is what you call being 'lost in objects of thoughts'. And while that is quite instinctive and dreamy compared to Imaginative thinking or even mathematical thinking (which is like 'frozen' Imagination), we have to see how it still more awakened to its true spiritual essence than our instinctive pictorial flow. That is why we can leverage it to attain the exceptional state. This rigorous 'thinking about thinking' through the grips of our verbal anchors is necessary to purify the pictorial soul flow, which allows us to ascend the gradient of spiritual activity. So in our ordinary experience, we are most awake in the thinking-perceptual rhythm which we can begin to actively direct and use as a critical anchor for our deeper intuitive movements.

I agree that the daily rhythm is more receding than the cycle of thoughts, and less available for transformation, but here I consider the various cycles in terms of the continuity of consciousness we can experience at each level. I was comparing cycles on the basis of whether their ups and downs allow for a continuous sight 'beyond the hill tops', or rather create discontinuities during which clear consciousness is lacking. I am mindful of this characteristic precisely because the difficulty with word-symbols is that they easily pass through the controls of clear consciousness. From this perspective, I notice that the daily cycle is the only one in which we see beyond the hill tops, and feel a certain harmonious sequence of our becoming - our life. As a matter of fact, it is the only cycle over which we have natural continuity of consciousness, because, even though we are unconscious during sleep, on the next day we are able to reconnect the threads and seamlessly add the last receding pictures to our life trajectory. As Steiner says, the point of awakening and the point of falling asleep are the same point.

Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep.

This fact is the reason why I called the daily cycle the best fit at our human scale. It's imply because it appears to be the natural highest point. Above that cycle, consciousness and memory can’t go past not even the first hill top, and below that daily cycle, they somewhat can, but less and less reliably, as we move to the cycle of thoughts, and further on, to that of language. But all this is not to revolutionize the practice of spiritual activity, and the necessity to start inquiries from within our thinking intellect first, which is what counts most for transformation. I was simply experientially monitoring a different parameter within the human-cosmic rhythms. So I guess we can say we are on the same page?

I don't think we need Steiner to tell us that our continuity of consciousness is much greater in the momentary thinking rhythm (which obviously he would and has, since it's phenomenologically true). How can we simultaneously say it is where we have natural continuity of consciousness, on the one hand, and that we are unconscious during sleep, on the other? The fact is that, exactly because the entire sleep period is unconscious and not even explored at the conceptual level, most people are not at all able to reconnect the threads from day to day, certainly not for more than a few days. This is why we generally have little idea why we are in a bad mood, why we are ill, why we interact with people in certain ways, why we are thinking about the things we are, etc. We completely lose sight of our receded spiritual activity over a few days and the ways in which it transforms during sleep and comes back to meet us in the perceptual flow. So we don't have continuous sight 'above the hill tops' of the day-night cycle, not at all. The only place where we have such continuous sight, to begin with, is when we actively intend to count, transform a triangle, trace our imaginary fingers, and so on. This is where we have intuitive clarity for why the immanent perceptual flow is structured the way it is, unlike the flow of daily events. We are only on the same page is this is perfectly clear.

I will have to think about it more, because I can't make myself agree with what you have written. I have revisited Clerics pre-verbal post, and I understand from that a confirmation of what I expressed above, that the daily rhythm is the one where we have the most continuity of consciousness, the one from which we can directly derive the sense of "I". The intuition of the highest essence of our human nature requires the working of memory and perception of time that only the daily cycle can form.

Man becomes a man when images of past soul states can be retained and experienced side by side with our present state. This is what accommodates the intuition of the "I". It's the overarching intuition that we exist as a be-ing going through a flow of becoming. Only now consciousness of memory and time can arise.

This I-intuition, can only consolidate when we overarch in continuous memory a multiplicity of day-night cycles. Only when we encompass the passing of the days of our life in a continuous arch, can we hold the understanding that we are the same being, that we flow through a continuous life as a coherent being. It's not when we continually awaken to our will-o'-wisp thoughts that we get that intuition. This is what phenomenological exploration is telling me. This same idea just quoted above has been so clearly expressed by Steiner as well:

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced—you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this—that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

Now this process which we have seen accomplished of the inner becoming an outer—this really gives the content of our soul-life; for if you think it over you will find you can call your “soul” all you have experienced, right back to the time which you first remember in early childhood. One who has forgotten all that he has ever experienced would actually have lost his ego. Thus in the fact that we can put memories behind us, and yet keep them, like continually cast-off skins—in this possibility lies the reality of our soul-life.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA134/En ... 30p01.html

You ask: "How can we simultaneously say it is where we have natural continuity of consciousness, on the one hand, and that we are unconscious during sleep, on the other?" This is precisely why I added that Steiner quote you said was not needed - it answers your question:

Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA201/En ... 02p01.html

[AshvinP]

I will have to think about it more, because I can't make myself agree with what you have written. I have revisited Clerics pre-verbal post, and I understand from that a confirmation of what I expressed above, that the daily rhythm is the one where we have the most continuity of consciousness, the one from which we can directly derive the sense of "I". The intuition of the highest essence of our human nature requires the working of memory and perception of time that only the daily cycle can form.

Man becomes a man when images of past soul states can be retained and experienced side by side with our present state. This is what accommodates the intuition of the "I". It's the overarching intuition that we exist as a be-ing going through a flow of becoming. Only now consciousness of memory and time can arise.

This I-intuition, can only consolidate when we overarch in continuous memory a multiplicity of day-night cycles. Only when we encompass the passing of the days of our life in a continuous arch, can we hold the understanding that we are the same being, that we flow through a continuous life as a coherent being. It's not when we continually awaken to our will-o'-wisp thoughts that we get that intuition. This is what phenomenological exploration is telling me. This same idea just quoted above has been so clearly expressed by Steiner as well:

Firstly then, man is in the thoughts and feelings which are directly given to him. Suppose you let this piece of chalk incite you to a thought; then, if you exclude everything else, if you are absorbed in the idea that has been stimulated in you by the perception of chalk, your inmost being is one with the idea of chalk. But now suppose you have grasped this idea and all at once you remember that yesterday you also saw chalk; and you compare the idea of chalk that has been given you by direct perception with what you experienced yesterday. And you will be aware that though you are completely identified with the chalk observed to-day you cannot identify yourself with the chalk of yesterday. This latter is a memory picture and must remain so. You have truly become one with the chalk of to-day, but the chalk of yesterday has become something external for you. The chalk observed to-day is identified with your own inner being of to-day; your memory picture is, to be sure, something upon which you look back, but in comparison with the other it is objective and external. And it is the same with everything you have experienced in your soul with the exception of the present moment. The present moment is for the moment your inner being; everything that you have experienced—you have rid yourself of, it is already outside you. You may imagine, if you wish to have a picture of it, that the present moment with your concepts is a snake, and what you put outside you is the cast-off skin of the snake. And as the snake casts its skin again a second and a third time so you can have ever so many cast-off ideas which are for you something external in comparison with your temporary present inwardness. That is to say, as far back as you can remember, you have continually been making outward what was first inward. The idea of the chalk, for example, which you now have, the very next moment you have made it external to you, while you yourself have passed on to something else. That is to say, you are working at a continual exteriorisation. You are perpetually creating something within you and then leaving it behind; this innermost that you have in you at once becomes an outer, just like a sloughed skin. Our soul-life consists in this—that the inner is continually becoming an outer; so that within our own being, within this inner spiritual process, we are able to distinguish between the real innermost and the outer within the inner. We are all the time within our own being, but we have there to distinguish two parts: first, our real inwardness, and secondly, the part of our inwardness which has become an outer.

Now this process which we have seen accomplished of the inner becoming an outer—this really gives the content of our soul-life; for if you think it over you will find you can call your “soul” all you have experienced, right back to the time which you first remember in early childhood. One who has forgotten all that he has ever experienced would actually have lost his ego. Thus in the fact that we can put memories behind us, and yet keep them, like continually cast-off skins—in this possibility lies the reality of our soul-life.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA134/En ... 30p01.html

You ask: "How can we simultaneously say it is where we have natural continuity of consciousness, on the one hand, and that we are unconscious during sleep, on the other?" This is precisely why I added that Steiner quote you said was not needed - it answers your question:

Let us consider this daily round of man on the basis already established, that is to say, representing it in thought as a line in which the points of sleeping and waking lie upon one another, as I have pointed out. There are many reasons, but one will suffice for an unprejudiced judgement to understand that we are bound to place the point of waking over that of falling asleep. Consider the remarkable fact that when we look back over our life, it appears to us as an unbroken stream. We do not feel compelled to regard life in such a way as to say: Today I have lived and have been conscious of my environment from the moment of waking; before that all was darkness; before that again, my falling asleep of yesterday was preceded by life, I lived again, back to the moment of waking; but then darkness again. You do not picture the stream of memory like this, you picture it so that the moment of awaking and the moment of falling asleep really unite in your conscious recollection. That is a plain fact. This fact can be expressed in that the curve representing the daily round in man comes out as a spiral, with the point of awaking always crossing the point of falling asleep.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA201/En ... 02p01.html

Federica,

It's not clear to me whether you are speaking of a more metaphysical description of the way things are and how they can be understood at the highest level of Intuitive cognition, or rather whether you are speaking phenomenologically of the starting point from which we can gradually expand our intuitive resonance into the more integrated domains of spiritual activity. I have been speaking about the latter, which of course is the most important thing to get a proper orientation to. It's also very helpful (and necessary) to survey the results of higher cognition and how the latter enriches and coheres our continuous sense of "I", however we should remain perfectly clear that we can only start the process of spiritualizing the World Content, beginning with our own thought-flow and linguistic habits, from the exceptional point of the momentary thinking-perceptual rhythm. This is where we find the mostly unadulterated reflection of our present spiritual activity, whereas the perceptual content of higher-order rhythms all reflect past spiritual activity.

The former is the only point through which we can begin to experience the life processes in our thinking and the unity of 'beginning and end' in the frames of our mental states, instead of only abstractly reflecting upon how the moment of awakening overlaps with the moment of falling asleep (which implicates the entire depth structure of our state of being). Again, it is critical to also do the latter, and both of these should always exist in a complementary relationship, but it didn't seem to me that we were ever discussing the details of higher cognitive research on this thread, which is what the lectures you quoted are focused on. Especially when for example you write, "There is no need to appeal to a lack of higher cognition to recognize the more or less pronounced disconnection of the flow of words from thinking and meaning. Remaining within plain intellectual thinking..." So let's be clear on whether we are discussing the higher-order spiritual structure as it is revealed by higher cognition, or whether we are focusing on the ordinary thinking flow of experience and how we can begin spiritualizing it from the inside-out.

[Federica]

Federica,

It's not clear to me whether you are speaking of a more metaphysical description of the way things are and how they can be understood at the highest level of Intuitive cognition, or rather whether you are speaking phenomenologically of the starting point from which we can gradually expand our intuitive resonance into the more integrated domains of spiritual activity. I have been speaking about the latter, which of course is the most important thing to get a proper orientation to. It's also very helpful (and necessary) to survey the results of higher cognition and how the latter enriches and coheres our continuous sense of "I", however we should remain perfectly clear that we can only start the process of spiritualizing the World Content, beginning with our own thought-flow and linguistic habits, from the exceptional point of the momentary thinking-perceptual rhythm. This is where we find the mostly unadulterated reflection of our present spiritual activity, whereas the perceptual content of higher-order rhythms all reflect past spiritual activity.

The former is the only point through which we can begin to experience the life processes in our thinking and the unity of 'beginning and end' in the frames of our mental states, instead of only abstractly reflecting upon how the moment of awakening overlaps with the moment of falling asleep (which implicates the entire depth structure of our state of being). Again, it is critical to also do the latter, and both of these should always exist in a complementary relationship, but it didn't seem to me that we were ever discussing the details of higher cognitive research on this thread, which is what the lectures you quoted are focused on. Especially when for example you write, "There is no need to appeal to a lack of higher cognition to recognize the more or less pronounced disconnection of the flow of words from thinking and meaning. Remaining within plain intellectual thinking..." So let's be clear on whether we are discussing the higher-order spiritual structure as it is revealed by higher cognition, or whether we are focusing on the ordinary thinking flow of experience and how we can begin spiritualizing it from the inside-out.

Ashvin,

I am not speaking metaphysically. I have simply tried to compare the various cycles: lifes and deaths, days and nights, tetris thoughts, and - as I proposed - word-symbols. And I have tried - also with the help of various Steiner lectures - to order them phenomenologically for how able we are to naturally inhabit each of them with clear consciousness. By "clear consciousness" I mean a state that allows the individual to grasp the cyclical ups and downs unbrokenly, in clear waking consciousness. This is opposed to a state where one is stuck within the hollow of a single cycle, unable to see beyond that one hill top.

And so I find the cycle most estranged from our human scale to be the life and death cycle. I definitely can’t get any phenomenological sense of continuity of consciousness/memory beyond this one present life I’m living. I know, of course, that this is possible with enough spiritual development, but I am looking at the ‘natural’ human scale in our time, which I suppose I represent more or less. Up next, the daily cycle. I find it to be the most comfortable, the one in which continuity of consciousness is at the highest. I do recognize in my experience what I quoted from Steiner and Cleric, I do have a sense/consciousness/memory/future purpose of an unbroken stream of life, that makes me act, think and feel like one coherent self, from one day to the next, to the next. I do see continuously beyond the hollows (the nights). I overarch many hill tops, as Steiner describes in the quote. This is why I say this cycle is the one in which present man is most naturally comfortable, the one that allows continuity of consciousness, the best fit for our human scale.

Next, considering the tetris cycle, I notice that some level of continuity of consciousness is definitely possible. If, on the one hand, we are very mindful of the receding thoughts, and try to bring them into clear consciousness, we can recognize the effects of distractions, we can awaken to them. On the other hand, in the direction of the future, we can strive to approximate the exceptional state, so as to break the clock-time discrepancy and progressively expand the now. Then we are thinning the variance of the cycle, so to say. But we can’t remain in that state indefinitely, and at some point we have to sink back into the hollows, we are lost in objects of thought again, and have to go back to doing our best with the not too far away receding thoughts. That's the phenomenology of our life in the tetris cycle. As I said, if we had continuity of consciousness in there, we would be in a permanent exceptional state. How can it get clearer than that? If we were continuously I-conscious of thinking and of thoughts-perceptions, we would be fully initiated. We would have leveraged the potential of the human I to its entire capacity.

So for me, this cycle - precisely because it is the crucial cycle, where our activity needs to focus, where our striving have to concentrate, cannot be the most in sync with our current human scale, and indeed it is not, when phenomenologically probed. Finally what I have proposed to consider as yet another cycle nested in the previous - the linguistic cycle - is even more stuck into the hollows of word-ebbs, though not as unambiguously impassable as the life and death cycle.
I know this is more or less a repetition or summary of what I already said at page 20 of this thread, but I hope I laid it out more clearly this time. And about being clear that we can only start to spiritualize the World Content from the tetris cycle --- absolutely. I thought I had already reassured you about that:

if we reason in terms of ability to transform the flow of becoming, the only starting point for lucid inquiries that lead to self-transformation is the rhythm of thoughts nested inside the daily cycle. Only from there the exceptional state can be approached and the nature of reality progressively unveiled.
...
I agree that the daily rhythm is more receding than the cycle of thoughts, and less available for transformation, but here I consider the various cycles in terms of the continuity of consciousness we can experience at each level.

The reason why I considered the continuity of consciousness at various scales is to get some orientation when I propose to consider the language layer as an additional cycle, nested within the tetris one, as said. All this being said, I can be clear: I am not “discussing the higher-order spiritual structure as it is revealed by higher cognition”. This is why I suggested that we may already be on the same page. If it's ok, can we move on to the rest of the reflections about language? You said you had found multiple problems in them, and I would like to know what you were thinking:

If so far we are all in agreement, we can now turn to what I called dreaming in word-symbols. As I proposed, this is yet another cycle, lying below the cycle of awakening to our thoughts (and remembering the dead ones, the receding ones, possibly noticing they were of a distracting nature). That’s why I said we are not talking about the same thing. In this even smaller cycle we have even less memory/ consciousness available to pour into the diversions facilitated through association by the word-symbols. The word-symbols should be the output of a process of transliteration of spiritual reality, pure meaning, archetypal substance, or however else you prefer to call it, into sense-perceptible forms that can be negotiated in the physical environment. They should be sensory precipitations resulting from cosmic thought filtered down through the sieves of the various folk souls, the ether, and finally the sensory perception of the single individual. This continual vertical link should be known, and continually traceable. Through physical and etheric resonance (sound), it is a feeling link, in that it can be traced back up through the characters of the folk souls. Higher up, it becomes a thinking link, as it connects to archetypal meaning substance. However, what happens is that, once the precipitated verbal forms are out there in the world of senses, they tend to become captive to the horizontal, sensory layer, and to attract other word-symbols by association (basically the essence of what LLMs highlight).

So for example, the thought distractions first drive the flow dreamingly from weather conditions to, say, climate change. This in turn crystallizes some associations of word-symbols. Once the symbols are out there, in their linguistic, spelled-out form, they acquire horizontal power by linking with one another, not on the basis of fully willed and logical reasoning, but on basis of frequency of associated use. This frequency (the same rendered by LLMs) is not a direct expression of meaning, because of the largely subconscious flow within which the associations are rooted (as in your weather example). The frequency is largely the expression of dreaming junctures within the trains of thought. What the word-symbols do in this situation is, they crystallize those unconscious junctures. They are out there, available for meaning-less use. Future trains of thought are susceptible to these endless micro-derailments. They get constantly attracted into unconscious junctures, through the entrypoint of specific word-symbols - memes if you will.

In this way, the word-symbols become the amplifiers, the consolidators of the dreaming-in-language flow. The flow forgets the vertical, meaningful threads and proceeds horizontally, in a purely sense-based manner, be the sensory stimulus auditory or visual. In both cases, the physical body becomes the main driver: the physical ears and voice, the wrists and hands, the eyes. This involves both the speaker/writer and the listener/reader, though each of them can entertain their own dream, along their personal associative paths. Compared to the dreaming flow you talk about, this dreaming in linguistic symbols happens on a smaller scale, below the order of magnitude of an assembled reasoning, and it’s even less conscious. Almost the entire volume of consciousness/memory is poured into the aliased thought train, and the word-symbols are let to operate their various attractions from the bottom. Within the tetris metaphor we could say that not only do we fail to see the blocks coming from behind, but also, once they have fallen into place, we are captivated by their color and shape and we dreamily stare at them.

Coming to your further critiques, I agree with you that a dialogue in storyboard form is improbable, would require exceptional skills, initial verbal instructions, etcetera, but it was your own suggestion to take it as an exemple. A similar concept that really exists is the so called live scribing, where a meeting or workshop is held in presence of a graphist who creates a storyboard in real time, to document the discussion or presentation-flow in visual form. This existing technique is interesting, but results in a mix of written language and pictures. If we improbably imagine a similar endeavor but only restricted to pictures, drawn by highly skilled practitioners, then yes, we would obviously have difficulties expressing many refined ideas, but whatever is pictured would be preserved from the horizontal attraction of word-symbols.

To illustrate, think about times when you are searching for a word. Let’s say you need to say “elephant” in your discussion, but the word escapes you. You see the animal clearly in your mind’s eye, but the corresponding word just doesn’t come. If you have paper and pen available at that moment, you can very effectively replace the missing word with a quick sketch and move on with whatever reasoning you were expressing. If you do, the need to come up with the missing word is entirely bypassed, because the sketch replaces it perfectly. Now, if the word-symbol doesn’t enter your mind at all, you are also preserved from all verbal associations that could have entered your train of thought by the attractive force of the word-symbol “elephant”. LLM-style frequencies, recent memes, sayings, other undetected associations, could have steered your flow horizontally, through the sensory layer. But if you don’t connect with the word, you are preserved from all that. That’s why I say, a more pictorial flow preserves from the micro derailments facilitated by the sense-heavy, linguistic forms.

This said, I agree with you that, when we develop along the path of living thinking, we become more sensitive to all sorts of reality, inner and outer, which includes language, thus we can mine more meaning from all types of expressions, including linguistic expressions. This is done from a higher level of wisdom. In other words, we can enter a meta-consideration of linguistic expressions. Certainly this is so. Sensitivity is progressively developed for all scales of activity, and just as we start to imbue with consciousness/memory the larger cycles of life and death, we do so in the smaller ones as well. the continuous awakening to thoughts, and the smallest: the liminal weaving from within one word-form into the next.

Lastly, regarding your critique that I am creating a dualism between feeling and thinking (and all your related speculations into my supposedly Eugene-like psycho mechanisms) I remind you that I stress the importance of feeling within the context of the spiritualization of language in particular. This is because of the objective feeling substance in which language is rooted. I am not saying feeling should be a general cognitive approach, on a par with thinking, and somehow alternative to it. I completely agree with the PoF 101 reminders and the quote. But they are off topic. I hope I have now clarified why. Also, the feelings in language that I refer to are certainly not arbitrary and personal feelings. I agree those would only open the way to whatever personal biases the lower self is entangled with. And I agree that Hanna’s subscribers have very meager chances of making any spiritual progress on the sole basis of her demonstrations. The attention we should pay to feeling in language only works within the context of phenomenological spiritual development.

This being said, I don’t agree that “the feeling-richness of language Steiner is speaking about is attained from the 'side of thinking'”. The sound of every vowel and consonant, every combination thereof, every linguistic tone, pace, pitch, harmony evokes specific (not personal or arbitrary) feelings that we need to rediscover, through the genius of language and its various characters expressed through the various folk souls. I think we could hardly find it expressed more clearly in Seiner. I have many more Steiner quotes I could use, but for now I would stay with the ones I brought here. How would you explain or paraphrase these particular sentences, and also maintain that Steiner tells us to develop the feeling for language “from the side of thinking”?

Thoughts are not there at all; men only think in words, and to think in words is no way to Michael. We only come to Michael when we get through the words to real inner experiences of the spirit—when we do not hang on the words, but arrive at real inner experiences of the spirit.

This is the very essence, the secret of modern Initiation: to get beyond the words to a living experience of the spiritual. It is nothing contrary to a feeling for the beauty of language. Precisely when we no longer think in language, we begin to feel it; we begin to have it streaming in us, and out from us, as an element of feeling.