Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

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 waking consciousness. This is opposed to a state where we are 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) overarching 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 indeed 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:

Federica, I do want to eventually address the rest of your original post, but this sub-discussion has revealed a huge discrepancy in phenomenological understanding and I hope we are both interested in resolving it before attempting to move on. In fact, this discrepancy is probably related to all of the other problems I noticed in the subsequent reasoning. So we simply aren't at all on the same page in this sub-discussion.

Since you have clarified that you are speaking of ordinary phenomenological thinking experience, the 'natural human scale', and so on, this only makes the discrepancy more pronounced. I cannot help but think this is a great illustration of how we can go astray if we try to approach these questions from the 'side of feeling'. When you speak about the daily cycle being the most 'comfortable', it seems like you are trying to sense what 'feels right' to you from initial impressions. What results from that more feeling-based approach is a gradient that is simply not aligned with the phenomenology of spiritual activity. This is exactly why we need to resist this approach from the 'side of feeling' and always begin through the side of thinking.

You mention that Steiner and Cleric support this feeling that the daily cycle is where "continuity of consciousness is at the highest", but that is not accurate. Even without going through their lectures and posts, I can say with 100% confidence that they would never assert that because it is not aligned with phenomenological experience. We have to see that even if we can conceptualize how our days fit together through the dark periods in some nebulous way, this doesn't at all translate into intuitive clarity about how the threads of spiritual activity weave them into a Unity. It is enough to see how the perceptual flow of our daily cycles generally involves other souls with whom we interact, which then implicates complicated elastic (karmic) soul tensions. We simply don't know, at an intuitive level, why we have been brought into contact with these other souls and why we interact them with them in the way that we do.

Within the tetris cycle, on the other hand, we are dealing with the perceptual flow of mental pictures and it is here where we can gain a firm point of intuitive clarity about the reasons why our mental pictures condense in one way and not others, combine with each other in certain configurations, and so on. That's not to say the elastic soul tensions are not implicit in this cycle as well, but we are able to bring into focus a point of overlap between the intuitive depth structure and our lucid cognitive horizon of perceptions. As you know, this is all basic PoF. It's enough to ask ourselves whether we think Steiner, in later lectures, developed some alternate phenomenological approach that begins with intuiting the transformations of the day-night cycle? Clearly not. But even leaving Steiner aside, we can easily verify all of this in our own intimate thinking experience. This has been extensively explored on the forum as well.

What does it mean to see continuously over the hollows overarching the hilltops? As long as we still within a planar mode of intellectual thinking, we cannot speak of seeing continuously, only spreading our mineralized concepts over the hollows. As we have discussed, we can never attain intuitive sight by either nebulously trying to feel our way into these cycles or spreading our concepts faster and faster over the hollows. That is sort of like trying to feel our whole hand by focusing attention on the tips of our fingers and then switching attention between them faster and faster. Our attentional movement may blur together, but we never reach the holistic sensation of the hand in this way. Instead, we need to ‘zoom out’ our attention to a higher-order scale than the scale of the particular fingertips, so to speak, becoming aware of an irreducible wholeness that is more than the sum of its parts. Analogously, we can only reach the inner contextual depth of our mental picturing activity by 'zooming out' our attention into the flow of the imaginative activity itself, which unites the frames of our mental pictures but cannot be found contained within the content of those pictures.

The only entry point for that zooming out is within the tetris cycle, the ticking scale of thought-perceptions which manifest instantly and lucidly from our intuitive movements. Would it be easier to live in the exceptional state, consciously uniting with the intuitive intents that structure the perceptual flow, within the tetris cycle or within the day-night cycle? I think it's clear that the former is much easier for modern thinking humans. With all that said, I am interested to see where we stand on this question before moving further to any other points, because it is of utmost importance for all our further phenomenological reasoning.

[Federica]

Federica, I do want to eventually address the rest of your original post, but this sub-discussion has revealed a huge discrepancy in phenomenological understanding and I hope we are both interested in resolving it before attempting to move on. In fact, this discrepancy is probably related to all of the other problems I noticed in the subsequent reasoning. So we simply aren't at all on the same page in this sub-discussion.

Since you have clarified that you are speaking of ordinary phenomenological thinking experience, the 'natural human scale', and so on, this only makes the discrepancy more pronounced. I cannot help but think this is a great illustration of how we can go astray if we try to approach these questions from the 'side of feeling'. When you speak about the daily cycle being the most 'comfortable', it seems like you are trying to sense what 'feels right' to you from initial impressions. What results from that more feeling-based approach is a gradient that is simply not aligned with the phenomenology of spiritual activity. This is exactly why we need to resist this approach from the 'side of feeling' and always begin through the side of thinking.

You mention that Steiner and Cleric support this feeling that the daily cycle is where "continuity of consciousness is at the highest", but that is not accurate. Even without going through their lectures and posts, I can say with 100% confidence that they would never assert that because it is not aligned with phenomenological experience. We have to see that even if we can conceptualize how our days fit together through the dark periods in some nebulous way, this doesn't at all translate into intuitive clarity about how the threads of spiritual activity weave them into a Unity. It is enough to see how the perceptual flow of our daily cycles generally involves other souls with whom we interact, which then implicates complicated elastic (karmic) soul tensions. We simply don't know, at an intuitive level, why we have been brought into contact with these other souls and why we interact them with them in the way that we do.

Within the tetris cycle, on the other hand, we are dealing with the perceptual flow of mental pictures and it is here where we can gain a firm point of intuitive clarity about the reasons why our mental pictures condense in one way and not others, combine with each other in certain configurations, and so on. That's not to say the elastic soul tensions are not implicit in this cycle as well, but we are able to bring into focus a point of overlap between the intuitive depth structure and our lucid cognitive horizon of perceptions. As you know, this is all basic PoF. It's enough to ask ourselves whether we think Steiner, in later lectures, developed some alternate phenomenological approach that begins with intuiting the transformations of the day-night cycle? Clearly not. But even leaving Steiner aside, we can easily verify all of this in our own intimate thinking experience. This has been extensively explored on the forum as well.

What does it mean to see continuously over the hollows overarching the hilltops? As long as we still within a planar mode of intellectual thinking, we cannot speak of seeing continuously, only spreading our mineralized concepts over the hollows. As we have discussed, we can never attain intuitive sight by either nebulously trying to feel our way into these cycles or spreading our concepts faster and faster over the hollows. That is sort of like trying to feel our whole hand by focusing attention on the tips of our fingers and then switching attention between them faster and faster. Our attentional movement may blur together, but we never reach the holistic sensation of the hand in this way. Instead, we need to ‘zoom out’ our attention to a higher-order scale than the scale of the particular fingertips, so to speak, becoming aware of an irreducible wholeness that is more than the sum of its parts. Analogously, we can only reach the inner contextual depth of our mental picturing activity by 'zooming out' our attention into the flow of the imaginative activity itself, which unites the frames of our mental pictures but cannot be found contained within the content of those pictures.

The only entry point for that zooming out is within the tetris cycle, the ticking scale of thought-perceptions which manifest instantly and lucidly from our intuitive movements. Would it be easier to live in the exceptional state, consciously uniting with the intuitive intents that structure the perceptual flow, within the tetris cycle or within the day-night cycle? I think it's clear that the former is much easier for modern thinking humans. With all that said, I am interested to see where we stand on this question before moving further to any other points, because it is of utmost importance for all our further phenomenological reasoning.

"I cannot help but think this is a great illustration of how we can go astray if we try to approach these questions from the 'side of feeling'."

I think this is a psychological theory built on previously speculated psychological theories. As a method, it can quickly introduce large discrepancies. Just because I have highlighted the fact (Steiner says it, not I) that language stands between feeling and thinking and therefore can be approached from both sides, doesn't mean I have designated feeling the primary form of spiritual activity. I have already reassured you about that but, as it appears, uselessly.



"We have to see that even if we can conceptualize how our days fit together through the dark periods in some nebulous way, this doesn't at all translate into intuitive clarity about how the threads of spiritual activity weave them into a Unity."


To be honest, I don’t understand what a feeling approach to the daily cycle consists of, in your view. For my part, I do have some level of intuitive clarity about how my days fit together in continuity, across the dark periods. I think we all have that, to variable extents and intensities. If I read one Steiner lecture per week, I will need 115 years to read them all, and so I know it’s not going to happen. So I may readjust my intentions, thoughts, feelings, and actions accordingly. If I issue an invoice today, it’s within the context of the arc of my monthly, quarterly, and yearly activity, in parallel with the arc of a client relation, with the arc of a service delivery, that of VAT declarations, and intersecting with the arcs of my other daily activities, etcetera. These and similar conscious experiences constitute a dense network that overarches the daily cycles and provides me with an intuition of my path, purpose, past and future, as a unitary being.

Surely, I don’t have clear knowledge of, for example, my karmic connections with the people I happen to interact with, and I know well that the path to develop that kind of clairvoyance unequivocally starts from thinking. I know that the experience of sleep changes with development, to become more and more imbued with consciousness, which transforms self-knowledge and world knowledge. and I realize how one has to work in that direction, and that feeling is by no means the leading approach. But that doesn't change the fact of experience that the I-intuition of existing as a unitary being of will, feeling and thinking, gained through the variously extended waves that map the intuitive context we navigate through the daily cycles, is an experience superior to the carousel of will-o’-the-wisp thoughts, that first hit us in the neck from behind, and then lead us by the nose hither and thither. As a conscious experience, it is more characteristically human, even if the consciousness of self can be extended indefinitely, if higher cognition is approached.

Can you understand what I’m saying without imagining that in the background of that I want to give up thinking, and have been led astray along “the way of feeling”?

[AshvinP]

"We have to see that even if we can conceptualize how our days fit together through the dark periods in some nebulous way, this doesn't at all translate into intuitive clarity about how the threads of spiritual activity weave them into a Unity."


To be honest, I don’t understand what a feeling approach to the daily cycle consists of, in your view. For my part, I do have some level of intuitive clarity about how my days fit together in continuity, across the dark periods. I think we all have that, to variable extents and intensities. If I read one Steiner lecture per week, I will need 115 years to read them all, and so I know it’s not going to happen. So I may readjust my intentions, thoughts, feelings, and actions accordingly. If I issue an invoice today, it’s within the context of the arc of my monthly, quarterly, and yearly activity, in parallel with the arc of a client relation, with the arc of a service delivery, that of VAT declarations, and intersecting with the arcs of my other daily activities, etcetera. These and similar conscious experiences constitute a dense network that overarches the daily cycles and provides me with an intuition of my path, purpose, past and future, as a unitary being.

Surely, I don’t have clear knowledge of, for example, my karmic connections with the people I happen to interact with, and I know well that the path to develop that kind of clairvoyance unequivocally starts from thinking. I know that the experience of sleep changes with development, to become more and more imbued with consciousness, which transforms self-knowledge and world knowledge. and I realize how one has to work in that direction, and that feeling is by no means the leading approach . But that doesn't change the fact of experience that the I-intuition of existing as a unitary being of will, feeling and thinking, gained through the variously extended waves that map the intuitive context we navigate through the daily cycles, is an experience superior to the carousel of will-o’-the-wisp thoughts, that first hit us in the neck from behind, and then lead us by the nose hither and thither. As a conscious experience, it is more characteristically human, even if the consciousness of self can be extended mindefinitely, if higher cognition is approached.

Can you understand what I’m saying without imagining that in the background of that I want to give up thinking, and have been led astray along “the way of feeling”?

What is evident, Federica, is that you are not assessing the meaning of 'intuitive clarity' properly and therefore reaching erroneous conclusions about the gradient of our existential rhythms, which can potentially lead to great misorientation. This has been repeated in practically every recent post. I don't know if this is because of the 'feeling approach', because you are misinterpreting certain lectures of Steiner and posts of Cleric, or because of something else entirely. I am only hoping that you are interested in using the meaningful feedback of my responses to work that out for yourself. That means you need to remain open to the possibility that are misunderstanding something. I get the sense that, whenever the responses come from me specifically, this opening narrows to near non-existence. In that case, the only possibility may be if Cleric decides to illustrate something about this discussion of the daily cycle, because I am sure you meet his posts with greater openness. And perhaps he will point out how I am missing some aspect as well, which I am also open to considering.

In any case, I will try one more time to point out the issue as I currently see it.

For my part, I do have some level of intuitive clarity about how my days fit together in continuity, across the dark periods. I think we all have that, to variable extents and intensities. If I read one Steiner lecture per week, I will need 115 years to read them all, and so I know it’s not going to happen. So I may readjust my intentions, thoughts, feelings, and actions accordingly. If I issue an invoice today, it’s within the context of the arc of my monthly, quarterly, and yearly activity, in parallel with the arc of a client relation, with the arc of a service delivery, that of VAT declarations, and intersecting with the arcs of my other daily activities, etcetera. These and similar conscious experiences constitute a dense network that overarches the daily cycles and provides me with an intuition of my path, purpose, past and future, as a unitary being.

Certainly, whenever we think about our flow of experience, even with intellectual gestures, we are attaining certain intuitions about its lawfulness. These are extremely chopped up intuitions and, for that reason, there is a fundamental ceiling on what can be attained in this way. Your examples highlight this very well. The best you can do is take your past experiences of reading Steiner's lectures and extrapolate that indefinitely into the future to come up with some sense of how to modulate your spiritual activity in that domain. That is actually how much of modern scientific theories operate, for example in geology. And that's really the best they can do with mere intellectual gestures. Yet it's easy to see how there are so many unknown factors that could easily make your modulation suboptimal - for example, you wouldn't be taking into account how your rate of reading can increase as you progress in your intuitive understanding of the content. It's the same with the invoice example. The point is that there are certain aspects of these daily+ arcs can never be reached through the chopped up intuition that feeds back on our intellectual gestures. The examples you are giving are little different than the natural scientist who feels they have reached 'intuitive clarity' about biological processes because they have spread their mineralized concepts over the sensory transformations and received some chopped up intuition in return. Because they have nothing to compare that to, the intuitions feel profound and powerful, like it really gives them the optimal directions for future research.

This is of course understandable for the natural scientist who doesn't know any better, but it is an extremely problematic approach for anyone on the spiritual path. We really need to reach the stage where we feel like we know nothing about the perceptual flow, except in this tiny segment of our active imaginative life. It is in that segment where we can finally discover intuitive clarity in its true essence, and therefore have a basis to compare all other daily experiences and distinguish what is 'path and purpose' and what is simply mysterious events into which we are projecting our preferred concepts about 'path and purpose', which in fact could be easily working at cross-purposes with higher intuitive intents. Even with our intellectual gestures, we can start to sense how intentionally counting to 10 in a smooth way with proper attention to those gestures is bringing intuitive clarity that we will find nowhere in any other part of our daily cycle of experience. When we do the delayed red dot (and lagging/leading finger) exercise from Cleric's essays, for example, it is true that we don't feel like we are initially exploring intuitions of great practical value, like something that will helps us with our client relations or financial issues. This practical value will grow with time. On the other hand, we do quickly realize the practical value for mining holistic intuitive meaning more efficiently from esoteric writings.

I know you aren't challenging what I am saying in the 2nd paragraph, but we need to realize there is also a danger to keeping another imaginary door open. The fact is that we are always looking for excuses, out of anxiety and fear of the spiritual world, to relax on the side of thinking, to avoid the pinhole of cognition, and see if we can attain profound insight in some other way. We need to take these inner temptations seriously. The best defense to such temptations is always truthful orientation. Whenever we stray into erroneous understandings of our experiential flow, it is for a reason - it is telling us something meaningful about our inner constitution and where it could be headed. We simply need to pay attention to that meaningful feedback and take it seriously.

[AshvinP]

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.

Now I haven't ignored this part of your comment, so I will briefly touch on it. I think you are providing a helpful and interesting way of describing the way in which our associative thinking can take shape, but I still don't understand what this sub-rhythm or smaller cycle is that you associated specifically with word-symbols. I don't get why, for example, it would be any different if the two people were dreaming their way through the climate change discussion with sign language, which are also 'crystallizing the unconscious junctures'. Why would the word-symbols specifically be more susceptible to the micro-derailments and operate more attractions from the bottom than the sign language gestures (other than the fact that many more people think/communicate verbally)?

We can also use Cleric's illustration of planar vs. vertical thinking here:

To make everything even clearer it can be useful to look more closely at our normal thinking process. In our ordinary thought life, our activity feels as if it moves and rearranges mental puzzle pieces (words, images, whole storyboard pictures, etc.). They are either mental images that feel like replicas of conscious phenomena, or symbols for them. The symbols, however, are conscious phenomena too – for example, the thought-word ‘house’ is in itself a mental replica of a sound experience, yet ordinarily, we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house. As already explained, in this kind of thinking we tend to forget that we’re actually thinking. What we experience is the intuition behind the arrangements of the puzzle pieces, i.e. how they click together between themselves and with the perceptual spectrum. We can call this kind of thinking horizontal or planar because it feels like we are ‘here’ with our intellect, merged with the background, and we arrange mental images ‘there’, on the imaginative plane in front of our mind’s eye. We can also distinguish another kind of thinking which we can call vertical or depth thinking.

[illustration]

These are not fundamentally different modes of thinking. In their essence, they are both means of focusing intuition. The difference is that in planar mode all our intuition is about the mental images that click together, without much concern about the actual thinking process, while with depth thinking, it is precisely the fact that we’re focusing meaning from within our intuitive context that is of prime importance.

The latter kind of thinking can most easily be exemplified through our activity of remembering (see also the ‘what we had for breakfast’ example in FoHC). When we remember something, we focus the memory thought-images from within our intuitive context. We are interested not simply in any mental images (which would correspond to fantasy) but precisely those that fit musically within the dim intuition of the thing we try to remember. The fact that they fit in this way doesn’t in itself guarantee that our dim intuition is truthful. The memory images that explicate this intuition need to fit also with the rest of the phenomenal content. In other words, we should always be pursuing the harmony of the facts.

When historians seek to reconstruct the events of the past, their thinking is in the planar mode. Their intuition grows through mental pieces that click together with perceptual facts – written records, artifacts, etc. Here the ideal is to let the perceptual facts, if we may so express, exercise a kind of ‘suction’ on our intuitive context and draw the meaning to themselves. The historian feels secure only when the intuition thus drawn is fully determined by the perceptual facts, there shouldn’t be anything subjective.

I don't see anything different between what you are describing as the smaller cycle of associative word-based thinking and what is described above as the historian's planar thinking. In other words, when you write - "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)... They are out there, available for meaning-less use" - I think this is at direct odds with the illustration above and I don't see how it is possible. Even if the verbal thinking is all based on frequency of associated use, that does not disconnect it from its fundamental character of being a means of focusing intuitions. It just means the intuitions being focused can only be reflected in an extremely narrow, mechanical, repetitive, etc. way. We have to remember the words get caught up in these frequencies of associated use for concrete reasons related to various contextual factors of spiritual evolution. The associations are not completely arbitrary or random in any fundamental sense (indeed nothing in the perceptual spectrum can ever be random in such a sense).

Do you see what I mean?

[Cleric]

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.

We need to be clear what 'natural' implies. If it is about at what scale adults in our age find their consciousness to be most predominantly treading, then yes, your observation is correct. An adult consciously programs mainly the daily routine. We say "I'll get a breakfast, then I have some emails to write, then I'll need to go to the bookstore and maybe grab a lunch with Suzy." If asked about the greater rhythms, like the Arabs the person may say "Tomorrow never comes" - it's of no use to make detailed plans for longer timespans, except in the broadest lines, because things are so uncertain nowadays. On the other hand, when asked about the smaller rhythms, they are too volatile, too uncontrollable. Even the conversation with Suzy was probably mostly small talk, piling up verbal depictions of daily happenings.

We need to keep in mind that this 'natural' scale can change with age and also can be different from person to person. For example, a small child lives much more in the moment-by-moment consciousness of play, without much concern about meals, clothing, etc. which are taken care of for him. The astronomy professor may be living all day in the mental images of the Big Bang and the billions of years of cosmic evolution. If it was not for his dear wife to make him meals and do his laundry, he would have to spare some processing time also for such trivialities.

So to repeat, as far as your observation is concerned, it is in place. Adult people feel that the 'inputs' to the game of existence mainly concern the navigation of the daily rhythm. However, when we speak of 'natural' rhythm in the cognitive evolutionary sense we should make a simple observation: even when we plan our daily routines we still do that at the ticking scale of our real-time thinking. This is what I attempted to illustrate here:



It all amounts to differentiating between the thinking process itself and what is being thought about. When we find it natural to live in thoughts about the daily rhythm it means exactly that - the scaled mental images of happenings at a daily scale constitute the language that we feel most fluent in.

As long as we are in ordinary consciousness and use our bodily instruments (brain) for support, whatever intuitive scale we project into, the sequencing of scaled mental images ticks at a certain rate which is comparable to the rate at which we speak/think. We can call this rate 'natural' because it is more or less the same regardless of whether we think about astronomical evolution, daily routines, or whizzing electrons. This is also why in concentration we begin by attuning to this rate. It is here that we can begin uniting with our deeper being, who projects thoughts into all scales.

It is interesting that when you came to the forum you argued for something else. You were drawn by the idea that time - as far as we experience it as thoughts about past and future (and the mental engineering of our daily rhythm certainly falls in here) - is in a sense unreality. Reality was to be found in the present moment. You have gone a long way since then, and gradually the intuitive curvatures of time along which the ever-present moment transforms (the Taylor series analogy) gained reality too. As said, it is completely true that most adults are predominantly conscious of curving the daily rhythm. The tighter rhythms have become completely habitual (semi-automatic), such as everyday movements, opening a door, washing, dressing up, talking, thinking, etc. But this 'natural' situation is in a way unnatural, it's kinda off center. This is reflected in secret ways in the fact that we have Earth with a tilted axis, that the heart is slightly offset from the center, and so on. In completely harmonic evolution, man would very gradually evolve from the natural ticking rate of mental images. He wouldn't have to make daily plans because the Angelic beings would instill them unto man until he could curve his daily rhythm in harmony with the planetary rhythms. Our evolutionary scenario, however, is such that there are competing 'parents', so to speak. Thus, simply letting go and expecting that we'll be cared over, doesn't work. Man curves his path of being in the presence of conflicting inspirations. Thus we become prematurely responsible for taking conscious control of curving our path at different scales, according to our understanding and ideal.

Curving our path at the daily rhythm (speaking in a completely secular sense), while being completely without control over our mental flow, is still an off-center situation. Now, we can do a lot of spiritual work on harmonizing our inner activity across scales even if we do not take the path that runs right through the core of thinking spiritual activity. We can do this by following the teachings of BD and OMA, for example. These give many advice that lie precisely in the organizing of the daily patterns, yet they are based on an understanding of the vertical resonances. It seems that those who are willing to tackle the mystery of man head-on (that is, to tread the path of Initiation), are still relatively few. This, of course, doesn't mean that the remaining greater part of humanity is doomed. Initiates can distill guidelines for living which are scaled thoughts from all levels tested in practice, and those who have at least a little faith can quickly see whether these guidelines lead their path for good. Those who want to walk such a path with greater awareness and understanding even before they have attempted some of the advice, can only do so by going through their thinking being. Then, such teachings are still of the greatest value because we should remember that all techniques for living at different scales do not simply come by automatically in meditation. They have all been distilled by Initiates who faced many trials in life and at the price of many difficulties, found ways to overcome the obstacles. The great thing about going through the path of cognitive development is that when we read about these living techniques we often quickly see why and how they can be effective.

With all that said, as living beings here on Earth, we are responsible for having a conscious approach to all rhythm scales of our flow. This doesn't mean that we should or can determine them single-handedly. Prayer is always the way to seek resonance with the 'parents' that we have chosen. As such, it is natural that we need to organize our daily rhythms, and this may even take a lot of our processing time. I mean that in the sense that we shouldn't imagine we can focus entirely on our real-time thinking and expect that everything else will fall into place by itself. But as far as reaching toward the true stages of higher consciousness, in our meditations we should always first find the ticking rate at which all our thinking ticks and then fully synchronize with that rate. It is from within this kernel that gradually the inner nature of the higher rhythms is grown into. Just because we think comfortably about higher scale rhythms (such as the daily), doesn't mean that our spiritual being lives natively at that scale. Instead, our intellectual being lives in the scaled mental images of greater timespans, while the thinking process that does the thinking at its native ticking rate still remains somewhat instinctive. To make this explicit, thinking all day God, God, God... - the infinite curvature there could be - doesn't change the fact that the pronunciation of these thoughts still happens at our ordinary intellectual rate. In this extreme case, it is easy to see that one practically loses all means to know the Spirit that manifests in the thinking at the intellectual rate. In other words, reaching a higher state of being is not the same as thinking primarily of the greatest rhythms, for ex., Saturn, Sun, Moon, etc. For this reason. To find our true being we can only do by closing the distance at our ordinary thinking ticking rate, through concentration in the seemingly simplest thoughts. I think it could be better - at least in the start - that these thoughts are not scaled images of other rhythms but keep us right in the real-time flow - that is, we need to concentrate on the thought directly in its imaginative content in the here and now.

[Federica]

What is evident, Federica, is that you are not assessing the meaning of 'intuitive clarity' properly and therefore reaching erroneous conclusions about the gradient of our existential rhythms, which can potentially lead to great misorientation. This has been repeated in practically every recent post. I don't know if this is because of the 'feeling approach', because you are misinterpreting certain lectures of Steiner and posts of Cleric, or because of something else entirely. I am only hoping that you are interested in using the meaningful feedback of my responses to work that out for yourself. That means you need to remain open to the possibility that are misunderstanding something. I get the sense that, whenever the responses come from me specifically, this opening narrows to near non-existence. In that case, the only possibility may be if Cleric decides to illustrate something about this discussion of the daily cycle, because I am sure you meet his posts with greater openness. And perhaps he will point out how I am missing some aspect as well, which I am also open to considering.

In any case, I will try one more time to point out the issue as I currently see it.

For my part, I do have some level of intuitive clarity about how my days fit together in continuity, across the dark periods. I think we all have that, to variable extents and intensities. If I read one Steiner lecture per week, I will need 115 years to read them all, and so I know it’s not going to happen. So I may readjust my intentions, thoughts, feelings, and actions accordingly. If I issue an invoice today, it’s within the context of the arc of my monthly, quarterly, and yearly activity, in parallel with the arc of a client relation, with the arc of a service delivery, that of VAT declarations, and intersecting with the arcs of my other daily activities, etcetera. These and similar conscious experiences constitute a dense network that overarches the daily cycles and provides me with an intuition of my path, purpose, past and future, as a unitary being.

Certainly, whenever we think about our flow of experience, even with intellectual gestures, we are attaining certain intuitions about its lawfulness. These are extremely chopped up intuitions and, for that reason, there is a fundamental ceiling on what can be attained in this way. Your examples highlight this very well. The best you can do is take your past experiences of reading Steiner's lectures and extrapolate that indefinitely into the future to come up with some sense of how to modulate your spiritual activity in that domain. That is actually how much of modern scientific theories operate, for example in geology. And that's really the best they can do with mere intellectual gestures. Yet it's easy to see how there are so many unknown factors that could easily make your modulation suboptimal - for example, you wouldn't be taking into account how your rate of reading can increase as you progress in your intuitive understanding of the content. It's the same with the invoice example. The point is that there are certain aspects of these daily+ arcs can never be reached through the chopped up intuition that feeds back on our intellectual gestures. The examples you are giving are little different than the natural scientist who feels they have reached 'intuitive clarity' about biological processes because they have spread their mineralized concepts over the sensory transformations and received some chopped up intuition in return. Because they have nothing to compare that to, the intuitions feel profound and powerful, like it really gives them the optimal directions for future research.

This is of course understandable for the natural scientist who doesn't know any better, but it is an extremely problematic approach for anyone on the spiritual path. We really need to reach the stage where we feel like we know nothing about the perceptual flow, except in this tiny segment of our active imaginative life. It is in that segment where we can finally discover intuitive clarity in its true essence, and therefore have a basis to compare all other daily experiences and distinguish what is 'path and purpose' and what is simply mysterious events into which we are projecting our preferred concepts about 'path and purpose', which in fact could be easily working at cross-purposes with higher intuitive intents. Even with our intellectual gestures, we can start to sense how intentionally counting to 10 in a smooth way with proper attention to those gestures is bringing intuitive clarity that we will find nowhere in any other part of our daily cycle of experience. When we do the delayed red dot (and lagging/leading finger) exercise from Cleric's essays, for example, it is true that we don't feel like we are initially exploring intuitions of great practical value, like something that will helps us with our client relations or financial issues. This practical value will grow with time. On the other hand, we do quickly realize the practical value for mining holistic intuitive meaning more efficiently from esoteric writings.

I know you aren't challenging what I am saying in the 2nd paragraph, but we need to realize there is also a danger to keeping another imaginary door open. The fact is that we are always looking for excuses, out of anxiety and fear of the spiritual world, to relax on the side of thinking, to avoid the pinhole of cognition, and see if we can attain profound insight in some other way. We need to take these inner temptations seriously. The best defense to such temptations is always truthful orientation. Whenever we stray into erroneous understandings of our experiential flow, it is for a reason - it is telling us something meaningful about our inner constitution and where it could be headed. We simply need to pay attention to that meaningful feedback and take it seriously.

Ashvin, I am open to the possibility that I misunderstand something, including when it’s you signaling the issues. Yes, my perceptions have been to certain extent strained by various 2024 discussions, but of course I also know for sure that your writings express solid spiritual understanding. It could not be otherwise given your overall forum presence through the years. But this particular discussion has turned out more dramatic than necessary, I believe. My intention has always been to discuss language, while the scales of human activity only came as a last-minute secondary thought, to organize the ideas about language on a gradient in relation to the other cycles across which human spiritual activity is spread out.
This said, I understand your reminders above, but don’t think I’m “keeping another imaginary door open”. Certainly I've relaxed on the side of thinking at many occasions, and the reasons are inevitably excuses, since more radical choices could have been made every time, that would have preserved the necessary conditions for sustained practice without relaxation. Nonetheless, I’m not anxious. On the contrary, a concrete spiritual life focus, even when uneven and at times relaxed, is the best antidote to anxieties of all sorts. In any case, thank you for the reminders. I do intend to take them seriously.


PS: Happy New Year to All!

[Federica]

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.

Now I haven't ignored this part of your comment, so I will briefly touch on it. I think you are providing a helpful and interesting way of describing the way in which our associative thinking can take shape, but I still don't understand what this sub-rhythm or smaller cycle is that you associated specifically with word-symbols. I don't get why, for example, it would be any different if the two people were dreaming their way through the climate change discussion with sign language, which are also 'crystallizing the unconscious junctures'. Why would the word-symbols specifically be more susceptible to the micro-derailments and operate more attractions from the bottom than the sign language gestures (other than the fact that many more people think/communicate verbally)?

We can also use Cleric's illustration of planar vs. vertical thinking here:

To make everything even clearer it can be useful to look more closely at our normal thinking process. In our ordinary thought life, our activity feels as if it moves and rearranges mental puzzle pieces (words, images, whole storyboard pictures, etc.). They are either mental images that feel like replicas of conscious phenomena, or symbols for them. The symbols, however, are conscious phenomena too – for example, the thought-word ‘house’ is in itself a mental replica of a sound experience, yet ordinarily, we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house. As already explained, in this kind of thinking we tend to forget that we’re actually thinking. What we experience is the intuition behind the arrangements of the puzzle pieces, i.e. how they click together between themselves and with the perceptual spectrum. We can call this kind of thinking horizontal or planar because it feels like we are ‘here’ with our intellect, merged with the background, and we arrange mental images ‘there’, on the imaginative plane in front of our mind’s eye. We can also distinguish another kind of thinking which we can call vertical or depth thinking.

[illustration]

These are not fundamentally different modes of thinking. In their essence, they are both means of focusing intuition. The difference is that in planar mode all our intuition is about the mental images that click together, without much concern about the actual thinking process, while with depth thinking, it is precisely the fact that we’re focusing meaning from within our intuitive context that is of prime importance.

The latter kind of thinking can most easily be exemplified through our activity of remembering (see also the ‘what we had for breakfast’ example in FoHC). When we remember something, we focus the memory thought-images from within our intuitive context. We are interested not simply in any mental images (which would correspond to fantasy) but precisely those that fit musically within the dim intuition of the thing we try to remember. The fact that they fit in this way doesn’t in itself guarantee that our dim intuition is truthful. The memory images that explicate this intuition need to fit also with the rest of the phenomenal content. In other words, we should always be pursuing the harmony of the facts.

When historians seek to reconstruct the events of the past, their thinking is in the planar mode. Their intuition grows through mental pieces that click together with perceptual facts – written records, artifacts, etc. Here the ideal is to let the perceptual facts, if we may so express, exercise a kind of ‘suction’ on our intuitive context and draw the meaning to themselves. The historian feels secure only when the intuition thus drawn is fully determined by the perceptual facts, there shouldn’t be anything subjective.

I don't see anything different between what you are describing as the smaller cycle of associative word-based thinking and what is described above as the historian's planar thinking. In other words, when you write - "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)... They are out there, available for meaning-less use" - I think this is at direct odds with the illustration above and I don't see how it is possible. Even if the verbal thinking is all based on frequency of associated use, that does not disconnect it from its fundamental character of being a means of focusing intuitions. It just means the intuitions being focused can only be reflected in an extremely narrow, mechanical, repetitive, etc. way. We have to remember the words get caught up in these frequencies of associated use for concrete reasons related to various contextual factors of spiritual evolution. The associations are not completely arbitrary or random in any fundamental sense (indeed nothing in the perceptual spectrum can ever be random in such a sense).

Do you see what I mean?

I’m open to the possibility of being wrong here, but what I think now is the following. If the sign language is of the so-called fingerspelling type - that is, the hand gestures symbolize, or mimic, the letters of the alphabet - then the problem is the same. Some form of linguistic spelling likely operates there too. However, if the sign language bypasses the descent into spelling by directly representing the concepts pictorially - for example, if there is a unitary gesture that refers to the animal “elephant” - then the need to traverse the double bottleneck of “e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” that we face when we use such word-symbol, is averted (double, because the word-symbol is sensorially bound through both the eyes and the ears/inner voice).

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.

So, when the sign language uses unique pictorial symbols, despite the fact that the symbol is indisputably a sensory transliteration of meaning, it’s more likely that the person doesn’t spell “e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” with the inner voice, but simply beholds the concept of elephant, pictorially, as evoked by the unique hand-symbol. The difference in the experience can be illustrated by the example I previously gave: if we imagine we momentarily forget the word-symbol for elephant during a conversation, we can notice how the concept of the animal is still perfectly in focus in the mind’s eye, as a dynamic picture. If the picture is inserted in the conversation as such, let’s say as a quick sketch, we remain in the flow of the conversation and are simultaneously preserved from the world of associations and multitude of horizontal doors into dreaming presented by the spelled-out symbol.

The difference between what I am describing as the smaller cycle of associative word-based thinking and the historian's planar thinking is - as I hope I have clarified above - precisely a difference of scale: in planar thinking, we are not consciously concerned with the auditory content of the word, but with the anchored intuition. However, the word, in its quality of fragmented, combinatory symbol (it has such quality in the feeling-less linguistic use of today) captures our senses in what I previously called a parallel horizontal world: the world of the code, that is, a system, with its specific architecture and forces, that uses the same fragmented sub-symbols (the letters) in endless arrangements as anchors for concepts. In comparison, a sign language with unique symbols for unique concepts has no architecture, creates no attractions/repulsions and would much better preserve the one-to-one vertical connection to the intuitive meaning.

Is this enough to show how I am not at direct odds with the illustration in Clerics quote?


ADDITION: By the way, I also hope that the feeling-less modern understanding of language referred to here helps to see how, the more we make language feeling-rich again, the more we avert its combinatory threat, thereby redeeming it "from the side of feeling" hopefully without this being interpreted as: "feeling is an alternative door to spiritual development, to use as a B-plan in the face of anxiety and fear of thinking".

[AshvinP]

I’m open to the possibility of being wrong here, but what I think now is the following. If the sign language is of the so-called fingerspelling type - that is, the hand gestures symbolize, or mimic, the letters of the alphabet - then the problem is the same. Some form of linguistic spelling likely operates there too. However, if the sign language bypasses the descent into spelling by directly representing the concepts pictorially - for example, if there is a unitary gesture that refers to the animal “elephant” - then the need to traverse the double bottleneck of “e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” that we face when we use such word-symbol, is averted (double, because the word-symbol is sensorially bound through both the eyes and the ears/inner voice).

“E-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” constitutes a symbolic fragmentation, compared to the unitary (pictorial) hand symbol. It decomposes the unique concept of elephant into a particular sequence of smaller, modular symbols, and those same modular symbols (the letters of the alphabet) can be rearranged in other ways to symbolize any other concepts. This is key to understand, in order to realize why the word-symbols are much more able to create an horizontal cycle, within which the mind can be held in relative captivity (in the Cleric quote, the fragmentation is found in the described divorce between auditory sensation and intuitive meaning: “we’re not concerned with the auditory content of the word but the fact that it anchors the same intuition as what we experience when we look at the visual image of a house”). On the contrary, the use of unique symbols for unique concepts, much better preserves the verticality of meaning.

So, when the sign language uses unique pictorial symbols, despite the fact that the symbol is indisputably a sensory transliteration of meaning, it’s more likely that the person doesn’t spell “e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t” with the inner voice, but simply beholds the concept of elephant, pictorially, as evoked by the unique hand-symbol. The difference in the experience can be illustrated by the example I previously gave: if we imagine we momentarily forget the word-symbol for elephant during a conversation, we can notice how the concept of the animal is still perfectly in focus in the mind’s eye, as a dynamic picture. If the picture is inserted in the conversation as such, let’s say as a quick sketch, we remain in the flow of the conversation and are simultaneously preserved from the world of associations and multitude of horizontal doors into dreaming presented by the spelled-out symbol.

The difference between what I am describing as the smaller cycle of associative word-based thinking and the historian's planar thinking is - as I hope I have clarified above - precisely a difference of scale: in planar thinking, we are not consciously concerned with the auditory content of the word, but with the anchored intuition. However, the word, in its quality of fragmented, combinatory symbol (it has such quality in the feeling-less linguistic use of today) captures our senses in what I previously called a parallel horizontal world: the world of the code, that is, a system, with its specific architecture and forces, that uses the same fragmented sub-symbols (the letters) in endless arrangements as anchors for concepts. In comparison, a sign language with unique symbols for unique concepts has no architecture, creates no attractions/repulsions and would much better preserve the one-to-one vertical connection to the intuitive meaning.

Is this enough to show how I am not at direct odds with the illustration in Clerics quote?

Perhaps we can get Cleric to also weigh in on that question

In general, whenever we isolate a part of the perceptual spectrum and point toward that part as specifically derailing our conscious thinking efforts, I feel that something is off - we are subtly redirecting attention from the responsibility of our own selfish and myopic soul tendencies (which exert their derailing influences equally in the verbal and pictorial spectrum) toward the perceptual spectrum itself, which is merely the instrument of our soul life. This is why Steiner also gives cautions like the one below when speaking of imaginative development, when we begin to become conscious of a new pictorial strata of our spiritual activity:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Psych/En ... 25p02.html

If he gives no heed to these facts; if when he gains clairvoyant consciousness through exercises in imaginative cognition, and forces his way down into the subconscious—if he does not recognize that in everything working within him he finds only himself—then he is exposed to manifold errors. For he cannot become aware of this in any way comparable to the ordinary activities of consciousness. There arises for the human searcher the possibility, at one step or another, of having visions, of seeing shapes which are quite new and do not resemble those with which he has become acquainted in average experience. This may happen, but to believe that such things are part of the outer world would be a serious mistake. These phenomena of the inner life do not present themselves as in the ordinary consciousness. If one has a headache it is a fact of the ordinary consciousness. One knows it to be located in one's own head. If anyone has a stomachache he is aware of it within himself. If we descend into what we call the hidden depths of the soul, we remain absolutely within ourselves, and yet what we encounter may present itself objectively, as if it were in the outside world.
...
This is a real possibility. I emphasize this today in order that you may gather from it the fact that only careful schooling, and caution in regard to your entrance into the domain of occultism can save you from falling into error. It is to be understood that you must first see a whole world before you, must note objects around you, excluding however that which you relate to yourself, or which is within you, even though it appears as a world tableau—if you know that it is well to regard what you first see only as the projection of your own inner life, then you have a good corrective for the errors along the way. This is the best of all: regard, as a general rule, everything as phenomena emanating from yourself. Most of them arise out of our wishes, vanities, from our ambitions, in short, from characteristics relating to the egotism of humanity.

It is in these soul depths that we find the true reasons for the continual derailments of our thinking activity when it tries to explore intuitive meaning. I also touched on this general topic in the new essay, that we have become 'skilled contortionists' with the imaginative replicas (mostly inner voice) in our thinking, shifting and rearranging them in the most varied ways to anchor intuitively experienced meaning. There I used this example:

We should notice how this is why thinking works, i.e. why thinking inquiries can lead to insights into the experiential flow. When the chemist decides to investigate the reaction of substances, for example, there are many other things he could allow his spiritual activity to flow along with, i.e. various sympathetic and convenient sensuous pleasures (like the animal does). Instead, he resists those preferred pleasures and directs his spiritual activity against the normal soul flow to devote time and effort towards setting up the experiment, perhaps motivated by the ideal of contributing new knowledge to society. In the process of conducting the experiment, his spiritual activity drags against the normal flow and certain meaningful intuition feeds back, like the meaning of sensory transformations indicating a new substance precipitating from the reaction. This meaningful feedback provides genuine insight into the contextual depth of existence, even if at a very fragmented scale. The common error that occurs here, however, is the chemist failing to understand the feedback is related to his own inner life - his own soul and spiritual structure - instead imagining the meaning points to some other reality ‘behind’ or ‘beyond’ the sensory appearances.

Surely the chemical reaction is not caused by the chemist’s personal imaginative activity, but its meaning can only shine forth through the contextual factors that structure this activity. This sort of ignorance can make our thinking efforts useful for myopic aims in the short-term, but it is untruthful and therefore unproductive for attaining spiritual sight within deeper scales of existence.

This is another way of speaking about the planar vs. depth thinking distinction. Can this common error be made equally when the meaningful feedback is anchored in verbal or pictorial/gestural form? The answer is clearly yes. Now you seem to suggest that, with the fragmented replicas of the inner voice, we can magnify and multiply this error more so than if we were to anchor the meaning in pictorial forms. Not only we can, but we are basically destined to because of the feeling-less linguistic structure of modern times. But again, I think the most important factor for that magnification of the error is still within our soul depth, i.e. the selfish, consumptive, myopic tendencies that shape and steer all forms of our imaginative replicas. Moreover, I think that decohering the pictorial spectrum into the sliced and diced intuitive meaning of verbal forms, is actually critical for getting a grip within that volatile soul depth and gradually aligning the focus of our contextual lenses, provided that we reorient toward a more phenomenological and artistic understanding of our inner voice (which brings feeling-richness back as a natural consequence).

So, overall, I think the addition of the 'smaller cycle' specifically associated with word-symbols within the planar thinking cycle, is not quite accurate phenomenologically and, functionally, can point our attention in the wrong direction in terms of purifying the soul life for higher development. We may start to imagine that if we mostly avoid verbal forms whenever possible and begin swimming in pictorial forms most of the time, this will in itself put us into more direct contact with the objective spiritual world (the meaningful intuitive context from which the forms transduce), when in fact we are merely swimming in phenomena emanating from our own soul depths that we can easily mistake for higher spiritual realities.

[Federica]

In general, whenever we isolate a part of the perceptual spectrum and point toward that part as specifically derailing our conscious thinking efforts, I feel that something is off - we are subtly redirecting attention from the responsibility of our own selfish and myopic soul tendencies (which exert their derailing influences equally in the verbal and pictorial spectrum) toward the perceptual spectrum itself, which is merely the instrument of our soul life.

Why didn't you raise a similar objection when Cleric described verbal language in terms of protein sequencing and H bonds? I don't suggest any redirection of responsibility. On the contrary, the responsibility of spiritualizing language is made concrete and directly operable, both from the way of feeling (as described in the addition to my last post) and from the way of thinking (because through imaginative cognition the vertical connection with meaning is made more robust, hence we better preserve ourselves from the sensory spell of language). It's our lacking thinking-feeling processing of language that perpetuates the spell. So there is a clear responsibility: through spiritual development we acquire the means to make our activity more robust, to avert the delusions lurking in our modern relationship with language. By the way, I doubt it's exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum, for the simple reason that languages are expression of folk souls. As such they comprise specific soul tendencies: an additional layer of "derailing influences", on top of the personal egoistic ones. This is in addition the the faculty of language to favor in our mind an associative, dreamy flow. If you say that pictorial symbols and linguistic symbols are equally derailing, you directly oppose everything I have so far proposed about language (that you previously described as "interesting").

[AshvinP]

In general, whenever we isolate a part of the perceptual spectrum and point toward that part as specifically derailing our conscious thinking efforts, I feel that something is off - we are subtly redirecting attention from the responsibility of our own selfish and myopic soul tendencies (which exert their derailing influences equally in the verbal and pictorial spectrum) toward the perceptual spectrum itself, which is merely the instrument of our soul life.

Why didn't you raise a similar objection when Cleric described verbal language in terms of protein sequencing and H bonds? I don't suggest any redirection of responsibility. On the contrary, the responsibility of spiritualizing language is made concrete and directly operable, both from the way of feeling (as described in the addition to my last post) and from the way of thinking (because through imaginative cognition the vertical connection with meaning is made more robust, hence we better preserve ourselves from the sensory spell of language). It's our lacking thinking-feeling processing of language that perpetuates the spell. So there is a clear responsibility: through spiritual development we acquire the means to make our activity more robust, to avert the delusions lurking in our modern relationship with language. By the way, I doubt it is exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum.

Cleric wrote:

Necessarily, our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word. The speaker assumes certain ideal form with their "I" which is then sequenced into words. Those reading can reconstruct the ideal form if the string of letters is folded in the proper way.

(this is a fantastic anchoring symbol, thanks for reminding me!)

This is exactly what I am speaking of when I say the verbal forms, no matter how they are sliced and diced, are not intrinsically associative and derailing, but rather embed unsuspected value when we reorient our perspective through the purification of the most proximate soul constraints, i.e. refolding the string of letters in the proper way to intuit the "secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word." To my recollection, Cleric has never spoken of a special sub-cycle of the planar thinking cycle in which the verbal sequences exist and exhibit inordinate attractive power that necessarily derails our thinking. He does not speak of another parallel 'way of feeling' by which we can purify the soul depths, rather the unveiling of feeling-richness within the Word is the natural consequence of higher thinking development (I realize we have spoken of BD/OMA before as a more feeling-based approach, but also that this by itself is only appropriate for a more limited spectrum of modern souls, whereas for most of us it will only bear fruits when built on the foundation of philosophical-scientific thinking development). It is always our thinking that purifies the soul depths and, for those who have already developed verbal thinking through Western culture, it is the best tool for getting a grip (i.e. ice skates metaphor) within our volatile passions, desires, vanities, etc. That is, of course, what we are doing here and now on this forum. The protein picture above, for example, works so well as an anchoring symbol precisely because it is accompanied by the strings of letters reflecting the ideal form of Cleric's "I" which sequenced the words, when encountered by readers who have also done some work toward purifying mechanical thinking habits.

Are you noticing any difference between these perspectives on verbal thinking?

By the way, I doubt it's exact to say that derailing influences equally exist in the verbal and pictorial spectrum, for the simple reason that languages are expression of folk souls. As such they comprise specific soul tendencies: an additional layer of "derailing influences", on top of the personal egoistic ones. This is in addition the the faculty of language to favor in our mind an associative, dreamy flow. If you say that pictorial symbols and linguistic symbols are equally derailing, you directly oppose everything I have so far proposed about language (that you previously described as "interesting").

When we speak about "language" at the depth of the folk souls, we can't isolate that to either verbal or pictorial. Language at that scale, where there are group soul tendencies, apply equally to verbal, pictorial, gestural, etc. So, yes, in that sense I am directly opposing what you are so far proposing about language. I think you are focusing too much on your thoughts about "derailment", rather than trying to intuit the depth structure of the soul constraints through which such derailment happens. It just seems to happen more with verbal forms because those are the forms we are most familiar with utilizing in our modern thinking.