On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

[AshvinP]

I think there is one lecture (maybe around 1915 period), in which Steiner talks about reducing a long bit of one's writing or thinking into successively smaller units and noticing how the meaning of each word changes with each metaphorphosis of expression. There is a Kuhlwind workbook in which I believe he points to that lecture as a great example of his own meditation advice regarding this practice.

And while it is not directly an example, when Steiner talked about how as the century progressed philosophers would be able to say in a few sentences what he (and others) needed entire books to say, it points to an aspect of this kind of process.

But, there are people for whom things are fixated and sacred. I would never demand that Cleric change one word of his masterpieces. It was simply part of a conversation in which you were continuing to tell me what I needed to do. I agreed. And I made a mere suggestion. Hands off! I'm stepping back in full respect of the Master.

Thanks for the reference, and I'm sure you already fully grasp the huge difference between doing that as a personal meditative practice and doing that as a way of conveying inner realities to other people.

Yes, and Cleric's last post (and dozens of others on this forum) are already tightly condensed expressions of PoF, KHW, and some other spiritual scientific works. They are all unique from one another in their illustrations, metaphors, examples, lines of reasoning, etc. Things are never repeated in the same way. So the diversity of expression you are asking for is already right here, in its most creative form. That is something SM accomplished to a certain extent as well, which is reflected on his website.

What is sacred is living through the intuitive movements, no matter from which author they come or which terminologies they use, that alone 'explain' the archetypal inner realities that are being symbolized through the artistic thoughts, in their innumerable expressions. Although these expressions are all highly unique, this 'living through' invites the same kind of concentration and resistance of associative mechanisms that Steiner and Kuhlewinde's phenomenological and meditative exercises invite. They invite the same kind of catharsis that Steiner spoke of and that SM speaks of here:

Said more simply: because what we know limits our knowing, the greatest danger for epistemology is what we already know. A central task for epistemology today is for it to become more awake to higher-order processes already at work within it. It must reverse (and re-verse) its direction, focusing not primarily on what it is possible to know (a first-order epistemology), but on the process of knowing itself (a second-order epistemology), which strangely means to engage in a process of unknowing.

I know concentration exercises are quite difficult for many people, including me. We all, in a sense, recapitulate the Fall in our reading or meditative sessions, where we start out with enthusiasm for inner spiritual work and quickly become engulfed in associative trains of thoughts and elastic feelings pulling us this way and that. We are tempted in the most varied directions that break our concentration within the holistic flow of ideal relations. Trying to resist these chaotic currents quickly exhausts us and then we either quit or find a way to adapt the reading/meditation to our ordinary inner habits. We find ways to justify those habits and make them into the new and improved 'phenomenology' and 'meditation'. The old meditation was too conservative, fixated, sacred, etc... we have now "evolved" to a new dynamic kind of inner phenomenology.

These are the kind of inner patterns we need to first confess, and then more intimately investigate, if we are interested in unknowing old habits of thinking and orienting to the transpersonal inner structure and dynamics of our spiritual activity. As boring and conservative as this may seem, it is the genuine path to non-atavistic clairvoyance.  

[findingblanks]

"I'm sure you already fully grasp the huge difference between doing that as a personal meditative practice and doing that as a way of conveying inner realities to other people."

I'm not sure you do, either. We can join our uncertainties together to find our blind-spots. Or: Teach with passive aggressive implications. Both lead to the same place if you take them seriously enough.

"These are the kind of inner patterns we need to first confess, and then more intimately investigate, if we are interested in unknowing old habits of thinking and orienting to the transpersonal inner structure and dynamics of our spiritual activity."

Yes, we could share stories about all of our successes and failures in these efforts. And what we've learned. And what we are still really confused about. So much to share!

[Cleric]

I'm not sure you do, either. We can join our uncertainties together to find our blind-spots. Or: Teach with passive aggressive implications. Both lead to the same place if you take them seriously enough.

FB, it’s nice that you often mention the blind spots. This prepares us to expect the unexpected, but sometimes our expectation already forms a certain framework within which we imagine the unexpected will be accommodated. For example, over and over again you ask Ashvin “Do you see the etheric body of the plant?” Likewise, he over and over explains to you how we should first clarify to ourselves what ‘etheric seeing’ means, yet, since you don’t see an answer coming that fits the framework from within which the question is asked, you assume that he simply evades it.

When we proceed from our Earthly experience, clairvoyance is most readily imagined as some additional layer of more ‘spiritual’ perceptions/experiences/feelings/sensations/presences, that we behold, and we experience ‘intuitive’ thoughts together with them. In this way, when I look at the plant I may think “When I look at that plant I experience only visual colorful shapes. Esoteric books speak about seeing also an etheric, peach-blossom-like colored halo, that envelops the visual shape. I don’t see such a thing. Thus I humbly accept that I have a blind spot. This potential etheric perception is currently blotted out of my consciousness. I expect that when I go through the appropriate development, my spiritual eye will be open and I’ll see the more ethereal colors of the etheric body.”

On one hand, it is nice that I recognize this blind spot. But on the other, I already assume way too much about how this unexpected perception needs to be expected. So we can speak of a ‘meta’ blind spot. It is one from within which my whole inner process is steered, which somehow leads me to seek reality in certain places and certain ways. If I don’t have any inkling of this meta blind spot, I’ll assume that everyone seeks clairvoyant consciousness as I do, except that they describe this journey and its experiences in different words (different ‘satisfying’ ways of reaching the spiritual world).

This meta blind spot is much more difficult to recognize than other lesser blind spots. After all, it wouldn’t be called ‘blind’ if it was already within our consciousness, would it? Imagine a surface with a small hole. We put a balloon through and begin inflating. The larger the balloon becomes, the more impossible it becomes to pull it out through the hole. If we try to do that, we feel elastic counteracting forces.



This is a metaphor for our intellectual condition, especially when it begins to seek knowledge of the spiritual in an abstract way, expecting perceptions that we can grasp in our ‘intuitive’ mind in the way we grasp the picture of the sensory world. To find the real spiritual being of man, we need to deflate that balloon and turn inside out through the hole (symbolizing the threshold). Steiner has often compared this with a glove turning inside out. For example here:

We must accustom ourselves to the difficult thought that the only way to understand the forms of the limb man is to imagine the head forms turned inside out like a glove or stocking. And in this is an expression of something of great significance in the whole life of man. If we were to draw it as a diagram we might say: the head is formed as though it were pressed outwards from within, is “bulged” outwards from within. The limbs of man we can picture as pressed inwards from without through being turned inside out at the forehead. (This turning inside out is a process of great significance in the life of man.) Consider your forehead, and imagine that your inner being is striving from within outwards towards your forehead. Now on the palm of your hand or on the sole of your foot, a kind of pressure is being exercised, like the pressure on your forehead from within, only in the reverse direction. So that when you hold your hand with the palm facing outwards, or when you place the sole of your foot on the ground, there streams from without through your sole, or through your palm, what streams towards your forehead from within. This is a fact of remarkable importance. It is so very important because it enables us to see the actual disposition of the spiritual-soul element in man.

This spirit-soul element, as you now see, is a stream. The spirit-soul passes through man as a stream, as a current.



https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA293/En ... 04a01.html

It is clear that the above simply doesn’t make sense when we expect clairvoyance only as the addition of more ‘spiritual’ perceptions, for which we assume we are currently blind. We simply remain clueless if we expect to see in inner vision a third-person picture of a brain and such a stream. One has no choice but to conclude that Steiner was either simply confused or that he used a very inappropriate metaphor for the clairvoyant experience. When we try to approach the spiritual with our sensory scientific habits, we inflate on the wrong side of the threshold, so to speak.

It is very difficult to recognize this meta blind spot because it is the very 'infrastructure' of our intellectual self. It is like the invisible emotional and ideal lines of force, along which our inner cognitive stream coalesces. We cannot simply step outside ourselves and observe this structure ‘objectively’ in the way we imagine we can observe the etheric plant.

This deflation of our intellectual self happens through the appropriate meditative concentration but also by adopting a proper inner attitude – one of humility and prayer-like surrender acknowledging that what we experience as ourselves is only a fragmentary patchwork of elemental processes that feel to gravitate around our “I”-singularity. As we deflate and go through the turning inside out, our whole inner experience of what we are inverts. Now our “I” is not a possessive sphere of control but in a sense we grow smaller and smaller. This point-like concentration, however, feels like a point of balance within the inner Cosmos. Thus, even though sounding paradoxical, this contraction leads to the expansion of the inner world, which proves to be one and the same as the inner phenomenological Cosmos. The difference is that we don’t experience this expansion as conquering new spiritual real estate for our egoic self. Just like we can grasp our body as the momentary meeting point of substances and forces that gather from all directions of the Cosmos, so in this higher stage we grasp also our soul being, our desires, opinions, inclinations, and so on, as such a meeting point of archetypal and elemental processes, which are quite independent, they have will of their own, so to speak. We feel expanded within this manifold inner Cosmos only as far as our “I”-point of balance is one within which all these forces interfere symphonically. Thus, the sense of expanse is proportional to how far we have attuned the contextual layers of our being to the Music of the Spheres, of which our Cosmic being now feels to be weaved.

None of this can ever be experienced as a reality by seeing it in the form of some additional ‘spiritual’ perceptions. It is the intellectual self who expects and wants to think ‘intuitively’ about such perceptions, that must be deflated. We cannot even begin to understand what Initiatic science speaks of, and even more importantly – how it reaches the states of existence from whence it speaks – if we do not realize that the future is not about gaining more ‘exact’ spiritistic perceptions, but about deflating and reaching through inner organization toward a fine point of balance within the Symphony of the Cosmic organism.

These things can be gathered in full clarity if we read even a single lecture (like this one) not with the intention to guess what kinds of cultural and epochal blind spots Steiner must have had in order to speak in such a way, but by simply trying to follow in our inner experience what he describes. If after reading in such a way one still says “I don’t share this view, I envision clairvoyant consciousness differently and I’ll expect its exact nature in the future”, then so be it. The conversation ends on the spot. But it is simply absurd to try to convince ourselves and others that Steiner, even though constantly trying to distinguish higher cognition from atavistic clairvoyance, was simply sloppy in his way of speaking and has secretly implied that it is precisely this kind of ‘seeing’ that we should be after. Maybe we rationalize that by saying he was obsessed with putting clairvoyance on scientific foundations as if to make it sound more serious, but in the end, all that he was doing was having certain ‘spiritual’ sensations and thinking ‘intuitively’ about them with loosened intellect. In that sense, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition (III) are seen simply as degrees of how 'intuitively' we think about the 'spiritual' sensations. The more spontaneous, certain, and free of dogma our thoughts feel, the more 'intuitive'. This, of course, is nothing but the reversal of III. Such kind of progression through reversed III is in truth the measure of how far the intellectual self has inflated on the wrong side of the threshold.

[findingblanks]

Cleric, I counted around 11 paragraphs and I'll use that information in figuring out where to put them in my pile of 'important' things to get to once I can. My other creative approach would be to just scan it very quickly and respond to one element that stands out; but I'd only do that if you felt a strong intuitive yes to the idea.

[findingblanks]

There is one kind of presuppositional 'mesh' that ensure a surprise if Steiner had said on his death bed, "In the last six months I've become aware of a certain kind of error that worked its way unawares into my research. This ruins nothing, but it changes everything. This will need to spotted before Anthroposophia can get a strong foothold in Her incarnationg process" There is another kind of experience that wouldn't be surprised at all by that statement, that would, in fact, be seeing evidence that matches the possiblity of it.

Both streams can do great work. One of them won't quite agree. But will know how to be polite in telling me so! Or, rather, might even (now that these sentences have been written) be able to agree so strongly that they will need to Teach Me why I am correct.

That said, if we found a valid document that Steiner said such a thing to his wife, we can think very deeply about the effect it would have. In other words, of the exact Clairvoyant Anthroposphists (like Cleric and Ashvin) who roam the Earth today, after reading the document, would they have inklings of where to begin understanding Steiner's meaning? Or would they INSTANTLY be able to being Teaching us what he meant by this and why it really doesn't require any major changes in the movement, the methods, the basic attitudes, etc.,

[Cleric]

There is one kind of presuppositional 'mesh' that ensure a surprise if Steiner had said on his death bed, "In the last six months I've become aware of a certain kind of error that worked its way unawares into my research. This ruins nothing, but it changes everything. This will need to spotted before Anthroposophia can get a strong foothold in Her incarnationg process" There is another kind of experience that wouldn't be surprised at all by that statement, that would, in fact, be seeing evidence that matches the possiblity of it.

Both streams can do great work. One of them won't quite agree. But will know how to be polite in telling me so! Or, rather, might even (now that these sentences have been written) be able to agree so strongly that they will need to Teach Me why I am correct.

That said, if we found a valid document that Steiner said such a thing to his wife, we can think very deeply about the effect it would have. In other words, of the exact Clairvoyant Anthroposphists (like Cleric and Ashvin) who roam the Earth today, after reading the document, would they have inklings of where to begin understanding Steiner's meaning? Or would they INSTANTLY be able to being Teaching us what he meant by this and why it really doesn't require any major changes in the movement, the methods, the basic attitudes, etc.,

To put that into an analogy again, imagine a child flipping through a mathematics book from cover to cover, without having any inkling of mathematical thought but simply beholding everything as pictures. The child marginally understands that the book demands the development of a different kind of cognitive activity but says "Imagine that the author of this book, at his deathbed received an illumination and realized that all his mathematizing activity was only an ill-understood aspect of some other activity that renders going through the mathematizing activity not strictly necessary. If this really happened to the author then I could save myself from trying to enter into this mathematizing activity."

But isn't this precisely what the physicalist does too? He says: "I see that you describe some non-ordinary experiences but imagine that a few more years down the line, in some way, we solve the hard problem. Then it will be clear that these experiences have been neurological effects all along and all those meditative efforts would have been unnecessary - it has been a wild-goose chase."

The great contrast here is that we very clearly understand what you offer and we do explore the route you point to. As a matter of fact, we don't need any special effort for that because what you offer is to simply keep circling the waiting room. This is what everyone does anyway - waiting for their miracle of choice. The opposite cannot be said, however. People do not reject the path of higher consciousness because they have explored it (even in the most rudimentary way) but only because they place all their chips on a 'what if' scenario. It is simply a bet. They hope that one day when the ball settles and they are on the winning side they'll say "I knew it! I was right all along that it was completely unnecessary to enter these exotic states of cognition."

Alright, FB. This settles it for me. It has never been the point here to change your mind, but ever since our discussions about the exceptional state, we've only tried to explain that your position is based not on where Initiatic Science leads to, but on the attempt to explain why Initiatic Science would speak as it does granted that the truth lies somewhere else, in a place that no one has yet discovered. And before you habitually reply that you do understand the path of initiation in its inner reality through and through, simply try to survey what is the source of the inner resistance that prevents you from reading, let alone internalizing, the few paragraphs that Ashvin and I have written here.

Please be aware that there are no hard feelings here, not even personal feelings. What's going on here is archetypal in nature, it has been addressed over and over again. The matter is such that it's not possible to state these things without sounding like a personal attack (because these things reach into our innermost core) but I warmly assure you that there isn't any.

[AshvinP]

Cleric, I counted around 11 paragraphs and I'll use that information in figuring out where to put them in my pile of 'important' things to get to once I can. My other creative approach would be to just scan it very quickly and respond to one element that stands out; but I'd only do that if you felt a strong intuitive yes to the idea.

I think it would help if you tried to reflect back to us our understanding of 'exact clairvoyance', particularly in distinction to visionary states, for ex. as illustrated in Cleric's dialogue post. Although you may think we don't properly reflect back your understanding of all these things, you have to admit we at least try. Even beginning with the first few pages of this thread, I felt that your responses were mostly associative commentaries of whatever ideas came to mind when reading through my posts, rather than attempts to reflect back what I was communicating and reach a shared understanding of the core issues involved. I would invite you to devote one post to nothing but an attempt to reflect back our understanding in your own words, i.e. no other commentaries, hypotheticals, and so on.

[AshvinP]

I would like to share here a post from Facebook that also utilized some of Cleric's recent illustrations since it might be generally helpful to contemplate.

FB, I hope you take some time to contemplate the post when you have a chance, and try to discern how the pre-1900 Steiner works truly harmonize at a deep level with the post-1900 spiritual scientific works. They harmonize through our effortful intuitive activity, of course. That is especially true on the question of 'spiritual purposes' at work within Earthly evolution. As discussed on Facebook, by 'spiritual' and 'purpose' I mean exactly what they mean in PoF - the experience of being intentionally active in structuring the phenomenal flow. For humans, this is most clearly experienced in structuring our mental pictures where the meaning of our flow is most 'in focus', for example when we intend to perform a mathematical operation. For higher beings, we need to stretch our imagination and intuitively feel how the phenomenal flow of our deeper inner states - impulses, moods, emotions, organic rhythms, physical sensations - are structured through more integrated intentional activity.

***

"The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism." (GA 30, I)

Meditating on quotes such as this one provides some of the most important foundations for orienting properly to Steiner's post-1900 spiritual scientific communications. At first, this may seem counter-intuitive, since the quote seems to be at odds with the vision of Anthroposophy and spiritual science, i.e. the vision of spiritual beings guiding human destiny from Alpha to Omega, but let's withhold judgment for a moment and see if we can explore the reasons why they harmonize further. There are generally two ways the intellect thinks about this question of 'purposes' in evolution.

1/ There were no purposes before human beings with self-consciousness. Nature evolved from very simple instinctive processes to more and more complex organizations, which eventually became self-conscious, and only then can we speak of purposes working in Nature.

2/ There were always purposes at work in the evolutionary process. The Ideas of God(s) have directed the course of evolution from the beginning and continue to determine how our Earthly destinies unfold.

We can see these are both metaphysical assertions - in one case we snap together our mental pictures (thoughts) in a way that results in the meaning of 1/, and in the other case, we snap them together in a way that results in the meaning of 2/. For some people, the snapping of thoughts into 1/ feels more coherent and convincing and, for others, the snapping into 2/ feels more coherent and convincing. In both cases, it is important to notice how we are only left with our mental pictures about the "purposes at work in evolution" and therefore get mired in endless debate with our intellectual opponents. One side selectively points to the empirical evidence that supports the meaning of its mental pictures, and the other side does the same for the meaning of its mental pictures. That is the essence of our dualistic condition today - on the one hand, we feel confined to our mental pictures about the 'true reality', and on the other, we know that the contents of our mental pictures cannot themselves be the 'true reality'. Is there another way of approaching this question that doesn't leave us confined within the tissue of our mental pictures?

Steiner, from the very outset of his epistemic works (GA 1-4), has pointed us toward an entirely different and more participatory way of conducting this inquiry to reach an intellectually satisfying and morally productive answer. He invites us to focus less on the meaning of the mental pictures we snap together and focus more on the flow of our inner states of being, most importantly the flow of our mental pictures where the meaning we are exploring is most 'in focus'. He asks us to try, with great devotion to this intimate inquiry and great concentration on its pursuit, to become more intuitively aware of what constrains, steers, and shapes the flow of those mental pictures and deeper inner states (including psychic and physical sensations). For example, it is clear that everything that we normally conceive as 'sympathies and antipathies' steers our attention, interests, and actions in one direction or another.

The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself.

A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. (Ibid)

To get a feel for the difference between these two approaches, we can imagine that we decide to slowly count from 1 to 10 in our mind. As we progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc.. we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner states guided by our general meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present state through the previously pronounced numbers.

Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions—that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself. (Ibid)

Now to feel the contrast with the previous metaphysical approach (1/ and 2/ above), we can imagine that just when we pronounce "5" we somehow forget that we are intentionally counting. Then we hear in our mind "5"’ but it sounds like a thought that randomly pops in our mind. We have no intuitive sense of either why it appeared or that something else should appear afterward. In this case, we make a mental picture of the sound "5" and then try to complement it with other mental pictures that should 'explain' it, like chemical reactions, neurons, supernatural beings who created the sound in our mind, and so forth. We feel satisfied with our explanation when these mental images are snapped together like puzzle pieces and seem to make intuitive sense, i.e. they feel internally coherent in some way.

Notice, however, how this explanation made of snapping mental images together remains abstract. We don’t know with certainty whether our mental puzzle truly corresponds to reality or not, even though the pieces may fit together very convincingly. We are then destined to remain mired in debate with our intellectual opponents. Contrast this with the experience of suddenly remembering our counting activity. This provides us with a completely different kind of ‘explanation’. We no longer need to assemble mental puzzles but instead, our intent to count fills the vacuum and makes intuitive sense of why the "5" appeared in our consciousness.

In that sense, PoF first brings us to the realization that most phenomena in our sensory and psychic environment meet us exactly like the "5" sound after we have forgotten our intent to count. If we are honest with ourselves, we don't feel like these phenomena, including our impulses, moods, and emotions, are guided along the 'curvature' of our meaningful intents. Instead, they are more like the erratic fly buzzing around - we dimly sense there is meaningful activity going on, but it begins as relatively isolated phenomena without a clear sense of from whence they came and to whence they are going. As thinking beings (assuming we are interested in exploring the nature of our existence), we quickly search for mental puzzle pieces to snap together such that the phenomena feel to attain more intuitive coherency. Yet, as we saw above, the mental puzzles remain abstract and uncertain.

Once we have confessed this habitual aspect of our ordinary mental life, we are in a position to begin remembering the intuitive intents that structure the flow of the mental pictures and deeper inner states. These intuitive intents will never be discovered as additional mental pictures that confront us from without, just as our 'intent to count' cannot be perceived as additional colors, sounds, tastes, etc. They can only be lived into and intuitively sensed from within. Now we are truly in a position to understand Steiner's original quote. As long as we keep searching for 'purposes' in either the contents of our current mental pictures or as some as-of-yet unperceived content that can eventually be discovered as more mental pictures (or, under the Kantian view, can never be discovered but only inferred), we have not understood the nature of our intimate intuitive activity. We are still expecting to find 'purposes' in a direction where they can never be truly found.

How can we apply what we have discussed so far to the communications of spiritual science? Steiner provides many detailed illustrations of how Angels and Archangels, for example, work their purposes - their intuitive intents - into human evolution. All of these illustrations give us symbolic angles from which to approach the inner life of these spiritual beings and to more intimately experience how our inner states are modulated on the waves of their spiritual activity. We can try to sense how, for example, our inner verbal thoughts emerge as a kind of commentary on the inner meaning we instinctively steer our way through, i.e. various sensory events, memory experiences, and corresponding moods, emotions, sympathies, etc. The latter is experienced as theatrical 'movie scenes' of mental pictures that we are dreaming our way through, which we sometimes become more sensitive to in the transition from sleeping to waking or vice versa, and these scenes are encoded as verbal commentaries in our waking thoughts. By living into such experiences, we begin to resonate more with the imagistic Angelic perspective which constrains and shapes our ordinary verbal thoughts.

Steiner also gives many illustrations of the 'folk souls' or Archangels. For this inner constraint, we can imagine the superimposed inner flow of all people from a given nation (imagined not as stacked abstract pictures in front of us, but imagining the inner life of those people superimposed over ours). There will be some regularities between our inner flows. Most of the things will 'cancel out' but certain elements of the flow will 'add up', which would be certain soul tendencies that are characteristic of the group, i.e. the inner gestures that form the common language, and so on. It may turn out that this sum belongs to a coherent perspective that conducts its intuitive intents within the unified World flow, which we dimly experience as linguistic and other collective soul constraints, such as national temperament, on our ordinary feelings and thoughts.

This also makes it clear why we can never gain consciousness of the intuitive intents within the World flow as a result of some purely personal development. The inner life of the Archangel remains completely unknown to our consciousness unless we expand our interests to feel how our flow is superimposed with that of all people from a nation. Only in that way can we inwardly understand the common element that is intuitively steered by the Archangel. Then if we go even further than the national spirits, we can experience the common element in all human beings. This also leads us to a coherent perspective of the World flow known as the Christ. It becomes easy to see in this way why the impulse that the Christ brought to humanity is that of Love. Only through Love can we attain the strength to remember our superimposed inner flow with all of humanity.

In this way, the devotional and artistic yet also detailed descriptions of spiritual science provide the opportunity for us to resonate more and more with the inner lives of spiritual beings, just as we resonate with the inner life of the artist when contemplating their artwork, and therefore how the flow of our inner states are modulated like ripples over the ideal waves of their spiritual activity. These concrete insights flow into our consciousness as moral imaginations and intuitions. We can discern these purposive patterns in the 7-year life stages, for example, which follow a clear trajectory of structured development, unfolding opportunities for new experiences and eventually new inner qualities and capacities through those experiences.

We can intuitively sense how the inner states of our life stages are attracted around certain patterns of development like the iron filings ordered by a magnetic field. These inner states were previously experienced as following a quite arbitrary and random trajectory and were generally ignored. But now we notice the patterns and sense how this attracted trajectory of our inner flow reflects the intuitive intents of concrete spiritual beings (including our own intents). By awakening to (remembering) these intuitive intents, we also gain the capacity to more consciously and freely participate in the unfoldment of our inner states. We no longer need to be helplessly dragged by sympathies and antipathies that we experience as the erratic movements of a fly, but can find the inner strength to creatively work into these deeper scales of intuitive intents and gradually get a conscious grip on our destiny. Only in this way can we experience spiritual freedom.

[Güney27]

I would like to share here a post from Facebook that also utilized some of Cleric's recent illustrations since it might be generally helpful to contemplate.

FB, I hope you take some time to contemplate the post when you have a chance, and try to discern how the pre-1900 Steiner works truly harmonize at a deep level with the post-1900 spiritual scientific works. They harmonize through our effortful intuitive activity, of course. That is especially true on the question of 'spiritual purposes' at work within Earthly evolution. As discussed on Facebook, by 'spiritual' and 'purpose' I mean exactly what they mean in PoF - the experience of being intentionally active in structuring the phenomenal flow. For humans, this is most clearly experienced in structuring our mental pictures where the meaning of our flow is most 'in focus', for example when we intend to perform a mathematical operation. For higher beings, we need to stretch our imagination and intuitively feel how the phenomenal flow of our deeper inner states - impulses, moods, emotions, organic rhythms, physical sensations - are structured through more integrated intentional activity.

***

"The essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be sought within that same world. Opposed to this view stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this dualism." (GA 30, I)

Meditating on quotes such as this one provides some of the most important foundations for orienting properly to Steiner's post-1900 spiritual scientific communications. At first, this may seem counter-intuitive, since the quote seems to be at odds with the vision of Anthroposophy and spiritual science, i.e. the vision of spiritual beings guiding human destiny from Alpha to Omega, but let's withhold judgment for a moment and see if we can explore the reasons why they harmonize further. There are generally two ways the intellect thinks about this question of 'purposes' in evolution.

1/ There were no purposes before human beings with self-consciousness. Nature evolved from very simple instinctive processes to more and more complex organizations, which eventually became self-conscious, and only then can we speak of purposes working in Nature.

2/ There were always purposes at work in the evolutionary process. The Ideas of God(s) have directed the course of evolution from the beginning and continue to determine how our Earthly destinies unfold.

We can see these are both metaphysical assertions - in one case we snap together our mental pictures (thoughts) in a way that results in the meaning of 1/, and in the other case, we snap them together in a way that results in the meaning of 2/. For some people, the snapping of thoughts into 1/ feels more coherent and convincing and, for others, the snapping into 2/ feels more coherent and convincing. In both cases, it is important to notice how we are only left with our mental pictures about the "purposes at work in evolution" and therefore get mired in endless debate with our intellectual opponents. One side selectively points to the empirical evidence that supports the meaning of its mental pictures, and the other side does the same for the meaning of its mental pictures. That is the essence of our dualistic condition today - on the one hand, we feel confined to our mental pictures about the 'true reality', and on the other, we know that the contents of our mental pictures cannot themselves be the 'true reality'. Is there another way of approaching this question that doesn't leave us confined within the tissue of our mental pictures?

Steiner, from the very outset of his epistemic works (GA 1-4), has pointed us toward an entirely different and more participatory way of conducting this inquiry to reach an intellectually satisfying and morally productive answer. He invites us to focus less on the meaning of the mental pictures we snap together and focus more on the flow of our inner states of being, most importantly the flow of our mental pictures where the meaning we are exploring is most 'in focus'. He asks us to try, with great devotion to this intimate inquiry and great concentration on its pursuit, to become more intuitively aware of what constrains, steers, and shapes the flow of those mental pictures and deeper inner states (including psychic and physical sensations). For example, it is clear that everything that we normally conceive as 'sympathies and antipathies' steers our attention, interests, and actions in one direction or another.

The monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is self-evident that we can explain its development from below scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate that spirit itself.

A philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic world-conception. (Ibid)

To get a feel for the difference between these two approaches, we can imagine that we decide to slowly count from 1 to 10 in our mind. As we progress from pronouncing "1" to "2" to "3", etc.. we have a very clear intuitive sense of how our momentary verbalizations are structured through time. The auditory vibrations of our inner voice, as we pronounce the words of the numbers, do not meet us like a foreign object, for example, the erratic movements of a fly buzzing around, but as an orderly progression of inner states guided by our general meaningful intent to count. If we are currently at "5", even though we haven’t yet reached ten, we have a good intuitive sense of where the process is going and what inner state will soon condense at our mental horizon, even though we haven’t yet pronounced the next numbers in our mind. This intuitive sense also gives us orientation for how we have reached our present state through the previously pronounced numbers.

Observation and thought are the two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation anything that does not lie already in the observation itself. It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions, and drawing conclusions—that is, we form conceptions and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation, though it does not carry us beyond itself. (Ibid)

Now to feel the contrast with the previous metaphysical approach (1/ and 2/ above), we can imagine that just when we pronounce "5" we somehow forget that we are intentionally counting. Then we hear in our mind "5"’ but it sounds like a thought that randomly pops in our mind. We have no intuitive sense of either why it appeared or that something else should appear afterward. In this case, we make a mental picture of the sound "5" and then try to complement it with other mental pictures that should 'explain' it, like chemical reactions, neurons, supernatural beings who created the sound in our mind, and so forth. We feel satisfied with our explanation when these mental images are snapped together like puzzle pieces and seem to make intuitive sense, i.e. they feel internally coherent in some way.

Notice, however, how this explanation made of snapping mental images together remains abstract. We don’t know with certainty whether our mental puzzle truly corresponds to reality or not, even though the pieces may fit together very convincingly. We are then destined to remain mired in debate with our intellectual opponents. Contrast this with the experience of suddenly remembering our counting activity. This provides us with a completely different kind of ‘explanation’. We no longer need to assemble mental puzzles but instead, our intent to count fills the vacuum and makes intuitive sense of why the "5" appeared in our consciousness.

In that sense, PoF first brings us to the realization that most phenomena in our sensory and psychic environment meet us exactly like the "5" sound after we have forgotten our intent to count. If we are honest with ourselves, we don't feel like these phenomena, including our impulses, moods, and emotions, are guided along the 'curvature' of our meaningful intents. Instead, they are more like the erratic fly buzzing around - we dimly sense there is meaningful activity going on, but it begins as relatively isolated phenomena without a clear sense of from whence they came and to whence they are going. As thinking beings (assuming we are interested in exploring the nature of our existence), we quickly search for mental puzzle pieces to snap together such that the phenomena feel to attain more intuitive coherency. Yet, as we saw above, the mental puzzles remain abstract and uncertain.

Once we have confessed this habitual aspect of our ordinary mental life, we are in a position to begin remembering the intuitive intents that structure the flow of the mental pictures and deeper inner states. These intuitive intents will never be discovered as additional mental pictures that confront us from without, just as our 'intent to count' cannot be perceived as additional colors, sounds, tastes, etc. They can only be lived into and intuitively sensed from within. Now we are truly in a position to understand Steiner's original quote. As long as we keep searching for 'purposes' in either the contents of our current mental pictures or as some as-of-yet unperceived content that can eventually be discovered as more mental pictures (or, under the Kantian view, can never be discovered but only inferred), we have not understood the nature of our intimate intuitive activity. We are still expecting to find 'purposes' in a direction where they can never be truly found.

How can we apply what we have discussed so far to the communications of spiritual science? Steiner provides many detailed illustrations of how Angels and Archangels, for example, work their purposes - their intuitive intents - into human evolution. All of these illustrations give us symbolic angles from which to approach the inner life of these spiritual beings and to more intimately experience how our inner states are modulated on the waves of their spiritual activity. We can try to sense how, for example, our inner verbal thoughts emerge as a kind of commentary on the inner meaning we instinctively steer our way through, i.e. various sensory events, memory experiences, and corresponding moods, emotions, sympathies, etc. The latter is experienced as theatrical 'movie scenes' of mental pictures that we are dreaming our way through, which we sometimes become more sensitive to in the transition from sleeping to waking or vice versa, and these scenes are encoded as verbal commentaries in our waking thoughts. By living into such experiences, we begin to resonate more with the imagistic Angelic perspective which constrains and shapes our ordinary verbal thoughts.

Steiner also gives many illustrations of the 'folk souls' or Archangels. For this inner constraint, we can imagine the superimposed inner flow of all people from a given nation (imagined not as stacked abstract pictures in front of us, but imagining the inner life of those people superimposed over ours). There will be some regularities between our inner flows. Most of the things will 'cancel out' but certain elements of the flow will 'add up', which would be certain soul tendencies that are characteristic of the group, i.e. the inner gestures that form the common language, and so on. It may turn out that this sum belongs to a coherent perspective that conducts its intuitive intents within the unified World flow, which we dimly experience as linguistic and other collective soul constraints, such as national temperament, on our ordinary feelings and thoughts.

This also makes it clear why we can never gain consciousness of the intuitive intents within the World flow as a result of some purely personal development. The inner life of the Archangel remains completely unknown to our consciousness unless we expand our interests to feel how our flow is superimposed with that of all people from a nation. Only in that way can we inwardly understand the common element that is intuitively steered by the Archangel. Then if we go even further than the national spirits, we can experience the common element in all human beings. This also leads us to a coherent perspective of the World flow known as the Christ. It becomes easy to see in this way why the impulse that the Christ brought to humanity is that of Love. Only through Love can we attain the strength to remember our superimposed inner flow with all of humanity.

In this way, the devotional and artistic yet also detailed descriptions of spiritual science provide the opportunity for us to resonate more and more with the inner lives of spiritual beings, just as we resonate with the inner life of the artist when contemplating their artwork, and therefore how the flow of our inner states are modulated like ripples over the ideal waves of their spiritual activity. These concrete insights flow into our consciousness as moral imaginations and intuitions. We can discern these purposive patterns in the 7-year life stages, for example, which follow a clear trajectory of structured development, unfolding opportunities for new experiences and eventually new inner qualities and capacities through those experiences.

We can intuitively sense how the inner states of our life stages are attracted around certain patterns of development like the iron filings ordered by a magnetic field. These inner states were previously experienced as following a quite arbitrary and random trajectory and were generally ignored. But now we notice the patterns and sense how this attracted trajectory of our inner flow reflects the intuitive intents of concrete spiritual beings (including our own intents). By awakening to (remembering) these intuitive intents, we also gain the capacity to more consciously and freely participate in the unfoldment of our inner states. We no longer need to be helplessly dragged by sympathies and antipathies that we experience as the erratic movements of a fly, but can find the inner strength to creatively work into these deeper scales of intuitive intents and gradually get a conscious grip on our destiny. Only in this way can we experience spiritual freedom.

Thank you ashvin.

I can really resonate with your counting Metapher from Clerics last essay series. One thing I notice is how certain impulses pop up in consciousness, like for example the impulse of scrolling trough social media mindlessly, while reading long phenomenological essays like here on the forum. Trough out our whole daily consciousness these impulses pop up. One thing I noticed is that they don’t appear in full articulated sentences, but more in single words or sometimes pictures, that drag us in another state of the experiential flow. But even if they appear without being completely articulated, they have a clear meaning.

Most of the time these impulses are of a selfish nature, pleasure seeking so to say. It’s rare that these impulses are of a loving, humble or sacrificial nature. It’s true that at this point I can’t say something about the deeper origins of these impulses. They just appear like the 5 sound, in the example above. There is some dynamics that can be found tough. I understand why in spiritual streams they called it animal nature. If RS (or anyone else) says that these impulses are the intents of elementals, his experience must differ from my observations at this time. So how can we approach the depth of these impulses?

[AshvinP]

Thank you ashvin.

I can really resonate with your counting Metapher from Clerics last essay series. One thing I notice is how certain impulses pop up in consciousness, like for example the impulse of scrolling trough social media mindlessly, while reading long phenomenological essays like here on the forum. Trough out our whole daily consciousness these impulses pop up. One thing I noticed is that they don’t appear in full articulated sentences, but more in single words or sometimes pictures, that drag us in another state of the experiential flow. But even if they appear without being completely articulated, they have a clear meaning.

Most of the time these impulses are of a selfish nature, pleasure seeking so to say. It’s rare that these impulses are of a loving, humble or sacrificial nature. It’s true that at this point I can’t say something about the deeper origins of these impulses. They just appear like the 5 sound, in the example above. There is some dynamics that can be found tough. I understand why in spiritual streams they called it animal nature. If RS (or anyone else) says that these impulses are the intents of elementals, his experience must differ from my observations at this time. So how can we approach the depth of these impulses?

That's great, Guney! You are clearly becoming more inwardly sensitive through concentrated thinking. Notice how, when you read long phenomenological essays, you intend a flow that conflicts with the wider World flow, i.e. all the other things that you could be attending to that would bring you sensual pleasure, satisfy your usual preferences, align with your normal habits, etc. The wider World flow then drags against your concentrated study and, assuming you don't let it immediately carry you away each time, that resistance feeds back as living thoughts that heighten your sensitivity to the inner constraints of the World flow (beginning with your proximate soul constraints).

We could also remember the clay pot metaphor. As long as our thinking is passive, we are immersed in the imaginative panorama (clay substance) and discern the lowest common denominator of meaning conveyed by the World flow. We rely on the concepts educated into our sensory organism through basic natural and cultural development. We will our bodily movements and this feeds back on us as the sensory panorama which, for the most part, feels like a morphing pot that has nothing to do with our hand movements (and we hardly even question the relationship). Our thoughts simply imitate the sensory flow as a commentary on it. When we begin actively intending our thinking in a certain direction, however, the mental pictures that feedback start to be reflected in the imaginative panorama, i.e. we begin to spiritually 'see' (as a negative image) inner aspects of the World flow.

This most clearly happens in philosophy, theology, and science and what feeds back on the resistance of active thinking are 'laws', 'principles', 'doctrines', etc. that cohere the sensory appearances across time. The natural scientists resist the usual curvature of flowing along with sensory impressions and associated 'subjective' feelings and instead concentrate their thinking to propose hypotheses, set up experiments, analyze the results, and so on. In that sense, since the very dawn of thinking, gaining insights into the World flow has always been an exercise in meditative resistance. The impulse of modern initiation is to simply extend and intensify that exercise within the domain of the spiritual activity that is presupposed in all other domains of inquiry.

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is that one starts from completely normal human experiences, that one has a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and develops these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must of course have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must pay attention to thoroughly ordinary normal experiences, which, however, we are not very much interested in observing carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character.

In a sense, you have already answered your own question. True knowledge of the deeper inner constraints always comes via catharsis, purifying the soul life of its selfish impulses (like the pride of feeling that ordinary experiences are already well understood). This only sounds like asceticism to those who cannot suspect a purification via concentrated intuitive thinking. It is a highly creative endeavor. We know exactly what the goal is and have a clear sense of how we will reach it, i.e. by intensifying the very same meaning we experience when we willfully resist the usual curvatures to study spiritual science and this feeds back on us as ordinary insightful thoughts (but now understood symbolically since we are somewhat conscious of the intuitive condensation process). The rest is practically creative techniques based on our individual, freely evaluated circumstances.

You have become more inwardly sensitive to a common habitual curvature that I also share with you (and I am sure many others do as well). When the Facebook notification pops up while I am reading an essay or lecture, I am amazed at how much attractive pull it exerts on my attention. The only way to deepen our sensitivity and unveil the inner nature of such constraints is renunciation. If we continue to let that selfish impulse drag our attention away while we are reading, when we still have visual support in the text, it will certainly do so during meditation, when we lack that support. We should use these opportunities to gradually make mini-exercises, like committing to not checking social media during certain times of day, or not stopping the essay for at least 15 or 30 min. of unbroken reading.

The reality is that, through our mental concentration, we will only grow more and more sensitive to these inner flaws and we may feel quite helpless to transform them for quite some time. But at the same time, we can take heart that our Spirit is growing into the depths of the World process. The very fact that these curvatures we have become conscious of are beyond our mental control helps us concretely feel how they belong to the unified World process that drives existence, rather than only being 'subjective' factors that exist 'in our mind'. The inner constraints are no longer a mere psychological theory but a living fact of our experience. And since we have become sensitive to them within ourselves, we will also more easily notice how they constrain the flow at more expansive spacetime scales. This should Inspire us to continue our concentration and renunciation efforts with ever-replenishing strength.