Philosophical Speculations

Federica wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 9:31 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 3:42 pm Then there is clearly a misunderstanding about that post, because when Cleric says:

"Gradually, by experiencing more closely this horizon at which our thinking words manifest, we begin to realize that our inner being always lives in rich dream-like flow... Our waking self normally lives only in the semi-automatic symbolic encodings of this hidden dream flow."

He is not speaking about our intellectual scale pictorial gestures where, for example, we picture our plans for the day. That is not what our waking self lives in as the 'hidden dream flow' (obviously our intellectual pictures and words are both meaningfully related to this dream flow).

Ashvin,

From that post, I quoted what I understood, and still understand, as a normal cognition thought experiment: the lamp switch. In that description, which does not involve higher cognition (Cleric can say if I'm wrong) the word "imaginative" is used to indicate pictorial thinking. As I quoted before: "For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent."

In alignment with that, I've used "imaginative" in the same sense. But for some reason instead of seeing the obvious, you decide I am "comparing apples to oranges" and build paragraphs and paragraphs on that assumption, including theories of my lacking honesty, my psychological problems, plus the reminders you have decided I need to be administered again and again, in huge daily dose. Incidentally, this also allows you to zoom out of your theses on verbal thoughts (you already addressed these, no point in reconsidering them on ground of my replies). And now that your assumption has turned out to be just that, a mere assumption, you pretend I then must have misunderstood the quote. Doesn't matter if it turns out to be one more wrong assumption. In the meantime, it gives you another excuse to make your post about how failed my thoughts are, and what medicines I need, rather than on verbal language.

Let's first relieve ourselves of the constraint of pace. It's not like we are in an improv band, the metronome is clicking and we have to come up with something good at the right time. Thus we may try to very slowly initiate the pronunciation of the words. It's almost as if the teacher asks us a question and we hesitate between two single-word answers. Then we begin to very slowly pronounce one while trying to read the teacher's expression. If we sense disapproval we cleverly morph the word into the other answer. We are in an emotionally similar situation when we try to know something about the words we are about to think in our mind, except that we can no longer pre-think them. Here we need great vigilance. Our intellect will try to make a mental replica of the physical situation. For example, we'll quietly mumble some thinking-words and then repeat them again in our mind but clearly and loudly. This is cheating, however. We should seek that elusive horizon where the thinking words manifest for the first time.

Depending on our skills or simply our present condition (how relaxed or nervous we are), we may find that we can't help but simply let out torrents of word-thoughts. On the other extreme, we may experience something like inner paralysis, where we are able to arrest our inner voice but at the same time our whole explanation activity ceases. Yet, if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized...

In a sense, I understand your logic

Walking, Speaking and Thinking:—let us now consider, of these three, the middle member—human speech. We may indeed say that in speech there lies a most essential element of all earthly culture and civilisation. By speech, human beings come together here on earth, and one man finds the way to another. Bridging the gulf that lies between, soul meets with soul through speech. We feel that we have in speech something essential to our nature here on earth. And indeed our speech is the earthly reflection of our life in the Logos, in the cosmic Word. Thus it is particularly interesting to understand the connection of what man attains by great efforts here on earth, as speech and language, with the metamorphosis of speech and language yonder in the pre-earthly life. Indeed, when we study this relationship, we are led to perceive how the human being is inwardly constructed and organised out of the very element of spoken sound and music.

Now you must still be clear on one point. If you go to the lower animals, you will find that they cannot directly express pain and pleasure through sound. The insects, indeed, produce noises, but they are body noises. Occult science here makes a quite decisive distinction between the sounding animals and the non-sounding ones. But, first, in man, does the inner sound become word, speech. Even the highest animals have only one-sidedly developed sounds.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 8:04 pm What feels intimate is not the sound of the word itself (in the sense that we may feel intimacy or familiarity with an object or a person) but the fact that our inner being is more exposed to itself, so to speak, when it recognizes itself in the voice. Of course, here we are speaking of ordinary consciousness. As explained, in Imagination and above, the spirit expresses in much more manifold ways.


It is a different kind of resisting. The point of meditative resistance is not to paralyze and mute our spirit. What we resist are the forces that drag the spirit through the grooves of necessity. This comes through concentration and as explained many times, by 'shrinking', becoming 'smaller' than these forces (remember the gown and the twigs). Then we find a new kind of wiggle room in this point of concentration which exposes unfamiliar degrees of freedom of our "I"-force, which interestingly can fill the whole of inner space yet somehow pass through the 'twigs'.


As said, the "I"-force of the spirit that expresses itself is always the primary goal. Both the words and the eurhythmic gestures are such expressions. Steiner explains in HTHW how in the course of development, our center of being moves down toward the heart center. I tried to depict this before:



Now, it should be clear that the inner experience that we can try to convey in this schematic way and further triangulate with words, cannot be found as contained in the words. But it cannot be contained in such an image either. In the heart region we approach the activity of the Spirit Self, which acts by bending the flow of destiny. In our everyday life we need to decide how to move an object, or how to do something in order to achieve some goal, while from within the heart world, the Spirit Self pictures how our whole soul life should transform for certain higher goals to be achieved. Instead of moving a hand or a leg, it is as if it says "Here we need a little more Mercury forces, here we should diminish the Mars forces, etc." Of course, this is not in the least some mechanical adjustment but all these intentions are like subtle shifts of the Ls which draw a new fractal tunnel of destiny, within which our ordinary consciousness condenses (of course there are also other bendings that counteract those of the higher self and the angelic beings, and our "I" my snap into their grooves). Anyway... my point is that obviously when we experience Imaginatively such things as those just described, we are clearly beyond verbalization. We are beyond mere pictures of sensory happenings too. We live in expanded intuition about this deeper flow, yet to convey anything of it we need to sieve it down into concrete pictures. And clearly, word-pictures (we can call them that) offer great flexibility. I don't think I could convey what I just wrote entirely in a slideshow of visual pictures. Maybe we can do that if we already have some shared understanding of the deeper meaning of the pictures but then it will gradually become precisely a written pictographic language.



Like, Ashvin, I'm not entirely sure why you try to separate language on such an orthogonal basis. In the way you describe it, it sounds as if as soon as we form a sentence, we drop down in the realm of combinatorics - horizontal, mechanical patching of words. But this is not so. Not only the sounds condense from the higher meaningful spiritual activity. Grammar originally condenses from higher-order dynamics, just like the formative forces of our bodies. For example, it would be combinatory if someone takes the picture above and says (like the bees example to FB) "Oh, I get this, I'll put a few more spheres here, here, and here, and get an even prettier picture." These abstract combinatorics are certainly a threat, but as established before, and as seen even from this example, we can lay down wordless pictures in an equally abstract and combinatory way.

So there's no argument that language and pictures, like for example the spheres above, should grow out of deeper meaning. Conversely, brooding over such images and words should lead toward that deeper meaning. However, language is no mere combinatorics on the physical plane. Language (at least originally) grows directly from the dynamics of the etheric (life) world. And as such, its redemption is not simply overcoming the usage of words but expanding consciousness in the formative forces that originally gave the structure of language and grammar. And yes, at that Imaginative level, these forces are known in much more manifold ways. Nevertheless, we still need to retrace language into its higher origins.

Here's a topic for meditation: in a certain sense, we can think of the origin of language as the way the formative processes in the etheric realm 'sound like' when we experience their effects in the tone ether. This in a way explains why language seems to be so complex even in the ancient literature. It's because language did not arise by distilling a few basic grunts and then gradually combining them into more complicated grammatical and phonetic relations. Instead, language appears directly as something complex, simply because it originally reflects the already complex processes in the whole etheric realm. The experience of a growing plant from within the formative spiritual gestures, when followed in tone, already 'sound like' a complex sentence with many words and complicated grammatic relations (which directly reflect the relations of the formative forces). Does this help? Thinking of original language not as abstract mapping that combines deadened tokens grown from living experience, but as growing from what the amazingly complex life-world 'sounds like' from within?

Cleric wrote: ↑Sat Jan 04, 2025 9:12 pm We can focus on whether you think it is conceivable that language (as a living and dynamic spiritual process) has grown from a higher origin (and not only the individual tonal contents for which you say we can't go wrong with). Or as soon as we form a sentence - even if through it we try to explicate a deeper inner experience - its structure is already the result of combinatorics lying within the intellectual plane. Basically, at the end I asked if it seems plausible that the growth of a plant can be compared to a life process that when experienced from within can be likened to a progression through meaningful states with an overarching goal, not unlike the way we progress through word-states when we think in language.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:12 am Federica, please stop taking quotes completely out of context simply to prove your points. Before the part you quoted, Cleric wrote:

Let's first relieve ourselves of the constraint of pace. It's not like we are in an improv band, the metronome is clicking and we have to come up with something good at the right time. Thus we may try to very slowly initiate the pronunciation of the words. It's almost as if the teacher asks us a question and we hesitate between two single-word answers. Then we begin to very slowly pronounce one while trying to read the teacher's expression. If we sense disapproval we cleverly morph the word into the other answer. We are in an emotionally similar situation when we try to know something about the words we are about to think in our mind, except that we can no longer pre-think them. Here we need great vigilance. Our intellect will try to make a mental replica of the physical situation. For example, we'll quietly mumble some thinking-words and then repeat them again in our mind but clearly and loudly. This is cheating, however. We should seek that elusive horizon where the thinking words manifest for the first time.

Depending on our skills or simply our present condition (how relaxed or nervous we are), we may find that we can't help but simply let out torrents of word-thoughts. On the other extreme, we may experience something like inner paralysis, where we are able to arrest our inner voice but at the same time our whole explanation activity ceases. Yet, if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized...

Do you think all that would be necessary if the imaginative flash of illumination connected with lamp is something that is ready-at-hand at our intellectual scale of memory pictures? Obviously the whole point of the exercise is to help us attune to a deeper scale of inner activity. I think you already know that, or if you don't, it's only because you are willfully ignoring all context at this point simply to defend your theoretical propositions.

and also the illustration leading to it, in your own quote

I don't remember ever saying you are "lacking honesty" in any of my comments on this issue, but with these tactics on display, I don't even need to because it is leaning heavily that way.

And to act like Cleric's last post had nothing to do with what you have been saying this whole time, is yet another example. This is what always happens when your propositions are challenged and the weaknesses in the underlying reasoning are revealed - you act like the other party has completely misunderstood/misinterpreted you and therefore everything they write is irrelevant. You dismiss entire posts and quotes on this basis.

Is it so hard to conceive that you are mistaken on a few of these propositions, especially given how many times it has happened before? Do we need to compile a list of all those times and associate it with a pictorial symbol, so next time it happens we can just plug that in as a reminder that, yes, there is still much that you can learn from these discussions?

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:10 am I have colored in rose your not-saturated rectifications, that suggest I had said or implied the opposite; and in blue what I don't agree with/don't understand. The one that particularly hurts is: "its redemption is not simply overcoming the usage of words", since I feel it is plain impossible to misunderstand my posts to the point of reading in them that I recommend overcoming the usage of words. That would be foolish. I don't want to speculate why you deemed it appropriate to write that, but certainly it gives a hint that these are not good bases to go on and focus on any particular part at this point. Thank you, however, for the meditation. That part I appreciate and find useful, since I obviously think it's "conceivable that language has grown from a higher origin".

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:42 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 12:12 am Federica, please stop taking quotes completely out of context simply to prove your points. Before the part you quoted, Cleric wrote:

Let's first relieve ourselves of the constraint of pace. It's not like we are in an improv band, the metronome is clicking and we have to come up with something good at the right time. Thus we may try to very slowly initiate the pronunciation of the words. It's almost as if the teacher asks us a question and we hesitate between two single-word answers. Then we begin to very slowly pronounce one while trying to read the teacher's expression. If we sense disapproval we cleverly morph the word into the other answer. We are in an emotionally similar situation when we try to know something about the words we are about to think in our mind, except that we can no longer pre-think them. Here we need great vigilance. Our intellect will try to make a mental replica of the physical situation. For example, we'll quietly mumble some thinking-words and then repeat them again in our mind but clearly and loudly. This is cheating, however. We should seek that elusive horizon where the thinking words manifest for the first time.

Depending on our skills or simply our present condition (how relaxed or nervous we are), we may find that we can't help but simply let out torrents of word-thoughts. On the other extreme, we may experience something like inner paralysis, where we are able to arrest our inner voice but at the same time our whole explanation activity ceases. Yet, if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized...

Do you think all that would be necessary if the imaginative flash of illumination connected with lamp is something that is ready-at-hand at our intellectual scale of memory pictures? Obviously the whole point of the exercise is to help us attune to a deeper scale of inner activity. I think you already know that, or if you don't, it's only because you are willfully ignoring all context at this point simply to defend your theoretical propositions.

Definitely, the flash of illumination we can sense when "looking at a lamp" - please let that sink, Ashvin: "looking-at-a-lamp" - is not exactly ready at hand, but requires a thoughtful, slowed-down exercise, or experiment. However, beyond the overall context of that entire post and thread, the lamp exercise itself, and also the illustration leading to it, in your own quote , clearly show this is a standard-cognition exercise. Otherwise, it wouldn't be given that the intellect tries to make a mental replica of the physical happening, and the instruction wouldn't invite to look at a lamp, if we were in meditation. Therefore, I repeat, I think it's completely appropriate and honest quoting to refer to this exercise as a standard-cognition, sense-based exercise, proposed as such in the original post. You see, there is no necessity inherent in the arguments to tag anyone disagreeing with you <<dishonest>>, unless one submits to constraints that little have to do with the arguments themselves.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 1:05 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 10:10 am I have colored in rose your not-saturated rectifications, that suggest I had said or implied the opposite; and in blue what I don't agree with/don't understand. The one that particularly hurts is: "its redemption is not simply overcoming the usage of words", since I feel it is plain impossible to misunderstand my posts to the point of reading in them that I recommend overcoming the usage of words. That would be foolish. I don't want to speculate why you deemed it appropriate to write that, but certainly it gives a hint that these are not good bases to go on and focus on any particular part at this point. Thank you, however, for the meditation. That part I appreciate and find useful, since I obviously think it's "conceivable that language has grown from a higher origin".

Well, prior to this discussion it would have never occurred to me to think that you may imply the opposite of the pink. But I'm left wondering where the problem lies exactly.

OK. Perhaps let’s clarify this first (sorry ). Not the first time it happens and I would admit it sounds little surreal.
So I was asking whether you agree with some of my thoughts about verbal and pictorial thinking. To summarize:

(sorry I realize this may look nothing like you )

Me:


But, Cleric, does this make any sense? Is it a special communication style you are testing or what

Cleric wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 1:05 pm So basically, it started by you saying that there's something deeper (the living, poetic, etc.) that lives behind our verbal expressions. And I don't think anyone has ever put that into question. Quite the opposite: we have used many metaphors, like the slots of the suit, etc. We all agree that these rigid slots are an evolutionary stage, which surely constrain the infinite, yet we also cannot do without them at this time, just like we cannot do without a physical brain, heart, etc.

Thus the question seems to amount to how should we relate to the word slots, such that they do not remain a trap but the higher being can grow from them. And it is at this point that we fail to understand each other I think.

From what I gather, you suggested that the linguistic layer is a sub-cycle of a more holistic daily cycle. This is, of course, true when things are ordered in their purely temporal aspect. However, what has been tried to explain is that the forces that give the structure of language are not to be found within the resolution at which the sequences of words are experienced. It is the Logoic force that metamorphoses the World state forward at all scales. What we experience as progressions of thinking states is a process of metamorphosis that is self-similar to the growth of living organisms, or the way evolutionary epochs grow from each other, etc. In that sense, the Logoic force in its inner reality can first be found in the thinking process in its real-time experience. And what was attempted was to show that we do not get into the inner reality of the Logoic activity by thinking through scaled images of greater periods of time. This is, of course, a completely necessary step, it stretches inner space and prepares us to awaken to the deeper spiritual movements. Yet the latter we can find only when they connect to our real-time kernel.

And before you color everything above in pink I'll say that I'm sure you understand all this. You have shown that you do many times already. This is what makes me wonder where exactly the discord comes from. And at this time, I cannot think of anything else than that in meditation you feel that merging with the real-time thinking leads in a less holistic (fragmentary) rhythm that is divorced from its overarching context (or at least is under such a threat). And thus you feel on a more secure ground when you live in wordless daily-scale images, where you feel that the linguistic rhythm is already contained as sub-cycles, thus you've got it under control, so to speak. Yet we need to realize that when we think in daily-scale images we still utilize real-time thinking.

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Dec 22, 2024 7:56 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Dec 21, 2024 7:58 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Sat Dec 21, 2024 4:38 pm By the way, when I get a chance I will go back to the dreaming-in-language post on page 17. From your example I realize we are talking about two different things. In your example there is not much reference to wording. It's an example of thought flow. It's much more high level, compared to what I mean with dreaming in language. Surely, if you remain at the level of thought flow, you can say it's casual, it's effortless, but it flows along the elastic tensions, yes. But I was giving an example of something else, something more precise. There are no word-ebbs in your example. There are no formulations that deploy their attraction and take over the steering. In my example specific linguistic anchors are elastic tensions in their own right, and it's not possible to notice that without considering precise wordings. I will come back to that.

That's where I think the fundamental discontinuity comes in, that linguistic forms are somehow different from thought-forms, the latter preserving its flow along the contextual elastic tensions while the former has somehow dropped out of it into their own isolated layer of elastic tensions which necessitate an attraction that takes over the steering. I don't see any possible scenario in which that could be the case... but I will wait for your further comment.

Doesn't there exist a 'discontinuity' between incarnated and disincarnated state? and, at a smaller scale, between waking and sleeping? At an even smaller scale, can't it be said that we continually awaken to our thoughts, coming from another state - call it intuitive-contextual, unconscious, or distracted state - in which the thought was not present? You wouldn't imagine calling any of these rhythms "fondamental discontinuities" I am sure. What I'm referring to is of this same nature: it is a thought cycle of descending below clear, reasoning consciousness in the middle of a thought-picture concatenation, only to reemerge at a discontinuous point of the contextual matrix. I am simply describing one modality of what we are already familiar with, that you definitely agreed with: our continuous awakening to our formed thought-images. The difference is only that in the process I refer to, the passages from consciousness to unconsciousness along the parabola of reasoning happen inopportunely, in the middle of the curve, so to say. You find no fundamental discontinuity in the following, I am sure:

Cleric wrote: ↑Thu Dec 08, 2022 4:24 pm What's interesting is that even our thinking trains are of the same nature. This we can notice when in meditation we investigate the nature of our distractions. Just like falling asleep, we're never clearly conscious of being distracted. We say "I used to concentrate on that thought but now I awakened to the fact that there has been an interruption and I have switched to thinking of something else". So in a strange way we constantly reincarnate in our thoughts.

And I'm saying, language plays a central role in how the micro-derailments happen. Perhaps this phenomenon is on an even smaller scale compared to what Cleric described above as constant reincarnation in our thoughts. This is a particularly fragmented mode of checking in and off the conscious parabola of reasoning, perhaps even one magnitude below the normal distraction patterns in our standard cognition. Where are we with our willed, steering consciousness when a normal distraction kicks in? We are at a less dense and pregnant level than the one in which attention is maintained without interruption, for example to solve a geometrical problem, correct? I'm saying, there is an hyper-distracted state, where the distraction doesn't correspond to (short and erratic, but still present) emergence in consciousness, within the context of the distracting thought. In this hyper-distracted state the thinker believes the main train of thoughts has never been abandoned. It's believed that continuity of reasoning was maintained. How is this possible? Because the space of distraction in which the mind is dreaming has been hijacked by some distracting force, and language is used as a proxy of thought, that makes us feel as if there is meaningfulness, as if there is continuity of reasoning. But there is not necessarily. Then, we awaken again from that dream, somewhere else closer to our preferences. The loose ends are patched together and the discontinuity remains unrealized. Even scientific work is sometimes executed in this mode, often, but not always, with the great complicity of LLMs (as it's been demonstrated time and again, like when it turns out that papers in major scientific publications have been written with Chat GPT, as an example).

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:28 pm I had the misfortune of casually saying it was the most natural cycle for present man.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 1:32 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:28 pm I had the misfortune of casually saying it was the most natural cycle for present man.

Wow, Federica, you had the misfortune of throwing out yet another theoretical proposition, as 'lateral' support for the other propositions, that, unsurprisingly, turned out to be mistaken? Do you see any problem with taking this victim mentality where your own actions are seen as something that happens to you?

Federica wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 2:15 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jan 06, 2025 1:32 pm

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Jan 05, 2025 11:28 pm I had the misfortune of casually saying it was the most natural cycle for present man.

Wow, Federica, you had the misfortune of throwing out yet another theoretical proposition, as 'lateral' support for the other propositions, that, unsurprisingly, turned out to be mistaken? Do you see any problem with taking this victim mentality where your own actions are seen as something that happens to you?

This is simply the direct translation of a common French expression: "J'ai eu le malheur de...". If you know French, or whenever you learn it, you will understand. If you don't know French, ask a friend who speaks it well. They will explain to you. BTW - and I am saying this for clarity to Cleric and anyone else following - that thought was not in any way a foundation for my ideas on language (as it is evident from what I wrote on December 22 highlighted here above in pink).