Philosophical Speculations

Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:39 pm I want to add some more personal observations. To be clear, the "structure" of language - not in itself, but in how it is used nowadays - is an obstacle to living thinking primarily (as I tried to characterise above) not to living feeling. Living feeling is hampered by our lost sensitivity to sound and rhythm. These are two things, though they are somewhat connected.

On the side of feeling, I don’t sense the direct value of the uttered sound other than dimly. Even less, do I sense it with the inner voice, and with written text. I mean that, beyond their disambiguating character - they allow the almost infinite variation of verbal tokens - the sounds of vowels and consonants are felt as more or less equivalent. With big efforts, and thanks to Steiner, things may slightly evolve, but I am struck by this insensitiveness to sound in language (yet, one has to become aware of the insensitiveness, before one can be struck by it).

For this reason, I am left with a sense of being sucked into sort of a condition of falsehood, abstractedness, superficiality, mannerism, still-standing, separated from the full and real experience. This is very tangible in prayer, for example. And here I particularly recognize what Steiner says, that translations are always possible, sure, but the valence of the translated verbal sequence is inevitably diminished and warped, especially for prayers, poetry, and any verbal sequence that is meant to be uttered, and has value for its power to uniquely connect the direct experience, through a pictorial flow and feeling.

However, this problem is overcome entirely when for example I try to concentrate on an image. No matter how unsuccessful that may turn out to be, there is a level of directness and reality in the image that is simply inaccessible through the mediation of verbal linguistic tokens. They simply have a persistent LaaS character. To be clear, I don’t mean that such character is inbuilt in the genius of language itself, but it feels overwhelmingly present in language that has been stripped (like it has in our times) of both its foundations: feeling (through sounds) and thinking (through the pictorial flow). This stripping is perceivable at various degrees. It is strongest with prosaic language, and with written text. It also depends on the ability of the individual, of course. I don’t want to be misunderstood here, so I repeat: it is not an inherent quality of the genius of language, but it’s an Ahrimanic, materialistic influence that affects language in our time, especially prosaic language, though different people are affected differently, like not everyone is inclined to a materialistic worldview (but the linguistic deception is much less obvious).

In many situations, the tokens are fine and even indispensable, for example now, when there is not much feeling involved, and when there is a specific effort to write out of real experience, that is, to contrast the tendency to abstractness. But even when feeling is not in focus, the abstract, almost self-generating character of prosaic, especially written language (which I tried to describe in the post above) is always in ambush. It's almost like a word is able to pull the next one 'by itself'. We could pause effortful and practical thinking, and the sentence would still go on, and make some grammatical and syntactical sense. It's almost like we have become ourselves something of an outlet for LLM linguistic output. We are more and more captive to the evil of our own Ahrimanic invention and keep going around in circles in its interior. We could almost go entirely to sleep with real, living thinking, and almost none would notice, not even ourselves. Words would be thrown out regardless.

I probably shouldn't, but I still hope these words provide some better sense of what I have been unsuccessfully trying to express for so long. By the way, if anyone knows a prayer that is particularly poetic, or a poem that is particularly prayer-like, even in languages I don't speak, I'd be interested. For a while, I have been starting my day with a prayer in a language I don't speak (I hope to prevent ironic comments by saying that I know the translation).

I intend to add a few more things later but now that you have given some more context about your personal experience it could be interesting to examine the following. In the post before your last, you quoted your elaboration:

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 7:50 pm As a modern habit, it boils down to treating words as mere verbal symbols. This habit misses the conscious experience of the powerful divine prerogative (made available to humans as language) to re-create the world (the concepts, the ideas,...) out of oneself.

That’s what language can achieve for man, simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking. In and with its quality of facilitating human thinking, language puts this higher prerogative into our individual and collective hands, so that we put our unique stamp on reality, or re-form it, re-create it, in words, out of ourselves, out of our unique self, unique in its individuality of soul and also in its belonging to groups

Now these are words that are most certainly not mechanically patched but in a way they reflect exactly the inner experience that you try to describe with them. It could be said that you paint verbal images of the soul experience. If you try to make this verbal painting the object of your investigation, would you say that in the process of producing the verbal paint strokes, you also feel the creeping shadow of abstractness and falsehood? Of course, the words may sound this way in someone else's ears, but what about how they sound to you?

Cleric wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 3:16 pm I intend to add a few more things later but now that you have given some more context about your personal experience it could be interesting to examine the following. In the post before your last, you quoted your elaboration:

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jan 09, 2025 7:50 pm As a modern habit, it boils down to treating words as mere verbal symbols. This habit misses the conscious experience of the powerful divine prerogative (made available to humans as language) to re-create the world (the concepts, the ideas,...) out of oneself.

That’s what language can achieve for man, simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking. In and with its quality of facilitating human thinking, language puts this higher prerogative into our individual and collective hands, so that we put our unique stamp on reality, or re-form it, re-create it, in words, out of ourselves, out of our unique self, unique in its individuality of soul and also in its belonging to groups

Now these are words that are most certainly not mechanically patched but in a way they reflect exactly the inner experience that you try to describe with them. It could be said that you paint verbal images of the soul experience. If you try to make this verbal painting the object of your investigation, would you say that in the process of producing the verbal paint strokes, you also feel the creeping shadow of abstractness and falsehood? Of course, the words may sound this way in someone else's ears, but what about how they sound to you?

These words were formed a month ago or so, and I only vaguely remember the real act of thinking them. I can of course set myself up to make the gestures again, and check whether the now-experience can be described with words that turn out to be similar to the quoted ones. I even expect that to be the case, however, there is nothing standalone in those words as they appear there, written in the cloud. They are desiccated. They can work only indirectly, for someone else, who may or may not summon the appropriate experience in themselves, and even for myself - I have to do it too, if I want to retrace the words. There was the real experience that produced them but this is not logged in the words out there, I have to reproduce it, to be sure. And for others, the words may simply hint how to think something along those lines, but there is no guarantee.

The case would be different if the words were poetic, formed with a feeling for sound and rhythm, but they were simply a prosaic best attempt to render my full experience in that moment. Let’s notice, this is not speech, this is a trace (written) of a trace (spoken) of a trace (thought)…. It’s almost a small miracle when something is triggered in another soul, by retracing written, prosaic words. So until I check them, they sound nothing special to me, apart from the fact that I trust myself and I know I was making my best effort when writing them. For example, I have to inquire: "What did I mean with "simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking"? Oh Ok, I realize what I was trying to convey".

Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:39 pm the abstract, almost self-generating character of prosaic, especially written language (which I tried to describe in the post above) is always in ambush. It's almost like a word is able to pull the next one 'by itself'. We could pause effortful and practical thinking, and the sentence would still go on, and make some grammatical and syntactical sense. It's almost like we have become ourselves something of an outlet for LLM linguistic output. We are more and more captive to the evil of our own Ahrimanic invention and keep going around in circles in its interior. We could almost go entirely to sleep with real, living thinking, and almost none would notice, not even ourselves. Words would be thrown out regardless.

By the way, Cleric, this is what I have always meant with the description "linguistic sub-cycle". It is the subtle Ahrimanic deception that makes us so easily sink below attentive consciousness, when we let the LaaS character of language, very smoothly and comfortably, take the upper hand and self-generate itself through our head, mouth and hands. Surely, the Initiate bridges all the gulfs - the incarnations’, the nights’, the thoughts’, and the words’ - but, just as surely, the normal person of the 2000s doesn’t.

There is nothing nonsensical in that.

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Jan 08, 2025 8:00 pm It is nonsensical to say "I very much want to understand what xyz is, its shape, color, how it feels to the touch, and so on, but the nature of verbal thinking prevents me from doing so." It prevents us only if we have no interest in understanding what the words symbolize, it's not that the grammar of language somehow forces us to remain with the words only.

The nature of the verbal tokens does prevent us from penetrating the flow of our experiences with creative power. At the very least, it puts big spanners in the works. Not for the Initiate, but for everyone else, to variable extents. This happens through the grammar of language, provided that "grammar of language" is understood - as I have tried to articulate in these pages! - not as the grammar one learns in grammar textbooks, but as the Ahrimanic bones that remain, the cadaveric remains we are left with, once the genius of language has been stripped, both from the side of thinking and feeling, of all that makes language a gift of creation, a chance to recreate the world out of oneself.

I think we all agree on the various 'spanners in the works' of modern thinking, which is of course dominated by the verbal element. But something peculiar happens when it is attributed to the 'character of language', just like it happens when modern diseases of nervousness, depression, digestive issues, and even deeper ones like cancer, are attributed to genes and the workings of the physical body itself. It is simply because the surface-level symptoms that can be easily followed within the perceptual (physical-etheric) spectrum are not traced any further into the wider supersensible soul context, the astral domain. It is very easy for us to understand all the symptoms you are pointing to, because we experience them clearly within ourselves, but we have also traced them further into precisely the soul tendencies that, at first, seem somewhat remote and unrelated to these symptoms.

We need to remember, that in our ordinary consciousness, we only have mental pictures of these soul constraints and those pictures cannot be confused for the constraints themselves. The latter are rather the invisible ‘geodesics’ along which our entire lives are normally dragged into various gravity wells, as individuals and collectives. We often say things like, “I don’t believe in that outlook”, “I don’t feel that resentment”, “I don’t have a problem with this expectation”, “I don’t really desire those sensuous things”, and so on. Such comments reflect how we so often confuse our mental pictures floating at the surface of our consciousness for the more encompassing yet invisible curvatures which steer them from within the shadowy depths. It is when we expand our imaginative activity into resonance with these depths that we begin to intuit how all the surface-level symptoms constellate through and around them.

This can also happen when we focus on the contents of isolated lectures, failing to probe the wider context in and through which those contents arise. What is the context for Steiner's Eurythmy lectures, for example, or his various lectures on the degeneration of modern language? It is, of course, spiritual science in general. The latter gives us hundreds of different angles on one central principle - the first stage of spiritualizing the World Content (language, first and foremost), is purifying our soul life - our narrow habits, preferences, desires, interests, and overall egoistic tendencies. It has consistently been the first stage from ancient to modern times. It is the first stage we pass through after death (kamaloca) before we can creatively participate in the spiritual worlds fashioning the karma for our next incarnation, i.e. the environment and living body we will incarnate into. We don't pass through a stage of judging the 'character of language' as a trap, but we holistically discern the traps in our own soul constitution. We can consider quotes like the following:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA159/En ... 18p02.html

But now consider the following: if we look at the East, we look at luciferic powers even in the near East. In the West, we look at ahrimanic powers. In spiritual science, we have to get into the habit of considering the matters not with sympathy and antipathy and also the peoples and folk-souls not with sympathy and antipathy, but in such a way as they are in their characteristics. What one calls the national characteristic of a human being who stands in his people, depends—above all—on that which is effective in the physical and etheric bodies. When we live from falling asleep to waking up with our soul and mind as an astral body and ego, we live beyond the normal national element. We live only from waking up to falling asleep in our nationality when we are in our physical body. That is why the nationality is also something the human being overcomes gradually during his stay in kamaloka. The human being there strives for the generally human, while he overcomes the nationality in kamaloka to live then in the generally human for the longest time between death and new birth. It belongs to the qualities which are taken off in kamaloka, also that which makes us a national human being.

That is how we reconcile the meaning of our thoughts (whether verbal, pictorial, etc.) with the formative forces structuring the metamorphoses of those thoughts. The former is then progressively experienced as symbolizing the latter, regardless of the specific language, the grammar, syntax, whether it is scientific, religious, or philosophical language (see Guney's latest comment, for example), and so on. Those latter factors only constrain this original function of linguistic-pictorial thinking when we allow them to do so through our myopic soul life, where our sympathies and antipathies for red or green dresses rule our thinking throughout the day. There is no 'other way' of spiritualizing language, as if we are a plumber fixing someone else's clogged pipes in a house. Language itself is not clogged or broken, we are clogged and broken in the lower astral realm.

In other words, we don't need to pick out specific words or phrases and substitute them with other ones, we don't need to ban certain words, we don't need to feel like certain words or grammars are trapping us, imprisoning us, and so on. All of that is a distraction from where the true clogging resides in our selfish soul tendencies, our love of ease and convenience, our antipathy for the soul lives of others, our myopic interests, and so on. The transformation of the etheric body into Life Spirit, which is how arts such as Eurythmy will be gradually perfected, proceeds through the purification of the astral body into Spirit Self. The latter proceeds through the portal of concentrated study-meditation (which includes devotional and prayerful practices) that purifies the most proximate thinking habits which continually distract us from perceiving this 'strait and narrow way' honestly and clearly. 

AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:35 pm When you write further on this, I ask that you provide some more concrete indications/examples for how LaaS influences you in spiritual life, for example when reading through Steiner's lectures or essays on the forum. What within the structure of language consistently derails you from approaching the deeper contextual meaning? Perhaps you can provide a specific passage as an example.

If that is generally not a problem, is it because the author (Steiner, Cleric, etc.) has sufficiently 'spiritualized' the word-sequences so that the additional Ahriman factor ('on top of' our etched soul pathways) are not much of a derailing threat, whereas the word-sequences of a theoretical scientific paper or newspaper article have not been so spiritualized and thus remain a threat? If so, what precisely makes the difference between how the word-sequences were condensed such that one remains a threat (above and beyond our derailing soul tendencies) and the other has been mostly neutralized?

Of course it is a problem, otherwise one wouldn't have read PoF 5 or 10 times, as you said (and this is for the few who manage to take some value out of those words) and there wouldn’t be such a level of constant misunderstanding of the written word.

And, the spiritualization is not encapsulated in the word tokens. The same words trigger for one an insightful and fruitful spiritual activity, while for another they only look like an endless string leading nowhere. Written words are desiccated traces. Even Steiners. Steiners transcribed words are coded tokens as well. Like all other written words, they are visible but not pictorial, unless you reshape the original picture in your thinking activity. They are listenable, but do not resound, unless you retrace and replay the original harmony in your feelings. Clearly, the magic happens somewhere else, not in the tokens. Tokens are a trace of a trace of a trace, as I said above.

In addition to all that, the act of retracing words that we found somewhere external to us is only a secondary side of the question. Before that, let’s focus attention on the words that we ourselves put out there.

Federica wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2025 1:52 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 1:35 pm When you write further on this, I ask that you provide some more concrete indications/examples for how LaaS influences you in spiritual life, for example when reading through Steiner's lectures or essays on the forum. What within the structure of language consistently derails you from approaching the deeper contextual meaning? Perhaps you can provide a specific passage as an example.

If that is generally not a problem, is it because the author (Steiner, Cleric, etc.) has sufficiently 'spiritualized' the word-sequences so that the additional Ahriman factor ('on top of' our etched soul pathways) are not much of a derailing threat, whereas the word-sequences of a theoretical scientific paper or newspaper article have not been so spiritualized and thus remain a threat? If so, what precisely makes the difference between how the word-sequences were condensed such that one remains a threat (above and beyond our derailing soul tendencies) and the other has been mostly neutralized?

Of course it is a problem, otherwise one wouldn't have read PoF 5 or 10 times, as you said (and this is for the few who manage to take some value out of those words) and there wouldn’t be such a level of constant misunderstanding of the written word.

And, the spiritualization is not encapsulated in the word tokens. The same words trigger for one an insightful and fruitful spiritual activity, while for another they only look like an endless string leading nowhere. Written words are desiccated traces. Even Steiners. Steiners transcribed words are coded tokens as well. Like all other written words, they are visible but not pictorial, unless you reshape the original picture in your thinking activity. They are listenable, but do not resound, unless you retrace and replay the original harmony in your feelings. Clearly, the magic happens somewhere else, not in the tokens. Tokens are a trace of a trace of a trace, as I said above.

In addition to all that, the act of retracing words that we found somewhere external to us is only a secondary side of the question. Before that, let’s focus attention on the words that we ourselves put out there.

Yes, but again needing to read PoF 5 or 10x is a symptom, what is the source of this symptom? It is not the structure of the written words themselves, and we know that precisely because "The same words trigger for one an insightful and fruitful spiritual activity, while for another they only look like an endless string leading nowhere". Restoring the pictorial and harmonic nature of word tokens is nothing but purifying our thinking from the myopic soul tendencies which veil their deeper Logoic essence. That is why Steiner describes PoF as a means of catharsis:

Catharsis is an ancient term for the purifying of the astral body by means of meditation and concentration exercises. Catharsis, or purification, serves the purpose of ridding the astral body of any elements that keep it from being properly and harmoniously organized, so that higher organs can develop in it. It is endowed with the potential for these higher organs; all one has to do is clear the way for the forces that are inherent in it.

We spoke of the possibility of bringing about catharsis by a great variety of methods. A person has gone a long way toward achieving it if, for example, he has taken in and experienced the content of my Philosophy of Freedom with such inner participation that he has the feeling, “Yes, the book was a stimulus, but now I can reproduce the thoughts it contained by my own effort.” If a reader takes the book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of himself—in the composer's sense, naturally—the book's organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis in him. For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn't make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that one later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog's hind legs where the front ones belong. The book is a living organism, and to work one's way through the thoughts it contains is to undergo an inner training. A person to whom this has not happened as a result of his study need not conclude that what I am saying is incorrect, but rather that he has not read it correctly or worked hard and thoroughly enough.

What is it that prevents us from taking the book as it was meant, relating to it as an artistic composition, as a living organism, to working hard and thoroughly enough? Is it the word sequences themselves, which as Steiner says above were actually artistically crafted to serve as anchors leading our thought movements into new degrees of freedom within the supersensible, or the same soul tendencies that generally prevent us from relating to the perceptual spectrum in a living, artistic, disciplined, devoted, and loving way? The same soul tendencies that are responsible for practically all our modern psychological and even physical diseases?

Ashvin,

Because of the attachment you have many times demonstrated to your preconceived ideas about me, which prevents you from paying unprejudiced attention to my written words, you are starting to sound like that thing.

One last time: I don't deny that we need to realize and cure the linguistic deception by strengthening our spiritual activity and purifying our soul - what else could we do. I have said and repeated that I don’t want to be misunderstood, and that the geniuses of language are not themselves perverted. Why are you iteratively ignoring that? To be sure, the Ahrimanic tendecies operate within our own souls. However, the work to be done in the area of language starts with realizing how the Ahrimanic deception is seamlessly deceiving us THROUGH language. Have you noticed this preposition in my last post to Cleric, and above?

Listen: when you read the following: “Our thoughts have become dead precipitations, shadowy thought-pictures, and that’s how it’s happened, and how it works....” etcetera, you don’t get pissed off and say: “The thoughts are only a symptom, stop accusing the thoughts, it’s in your etched soul pathways, desires, likes, dislikes, egoistic habits”, right? No you don't. Instead, you are interested in how it happened, and you don't find it preposterous and myopic to discuss it. Right. Now, you should react in the same way here. We definitely need to work on ourselves. But if we don’t see what is happening to our linguistic habits in these times - today - and do nothing about it, they will remain like a dark flack on the soul.

We also don’t need to “pick out specific words or phrases and substitute them with other ones, we don't need to ban certain words, we don't need to feel like certain words or grammars are trapping us, imprisoning us, and so on.”
Please stop this trick (and all the other tricks as well, please). I never suggested that we need to do anything similar. And if you have understood from my posts that I suggest to pick out specific words and phrases and replace them, it must be because your etched soul pathways hold you back in a stereotyped idea about me that wins you above and beyond the reality of what I am saying. Yes, we need to go to the level of words, grammar and structure. Steiner does that a million times, whenever he discusses these questions. But not because we need to pick out and substitute specific words. It's only because the words and the structure are the reality of language, and we need to approach that reality if we don't want it to remain abstract. And with this, I am done with this topic.

Federica wrote: ↑Sat Jan 11, 2025 6:20 pm Ashvin,

Because of the attachment you have many times demonstrated to your preconceived ideas about me, which prevents you from paying unprejudiced attention to my written words, you are starting to sound like that thing.

One last time: I don't deny that we need to realize and cure the linguistic deception by strengthening our spiritual activity and purifying our soul - what else could we do. I have said and repeated that I don’t want to be misunderstood, and that the geniuses of language are not themselves perverted. Why are you iteratively ignoring that? To be sure, the Ahrimanic tendencies operate within our own souls. However, the work to be done in the area of language starts with realizing how the Ahrimanic deception is seamlessly deceiving us THROUGH language. Have you noticed this preposition in my last post to Cleric, and above?

Listen: when you read the following: “Our thoughts have become dead precipitations, shadowy thought-pictures, and that’s how it’s happened, and how it works....” etcetera, you don’t get pissed off and say: “The thoughts are only a symptom, stop accusing the thoughts, it’s in your etched soul pathways, desires, likes, dislikes, egoistic habits”, right? No you don't. Instead, you are interested in how it happened, and you don't find it preposterous and myopic to discuss it. Right. Now, you should react in the same way here. We definitely need to work on ourselves. But if we don’t see what is happening to our linguistic habits in these times - today - and do nothing about it, they will remain like a dark flack on the soul.

Yes, we (Cleric and myself) are interested in how it happened, but you seem to only be interested in describing theoretical propositions about "how" it happens and defending them at all costs. The sub-cycle is pure abstract theory, supported by only the fact that you think mostly in words and have a hard time penetrating the inner gestures of those words (as we all do, to begin with). Nowhere in your posts, such as this one, is there any emphasis on your soul tendencies which prevent you from properly feeling the life and meaning behind the words, there are only various combinations of words that are aimed at blaming the word sequences themselves, with the occasional disclaimer absolving the 'genius of language'. This is why I specifically pointed attention as follows:

We often say things like, “I don’t believe in that outlook”, “I don’t feel that resentment”, “I don’t have a problem with this expectation”, “I don’t really desire those sensuous things”, and so on. Such comments reflect how we so often confuse our mental pictures floating at the surface of our consciousness for the more encompassing yet invisible curvatures which steer them from within the shadowy depths

This tendency is so bad that we often convince ourselves at the surface of the exact opposite of what is stirring within the soul depths. Hence the saying, “the lady doth protest too much”. At a more analytical level, psychologists have intuited the intellectual ‘mechanisms’ of projection and compensation as effects of this modern tendency, i.e. we continuously project our unconscious soul tendencies onto the content of our experience and try to ‘compensate’ for those tendencies by disclaiming them at the intellectual scale. It is like we are continually building things up with one arm and then tearing them down with the other - we instinctively feel motivated to transform some unhealthy tendencies but continually self-sabotage our efforts with theoretical intellectual convictions.

You need to face the reality that, if you concretely understood what we are saying about the nature of language and the soul tendencies, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Over and over again, your posts display flawed reasoning and places attention on some special Ahrimanic force that works in language specifically, and you imagine you are doing everyone a favor by calling attention to this hidden force in language. No amount of disclaiming that at the intellectual scale will deal with the underlying issue. You can't keep ignoring the meaningful feedback that is given to you by the higher worlds via this forum, acting as if everyone is misunderstanding you and interpreting your words with nefarious motives.These words are clear:

It is the subtle Ahrimanic deception that makes us so easily sink below attentive consciousness, when we let the LaaS character of language, very smoothly and comfortably, take the upper hand and self-generate itself through our head, mouth and hands... The nature of the verbal tokens does prevent us from penetrating the flow of our experiences with creative power. At the very least, it puts big spanners in the works.

And they simply reiterate what you have been saying in every single post. This is an exact replica of our discussions with Eugene where, post after post, he would reveal that he was failing to understand higher cognition, but every time this was mentioned, he would act shocked that we couldn't see he was "agreeing" with us. If this was happening with someone else, you would have no problem spotting it, but it's happening with you. These erroneous propositions and fixations don't arise in a vacuum, just like the daily cycle proposition, this one is pointing to deeper soul factors which are being avoided, and as usual, the content of the proposition itself acts as a convenient excuse to avoid the inner work. 

The only question is whether you are willing to renounce the theorizing and focus on how to freely transform this situation for yourself, or rather imagine it applies equally to everyone (except Masters and Initiates) and is a hard limit to language that evaporates when you "concentrate on an image" (when it most certainly doesn't).

We also don’t need to “pick out specific words or phrases and substitute them with other ones, we don't need to ban certain words, we don't need to feel like certain words or grammars are trapping us, imprisoning us, and so on.”
Please stop this trick (and all the other tricks as well, please). I never suggested that we need to do anything similar. And if you have understood from my posts that I suggest to pick out specific words and phrases and replace them, it must be because your etched soul pathways hold you back in a stereotyped idea about me that wins you above and beyond the reality of what I am saying. Yes, we need to go to the level of words, grammar and structure. Steiner does that a million times, whenever he discusses these questions. But not because we need to pick out and substitute specific words. It's only because the words and the structure are the reality of language, and we need to approach that reality if we don't want it to remain abstract. And with this, I am done with this topic.

Anyone can look back through your posts on this forum and see how much this obsession with manipulating language rules over your thinking. It is not a "stereotype" if it has been the consistent theme of your posts for months. How can we forget the whole "epistemology" episode? It's simply that, with these last posts, you have provided more insight into why your thinking keeps moving in this direction, based on theoretical propositions you have become invested in maintaining. 

Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jan 10, 2025 6:44 pm These words were formed a month ago or so, and I only vaguely remember the real act of thinking them. I can of course set myself up to make the gestures again, and check whether the now-experience can be described with words that turn out to be similar to the quoted ones. I even expect that to be the case, however, there is nothing standalone in those words as they appear there, written in the cloud. They are desiccated. They can work only indirectly, for someone else, who may or may not summon the appropriate experience in themselves, and even for myself - I have to do it too, if I want to retrace the words. There was the real experience that produced them but this is not logged in the words out there, I have to reproduce it, to be sure. And for others, the words may simply hint how to think something along those lines, but there is no guarantee.

The case would be different if the words were poetic, formed with a feeling for sound and rhythm, but they were simply a prosaic best attempt to render my full experience in that moment. Let’s notice, this is not speech, this is a trace (written) of a trace (spoken) of a trace (thought)…. It’s almost a small miracle when something is triggered in another soul, by retracing written, prosaic words. So until I check them, they sound nothing special to me, apart from the fact that I trust myself and I know I was making my best effort when writing them. For example, I have to inquire: "What did I mean with "simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking"? Oh Ok, I realize what I was trying to convey".

Let’s look again at the essence of the ‘Matrix’ that constitutes the constraints of our flow of becoming (and thus the nature of our Earthly life). When we say that people think primarily in words, this cannot be taken as the defining condition for the matrix. The people today who probably employ such thinking most prominently, are mainly academic philosophers. Here one can really make a living by thinking clever combinations of words, which correspond to almost nothing from direct experience.

Ordinary people, however, (or academics who need to get their way in practical life) think in more multimodal ways. For example, when we want to get a new couch we use pictorial and spatial imagination. We may mumble words like "I'll put it here... I'll have to get that out of the way..." but these words are not abstract, they are anchored in our weaving in geometric imagination. When a woman shares with her friend details of her new relationship, she certainly translates sensations and emotions into words. Thus, in practical life, our words are not so floating in the air.

Now, it is true that such thinking is not yet thinking in the true sense – actively willed mental flow. One dreams instinctively through such a flow. Nevertheless, the fact remains that these dreams flow not simply by the laws of some abstracted LaaS but by mimicking the greater flow. So ordinary people utilize all kinds of modalities in their dreamy flow. What Steiner speaks of, when seen in the context of the lecture, applies mostly to those who call themselves ‘thinkers’, who indeed seek answers in clever arrangements of words. For ordinary people, language is not that abstract. Many of our ordinary verbal thoughts actually embed quite well with the primary flow. Where these people experience abstractness is when they hear some words that do not ring familiar. Then it is possible to take that information only as words without trying to find the other modalities.

The latter can be compared to being a swot at school (I don’t know if this is the most appropriate word for what I’m trying to say. I chose it with the dictionary). For example, when we learn “A triangle has three vertices” this can simply be memorized as a sequence of words. Interestingly, in certain cases this can get us through the test even though we may not know what a triangle is. LLMs can be thought of as very sophisticated swots who have no clue what the words stand for but have memorized complicated statistics that help sequence words after the question.

In that sense, for ordinary people it might be useful to see roughly two different domains of inner life. When we deal with our practical matters, our language is not that abstract, even though it might act as a filter (like the African tribe and color vision). Here we speak of life in the naively presented way. Clearly, this is still Maya from the higher perspective. But we cannot say that language is the reason and locking factor that keeps us in the Maya matrix. Where purely abstract thinking takes hold is when we act like swots, when we consider that to know about something is to know a sequence of words, even if we can’t connect these words with other modalities of being. Simpler people actually don’t utilize such thinking that much. They may be philosophically naive, they may dream through their thoughts, but at least the words fit with the Maya flow, instead of creating an abstract labyrinth where the intellect is ensnared.

I think this distinction is important because it helps us recognize the more fundamental patterns of life that indeed constituve the grooves of the matrix. Deadened language is one factor but we’ll go too far if we believe that language is the main formative and constraining factor of the matrix.

As far as the revival of language is concerned, I think the greatest danger here is the introduction of an artificial chasm between words and the felt depth. This chasm is initially factual, as you describe in your own experience, but it might remain stuck in place if we cannot find the proper way of closing it. Then the situation becomes similar to FB and the way he expects the ‘exact clairvoyance of the future’, completely dismissing what is already here and now.

The closing of the felt depth and the words starts by thinking, by probing the depths, as you are doing when you describe how the words need to be drawn out of ourselves. The words thus drawn out may feel clumsy and unpoetic, but they are necessary. It is true that all these words are only sparse lines of a sketch of something infinitely rich, but nevertheless, this is the way through which we can initially make the depth cognitively known. When these gestures are explored more and more, then in meditation, when we are concentrated and there’s no inner verbalization, we can still feel the nudges of potential verbal explications. Otherwise stated, we feel intuitive orientation within the Imaginative state as far as we feel that we can potentially speak of what we experience if that is needed. By ‘speaking’ I don’t mean 'reduce' but more like painting with words. We do not replace the experiences with words but highlight some of their lines with verbal images. It is this inner force that can paint in words that we certainly need, because it is in its consciousness that the felt depth becomes a cognitive experience. In this way, there’s great value even if we aim to experience more lucidly the images of everyday-life thinking (like rearranging the furniture). These certainly are still in the world of Maya, but gaining consciousness of them and being able to think/speak of that, already draws us nearer to the experience of the cognitive “I”-force. If we contemplate our clumsy and seemingly unpoetic thoughts, and we are unsatisfied with them, then there's the danger that we'll begin to build a felt image of something nebulous that we can only hope to become intuitively lucid in the future, in ways that we are presently unclear of.

Cleric wrote: ↑Sun Jan 12, 2025 12:33 pm For ordinary people, language is not that abstract. Many of our ordinary verbal thoughts actually embed quite well with the primary flow.
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When we deal with our practical matters, our language is not that abstract, even though it might act as a filter (like the African tribe and color vision). Here we speak of life in the naively presented way. Clearly, this is still Maya from the higher perspective. But we cannot say that language is the reason and locking factor that keeps us in the Maya matrix.

I don't agree with you Cleric. Perhaps you live in a society where people still keep their feet on the ground to some extent, and their verbal thoughts make some sense, I am not sure. From what I see and read from around the world, the situation is much, much more dramatic than you describe. I was reading today of a mother, whose teen daughter got up one day saying she wanted to change pronouns and transition to male gender. The mother felt the school, the medical system, the discourse her daughter had been exposed to, had instigated that. So she decided to do an experiment. She contacted her medical services pretending she was herself willing to transition, to see how the process was going to unfold. She told her doctor she was feeling nonbinary, wanted her pronouns changed in her records, wanted testosterone treatment, mastectomy surgery, and possibly lower body surgery. Anyone willing to read the appalling report can find it here. So, in one of the preparation calls with her clinic's gender specialists, she got asked to comment on feeling that her inside was not matching her outside. She bubbled something about always wanting to dress in jeans and sweatshirts, and feeling it would be nice to have her nonbinary identity match that. As she reports, the doctor replied:

"Like, having control over what you wear and yeah. Kind of that feeling of just, yeah, this is who I am today. That’s awesome. Yeah."

So they were discussing something very concrete. And this is a doctor in the practice of her profession, coming up with words such as these. Now, please tell me: don't you think chances are high that this person was regurgitating a semi-conscious woke narrative, driven by words that came out of one another, through the colonized support of her vocal tract? Do you think that the word "awesome" in the context of that discussion and sentence has any other connection with meaning than a LaaS connection? Is there any plausible reason to assess that there's any trace of the concrete meaning of "awesome" in how the word is thrown out in that word sequence?

This is not an isolated example of typical present-day verbalizing. I could provide a thousand more examples. And let me be clear, I don't consider myself exempt from this LLM related plague, though I don't think I am an extreme case. We are at the point that people these days have a hard time completing a sentence, when they cannot enter the first part in Chat GPT. And if they do complete it, it's probably that they recall words that GPT or Google assigned them, last time they did a search. This applies to all possible contexts and situations. It's not unspecified people in a ghetto (as some would be tempted to imagine), but experts, neighbors, folks at social gatherings, people who are "knowledge workers". In the city where I live, the majority of students at the most reputed university affirm they are not able to read books. They really mean it, and they just say it, there are surveys. And guess what? They just don't read them, that's fine. They don't have the mind space, and they candidly say it. Awesome. Like, yeah, that's just who we are as students today. We are not less than enough. And so the system adapts, and anyone can become, for example a teacher, with grade F results, just because if they had to select more strictly, hardly anyone would pass. By the way, more than 1/10 of the entire population around me lives under antidepressant medication. You get the idea. Or do you?