AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 2:25 pm
I will elaborate a little on the above to address the Sense 2 suggestion in bold more directly. Here is a standard description of 'how the Moon formed':
...
Before I make further responses to what you have written in your last couple of post, I want to make doubly sure I understand the sense of this statement:
In that sense, the core realization is that no world is input-sensitive independently of our knowing perspective and gestures. The empirical outputs always co-vary with the inputs through that perspective and its constraints.
You responded that you are using both senses but that would put you in conflict with what I understand Steiner would teach and your subsequent writing suggests you don't mean sense 2.
Again:
Sense 1 (epistemic mediation): Our knowledge of X is perspectival - filtered through our faculties, concepts, instruments. This is a claim about the knowing, not about X. X itself is whatever it is; we just can't access it except through some perspective. Nobody disputes this.
Sense 2 (ontic constitution): X itself — what X is, not merely our knowledge of it - is partly constituted by, or co-varies with, the knowing perspective. This is a claim about X, about the object, about being. It says the perspective doesn't just filter our access to an already-settled fact; it participates in making the fact the fact it is. Change the perspective and you don't just get a different view of the Moon's formation - you get a different formation, because the formation was never a perspective-independent fact sitting there waiting to be viewed.
I can see 3 possible readings from all you have written:
Reading A — Sense 1 and Sense 2 are one claim; there is no coherent distinction between "how the object appears to inquiry" and "how the object is." This is full constitutive idealism while Steiner was a realist.
Reading B — The distinction is real in the abstract, but illusory in practice, because we never have access to the ontic except through the epistemic - the first-person flow is the only investigable thing, so any "ontic" fact is always already given through a knowing-perspective, and there's no operation by which we could pry the two apart for any actual object of inquiry. On this reading you are not saying the senses are the same proposition; rather the separation is unperformable — that when I insist "the Moon's formation (ontic) is one thing, our perspectival knowledge of it (epistemic) another," I'm invoking a gap I can never actually stand in.
Reading C — Since both aspects are present in every act of knowing, a complete inquiry has to attend to both, and current science illegitimately attends only to the ontic-seeming output while ignoring the epistemic conditioning. This is nearly the trivial Sense-1 point plus a demand that we take it seriously.
A, B, or C? (or D?)
Re: Early/late Steiner
Posted: Wed Aug 19, 2026 7:14 pm
by Cleric
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 1:44 pm
Of course, a will-intensified cognition risks projecting will, but it's also the only instrument that could register real will if it's there. A method that can detect X but sometimes hallucinates X is epistemically better placed on X than a method that can't detect X at all.
That's a great way of putting it! We can clothe it in physics/math metaphor by saying that the Oriental meditative path today (not in its rightful pre-Christ time) attends entirely to phenomenal space. Time is known only as the fact that space continuously changes. However, no consciousness is sought of where these changes come from and where they go, so to speak. There's only the contents of the here and now. In other words, even the driving forces of phenomenal transformations are considered as belonging to Maya, and thus, any sense of inner activity is actively expelled from consciousness (except the expelling activity itself!). Integrating the inner life of time into the here and now is like adding the higher-order terms (derivatives) of the Taylor series. These are metaphors for intuitive intent. Phenomenal spacetime has momentary contents, but aspects of them feel like following the streamlines of intent - we intuitively know something about how the present state has come about and where it is going, just like the derivative at a point tells us what the function would be were we to move a little to the left or right.
This is not an either/or situation. By adding the higher-order terms to the series, we do not lose the constant term (zeroth order) – space. Instead, the whole picture at the point (here and now) becomes richer and more meaningful since it is now intuited not as a random frame of existence but as a state along an intended stream of metamorphosis.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 1:44 pm
But it goes the other way. The active path might be viewed suspiciously for manufacturing the agentive reading - finding intent because it maximally amplified the very faculty (active will) whose signature is intent. We have a false positive problem. You can't use maximally-intensified willing as a neutral instrument for detecting whether the depth wills, since the instrument and the sought property are the same thing.
Stated like this, it sounds obviously problematic. However, this doesn’t present a proper picture of the correct deepening of spiritual activity. It sounds as if we need to intensify our speech into screaming in order to detect whether there are other voices in the air. This, of course, doesn’t make sense. We become deafened by our own willing activity and wonder whether in that intensified experience we have an example of something that might be happening for other perspectives of existence as well. The method that leads into the temporal depth of reality is something different.
This has been covered in the various essays, but if you want, I can reiterate briefly, in a more scientifically oriented conceptual palette.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 2:25 pm
I will elaborate a little on the above to address the Sense 2 suggestion in bold more directly. Here is a standard description of 'how the Moon formed':
...
Before I make further responses to what you have written in your last couple of post, I want to make doubly sure I understand the sense of this statement:
In that sense, the core realization is that no world is input-sensitive independently of our knowing perspective and gestures. The empirical outputs always co-vary with the inputs through that perspective and its constraints.
You responded that you are using both senses but that would put you in conflict with what I understand Steiner would teach and your subsequent writing suggests you don't mean sense 2.
Again:
Sense 1 (epistemic mediation): Our knowledge of X is perspectival - filtered through our faculties, concepts, instruments. This is a claim about the knowing, not about X. X itself is whatever it is; we just can't access it except through some perspective. Nobody disputes this.
Sense 2 (ontic constitution): X itself — what X is, not merely our knowledge of it - is partly constituted by, or co-varies with, the knowing perspective. This is a claim about X, about the object, about being. It says the perspective doesn't just filter our access to an already-settled fact; it participates in making the fact the fact it is. Change the perspective and you don't just get a different view of the Moon's formation - you get a different formation, because the formation was never a perspective-independent fact sitting there waiting to be viewed.
I can see 3 possible readings from all you have written:
Reading A — Sense 1 and Sense 2 are one claim; there is no coherent distinction between "how the object appears to inquiry" and "how the object is." This is full constitutive idealism while Steiner was a realist.
Reading B — The distinction is real in the abstract, but illusory in practice, because we never have access to the ontic except through the epistemic - the first-person flow is the only investigable thing, so any "ontic" fact is always already given through a knowing-perspective, and there's no operation by which we could pry the two apart for any actual object of inquiry. On this reading you are not saying the senses are the same proposition; rather the separation is unperformable — that when I insist "the Moon's formation (ontic) is one thing, our perspectival knowledge of it (epistemic) another," I'm invoking a gap I can never actually stand in.
Reading C — Since both aspects are present in every act of knowing, a complete inquiry has to attend to both, and current science illegitimately attends only to the ontic-seeming output while ignoring the epistemic conditioning. This is nearly the trivial Sense-1 point plus a demand that we take it seriously.
A, B, or C? (or D?)
I suppose it would be D, which is a mixture of readings A, B, and C. The reason is that the distinctions made in both Sense 1 and 2, and Readings A, B, and C, are all born from a specific intellectual perspective on the empirical plane, permeated by doubt and uncertainty. If we move orthogonal to the plane, as spiritual science strives to do, we arrive at the contextual flows of our first-person state that make sense of why this intellectual perspective takes shape and begins making these distinctions and asking about 'which sense or reading is the right one'. From that perspective, each sense and reading offers relevant considerations, depending on which aspect of the experiential flow we choose to focus on. None of them are 'true' in any absolute sense, but are simply different conceptual lenses through which we orient ourselves within the experiential flow. I know this answer can feel frustrating, like it's simply a way of dodging the question, but let me try to unpack this more, and hopefully it won't feel that way. As you know, such things cannot be easily addressed with a yes/no sort of answer.
Let's consider the contextual cognition-feeling-willing flows we experience in the midst of the Moon formation event as X. Note how we are not speaking about some unknown reality that exists 'behind' our perceptual impressions of the event. We are not making the kinds of assumptions usually adopted in metaphysical frameworks. X is a reality embedded within our first-person state and its temporally expansive intuition - the 'musically' structured impressions, ideas, feelings, and impulses of that state. It is unfamiliar but not unknown - deeply embedded within our subconscious. We could say our present state is X when reflected, refracted, convoluted, etc., through several contextually nested 'layers' of interfering spiritual activity, which increasingly diminish our awareness of how our state relates to X. That has been artistically depicted in various ways on the forum. I see that Cleric just added another metaphor in the last post and may expand on this view.
When we understand X this way, we can then say that X is itself a first-person perspective that navigates the contextual flows at a much more integrated temporal scale. Of course, this is highly simplified - in reality, there are manifold interfering perspectives that shape the flows with respect to X, but we are focusing on only two (ours and a higher-order perspective in which ours is embedded) to make it easier to hone in on the underlying dynamics. When we think about the Moon's formation, we are actually intuiting a whole intentional curvature of development, some of which has 'not yet happened' from our current perspective. For example, even modern movies and stories have intuited that the Moon may eventually rejoin the Earth (in a cataclysmic, destiny-changing way) and painted this into various physicalized imaginations.
In that sense, our current epistemic perspective lives within the higher-order X perspective and teases apart its holistic intent into a sequence of events, beginning with the Moon's formation (again, we can visually anchor that as an external body colliding into Earth and another body separating out from it, or simply cut out the first part) and culminating in its reintegration. We can then better appreciate how this curvature is not some static and predetermined aspect of existence, as most people imagine the 'things themselves' or 'eternal objects' (Whitehead), but is dynamically unfolding and being shaped by the most varied flow perspectives along the existential scales, including our neurally constrained human-scale perspectives. The partial transitions between the alpha and omega nodes of this overarching intent are 'filtered down' by our human-scale intuitive inputs, such that human souls experience traversing the curvature in various non-deterministic ways. Our quantitative-empirical models of the 'Moon formation' are like snapshots extracted from this holistic curvature we are always living through, recast into our present spatiotemporal intuition, and further stripped of all living qualities - colors, sounds, smells, tastes, ideas, emotions, impulses, etc. Such a narrowly constrained, stripped-down modeling perspective is completely unique to our human-scale epistemic mode.
One may still note that the alpha and omega nodes are deterministic in this view, which is relatively true. Consider how every coherent outlook that recognizes a developmental process for humanity (or even a cyclical process) also conceives of these relatively stable nodes between which human souls experience periods of differentiation and integration. Even the strictly materialist outlook conceives of an undifferentiated Big Bang state that is tending toward an undifferentiated 'heat death' or 'cold photon soup'. At the same time, from the higher-order perspective, the alpha and omega nodes of Moon differentiation-reintegration are themselves relatively placed within more encompassing curvatures, and are somewhat pliable to that perspective's creative inputs. The main point here is that we should guard against dismissing these considerations, which can be verified through our first-person scientific investigation of the contextual flows, simply based on feeling uncomfortable with the fact that our state is placed within agentic curvatures that have some 'say' in the possible continuations of that state. The intuitive feeling that our flow is stretched along these interleaved 'nodes', with distinct levels of stability, can become one of our best tools for making sense of our existence. Otherwise, we practically fall into the very thing we are concerned with - rigid determinism. We can only creatively modulate the curvatures that we become intimately aware of; otherwise, they act as inexorable attractors of fate.
This agentic contextual structure is increasingly intuited by scientific thinkers approaching the phenomenal flow from the most varied directions. Consider the following discussion with Hoffman. He first speaks about how, when we expand our consciousness beyond the 'headset', our field of navigation becomes the very 'rules' of familiar empirical dynamics. We begin to 'play with the rules' instead of being only tightly constrained by the rules (there are also many mystical errors that can creep in here, if we imagine the 'headset rules' are hegemonically determined by only our human-scale perspective). Then he mentions how his recursive trace logic leads him to conclude that our human-scale headset is the most trivial one, and we are at the 'bottom of the food chain' in terms of intelligently navigating the flow. He also mentions that his 'Trace Institute' is now collaborating with Levin's lab, which obviously explores similar intuitions through biological research. Hoffman's mathematical model, rooted in Markov blankets and their recursive trace logic, is a great imaginative symbol for what SS investigates much more intimately and directly, by awakening into the contextual flow-scales beyond the headset.
Another example of that agentic multiscale intuition, from an Eastern spiritual perspective, is Sri Aurobindo and his spiritual cosmology. Plenty of other Eastern and Western thinkers have converged on similar ideas in philosophy, theology, and science. It's interesting that the oldest Eastern and Middle Eastern cosmologies still retained an intuitive sense of the agentic contextual structure through which the empirical dynamics of Earthly life were felt to take shape. That is why they experienced all life activities, all ideas and decisions, as guided by a concrete Divine order that could be known and dialogued with. Only the much more recent ones (beginning around the Axial Age) seem to depict a more flattened and impersonal invisible structure in which we exist, which modern thinkers have gladly adopted for reasons we have discussed (maintaining the illusion of a 'private' ego space, even if the latter feels expanded to Cosmic scales). The modern materialistic outlook is simply the logical culmination of that flattening and depersonalization (or de-agentification) of the contextual depth.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 1:44 pm
Of course, a will-intensified cognition risks projecting will, but it's also the only instrument that could register real will if it's there. A method that can detect X but sometimes hallucinates X is epistemically better placed on X than a method that can't detect X at all.
That's a great way of putting it! We can clothe it in physics/math metaphor by saying that the Oriental meditative path today (not in its rightful pre-Christ time) attends entirely to phenomenal space. Time is known only as the fact that space continuously changes. However, no consciousness is sought of where these changes come from and where they go, so to speak. There's only the contents of the here and now. In other words, even the driving forces of phenomenal transformations are considered as belonging to Maya, and thus, any sense of inner activity is actively expelled from consciousness (except the expelling activity itself!). Integrating the inner life of time into the here and now is like adding the higher-order terms (derivatives) of the Taylor series. These are metaphors for intuitive intent. Phenomenal spacetime has momentary contents, but aspects of them feel like following the streamlines of intent - we intuitively know something about how the present state has come about and where it is going, just like the derivative at a point tells us what the function would be were we to move a little to the left or right.
This is not an either/or situation. By adding the higher-order terms to the series, we do not lose the constant term (zeroth order) – space. Instead, the whole picture at the point (here and now) becomes richer and more meaningful since it is now intuited not as a random frame of existence but as a state along an intended stream of metamorphosis.
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Tue Aug 18, 2026 1:44 pm
But it goes the other way. The active path might be viewed suspiciously for manufacturing the agentive reading - finding intent because it maximally amplified the very faculty (active will) whose signature is intent. We have a false positive problem. You can't use maximally-intensified willing as a neutral instrument for detecting whether the depth wills, since the instrument and the sought property are the same thing.
Stated like this, it sounds obviously problematic. However, this doesn’t present a proper picture of the correct deepening of spiritual activity. It sounds as if we need to intensify our speech into screaming in order to detect whether there are other voices in the air. This, of course, doesn’t make sense. We become deafened by our own willing activity and wonder whether in that intensified experience we have an example of something that might be happening for other perspectives of existence as well. The method that leads into the temporal depth of reality is something different.
This has been covered in the various essays, but if you want, I can reiterate briefly, in a more scientifically oriented conceptual palette.
Are you able to suggest which essays are most pertinent?
Re: Early/late Steiner
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2026 6:14 am
by Cleric
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 21, 2026 3:35 pm
Are you able to suggest which essays are most pertinent?
In a nutshell, what you objected to previously still maintains the strictly compartmentalized sense of being - we experience a dissociated sphere of existence; the greater World process impresses at the boundary as various phenomena, while our intellectual process arranges storyboard-like mental images (of the impressions) strictly within the sphere. Seen in this way, it's not surprising that even when we investigate our own spiritual activity, we can only conceive through analogy that something similar may be happening for other dissociated spheres. And additionally, we're always haunted by the solipsistic uncertainty: what if I'm the only dissociated sphere in existence?
To overcome this dead-end situation, we need to realize that even our thinking process, which is experienced as sequencing mental images about dissociative boundaries, our and others' personal bubbles, etc., is still part of the unitary World process. We can only move forward if we clearly recognize this dual aspect: on one hand, we have the meaning implied in the fragmentary storyboard sequences (models of existence). On the other, if we are attentive, we should realize that these storyboard flashes are modulated on top of the primary flow of the World process (they are not some 'other' special process, independent of the total World flow). The question is: is there a way to know this World process in a more direct way, and not by indirect sequencing ripples on its surface? The answer comes through the method of meditative concentration, which fundamentally shifts our scientific perspective. It is enough to attempt to concentrate our attention even for a few seconds in order to get a hint of this. In a sense, it is 'inverse' knowing (although as we progress we realize that this is the natural way of knowing, while it is precisely our present intellectual knowing that is more like an 'unnatural' inverse mode). We no longer instinctively build storyboard sequences and wonder whether they faithfully mirror true reality beyond the dissociative boundary, but we come to know something of the World process through the fact that it pushes our attentive stream into various directions. IOW, initially we come to know something of the World process not by picturing what it is, but by observing how our intended concentrated flow is pressured (thus the 'inverse' nature of knowing). There's a special quality of realness to this experience. We simply cannot deny it. If it were an illusion we could simply 'walk through it'. And this is an especially tricky part. We may say, "I can sustain my concentration if I wanted to. But I just don't feel like it right now; I have other things to do." It is precisely this 'wanting to attend to the other things' that is already an inverse intuition for how the World process pressures us. As long as we believe that this tendency (to attend to the other things) is our pure and free will, independent of the World process, we have no chance of knowing reality.
We can doubt our abstract metaphysical mental images about what these pressures are, but not that the pressures are real. So in a very general sense, this path of knowledge begins by resisting through concentration the usual pushes and pulls of our inner life, which are aspects of the World process (including our tendency to attend to other 'more important' things). This is not yet the experience of other agencies. We get to know about the latter when the meditative path goes even further and we gradually realize that the pushes and pulls of our inner life proceed from meaningful activity.
So in a nutshell: it is easy to conceive that the World process impresses at the dissociative boundary as sense impressions. Meditative concentration can be thought of as moving this boundary closer to our core intuitive process, such that even our thinking flows feel shaped and constrained by the impress of the World process. Now even our opinions, preferences, sympathies and antipathies feel like pressures that compete to rule our inner movie flow. And the critical thing to realize is that we no longer have the inner leeway of the personal sphere to philosophize about these impressions because now the very philosophical thoughts feel shaped and constrained by the impress. IOW, now even our personal intellectual flow is grasped as an interplay between deep intuitive steering and the friction with the World process (for example, what we consider to pertain to the nervous system).
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Wed Aug 19, 2026 2:50 pm
Again:
Sense 1 (epistemic mediation): Our knowledge of X is perspectival - filtered through our faculties, concepts, instruments. This is a claim about the knowing, not about X. X itself is whatever it is; we just can't access it except through some perspective. Nobody disputes this.
Sense 2 (ontic constitution): X itself — what X is, not merely our knowledge of it - is partly constituted by, or co-varies with, the knowing perspective. This is a claim about X, about the object, about being. It says the perspective doesn't just filter our access to an already-settled fact; it participates in making the fact the fact it is. Change the perspective and you don't just get a different view of the Moon's formation - you get a different formation, because the formation was never a perspective-independent fact sitting there waiting to be viewed.
I can see 3 possible readings from all you have written:
Reading A — Sense 1 and Sense 2 are one claim; there is no coherent distinction between "how the object appears to inquiry" and "how the object is." This is full constitutive idealism while Steiner was a realist.
Reading B — The distinction is real in the abstract, but illusory in practice, because we never have access to the ontic except through the epistemic - the first-person flow is the only investigable thing, so any "ontic" fact is always already given through a knowing-perspective, and there's no operation by which we could pry the two apart for any actual object of inquiry. On this reading you are not saying the senses are the same proposition; rather the separation is unperformable — that when I insist "the Moon's formation (ontic) is one thing, our perspectival knowledge of it (epistemic) another," I'm invoking a gap I can never actually stand in.
Reading C — Since both aspects are present in every act of knowing, a complete inquiry has to attend to both, and current science illegitimately attends only to the ontic-seeming output while ignoring the epistemic conditioning. This is nearly the trivial Sense-1 point plus a demand that we take it seriously.
A, B, or C? (or D?)
I suppose it would be D, which is a mixture of readings A, B, and C. The reason is that the distinctions made in both Sense 1 and 2, and Readings A, B, and C, are all born from a specific intellectual perspective on the empirical plane, permeated by doubt and uncertainty. If we move orthogonal to the plane, as spiritual science strives to do, we arrive at the contextual flows of our first-person state that make sense of why this intellectual perspective takes shape and begins making these distinctions and asking about 'which sense or reading is the right one'. From that perspective, each sense and reading offers relevant considerations, depending on which aspect of the experiential flow we choose to focus on. None of them are 'true' in any absolute sense, but are simply different conceptual lenses through which we orient ourselves within the experiential flow. I know this answer can feel frustrating, like it's simply a way of dodging the question, but let me try to unpack this more, and hopefully it won't feel that way. As you know, such things cannot be easily addressed with a yes/no sort of answer.
...
OK, we dissolve the epistemic/ontic distinction. Empirical facts are constituted by the totality of agentic perspectives along the scales, with ours a minor contributor. It's all lenses, no reading is true in an absolute sense. But it's a hierarchical epistemology with some perspectives more veridical than others because they sit closer to the constituting scales. Higher-integration perspectives have privileged access to how the flow is really constituted, and SS with its "orthogonal awakening," "higher cognition," and "facing the incoming flow" seeks to occupy them. But climbing to a higher scale doesn't lift one out of accountability - it multiplies what you're accountable to. The higher scales are more constitutive - they carry more of the weight, they're the majority that outvotes the human anchoring. So a perspective that genuinely reaches them is surely answerable to a larger and more binding portion of the totality, not a smaller one. Ascending the hierarchy is ascending toward more constraint, because that's precisely where the constraint lives. The higher-cognitive scientist has not escaped the tribunal; they've been promoted into the chamber where the votes are heaviest and where deviation from the constituted structure shows up most sharply.
Coming back to earth, if the human-scale perspective supplies only a small fraction of the constitutive weight, then the constituted world is more binding on us, not less. Steiner's physical-world assertions, where they conflict, aren't being unfairly held to an alien standard; they're being outvoted by the totality that supposedly constitutes the fact. Again, the mistletoe shifts the survival curve or it doesn't; the biodynamic prep moves a measurable outcome or it doesn't.
Focusing back on my main concern here, how does a claim to have reached a higher scale get distinguished from a compelling projection that merely feels integrated? If reaching the integrated scale is real, it should produce the signature of the integrated scale: cross-observer invariance and stability under varied entry-conditions. If higher cognition genuinely occupies the more-constitutive scale, it should systematically out-anticipate the receded quantitative models it disparages. A higher perspective that reaches the majority-constituting scale but can never demonstrate superior grip on how that constitution flows down into the sensory plane is indistinguishable - by any available operation - from an ordinary human-scale intellectual construction.
Re: Early/late Steiner
Posted: Sat Aug 22, 2026 4:53 pm
by AshvinP
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 22, 2026 1:53 pm
OK, we dissolve the epistemic/ontic distinction. Empirical facts are constituted by the totality of agentic perspectives along the scales, with ours a minor contributor. It's all lenses, no reading is true in an absolute sense. But it's a hierarchical epistemology with some perspectives more veridical than others because they sit closer to the constituting scales. Higher-integration perspectives have privileged access to how the flow is really constituted, and SS with its "orthogonal awakening," "higher cognition," and "facing the incoming flow" seeks to occupy them. But climbing to a higher scale doesn't lift one out of accountability - it multiplies what you're accountable to. The higher scales are more constitutive - they carry more of the weight, they're the majority that outvotes the human anchoring. So a perspective that genuinely reaches them is surely answerable to a larger and more binding portion of the totality, not a smaller one. Ascending the hierarchy is ascending toward more constraint, because that's precisely where the constraint lives. The higher-cognitive scientist has not escaped the tribunal; they've been promoted into the chamber where the votes are heaviest and where deviation from the constituted structure shows up most sharply.
Coming back to earth, if the human-scale perspective supplies only a small fraction of the constitutive weight, then the constituted world is more binding on us, not less. Steiner's physical-world assertions, where they conflict, aren't being unfairly held to an alien standard; they're being outvoted by the totality that supposedly constitutes the fact. Again, the mistletoe shifts the survival curve or it doesn't; the biodynamic prep moves a measurable outcome or it doesn't.
Focusing back on my main concern here, how does a claim to have reached a higher scale get distinguished from a compelling projection that merely feels integrated? If reaching the integrated scale is real, it should produce the signature of the integrated scale: cross-observer invariance and stability under varied entry-conditions. If higher cognition genuinely occupies the more-constitutive scale, it should systematically out-anticipate the receded quantitative models it disparages. A higher perspective that reaches the majority-constituting scale but can never demonstrate superior grip on how that constitution flows down into the sensory plane is indistinguishable - by any available operation - from an ordinary human-scale intellectual construction.
It is safe to say that none of us would be so captivated by spiritual science and its inner method if the latter didn't feel like it was continually expanding intuitive orientation to the sensory spectrum of experience, expanding the curvature of memory and anticipation, at both the personal and collective scales. The key realization, as Cleric noted above, is that this expansion begins in our intuitive thinking process, which is felt as an inseparable aspect of the total World flow. We realize that, if this thinking process is always the means by which we intuit certain lawful relations within experience, and which subsequently lead to our empirical models, then the practical significance of those models can only be magnified when we explore the pushing-pulling forces modulating the thinking process itself. At the same time, we realize that the empirical modeling process of the experiential flow is what results when our natural (intuitive) knowing process is artificially constrained by these same pushing-pulling forces. Consider the following:
Lehr, Man or Matter: "We mentioned Heisenberg's speech as a symptom of a certain tendency, characteristic of the latest phase in science, to survey its own epistemological foundations critically. A few years previous to Heisenberg's speech, the need of such a survey found an eloquent advocate in the late Professor A. N. Whitehead, in his book Science and the Modern World, where, in view of the contradictory nature of modern physical theories, he insists that 'if science is not to degenerate into a medley of ad hoc hypotheses, it must become philosophical and enter upon a thorough criticism of its own foundations'.
Among the scientists who have felt this need, and who have taken pains to fulfil it, the late Professor A. Eddington obtains an eminent position. Among his relevant utterances we will quote here the following, because it contains a concrete statement concerning the field of external observation which forms the basis for the modern scientific world-picture. In his Philosophy of Physical Science we find him stating that 'ideally, all our knowledge of the universe could have been reached by visual sensation alone - in fact by the simplest form of visual sensation, colourless and non-stereoscopic'.3 In other words, in order to obtain scientific cognition of the physical world, man has felt constrained to surrender the use of all his senses except the sense of sight, and to limit even the act of seeing to the use of a single, colour-blind eye."
I provided some examples of how mistletoe therapy can shift the survival curve and biodynamic prep can move a measurable outcome. And as we mentioned, these expanded scientific inquiries are only in their infancy. We shouldn't expect perfect understanding or application, just as we shouldn't expect it in industrial agriculture or allopathic medicine. Steiner himself remarked on this in various places, for example:
Steiner: "Spiritual Science is certainly in a sense a Science, and as such it is, we may say, still in a “fragmentary” stage at the present day, only partly established; what it may eventually become can really only be present in the first beginnings at the present time... It might even be—in what science has this not been the case in the course of the development of mankind!—that much of what can and must be proclaimed today quite conscientiously from the sources of Spiritual Science might have to be corrected; that much may appear in another form in the future through the further progress of Spiritual Science. Then perhaps there may be a different content in one or another department of this Spiritual Science."
We should also strive to perceive how it is the peculiar nature of the single, color blind eye that it can always interpret the data in certain ways, or find counterdata, that will support its preferred intellectual destination (that was the main point of the numerical trick analogy). That is especially true because this eye willfully constrains itself to shorter and shorter measurement intervals when evaluating outcomes. For example, we can imagine, for the sake of argument, that there are some cases in which illness and even death lead to the most optimal trajectory for long-term Health (and other Ideals implicit in all human striving), but that this only becomes evident over the course of multiple incarnations (of course, this only makes sense if the soul is not identical with its physical basis). The point is not to blindly believe that is true, but to imagine how, IF it is true, the single colorblind method could possibly lead to its realization. It never would, because this method constrains itself so that the realization becomes impossible. Thus, the exclusively intellectual method establishes a kind of echo chamber in which its self-imposed limitations continually reinforce its preferred narrative of what counts as a 'valid measurable outcome' for testing the value of its knowledge.
So it all comes down to realizing that we can no longer afford to conceive "empirical dynamics" as only those that can be represented as momentary spatial transformations that help us navigate toward only the most myopic, short-lived goals within the whole spectrum of human striving at evolutionary timescales. That is like the human being who invests all their intellectual energy in reaching satisfying sensations on a daily basis, only to become dissatisfied again as soon as the sensory experience is exhausted and repeat the cycle. Likewise, the artificially constrained intellect synthesizes medications that treat the symptoms of already manifested disease, only for the various pathogens to begin resisting those medications and repeat the cycle. It then labels measurements that fit within this cycle as the only valid data to consider for what counts as 'medical knowledge'. Instead, we should realize that the pushing and pulling forces that constrain the quantitative modeling intellect are also inseparable parts of the total empirical dynamics that need to be investigated if there is any hope of expanded intuition and long-lived practical outcomes. Why not investigate these forces more directly, without the exclusive mediation of our stripped-down, quantized mental images?
Then we may begin to realize that our human-scale contribution to the seemingly stable empirical dynamics is not so minor after all. It helps, especially as we get older, to contemplate how our prior inputs have influenced our present physical state. After all, the empirical dynamics that govern certain aspects of our physical organism should not be so different from those at work in the natural world, which participates in the same forces and substances of that world. As we walk down the street, we could try to feel how various physical gestures, movements, and qualities can be intuitively traced to those prior inputs. For example, perhaps we feel a rumbling in our stomach that can be traced to our decision to eat or not eat certain foods a few hours ago. Then we may also feel soreness in our knees that can be traced to physical activities we engaged in excessively or recklessly a few years ago. The way we walk, our gait, our posture, etc., can be similarly traced to prior intents and corresponding inputs, perhaps dating back to early childhood. We could feel our whole physical state as a kind of tree with rings laid down at different times, in correlation with prior inputs. Of course, all of that would initially feel dim and nebulous. The point is to simply accustom ourselves to shifting our scientific perspective.
Is it so much different for the tree rings of collective life that come to expression in various physical dynamics that we try to model, for example, as weather phenomena and natural disasters? In the age of powerful technology, it has become even more obvious how humanity's collective inputs influence these natural phenomena, with progressively less delay. Yet those technologies are themselves obviously extensions of our intuitive life and our soul forces. Could we better anticipate these empirical outputs if we are more attuned to these empirical forces underlying our ideas, passions, desires, and so on, just as we could better anticipate economic fluctuations, violent conflicts, population dynamics, etc.? The important thing here is not to reach quantifiable models of how our inputs relate to the empirical outputs, as if we can calculate exactly how a certain constellation of inner gestures led to our sore knee, or to a massive thunderstorm, but to gradually accustom ourselves to a new way of feeling the IO relationships and temporally expanding our orientation to those relationships, without artificially constraining ourselves to the perspective of a single, colorblind eye that can only passively contemplate them in myopic measurement intervals.
If we feel satisfied with the latter as the absolute culmination of human cognitive striving, then we positively preclude ourselves from expanding temporal orientation within the total empirical dynamics. Only when we feel utterly dissatisfied with the constrained hamster wheel, and when we feel that we may be on the frontier of an entirely new scientific perspective (which, in a sense, restores the momentarily inverted intellect to its most natural knowing process), can we create the conditions for seeing those dynamics in stereoscopic, color-filled vision.