Philosophical Speculations

"You are also saying #2 example shows how it is our personal faculties which make the difference in richness of meaning rather than anything in the percepts themselves or our lack of finding the proper concepts for them."

I genuinely think it would be interesting to know why you think I claimed our personal faculties make 'the difference' in richness. Maybe it seemed implied by the way I contrasted the examples. While I absolutely believe that our individuality plays an important role, I'd say the greater role is played by a whole host of factors related to the interactional nature of experience itself. But, yeah, I can go with the main gist of your summation.

"People have observed thoughts from the most ancient times."

Not in the sense that Steiner is talking about. As you've noted in earlier posts, he is describing the state of modern consciousness and observing our finished thoughts is not anything like it was in the past. I can't debate or explain this in this context, but I just want to note that I strongly disagree with you claim. In original participation, paying attention to a thought included a living sense of the participating consciousness of the concept itself. This clearly is not the experience Steiner is pointing to.

Just to note, rather than respond specifically to Steiner's first characterizations, your instinct was to go straightaway to the aspect I signaled out as complicated. That's fine, but if you don't go back and relate it to what I spelled out, it'll be the same old avoidance of the issue. I'll keep reading.

"Materialistic scientists are perfectly capable of observing thoughts, otherwise they wouldn't compare them to bile secreted from the liver."

Nope. The exceptional state is defined as not making a causal attribution outside of thought to the exceptional state. A materialist isn't in the exceptional state because he is attributing it to his concept of matter. Or, in other words, a materialist doesn't realize the significance of those moments of simply reflecting on a thought. In other lectures, Steiner certainly talks about materialists having spiritual expeirences all the time but unaware. He says the same thing happens to Anthroposophists. Ultimately, he explains that materialist has very little to do with a world view and much more to do with quality of experience.

"The difficulty in explaining the exceptional state is because its experience is resisted."

Show me in PoF where Steiner points to this resistance.

If we get lost in talking bout our deeper understandings, via spiritual experiences, of the text, there is no use in referring to Steiner's core text at all.

" When we observe thinking, we have perceptions of thoughts, the meaning of which is grasped through intuition."

Whereas I showed how Steiner sequentially built up his thought, you are ignoring any aspects that don't feed into your opening comments. You say "when we observe thinking" and you haven't even yet addressed Steiner's comments that we can't observe thinking.

"But the fact that we are the causing activity of the thoughts is not something that we perceive in sensory-like way."

In the chapter we are discussing, Steiner explains that we can't yet even claim there is a 'we' that is 'causing' the activity. Again, I think that despite his conflating a few crucial items, you don't even acknowledge many of his core statements. My hunch is you'll refer to your spiritual experience instead. The reason I don't do that is because I agree with Steiner that he tried to link each sentence up so that a careful reader to could spot each step and connection. And, as he said, we should be able to spot the places of unclarity as well. I can tell that your approach will be to refer to other models, your spiritual experience and, occasionally match them up with sentences from the text that work. I can benefit from reading this but I'm still holding out you'll address even one of my points.

Okay the rest of your post continues to use the portion of the chapter in which Steiner mentions materialism. I can't do anything about your focus on that. I can only hope that someday, for fun, you'll read the chapter and leave that out for a moment and notice how the term is used differently there. As for you now, it seems you are hell bent on not addressing Steiner's examples and the way he differentiates noticing our thinking ("I am thinking about this table right now) from the transformation of thinking. I assume that is mostly because you don't yourself distinguish noticing thinking (see, I'm putting it in the present participle for you) from that transformation.

You've ignored everything that relates to that difference that Steiner sets up. Okay, fine. I can't force you.

But you might at least explain how it can be that Steiner will claim intuitive thinking is the utter empirical knowing of the true self participating true spirit as cosmos and why, at the end of chapter three, he makes clear that the 'exceptional state' does not yet ensure us of any ontological reality. He goes out of his way to clarify that by the end of chapter 3 he hasn't pointed to the new kind of certainty that intuitive thinking will reveal. You'll have to resist the pull of those passages on materialism to address some of these differences. If you absolutely need the exceptional state to refer to the activity of thinking, you can just say it does at the end.

When my daughter said, "I realized I was thinking about the dog," I highly doubt you would focus on the tense of the verb you show she is referring to the activity itself.

If I show you a quote from Steiner in which he says, "The doctor was noticing that his thinking was clouded" I highly doubt you would claim the doctor therefore could not have been a materialist because materialists don't notice their 'thinking activity' and Steiner would never use that verbal tense of 'to think' when describing a materialist. It all gets so silly.

Steiner even gave examples of what reflection of this kind could look like.

I'm going to read your response again in a bit because I think you may have even skipped over Steiner's claim that we can't experience our current thinking. Even though I know how orthodox students try to get around that, I don't think you even mentioned it. But I'm tired and may have missed it.

"I can never observe my present thinking." -- Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom

Oh my goodness, he said 'thinking' not 'thought'......

and he said never. Oh well.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:26 am "You are also saying #2 example shows how it is our personal faculties which make the difference in richness of meaning rather than anything in the percepts themselves or our lack of finding the proper concepts for them."

I genuinely think it would be interesting to know why you think I claimed our personal faculties make 'the difference' in richness. Maybe it seemed implied by the way I contrasted the examples. While I absolutely believe that our individuality plays an important role, I'd say the greater role is played by a whole host of factors related to the interactional nature of experience itself. But, yeah, I can go with the main gist of your summation.

Because you mentioned in #2 the person wakes up muddled and goes out to see the same things as #1 - that made me think you are conditioning the difference in meaning quality on the person's state more than what he is perceiving-thinking when he goes outside. Of course, I do not deny a person's state can affect their thinking process.

The bigger point, though, is that I think you are still regarding this whole thing in a very mechanistic way, which is the precise way that people like Steiner and Barfield want us to leave behind when considering these experiences so that we may gain true understanding of them. What is one of the biggest hallmarks of this "mechanistic" thinking in the modern age? It is the focus on particular manifestations and isolated experiences as the means through which we can gain true understanding of what is happening. That derives from nominalism which became the dominant philosophical perspective over realism. The latter focuses much more on archetypal principles as the means to true understanding.

So how is that relevant here? You are asking us for a clear mechanism by which the conceptual meaning gets "attached" to the perceptions in #1 example. When I cannot come up with one, then you say, "see this experience shows that we immediately have meaning when we walk out the door and take a quick look around". If I were to respond with, "all of the conceptual attachments happen very rapidly in that experience", you would respond with, "ok then describe the precise mechanism of how that happens so quickly?", and of course I do not have any such detailed mechanism. (if that does not accurately reflect your position, then again I urge you to just state it plainly in response). I am not responding with "concepts are attached very quickly" because I fundamentally do not believe that is the proper way to understand our experience, in philosophy, science, or any other field of inquiry.

Rather, I think we must look to those overarching principles which make sense of our experience. We both seem to believe Barfield was correct to say modern man no longer perceives the inherent meaning in the natural world he looks at. That evolution of consciousness from "original participation" to modern age of logical positivism and atomism (which results naturally from modern mode of consciousness) is a major principle we should keep in mind, perhaps the major principle. That explains why our perception, no matter how immediately meaningful it seems when we look out at the world in the morning, is still lacking most of its true meaning. The meaning we get from seeing the kid running and the mother looking with pride is still a dull shadow of the true spiritual meaning which underlies that experience. I think even philosophers of Will agree with that observation, even if they would not call the underlying reality "spiritual".

Here is where the mystic (not saying this is your approach) may agree with me and say "therefore we should stop looking for meaning in these worldly perceptions and just accept it is all Maya and the only true connection to spiritual reality is via deep mystical experience from meditation, psychedelics, etc.". Cleric and I (and Steiner and Barfield) disagree with the mystic completely. We say the dull shadows still carry some shape of that which is producing the shadows and it is through our disciplined and rigorous Thinking activity, including imagination, inspiration, and intuition, that we can build back up the meaningful networks of percept-concept relations which give us that immanent meaning from Nature our ancestors had without any effort. And since we are, in fact, gaining this meaning through our own individual effort and seeing how it manifests within us every step of the way, in full consciousness, we are actually gaining much more than even our constantly dreaming ancestors possessed - that is Barfield's "final participation".

Cleric K wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 9:30 pm Of course, intellectual concepts are only the most rigid form of ideal content. The question is what is the relation, in your view, between the concepts of the intellect (where mathematical concepts also fall) and higher sentience? Do you think the higher forms are reserved for higher, non-human beings or man is capable to attain to them through proper development? And if he can, what significance should that higher knowledge have for his Earthly life?

Spirit world (in all directions!) is vastly complex and mostly beyond epistemic knowledge, which seens inherently localized perspectivity (aboutness). What I can say of mathematics (the general study of relations and forms), there are ideal/spiritual processes we intuit, and conceptualizing intellect, also in human form as well other life, actively participates in mathematical creativity. Mathematics and it's evolution as whole appears thus as dynamic process of distributed divinity. The evolution of implicate orders of mathetical divinity, which. e.g. organize forms of time, from it's part organizes unfolding of Earthly life.

In this Earthly life and in our era, we can observe e.g. evolution processes from "singular" demiourge to more distributed and participatory forms of co-creation. E.g Whitehead's theology (dynamic Indra's Net) can be considered such form of fundamentally decentralized and participatory divine self-consciousness, which as such and by definition is accessible form-idea to participant intellects.

SanteriSatama wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 3:03 pm There's nothing in what I said that comes even closely to the Borg you're describing. I didn't even tackle the question of 'what' ideas are being thought. The point was only to bring to attention that in the experience of ideas we truly live in the same ideal element, irrelevant of the idea itself. To put it into a picture, parts of our consciousnesses overlap when we experience the same idea. This is true oneness. When I experience my will, even if I have the idea that this will is part of unbroken wholeness, it's still the case that the will-part that I experience within my skin is no the same will-part that you experience within yours. The reverse is true for thinking (and the higher forms of cognition) - when we cognize a certain idea, both yours and mine consciousness meet at the idea, they overlap. This is not yet the case for most part in this discussion But it's possible that we meet (overlap) at the domain of the spiritual-world that I'm speaking of.

What associates with Borg is just a persistent habit of language, which speaks "same idea" as perfective and complete object with independent existence. On this level language expresses and discusses the starting point of Plato's study of Forms. For European mythos and archetypal evolution to gain and internalize deep comprehension, it's good and important to relive the roots of European philosophy. Living philosophy is not a mere intellectual process, but whole body investigation. We know myths be reliving them, and by reliving we can gain deep insight and wisdom what to keep, what to improve.

Here's a nicely narrated path from Platonic formalism of Locke to empirism of Berkeley and to empirism of Hume. A well trodden path, but still good to walk to gain better insight of evolution of epistemology. The epistemic path alone, as we agree, can become easily self-repeating loop. For a more holistic and IMHO zeitgeist comprehension, a fusion of analytic Whitehead's theology and synthetic Merleau-Ponty's animism could work quite well in the European narratology.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:59 am "Materialistic scientists are perfectly capable of observing thoughts, otherwise they wouldn't compare them to bile secreted from the liver."

Nope. The exceptional state is defined as not making a causal attribution outside of thought to the exceptional state. A materialist isn't in the exceptional state because he is attributing it to his concept of matter. Or, in other words, a materialist doesn't realize the significance of those moments of simply reflecting on a thought. In other lectures, Steiner certainly talks about materialists having spiritual expeirences all the time but unaware. He says the same thing happens to Anthroposophists. Ultimately, he explains that materialist has very little to do with a world view and much more to do with quality of experience.

I'm confused. It seems to me that you were left with the impression that I said that the materialist is in the exceptional state when he speaks of secretion of thoughts. Not at all. That's why my whole post began with the differentiating between the experience of the finished thoughts and that of the causal attribution which is entirely within thinking. When I said "Materialistic scientists are perfectly capable of observing thoughts, otherwise they wouldn't compare them to bile secreted from the liver" I meant that they do experience thoughts but thrust them down at the level of any other process they observe through the senses. Thoughts are for them just another billiard ball whose movement is to be explained by its prior interaction with other objects. The experience of thinking is not understood as having any causative reality but only as the final output of an underlying mechanical process - a process which tries to figure itself out by tracing the mechanics that set it in motion. To experience the exceptional state one must become one with spiritual force that sets the thought in motion. This is not attempted by the materialist because he sees this experience only as an effect of the underlying causes. To consider that the cause of thinking lies within the experience of thinking itself, is the greatest stupidity in his eyes. For him it would be like saying that the cause for the flashing of pixels on the PC screen are within the pixel itself (instead of the CPU and the whole chain of hardware leading to the pixel). This makes the materialist to immediately avoid the exceptional state because it's nothing but irrationality for him to consider that there's something of value in the (illusionary) experience of being a causative force of thinking.
The mystic avoids the exceptional states for similar reasons, although from another side. For him the ego is only the illusion of thoughts feeding back on themselves, much like a squeal of a microphone feedback. And deliberate experience of this self-causative thinking activity is seen only as fueling the illusion of the ego and bringing the microphone feedback to painful decibels.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:59 am "The difficulty in explaining the exceptional state is because its experience is resisted."

Show me in PoF where Steiner points to this resistance.

Here:

Steiner wrote:A person who cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to call forth the characterized exceptional state which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious to all other spiritual activity.* With someone who does not have the good will to take this standpoint, one could as little speak about thinking as with a blind person about color.

The good will is the key here. These words go much further than can be discussed in PoF itself. There are deeper reasons for the lack of this good will, that can be addressed only with higher cognition. Above we're at a point where Steiner says "Through words I can only lead you to the threshold of the exceptional state. In order to experience it you have to step across the threshold yourself. No other being is able to carry you across this threshold except the being of your own "I"".

This is something very important and it concerns not only materialists but also spiritualists alike. I know that Steiner doesn't explicitly use the word 'resist' here but this is what actually goes on. The person has their own conscious or unconscious reasons for not applying the good will and understanding from their own experience what Steiner is talking about. The most common reason for this, as already stated, is that people are afraid that they'll fall into the illusion of self-indulgence if they experience their causative role in thinking. They feel they are more humble when they place the causes of thoughts outside themselves - in mechanical Nature or within the mystery of the void. Ironically this is exactly what perpetuates the illusion because when one denies his involvement with thoughts in this way, it's not that he stops to think them, but simply ensures that the spiritual experience of thinking (the exceptional state) remains deeply buried in the blind spot.

So effectively, what we have here is nothing but resistance for the intimate and living experience of thinking, justified by the most varied excuses.

You say that I should read the chapter without the talk about materialism. But why should I do that? Understanding why the materialist misses the exceptional experience is key to its proper comprehension.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:59 am If we get lost in talking bout our deeper understandings, via spiritual experiences, of the text, there is no use in referring to Steiner's core text at all.

This is where we really differ and the reason for all these back and forths. What is the point of talking about Steiner's core texts if not the reaching of the deeper understandings, which were the actual reasons for the existence of the texts? We're arguing whether Steiner has introduced intuition in the 'first' or the 'third' paragraph and so on. We can't change the core texts, they are historical facts. We can debate forever about 'how well' these texts have performed their duty. The fact is that all these texts point to a living spiritual core which everyone can find in themselves, as long as they have the good will to do so. I don't know how others see it but my impression, not only from this thread but others too, is that you spend much more energy to focus on the way people misunderstand things and how the texts are full of caveats, instead of actually trying to point attention to the right way to understand them. And I'm no longer sure if you at all think that Steiner has expressed something in the texts that is right.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Jun 28, 2021 1:59 am "I can never observe my present thinking." -- Rudolf Steiner, The Philosophy of Freedom

Oh my goodness, he said 'thinking' not 'thought'......

and he said never. Oh well.

But he also said 'observe'. Present thinking is experienced in intuition, what is observed is the perception of thoughts, which are already past, just as the soundwaves radiating from the larynx are already past in comparison to the current vibrations of the cords. The above quote is a necessary sanity check, ensuring that we don't confuse the hearing (observation) of the voice in the head with the present thinking which is experienced intuitively. But there's also no contradiction to speak of "observation of thinking", since the thought-perceptions are faithful imprint of the thinking activity (even if the activity itself can't be found in the perception, just as the vocal cords themselves are not to be found within the air pressure waves meters away). Yet we can say that when we hear our voice we hear our singing. Similarly we can hear thinking in the thoughts even if the living spiritual activity is already absent from them. As long as we realize that the thought-perceptions point us towards the intuitively experienced activity, it's justifiable to say that we observe (the image of) our thinking within the (past) thought perceptions. It's a fine distinction. Just as I can look at a mirror, wave my hand and say "That's my handwaving", and someone else can object "that's not your handwaving but its reflection!" Yes, it's slippery usage of words, but as long as we're interested in realities, there's no reason to be tripped by them. We're given the whole proper context in order to understand things as they were intended.

Well, perhaps someday we will have a fun debate between the Khulewind's and the Clerics. To me Khulewind is much more clear logically than you are in laying out carefully Steiner's steps through the book. And, more importantly, Khulewind's characterization of reflection vs intution is much more aligned with my experience than how you set up these terms and experiences.

"A person who cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to call forth the characterized exceptional state which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious to all other spiritual activity."

Steiner said that the world would be in much better hands with creative materialists than with dogmatic Anthroposophists. He was quick to hire materialists as the first Waldorf teachers if he saw that they lived actively within their thoughts. A dogmatic mind will certain take the above quote and use it as a wedge. I don't mean that personally, simply that, as I said at the top, that portion of the chapter is often what makes this investigation impossible. It tends to ensure that the same conclusions and finished thoughts are spouted about PoF as have been for over 100 years.

What is a creative materialist doing that a dogmatic Anthroposophist is not doing?

A creative materialist is spending more time in the development of his ideas without reference to a casual system of thought underlying them. When the creative materialist (like some of the early Waldorf teachers that Steiner shocked his students with when he said they must hire them) is observing a situation and trying to deal with it, he doesn't spend much time at all referring to his ontologically dead beliefs about materialism. Sure, he might refer to them later, at home, when somebody asks him for an intellectual explanation of the ideas he came up with at the school. But when he's actively 'problem-solving- at the school, he is fluidly observing and thinking and, occasionally, entering into the less common moments of reflecting on what he just thought. So let's say that the creative materialist is trying to find a creative way to make the drawing of the letters connect to his student's experience. It is before class has begun and he is painting letters on paper and trying to find a more enlivened approach. As he does this, he suddenly realizes that he thinking certain assumptions about the children's hands that were not correct. "Oh, I've been thinking that they have X!" In that moment, he is in the exceptional state of no longer merely perceiving and thinking about the painting (as he has for the last hour), but he is beholding his thinking process itself in stark outlines, not intuitively grasping the nature of thinking itself. And the creative materialist is not then grounding this reflection into any type of deadened ontology, he simply observes it and uses the insight itself to move forward with his creative approach to today's lesson plan.

Steiner supposedly watched a man fix a pair of shoes and knew immediately that this man would be a great Waldorf teacher. When Steiner was told that the man was a materialist, Steiner said something like, "Who cares? Did you watch how he attended to that process? He clearly is alive in his experience and that is what he will bring to the children. We must not be dogmatic in approaching these things."

{{Steiner wrote PoF and EXPECTED some materialist philosopher's to grasp his core points. According to your interpretation, this means that he expected them to transform their thinking and directly grasp the nature of spiritual reality consciously. Within months of its publication he was disappointed to see that some of these men were not in agreement with him. The idea that Steiner believed Chapter 3 was referring to one of the most profound experiences a human being can undergoe is....wow.}}

What about the dogmatic Anthroposophist that Steiner was so worried about? He did not want the children in the Waldorf schools to be taught by people who's habits of thought tended towards non-spontaneity and creativity EVEN IF those people could lead a Philosophy of Freedom study group.

What does the dogmatic Anthroposophist do when he has a similar reflection on a thought? Rather than let the thought remain in freshly reflected state, the dogmatic anthroposophist immediately entwines it with finished thoughts about the spiritual world or representations of spiritual beings that he has read in lectures or just a deadened sense of 'knowing' that the source of this thought was thinking. This is the exact same kind of 'casting down' that a dogmatic materialist does to the exceptional state. The dogmatic Anthroposophist and the dogmatic materialist are doing the exact same thing.

The quote that is being wrongly understood would mean the same thing if we replaced 'materialism' with 'dogmatic Anthroposophy.'

"A person who cannot overcome a dogmatic approach to Anthroposophy lacks the ability to call forth the characterized exceptional state which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious to all other spiritual activity."

This 'bringing to consciousness' is not an insight about spiritual reality. The creative materialist brings about the exceptional state without then having a belief about the nature of thinking. He merely tacitly refuses to kill the creative process by casting it down into a web of dogmaticly finished ideas. The dogmatic Anthroposophist and the dogmatic materialist immediately cast down and enclose their reflections in systems of 'explanation' rather than carry them forward into the process of discovery.

But nothing either of us says till make too much of a difference here. Presently, you feel that if the 'exceptional state' is not elevated to a conscious grasping of the spirit, it is not being understood. For the logical and experiential reasons I've given (which are not exactly the same as Khulewind's but in perfect alignment with his characterizations), I think this is a mistake.

Even the examples Steiner gives of the less common occurance ("I am thinking of a Table") compared to his characterization of the transformation of thinking itself in intuitive thinking...even those examples should give you pause. But I imagine you would say that he hoped the reader would see that "I am thinking of a Table" is also the living experience of the Christ, which, of course, is the fundamental experience of grasping the essence of thinking.

Or, I've seen some Anthroposophists, when pushed, say that Steiner is secretly teaching that intuitive thinking is grasped in stages and "I am thinking about X" is supposedly the first spiritual experience that leads one away from materialism. Ugh. I'm with Cool Wind on this one.


Thanks for the energy and passion of at least looking at this. And, regardless of the details, I know that we are each working to enliven people's experiences of being human so that it hardly matters where they land ontologically. The world needs this kind of enlivening much more desperately than finished thoughts about spirit or matter or which philosopher knew best. I know for certain we agree on that.

If you believe that the exceptional state is the direct beholding of the self-sustaining, essential nature of intuitive thinking, you then have divided this profound realization from the intuition of the "I" itself.

I'd love an explanation for that division. To me it goes against the careful logic of the book and it certainly doesn't match the experience that is the fundamental intuition of thing which is also the intuition of the true self.

And Steiner could not have been more clear that the exceptional state does not establish the intuition that I Am.

Putting aside the fact that Steiner differentiates the less common condition (the exceptional condition) from the experience of intuitive thinking by stating that the less common condition does not at all establish the reality of the "I" nor does it give any insight into the nature of thinking's essence, let's look again at some of the other ways he tries to help keep this clear to the reader.

"In saying “I am thinking of a table,” I adopt the exceptional point of view characterized above..."

He calls the less common condition a 'point-of-view' here. Does that help us in anyway?

Well, Cleric, I'd say we could look at this:

"I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity."

He says a standpoint outside his own activity.

"I observe the table, but I carry on a process of thought about the table without, at the same moment, observing this thought-process."

Right. The carpenter, even if he is a creative materialist, is thinking about the table in countless ways but not thinking about his thinking. He may be thinking, "Okay, this part has to be smaller and I need to make that smooth or it won't function..." He is observing and thinking. He is not stepping 'outside' this stream of thought and making it meta-conscious. He is obviously experiencing thought, just not making that experience meta. If somebody said, "Why is your face so wrinkle up like that?", he might laugh and say, "Hey, figuring out how to best make this structure isn't easy, my friend!"

"We should never forget that the distinction between thought which goes on unconsciously and thought which is consciously analysed, is a purely external one and irrelevant to our discussion."

So, Cleric, you don't think that the 'thought which is consciously analysed' refers to 'taking a standpoint outside my own activity.'

""I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity."

And after setting up his starting point, Steiner says:

"I think I have given sufficient reasons for making thought the starting-point for my theory of the world."

You think that Steiner's starting point is this exceptional state, which is a very very rare experience of transforming cognition by grasping it intuitively?

Whereas Steiner thinks that his starting point has only made clearly reasoned points as to why we should not make any assumption about the nature of thought before we dive into exploring it's nature. He makes clear that he hasn't yet spoken of thoughts actual nature or it's actual possible relation to the cosmos.

"We must first consider thought quite impartially without relation to a thinking subject or to an object of thought. For subject and object are both concepts constructed by thought."

This matches what Khulewind and I are saying regarding the exceptional condition in which we reflect on our thought. But you say things like this:

"To experience the exceptional state one must become one with spiritual force that sets the thought in motion."

Maybe this question will help. Is what you call the experience of the exceptional state conscious? So when the person says, "Oh, I'm thinking of a table right now" they have become one with the spiritual force? And not only have they become one with the spiritual force but they are aware of this oneness? Or are you saying that person can become one with this spiritual force "I'm thinking of a table") and not be conscious of what is happening, they might say, "Hey, I don't know what you mean about my becoming one with a spiritual force, but I definitely realized that I had been thinking of X."

I'm assuming you are claiming that the experience is conscious and understood at least as a 'becoming one with'.

For those who think that the exceptional state is intuitive thinking, I assume this first well with Steiner saying:

"I must first take up a standpoint outside of my own activity."

In other words, one way of describing the nature of intuitive thinking is that we take up a standpoint outside our own activity...

Obviously, Khulewind and I disagree for reasons both logical and experiential. And I think Steiner does a wonderful job contrasting this 'taking up a standpoint outside of my own activity" with the experience of grasping thinking from within. Of course, he doesn't describe the latter experience in this early chapter because in the early chapter he is setting up his starting point describing where it can lead.

In PoF, Steiner characterizes intuive thinking very differently than the necessary first step of reflecting upon thinking without presuppositions:

"A proper understanding of this observation [of the relationship of cognizing man to the world] leads to the insight that thinking can be directly discerned as a self-contained entity [obviously, here also, we are dealing with a new form of experience, not a “standing over against”]. . . . When we observe our thinking, we live during this observation directly within a self-supporting, spiritual web of being. Indeed, we can even say that if we would grasp the essential nature of spirit in the form in which it presents itself most immediately to man, we need only look at the self-sustaining activity of thinking. . . . We [who penetrate and behold the essence of thinking] shall see in this element that appears in our consciousness as thinking, not a shadowy copy of some reality, but a self-sustaining spiritual essence. And of this we shall be able to say that it is brought into consciousness for us through intuition. Intuition is the conscious experience — in pure spirit — of a purely spiritual content. Only through an intuition can the essence of thinking be grasped."

At some point it might land like a ton of bricks why Steiner's starting point is to reflect upon thinking without presupposition and how this is what allows us to avoid the traps of all forms of ontological dogmatism.

However, merely reflecting upon thinking free from presupposition is not the same as grasping the essence of thinking. I admit I am a bit surprised that it is so difficult to see the way Steiner moves the reader from the starting point towards the actual nature of thinking itself. I have to do a bit of work to remind myself why I myself shared that view for so long! But once you see something, it is hard to un-see it.

As long as the 'exceptional state' is treated as intuitive thinking, at least we know those folks have a huge surprise in store for them down the road when they eventually intuit thinking. I wonder if the example they will give of that transformation of consciousenss will be more like, "I am thinking of a table" or more like Steiner evocations of the penetrating and living warmth penetrating self-sustaining intuitive thinking.

I admit. I think he was very wise to show us why even very simple reflections on thought ("I am thinking about a table"), as long as we don't immediately interpret them via a spiritual or materialistic dogma, are where we get our foothold to begin.

But the foothold stands far below intuitive thinking itself. As Steiner says, the foothold tells us nothing about reality, whereas intuitive thinking reveals the essence of self and cosmos.

For any future readers of this long and twisty thread, if you share the orthodox interpretation that 'exceptional state' is intuitive thinking and if you believe you've grasped intuitive thinking directly, you have a real treat ahead of you.