Saving the materialists

[Federica]

Here’s the related video from last week: “The biggest misconception in physics - Energy is not conserved”. I don’t get all the mathematical and experimental details, but if scientists eventually start to admit that, a breach opens up for the consideration of the extensive non-spatial processes operating behind sense-perceptible substances and phenomena - the "becoming of phenomena", in Huecks words.

Thanks for sharing your insightful thoughts on this topic, Federica. I don't have much to comment at the moment, but just thought it was interesting that I also came across this non-conservation of energy video after Cleric posted the other one and started searching for a relevant Steiner quote to share. I found a few and settled on this one (as expected, no likes or responses):

"Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever.[1] Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be human in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us human.

A past world dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth. Through our theoretical thinking, matter—substantiality—is brought to its end; through our pictorial thinking, matter and cosmic energy are imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary of the human skin is connected with the dying and birthing of worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.
...
Because of unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so, because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral world-order—which in actual fact it does by speaking of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral world-order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can understand the course of the world's development only if we grasp how out of this 'illusory' moral world order—for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds come into being." (Steiner, GA 202, 1920)


The saddest thing is that, here we are 105 years after Steiner elucidated such things in detail, and still only 24% of us can see the flaws in the conservation of energy principle, and among that 24%, probably none have attained any concrete inkling of what it is pointing to.

Great quote, Ashvin, thanks! It gives me the opportunity to use Steiners reference to the noll point and try to clarify what I mean (in the 3D thread) when I say that the inner re-creation of external processes we experience in ourselves (Hueck) can be extended to the entire human organism, not only to a perceptual process in the head system. The high-level intentional context of this idea is, as said, the purpose of “saving the materialist” not at all to criticize Hueck.

So, Steiner says that both matter and energy are killed in us, coming to a noll point, and then transformed. This applies to our thoughts, our I-conscisouness, that only can emerge from a necessary and paradoxically healthy process of death, as in the quote. But, our entire organism, just as much as ordinary sense thinking, is a fragmenter, is a homeopathizer. It brings introduced substances to noll points, which in turn trigger effects opposite to the initial ones.

Just as our nervous-sensory system potentizes processes, or energies, through I-consciousness, by a death process that open the path to rebirth (beyond the energetic null point), so our entire organism potentizes substances. In both cases, the opposite effect is triggered, once the noll points are passed. And, all these processes - including their respective elemental culminations in substances - are in direct reciprocal correspondence with the natural phenomena and substances that natural science makes into objects of scientific inquiry.

So I agree that we can’t create intellectual models for these processes and expect them to open the way to direct understanding from within. However, for the sake of saving the materialists, I believe it can be useful to highlight the full, real reciprocal relation (not only aliased in perception) existing between phenomena (processes) in nature and phenomena in the human being. So that scientists can begin to say to themselves: “OK now I begin to see how it can make sense to recreate a natural process within, in introspection. It’s because, our entire being, is already a complete mirror of that phenomenal landscape.”

Even before anything is grasped experientially, the reference to the entire organism highlights the reciprocal interconnection more completely, in a way that is easier to wrap one's head around, more intuitively. I guess the cognitive dissonance initially experienced is attenuated. Because what’s so hard for a materialistic-conditioned mind is to grasp how the heck one can learn something about external nature by means of... meditation. Like what? How can we find within the shadowy, casual, unlawful, individual inner space an understanding of... general external phenomena? It’s too much to ask. But, if one is first familiarized with the idea that our entire organization is a lawful microcosm of the universe, not in a nebulous esoteric way, but in a concrete way, that can be traced with a periodic table in hand, and a phenomenology of dilutions to play with and assess positions of noll points, then things may start to look less mind boggling and unfathomable. Perhaps

[Cleric]

Thank you so much Cleric, I see. I am sorry you had to write a long post. It was only my ignorance in these matters. Youtube served me that video, and I thought it fitted nicely as one more illustration of the previous post, but it doesn't. I was misled by the word "chaotic". Now that I've googled it, I see the scientific definition of chaotic is not really "unpredictable" as one would think from common language use. A predictable motion modeled through known equations can still be called chaotic, or irregular. Next time I will try to be more cautious with scientific concepts. Thank you for the great explanation!

It's all fine, Federica. I'm glad I wrote about these things. They have some potential to be spiritualized, as I've tried, for example, through the phonograph metaphor. What needs to be overcome for this to happen, however, is seeing things as an entirely mathematical equilibrium, which by its nature is a timeless picture. Mathematics seems to move only because we ourselves traverse the ideal relations through the temporal metamorphosis of our thinking activity. But the relations themselves are not subject to temporality. Like the conversation on the other thread, this is the perfect environment for keeping the split between perceptual activity (we can call such the thinking that is completely glued to perceptions and their memory replicas) and the deeper intuitive gestures. We continuously try to find our reality within mathematical thoughts. For example, if we imagine a far more complicated PE field - that of our brain, and the movements of chemicals (KE), we can once again picture things in a very general way. There's this configuration space of an unthinkable number of degrees of freedom (each particle has at least three coordinates, and three more for the velocity vector), but nevertheless, our momentary brain state is a single point within that space, corresponding to the momentary positions, velocities, etc., of all brain particles. Our brain state is represented by an inertially rolling marble through this multidimensional configuration space, and its velocity arrow is still nudged toward the steepest descent. Even though we do not understand the details, the general picture is this - that's what the physicist says. But it is the mode of cognition that is interesting here. Basically, we call this 'understanding' if our thinking can become like the rolling marble and follow the gradient curvature. The illusion of freedom is seen as stemming from the fact that, just like the marble in the complicated landscape, we always move inertially in some direction, while the PE gradient bends it along another direction - that of the steepest descent. Thus, a kind of hysteresis. In other words, this thinking can only be satisfied if it eliminates its troublesome freedom and feels that its every transformation is dictated by a mathematically precise gradient. This could be different if the KE and PE aspects spiral together (like the Euler's disc) in such a way that we feel ourselves not only as a brain state but as the whole World state. Then our activity once again seeks to eliminate itself, in the sense that the out-of-phase condition should be reconciled, but for this to be achieved, we would have to walk the full evolutionary path into the Eternal, becoming/uncreating the Universe in the process. So, we see once again confirmation of what Steiner said: that all evil is nothing but good out of its proper time. The intellect striving to reconcile the wobble is actually good, but when it is taken in such a narrow domain, it becomes evil, because it now paralyzes the evolutionary development. The intellect aims to prematurely find the intuitive curvature that, when fully aligned with, no longer leads to the experience of questions, no longer demands to ask "What should I do next?". If the intellect's dream is achieved, then its solution would act as the perfect oracle, every next thought would emerge through iron logical necessity from the followed curvature. It is premature because it is not realized that we need to that for the whole World-state, not just our intellectual brain-patch. And this is also the reason why this dream of the intellect is impossible. Such perfect in-phaseness can never be achieved only for the brain-intellect experience in isolation. As the cracks in the pipe, our intellectual state is always 'venting' in and out of the World state, and this ensures that its fragile equilibrium cannot be sustained for long.

[AshvinP]

Here’s the related video from last week: “The biggest misconception in physics - Energy is not conserved”. I don’t get all the mathematical and experimental details, but if scientists eventually start to admit that, a breach opens up for the consideration of the extensive non-spatial processes operating behind sense-perceptible substances and phenomena - the "becoming of phenomena", in Huecks words.

Thanks for sharing your insightful thoughts on this topic, Federica. I don't have much to comment at the moment, but just thought it was interesting that I also came across this non-conservation of energy video after Cleric posted the other one and started searching for a relevant Steiner quote to share. I found a few and settled on this one (as expected, no likes or responses):

"Here we come to the point where he who is initiated into the secrets of the universe cannot speak, as so many speak today, of the conservation of energy or the conservation of matter. It is simply not true that matter is conserved forever.[1] Matter dies to the point of nullity, to a zero-point. In our own organism, energy dies to the point of nullity through the fact that we formulate theoretical thoughts. But if we did not do so, if the universe did not continually die in us, we should not be human in the true sense. Because the universe dies in us, we are endowed with self-consciousness and are able to think about the universe. But these thoughts are the corpse of the universe. We become conscious of the universe as a corpse only, and it is this that makes us human.

A past world dies within us, down to its very matter and energy. It is only because a new universe at once begins to dawn that we do not notice this dying of matter and its immediate rebirth. Through our theoretical thinking, matter—substantiality—is brought to its end; through our pictorial thinking, matter and cosmic energy are imbued with new life. Thus what goes on inside the boundary of the human skin is connected with the dying and birthing of worlds. This is how the moral order and the natural order are connected. The natural world dies away in man; in the realm of the moral a new natural world comes to birth.
...
Because of unwillingness to consider these things, the ideas of the imperishability of matter and energy were invented. If energy were imperishable and matter were imperishable there would be no moral world-order. But today it is desired to keep this truth concealed and modern thought has every reason to do so, because otherwise it would have to eliminate the moral world-order—which in actual fact it does by speaking of the law of the conservation of matter and energy. If matter is conserved, or energy is conserved, the moral world-order is nothing but an illusion, a mirage. We can understand the course of the world's development only if we grasp how out of this 'illusory' moral world order—for so it is when it is grasped in thoughts—new worlds come into being." (Steiner, GA 202, 1920)


The saddest thing is that, here we are 105 years after Steiner elucidated such things in detail, and still only 24% of us can see the flaws in the conservation of energy principle, and among that 24%, probably none have attained any concrete inkling of what it is pointing to.

Great quote, Ashvin, thanks! It gives me the opportunity to use Steiners reference to the noll point and try to clarify what I mean (in the 3D thread) when I say that the inner re-creation of external processes we experience in ourselves (Hueck) can be extended to the entire human organism, not only to a perceptual process in the head system. The high-level intentional context of this idea is, as said, the purpose of “saving the materialist” not at all to criticize Hueck.

So, Steiner says that both matter and energy are killed in us, coming to a noll point, and then transformed. This applies to our thoughts, our I-conscisouness, that only can emerge from a necessary and paradoxically healthy process of death, as in the quote. But, our entire organism, just as much as ordinary sense thinking, is a fragmenter, is a homeopathizer. It brings introduced substances to noll points, which in turn triggers effects opposite to the initial ones.

Just as our nervous-sensory system potentizes processes, or energies, through I-consciousness, by a death process that open the path to rebirth (beyond the energetic null point), so our entire organism potentizes substances. In both cases, the opposite effect is triggered, once the noll points are passed. And, all these processes - including their respective elemental culminations in substances - are in direct reciprocal correspondence with the natural phenomena and substances that natural science makes into objects of scientific inquiry.

So I agree that we can’t create intellectual models for these processes and expect them to open the way to direct understanding from within. However, for the sake of saving the materialists, I believe it can be useful to highlight the full, real reciprocal relation (not only aliased in perception) existing between phenomena (processes) in nature and phenomena in the human being. So that scientists can begin to say to themselves: “OK now I begin to see how it can make sense to recreate a natural process within, in introspection. It’s because, our entire being, is already a complete mirror of that phenomenal landscape.”

Even before anything is grasped experientially, the reference to the entire organism highlights the reciprocal interconnection more completely, in a way that is easier to wrap one's head around, more intuitivly. I guess the cognitive dissonance initially experienced is attenuated. Because what’s so hard for a materialistic-conditioned mind is to grasp how the heck one can learn something about external nature by means of... meditation. Like what? How can we find within the shadowy, casual, unlawful, individual inner space an understanding of... general external phenomena? It’s too much to ask. But, if one is first familiarized with the idea that our entire organization is a lawful microcosm of the universe, not in a nebulous esoteric way, but in a concrete way, that can be traced with a periodic table in hand, and a phenomenology of dilutions to play with and assess positions of noll points, then things may start to look less mind boggling and unfathomable. Perhaps

I like how you state the above, Federica. The bold has especially been something I have pondered over, and I think it is spot on. I suppose where I am much more reluctant is that things will become less mind-boggling if one starts with the indications you (and Steiner) have given. As Cleric pointed out before, even that Steiner quote can easily be fitted into the intellect's familiar theoretical habits, i.e., it can all remain pointing to imagined entities, energies, mechanisms, processes, etc., other than the first-person thinking process that is contemplating how the human organization is a lawful microcosm of the Cosmos (and, in retrospect, I realize it was not so helpful to post such a quote on the YT clip, but more of an impulsive gesture like "don't you guys realize this has already been discovered and thoroughly explored??"). The intellect doesn't attain to a different mode of positioning itself within the flow of existence, in this way, but instead blocks the possibility of that reorientation.

And this is perhaps a problem for many Anthroposophists as well. They reason that these detailed correspondences between the physical and spiritual must be the most important for higher understanding, because Steiner lectured on them so many times and from so many different angles. Yet, as we know from the earlier works, he also placed the most stress on spiritualizing the intellect from its default habitual conditioning so that these higher facts could be properly perceived and integrated, as symbols for our intimate spiritual structure that help us orient toward completely unfamiliar supersensible realities and allow our self- and world-understanding to be continually transformed through them. Even throughout the later lectures, he periodically returns to this warning. For example:

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things.

[Federica]

I like how you state the above, Federica. The bold has especially been something I have pondered over, and I think it is spot on. I suppose where I am much more reluctant is that things will become less mind-boggling if one starts with the indications you (and Steiner) have given. As Cleric pointed out before, even that Steiner quote can easily be fitted into the intellect's familiar theoretical habits, i.e., it can all remain pointing to imagined entities, energies, mechanisms, processes, etc., other than the first-person thinking process that is contemplating how the human organization is a lawful microcosm of the Cosmos (and, in retrospect, I realize it was not so helpful to post such a quote on the YT clip, but more of an impulsive gesture like "don't you guys realize this has already been discovered and thoroughly explored??"). The intellect doesn't attain to a different mode of positioning itself within the flow of existence, in this way, but instead blocks the possibility of that reorientation.

And this is perhaps a problem for many Anthroposophists as well. They reason that these detailed correspondences between the physical and spiritual must be the most important for higher understanding, because Steiner lectured on them so many times and from so many different angles. Yet, as we know from the earlier works, he also placed the most stress on spiritualizing the intellect from its default habitual conditioning so that these higher facts could be properly perceived and integrated, as symbols for our intimate spiritual structure that help us orient toward completely unfamiliar supersensible realities and allow our self- and world-understanding to be continually transformed through them. Even throughout the later lectures, he periodically returns to this warning. For example:

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things.

Yes, the intellect has the option to keep cloning itself forth, but that's OK. Even, it is necessary. This option should not be our concern in itself, and I believe it can't be a valid objection to various suggestions about how to present contents differently in order to "save the materialist". The thing is, if you think it's worth speaking to such minds, and if you do it - you actually regularly do it - then it means that it seems reasonable to you that something can be submitted to the intellect's attention, for its own personal use, that could act like a bridge, shifting the mind in question towards a more favorable position, with regards to its opening to new modes of cognition.

If you didn't accept this principle, then it would make no sense at all to write an email to the 4D guy, for example. So I can't accept the generic objection: "This will get them no further cos the intellect will just engulf the new prompt." I am not saying that my suggestion is necessarily good, it may be mediocre, but you will need some more specific argument to convince me that this is actually the case, and that even the possibility of reorientation for the intellect would be blocked. How do you know it would be blocked? This is a black and white statement: "If you give them more intellectual content, the possibility of reorientation will be blocked”. ....why?

As a matter of fact, there is just nothing other than more intellectual content that can be given, to begin with. And if you really think that any additional intellectual content will just bung their options, then stop talking to them, materialists and label-Anthroposophists alike? Why not trying a little more positivity instead. I don’t think there is any reason to doubt that certain intellectual contents can act supportively with respect to the realization of the necessity of spiritual science. PoF and also Steiners entire life mission, to whose fulfillment he inexhaustibly spoke and wrote to hordes of materialistically oriented people, is the most obvious indication of that…

For clairvoyance, a new cognition needs to be developed. But intellectual content can do a great deal to orient the intuitive context towards a configuration more favorable to the Spirit. I would go even further (and believe me, I kind of struggle with this one): even material and energetic content - not only thought content - could do a good deal, since an aversion to the Spirit is, to some extent, a psychic ailing, as Steiner says, and as such it can be rebalanced within the organism.

[AshvinP]

I like how you state the above, Federica. The bold has especially been something I have pondered over, and I think it is spot on. I suppose where I am much more reluctant is that things will become less mind-boggling if one starts with the indications you (and Steiner) have given. As Cleric pointed out before, even that Steiner quote can easily be fitted into the intellect's familiar theoretical habits, i.e., it can all remain pointing to imagined entities, energies, mechanisms, processes, etc., other than the first-person thinking process that is contemplating how the human organization is a lawful microcosm of the Cosmos (and, in retrospect, I realize it was not so helpful to post such a quote on the YT clip, but more of an impulsive gesture like "don't you guys realize this has already been discovered and thoroughly explored??"). The intellect doesn't attain to a different mode of positioning itself within the flow of existence, in this way, but instead blocks the possibility of that reorientation.

And this is perhaps a problem for many Anthroposophists as well. They reason that these detailed correspondences between the physical and spiritual must be the most important for higher understanding, because Steiner lectured on them so many times and from so many different angles. Yet, as we know from the earlier works, he also placed the most stress on spiritualizing the intellect from its default habitual conditioning so that these higher facts could be properly perceived and integrated, as symbols for our intimate spiritual structure that help us orient toward completely unfamiliar supersensible realities and allow our self- and world-understanding to be continually transformed through them. Even throughout the later lectures, he periodically returns to this warning. For example:

In order to understand these things fully we must grasp thoughts which are not so easy to digest (but these things must be said because they are so)—thoughts that cost us an effort to think out. Man has no such thoughts in the course of his everyday waking consciousness. He prefers to limit his knowledge to that which is stretched out in space and that which takes its course in Time. A frequent pathological symptom is this one: to imagine even the spiritual world spatially, although these thoughts may be nebulous, thin and misty; yet we somehow wish to imagine is spatially; we wish to think of souls flying about in space, and so on. We must go beyond the ideas of space and time to more complicated ideas, if we really wish to penetrate into these things.

Yes, the intellect has the option to keep cloning itself forth, but that's OK. Even, it is necessary. This option should not be our concern in itself, and I believe it can't be a valid objection to various suggestions about how to present contents differently in order to "save the materialist". The thing is, if you think it's worth speaking to such minds, and if you do it - you actually regularly do it - then it means that it seems reasonable to you that something can be submitted to the intellect's attention, for its own personal use, that could act like a bridge, shifting the mind in question towards a more favorable position, with regards to its opening to new modes of cognition.

If you didn't accept this principle, then it would make no sense at all to write an email to the 4D guy, for example. So I can't accept the generic objection: "This will get them no further cos the intellect will just engulf the new prompt." I am not saying that my suggestion is necessarily good, it may be mediocre, but you will need some more specific argument to convince me that this is actually the case, and that even the possibility of reorientation for the intellect would be blocked. How do you know it would be blocked? This is a black and white statement: "If you give them more intellectual content, the possibility of reorientation will be blocked”. ....why?

As a matter of fact, there is just nothing other than more intellectual content that can be given, to begin with. And if you really think that any additional intellectual content will just bung their options, then stop talking to them, materialists and label-Anthroposophists alike? Why not trying a little more positivity instead. I don’t think there is any reason to doubt that certain intellectual contents can act supportively with respect to the realization of the necessity of spiritual science. PoF and also Steiners entire life mission, to whose fulfillment he inexhaustibly spoke and wrote to hordes of materialistically oriented people, is the most obvious indication of that…

For clairvoyance, a new cognition needs to be developed. But intellectual content can do a great deal to orient the intuitive context towards a configuration more favorable to the Spirit. I would go even further (and believe me, I kind of struggle with this one): even material and energetic content - not only thought content - could do a good deal, since an aversion to the Spirit is, to some extent, a psychic ailing, as Steiner says, and as such it can be rebalanced within the organism.

To answer your questions, I will first quote something I wrote previously:

I still maintain faith that Steiner, with feedback from the higher worlds (the White Lodge), crafted the most fruitful path for bridging the intellectual-scientific with the higher folds of spiritual existence. There is certainly endless creative work that can be done within that overarching phenomenological bridge, but I see no need to wish for a 'more worldly' way to arrive and inspire me. 

So it's not that we need to avoid engaging the intellect or its content, but that the proper phenomenological method of engagement has already been established, such that the intellect is experientially transformed in the process of livingly engaging the recursive content. It feels itself reaching a slightly deeper scale than the horizontal plane of mental pictures rearranged in the most varied ways. Hueck is an example of creative work within the PoF bridge:

The aim here is to show a way in which Nagel’s teleological hypothesis can be substantiated and confirmed. In doing so, I refer to Rudolf Steiner’s theory of knowledge and his understanding of evolution. According to Steiner, the knowing consciousness is not simply a mere spectator of an external reality, but the stage [‘Schauplatz’] on which reality is constituted in each individual act of cognition. The introspective observation of this act and the mental faculties involved in it can be carried out just as precisely as the investigation of the external nature. Applying the method of introspective observation to biological cognition opens an experiential approach to the riddles of life. A holistic view of evolution therefore does not require a turning away from the scientific method, but rather its expansion through the introspective self-observation of cognition. One works with facts found through empirical research and links them through thoughts that closely follow the phenomena, and in addition one observes how one grasps the facts and thinks their connections.

Hueck, Christoph J.. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought (pp. 12-13). epubli. Kindle Edition. 

Steiner probably pondered the possibility of rooting his bridge to spiritual science in detailed considerations of biology and physics, leaving aside the introspective observation of cognitive activity at first, and we know he was more than capable of that. He was up to speed on all the latest scientific developments and modes of thinking, which, in many ways, have carried over to our time as well. Practically everything we are pondering now in terms of new openings in natural science was already pondered by him in some form or another, with few exceptions.

Yet his extensive discussion of that content was intended for souls who were sufficiently prepared through the self-observation of thinking. Through the wise logic of spiritual evolution itself, this self-observation has become the only viable bridge from natural to spiritual science. These aren't arbitrary decrees established by Steiner or anyone else, but initiatic methods based on extensive investigation of the underlying spiritual realities. In our time, in particular, the known trap of the intellect indefinitely 'cloning itself forth' is the most pronounced. We have to realize this is a strategy of the adversaries to forestall the unfoldment of germinal capacities. Every intellectual thought and system we construct 'about reality' as spectators engenders new karma, new elemental beings, and this conditions the Spirit even further to its myopic degrees of freedom. The intellect becomes like the myth of the Minotaur, guarding its labyrinth and devouring all content that enters its etched pathways.  

I get that it seems natural that there should be 'more than one way' to establish the bridge, that we should be able to save the materialists by drawing various correspondences that we imagine should feel more accessible and engaging for them. Yet this is exactly what various thinkers are already doing, corresponding and integrating findings across disciplines, including esoteric science, looking into the concept of 'participatory knowing', and so forth. In fact, I have come across a few souls interested in Steiner who have taken the intellect in this direction and feel quite satisfied with it. That feels like the most natural direction for the intellect's momentum to carry it. But is it the most healthy direction? 

The intellect only finds it proper stance within the flow of existence when it feels like its mental puzzles are a fragile house of cards, like a game of Jenga where there are hidden tensions and moving a block slightly too fast, too slow, too carelessly, etc., will reduce its whole superstructure to rubble. Indeed, modern civilization is a macro-reflection of this reality - we can hardly imagine what would happen to all our conveniences and comforts if one tiny link in the financial, energy, internet, etc. chain were broken. We only begin to concretely feel these hidden tensions when our intellectual content becomes self-consciously recursive and acts as a leverage point from which we can explore the formative processes through which we construct our mental puzzles about biology, physics, and so on. Cleric's last illustrative post on the PE-KE energy dynamics was a great example of that, at least as the first beginnings. We can easily see how such a technical illustration could be extended as a metaphor (which he began to do in the next post) for the limitations of the intellect and the inner 'direction' in which its new degrees of freedom can be discovered. There is no forsaking of intellectual content here, just a deeper understanding of its proper role in service of the higher cognitive orientation, an orientation which is desperately needed in our time. 

[AshvinP]

PS - here is another great example of how somewhat schematic intellectual content can serve its proper orienting function within the flow of existence (which has also been explored through Cleric's essays in various ways). Of course, this always presupposes that the readers are trying to place themselves within the concepts described and feel out how they relate to the intimate first-person experiential flow. That is the single most important factor for whether the intellectual 'bridge' actually serves as a bridge, i.e., it helps reorient and spiritualize the intellectual faculty by inviting the latter to work its way into the second-order formative processes that shape its becoming. Otherwise, if the content does not aid and invite that transformative purpose, no matter how many interesting correspondences it makes between various concepts, it acts more as a poison for the intellectual soul than a cure.

From Hueck's book:

***

Consciousness is always a present phenomenon, but it is connected with the past as well as with the future. It recalls the past through memories, through representations formed on past experiences. The once imagined is forgotten again and lives on unconsciously connected with the subject. From this stream, which continuously flows from the past into the present, individual contents can be presented again, i.e. remembered. Then Steiner referred to feelings such as longing, impatience, hope, anxiety, fear, etc., which relate to the future and “rumble” strongly in the soul as an expectation or, as he said, “desire” of what is to come. One can understand such feelings if one presupposes that phenomenological time not only flows from the past into the future, but “that which we desire does not flow at all in the same direction as the flowing stream of representations, but that it comes towards this stream. … You will be able to throw a tremendous flash of light on your whole soul-life, if you only presuppose this one thing: that everything which desires … are, represent a current in the soul-life, which does not flow at all from the past into the future, but which comes towards us from the future, which flows from the future into the past. – All at once the whole sum of soul experiences becomes clear! … Then what is our soul life at the moment? It is nothing else than the meeting of a stream from the past into the future, and a stream flowing from the future into the past. … You will easily understand that these two currents come together in the soul itself, as it were, they collide. This clashing is the consciousness. … Thus our soul participates in everything that flows on from the past into the future, and in everything that comes towards us from the future. If you look into your soul life at any moment, you can say: There is something like an interpenetration of what flows from the past into the future with what flows from the future into the past and opposes the former as desires, as interestedness, as wishes and so on. Two things interpenetrate.”
...
What do memory and expectation mean for our relationship to the world? I must be able to expect that I will grasp the cup, that this sentence will end, that there is still a world around the next corner. Usually one interprets this fact in such a way that there is a spatial-material reality ‘out there’ independent of me, which I watch in its course and in which I move (Fig. 14a). One interprets the phenomenal experience of time by the assumed constancy of matter in space. (It is really only an assumption, because one can perceive matter neither in the past nor in the future!) But if one really sticks to experience, then one must start from what one experiences from the world and not from what one thinks about it. One must observe not the world, but the world within the consciousness of the world and its course. In this way, consciousness shifts from the outside position of the uninvolved observer into the stream of world events, as it were; it goes from being a spectator to being the stage or scene (Fig. 14b). The habitual external perspective of consciousness may be called the ‘representational spectator consciousness’, the phenomenological internal perspective the ‘participatory scene consciousness’. For the scene consciousness there is a stream from the past, in which its memories flow, that is met by a stream of what is expected from the future.
...
Rudolf Steiner further elaborated the image of the double stream of time experience enclosed by the circle of consciousness. For in consciousness is also found the ‘I’, that is, the fact that there is a self-conscious and autonomously acting element which, on the one hand, can actively deal with the stream from the past (through conscious memories), and, on the other hand, actively places itself in relation to what is expected or desired in the future (through ‘judging’). According to Steiner, the influence of the ‘I’ can be “graphically represented – and the graphic representation in this case corresponds completely to the facts – by letting the stream of the I fall perpendicularly on the stream of time. … You will come to terms with the phenomena of the soul if, in addition to the two currents – the one from the past into the future and the one from the future into the past - you assume another such current in the human soul, which stands perpendicular to the other two. This is that which corresponds to the impact of the ‘I’ itself.”{99}

Finally, concerning the impressions of the senses, which also occur in consciousness, Steiner said, “If I now draw the fourth direction, from below to above, I would have to call the direction running opposite to the I the direction of the physical world. … The impressions of the physical world thus go, graphically represented, from bottom to top and reveal themselves in the soul as sense impressions.”{100} We thus arrive at the following overall representation (Fig. 15), which represents the soul’s experience as an experienced order of time. The ‘I’ places itself above the continuous flow of time and stops this, as it were, for moments: presence. Things therefore do not appear blurred in transition, but as delimited particulars. What thus confronts the ‘I’ becomes its counter-object. In recognition, it takes a sum of perceptual impressions from the flow of time and fixes them temporarily as a form. Thus conscious presence arises in the confrontation of the ‘I’ with the world which it has helped to shape. In the twilight state of dreaming, in trance or ecstasy, the separation of ‘I’ and world blurs and changes the experience of world and time.



Summing up, Steiner said, “Now I can give you the assurance that innumerable riddles of the soul will be solved for you if you take this scheme as a basis. … In this cross, which is traversed by a circle, [is given] a very good scheme of the life of the soul, as it adjoins the spiritual above, the physical below, the [past] to the left and the [future] to the right. Only, in doing so, you must rise to the idea that the stream of time is not merely something flowing calmly along, but that something is coming toward it, but that the life of the ‘I’ and the life of the senses can be comprehended only when they are understood as meeting the stream of time at right angles.”

Hueck, Christoph J.. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought (pp. 86-87). epubli. Kindle Edition.

[Federica]

To answer your questions, I will first quote something I wrote previously:

I still maintain faith that Steiner, with feedback from the higher worlds (the White Lodge), crafted the most fruitful path for bridging the intellectual-scientific with the higher folds of spiritual existence. There is certainly endless creative work that can be done within that overarching phenomenological bridge, but I see no need to wish for a 'more worldly' way to arrive and inspire me. 

So it's not that we need to avoid engaging the intellect or its content, but that the proper phenomenological method of engagement has already been established, such that the intellect is experientially transformed in the process of livingly engaging the recursive content. It feels itself reaching a slightly deeper scale than the horizontal plane of mental pictures rearranged in the most varied ways. Hueck is an example of creative work within the PoF bridge:

The aim here is to show a way in which Nagel’s teleological hypothesis can be substantiated and confirmed. In doing so, I refer to Rudolf Steiner’s theory of knowledge and his understanding of evolution. According to Steiner, the knowing consciousness is not simply a mere spectator of an external reality, but the stage [‘Schauplatz’] on which reality is constituted in each individual act of cognition. The introspective observation of this act and the mental faculties involved in it can be carried out just as precisely as the investigation of the external nature. Applying the method of introspective observation to biological cognition opens an experiential approach to the riddles of life. A holistic view of evolution therefore does not require a turning away from the scientific method, but rather its expansion through the introspective self-observation of cognition. One works with facts found through empirical research and links them through thoughts that closely follow the phenomena, and in addition one observes how one grasps the facts and thinks their connections.

Hueck, Christoph J.. Evolution in the Double Stream of Time: An Inner Morphology of Organic Thought (pp. 12-13). epubli. Kindle Edition. 

Steiner probably pondered the possibility of rooting his bridge to spiritual science in detailed considerations of biology and physics, leaving aside the introspective observation of cognitive activity at first, and we know he was more than capable of that. He was up to speed on all the latest scientific developments and modes of thinking, which, in many ways, have carried over to our time as well. Practically everything we are pondering now in terms of new openings in natural science was already pondered by him in some form or another, with few exceptions.

Yet his extensive discussion of that content was intended for souls who were sufficiently prepared through the self-observation of thinking. Through the wise logic of spiritual evolution itself, this self-observation has become the only viable bridge from natural to spiritual science. These aren't arbitrary decrees established by Steiner or anyone else, but initiatic methods based on extensive investigation of the underlying spiritual realities. In our time, in particular, the known trap of the intellect indefinitely 'cloning itself forth' is the most pronounced. We have to realize this is a strategy of the adversaries to forestall the unfoldment of germinal capacities. Every intellectual thought and system we construct 'about reality' as spectators engenders new karma, new elemental beings, and this conditions the Spirit even further to its myopic degrees of freedom. The intellect becomes like the myth of the Minotaur, guarding its labyrinth and devouring all content that enters its etched pathways.  

I get that it seems natural that there should be 'more than one way' to establish the bridge, that we should be able to save the materialists by drawing various correspondences that we imagine should feel more accessible and engaging for them. Yet this is exactly what various thinkers are already doing, corresponding and integrating findings across disciplines, including esoteric science, looking into the concept of 'participatory knowing', and so forth. In fact, I have come across a few souls interested in Steiner who have taken the intellect in this direction and feel quite satisfied with it. That feels like the most natural direction for the intellect's momentum to carry it. But is it the most healthy direction? 

The intellect only finds it proper stance within the flow of existence when it feels like its mental puzzles are a fragile house of cards, like a game of Jenga where there are hidden tensions and moving a block slightly too fast, too slow, too carelessly, etc., will reduce its whole superstructure to rubble. Indeed, modern civilization is a macro-reflection of this reality - we can hardly imagine what would happen to all our conveniences and comforts if one tiny link in the financial, energy, internet, etc. chain were broken. We only begin to concretely feel these hidden tensions when our intellectual content becomes self-consciously recursive and acts as a leverage point from which we can explore the formative processes through which we construct our mental puzzles about biology, physics, and so on. Cleric's last illustrative post on the PE-KE energy dynamics was a great example of that, at least as the first beginnings. We can easily see how such a technical illustration could be extended as a metaphor (which he began to do in the next post) for the limitations of the intellect and the inner 'direction' in which its new degrees of freedom can be discovered. There is no forsaking of intellectual content here, just a deeper understanding of its proper role in service of the higher cognitive orientation, an orientation which is desperately needed in our time. 

If we consider this purpose you quoted form Hueck:

“According to Steiner, the knowing consciousness is not simply a mere spectator of an external reality, but the stage [‘Schauplatz’] on which reality is constituted in each individual act of cognition. The introspective observation of this act and the mental faculties involved in it can be carried out just as precisely as the investigation of the external nature. Applying the method of introspective observation to biological cognition opens an experiential approach to the riddles of life.”


What I am talking about is a stage preliminary to what Hueck describes. Fact is, from the perspective of a materialistically oriented mind (as you have convened) the above purpose is simply splendid mambo jumbo. The introspective observation of empirical fact will simply not be taken seriously, out of the blue. It can't happen. Therefore a preliminary step is almost always necessary. And here my point is, if certain intellectual preliminary considerations and observations are brought to attention, it will be easier to appreciate or intuit, in a circumstantial way, that the knower is not a mere spectator. The goal is that the introspective observation described above progressively appears less recondite, eventually to be taken as a serious possibility.

I see the risk of permanently settling down in a purely intellectual method that produces nicely arranged but rigidified compositions of esotericism, philosophy and science, and that adversarial forces may feed on precisely such seemingly open stances. But this is not what I propose. Think for example about your own evolving understanding before you started exercising introspective observation and meditative exercises, and before you read PoF. Don’t you think that philosophical-logical considerations, as well as properly chosen empirical observations, spoke to your intellect at that time, making it meaningful for you to eventually decide to commit to the inner inquiry? And making end-to-end deep study of a hairsplitter, fastidious, slow book like PoF actually worth your time and effort?

What I am searching for is not "exactly what various thinkers are already doing". And I don’t think Steiner would be against that. I also don’t think that he intended the detailed scientific discussions to remain within the circle of souls already familiar with self-observation of thinking. The very last book he worked at, for publication - Fundamentals of therapy - is precisely one of those extensive discussions of such contents.

How many times have appeals to the intellect been made here, with drawings and diagrams (and you have here reported another such one from Hueck) accompanied by the invitation to understand them as artistic representations of thought processes, not as actual models of reality? Why the heck would that be all of a sudden inappropriate for diagrams pertaining to the real, complete organization of man? I definitely think an intent similar to the one behind all these diagrammatical expositions, can be pursued, using the same approach, applied to the study the human organization. And what better starting point than precisely the human organization to get a sense of the interconnectedness of all reality. What better focus of inquiry than the one laying a the core of the archetype of Misunderstanding itself - the real human being? I do beleive this can be effectively pursued by means of ‘drawings’, with the added caveat that the drawings are not theories, but glimpses, artistic representations of what is open to direct realization from within, through sense-free inquiry - for those who have enough strength to take that path.

I would also like to say that everywhere in the medicine lectures it is clear that Steiner was speaking to an audience which, overall, had not attained spiritual vision (of course, I admit there may have been counterexamples in those classes). Here’s a few of the many passages that could be reported. Some would be an even better hint to the overall non-clairvoyance of the medical audience, but I've chosen these passages because they also convey Steiner's view on an intellectual approach to this field of scientific inquiry.

We can hardly hope to reach the understanding of tumorous growths, with their culmination in cancer, by means of merely physical methods, unless the insight given by spiritual science serves at least as a guidance. And contemporary psychiatry is in such a sorry state, mainly because there is no conscious bridge between it and the usual pathology and therapeutics—though such bridges abound everywhere in nature—that it is probable that these two special fields will be the first to approach the standpoint of spiritual science. They will need to mark all that spiritual science can tell them, and even now you have only to refer to my publications, to realise that spiritual science has already told them a good deal. It will be necessary, in fact, to talk of the intervention of the etheric body, within the physical organism.
For indeed no one should merely assert that clairvoyance is needed in order to show how the etheric body acts within the organism.

I must first of all repeat that the exclusively physical study of man only surveys a part and a comparatively small part of human nature. This is for the simple reason that man contains the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, which are constantly working upon and moulding the physical organism, yet entirely inaccessible to external physical judgment—I use this term with intention and reference to what follows. At the same time it is not impossible for the human being to educate himself and evolve (granting steadfast effort) to the point of acquiring and assimilating a certain degree of clairvoyance into the operation of intellect and judgment. This will not yet mean the attainment of a proper clairvoyance associated with definite visual images, but it will be possible to attain a type of judgment capable of strong and reliable coincidence with the results of clairvoyance.

My starting point today will be a comment made to me from a very competent quarter, to the effect that the present course of lectures are among the most difficult to comprehend of all lectures presenting the anthroposophical point of view.

[AshvinP]

If we consider this purpose you quoted form Hueck:

“According to Steiner, the knowing consciousness is not simply a mere spectator of an external reality, but the stage [‘Schauplatz’] on which reality is constituted in each individual act of cognition. The introspective observation of this act and the mental faculties involved in it can be carried out just as precisely as the investigation of the external nature. Applying the method of introspective observation to biological cognition opens an experiential approach to the riddles of life.”


What I am talking about is a stage preliminary to what Hueck describes. Fact is, from the perspective of a materialistically oriented mind (as you have convened) the above purpose is simply splendid mambo jumbo. The introspective observation of empirical fact will simply not be taken seriously, out of the blue. It can't happen. Therefore a preliminary step is almost always necessary. And here my point is, if certain intellectual preliminary considerations and observations are brought to attention, it will be easier to appreciate or intuit, in a circumstantial way, that the knower is not a mere spectator. The goal is that the introspective observation described above progressively appears less recondite, eventually to be taken as a serious possibility.


I see the risk of permanently settling down in a purely intellectual method that produces nicely arranged but rigidified compositions of esotericism, philosophy and science, and that adversarial forces may feed on precisely such seemingly open stances. But this is not what I propose. Think for example about your own evolving understanding before you started exercising introspective observation and meditative exercises, and before you read PoF. Don’t you think that philosophical-logical considerations, as well as properly chosen empirical observations, spoke to your intellect, making it meaningful for you to eventually decide to commit to the inner inquiry? And making end-to-end deep study of a hairsplitter, fastidious, slow book like POF actually worth your time and effort?

Federica, if a preliminary step is almost always necessary, then can you describe what this step looked like for you? For me, there was surely much abstract philosophical, scientific, and religious probing of 'integral' thought-systems before coming across PoF (in which I include the postings on this forum), but the latter was eventually like a phase-shift in cognitive perspective that, in retrospect, I can easily see would have never been reached by more and more probing. In many ways, I can see how the probing, if continued further, would have made the phase-transition more difficult than easier, since my intellect would become more conditioned to avoiding the sort of orthogonal inner effort and stance that is necessary. Was it different for you?

What I am searching for is not "exactly what various thinkers are already doing". And I don’t think Steiner would be against that. I also don’t think that he intended the detailed scientific discussions to remain within the circle of souls already familiar with self-observation of thinking. The very last book he worked at, for publication - Fundamentals of therapy - is precisely one of those extensive discussions of such contents.

How many times have appeals to the intellect been made here, with drawings and diagrams (and you have here reported another such one from Hueck) accompanied by the caveat to only understand them as artistic representations of thought processes, not as actual models of reality? Why the heck would that be all of a sudden inappropriate for diagrams pertaining to the real, complete organization of man? I definitely think an intent similar to the one behind all these diagrammatical expositions, can be pursued, using the same approach, applied to the study the human organization. And what better starting point than precisely the human organization to get a sense of the interconnectedness of all reality. What better focus of inquiry than the one laying a the core of the archetype of Misunderstanding itself - the real human being?

I do beleive this can be effectively pursued by means of ‘drawings’, with the added caveat that the drawings are not theories, but glimpses, artistic representations of what is open to direct realization from within, through sense-free inquiry - for those who have enough strength to take that path.

I think the key factor here is whether we are starting from self-observation of the imaginative space and then expanding from the inside-out, so to speak, toward the deeper biophysical spaces. Try to put yourself in the position of encountering all these 'drawings and diagrams' of the complete spiritual-psycho-physical organization of man, as revealed by spiritual science, without any preliminary work in attaining the phase-shift of cognitive perspective. Even if someone tells you, "don't take this as an actual model of reality but only as artistic representations of ideal processes", will this caveat mean much of anything to you? Would you be able to sufficiently distinguish "ideal processes" at an experiential level from the mechanical processes we imagine unfolding in the bodily organization with the intellect?

Remember, plenty of people say they are not confusing their models for reality (Levin et al. come to mind), but that doesn't ensure that their models are not functionally standing in for reality and increasingly becoming the sole means through which they interface with reality. Only the phase-shift in cognitive perspective can ensure that, no matter how much we are tempted to scratch the idolatrous itch, we can effectively resist it and remain relatively conscious of how it is influencing our imaginative states. Otherwise, we simply convince ourselves that we are not confusing models for reality but, for all intents and purposes, we are and we don't realize it because we lack consciousness of the deeper scale from which the soul itch proceeds.

I would also like to say that everywhere in the medicine lectures it is clear that Steiner was speaking to an audience which, overall, had not attained spiritual vision (of course, I admit there may have been counterexamples in those classes). Here’s a few of the many passages that could be reported. Some would be an even better hint to the overall non-clairvoyance of the medical audience, but I've chosen these passages because they also convey Steiner's view on an intellectual approach to this field of scientific inquiry.

We can hardly hope to reach the understanding of tumorous growths, with their culmination in cancer, by means of merely physical methods, unless the insight given by spiritual science serves at least as a guidance. And contemporary psychiatry is in such a sorry state, mainly because there is no conscious bridge between it and the usual pathology and therapeutics—though such bridges abound everywhere in nature—that it is probable that these two special fields will be the first to approach the standpoint of spiritual science. They will need to mark all that spiritual science can tell them, and even now you have only to refer to my publications, to realise that spiritual science has already told them a good deal. It will be necessary, in fact, to talk of the intervention of the etheric body, within the physical organism.
For indeed no one should merely assert that clairvoyance is needed in order to show how the etheric body acts within the organism.

I must first of all repeat that the exclusively physical study of man only surveys a part and a comparatively small part of human nature. This is for the simple reason that man contains the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, which are constantly working upon and moulding the physical organism, yet entirely inaccessible to external physical judgment—I use this term with intention and reference to what follows. At the same time it is not impossible for the human being to educate himself and evolve (granting steadfast effort) to the point of acquiring and assimilating a certain degree of clairvoyance into the operation of intellect and judgment. This will not yet mean the attainment of a proper clairvoyance associated with definite visual images, but it will be possible to attain a type of judgment capable of strong and reliable coincidence with the results of clairvoyance.

My starting point today will be a comment made to me from a very competent quarter, to the effect that the present course of lectures are among the most difficult to comprehend of all lectures presenting the anthroposophical point of view.

We need to clearly distinguish between "proper clairvoyance" and the cognitive phase-shift that I am speaking about above. The latter is more along the lines of the 'healthy human understanding' that we have discussed before, and what Steiner is referencing in the quote. It would be interesting to see how often Steiner refers back to PoSA, KHW, and similar things in some of these later lecture cycles. I can distinctly remember quite a few lectures where he told the audience that the methods to healthily understand what he is speaking about are contained in those books and corresponding exercises. Once we clearly distinguish clairvoyance and HHU, then we can also distinguish HHU from the 'preliminary steps' of abstractly working with diagrams and correspondences. In many places, Steiner warns precisely against the latter, including the quotes you have shared about how modern people tend to think only in words. They hear etheric-astral-ego, moon-sun-saturn, limb-chest-head, etc., and find endless connections and correspondences between the concepts, but never really stop to feel the intuitive meaning they are living in and steering through when working with such concepts. They don't stop to do that because they have no foundation to suspect that it is even possible or worthwhile, a foundation that is established through PoF and resulting HHU.

As one of many examples:

Nor must the matter be taken superficially. You can find plenty of doctors nowadays, properly recognised members of the medical profession, who would never admit to being sworn materialists; they profess to one or another religious faith, and they would staunchly deny the accusation of being materialistic. But this is not the point. Life does not depend on what a man says or believes. That is his personal concern. To be effective it is necessary to know how to apply and make valuable use in life of those facts that are not limited to the sense world but have an existence in the spiritual world. So that however pious a doctor is and however many ideas he has regarding this or the other spiritual world, if he nevertheless works according to the rules that arise entirely out of our materialistic world conception, that is, he treats people as though they only had a body, then however spiritually minded he believes himself to be, he is nevertheless a materialist. For it does not depend on what a person says or believes but on his ability to set in living motion the forces behind the external world of the senses. Nor is it sufficient for anthroposophy to spread the knowledge of man's fourfold nature and for everybody to go repeating that man consists of a physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego, even if people can define and describe them in a certain way. The essential thing is not just to know this, but to understand more and more clearly the living interplay of these members of man's being and the part the physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego play in the healthy and in the sick human being and what their interrelationship implies.

[Federica]

Federica, if a preliminary step is almost always necessary, then can you describe what this step looked like for you? For me, there was surely much abstract philosophical, scientific, and religious probing of 'integral' thought-systems before coming across PoF (in which I include the postings on this forum), but the latter was eventually like a phase-shift in cognitive perspective that, in retrospect, I can easily see would have never been reached by more and more probing. In many ways, I can see how the probing, if continued further, would have made the phase-transition more difficult than easier, since my intellect would become more conditioned to avoiding the sort of orthogonal inner effort and stance that is necessary. Was it different for you?

Yes. For me it was about finding here a satisfactory (for the intellect, inevitably) treatment of the objections I had to BKs model. Of course I agree the phase shift is not reached by more probing. A shift must take place. But without an attuning preliminary phase to make the possibility of shift accessible (not guaranteed, but at least accessible) one would not even contemplating to read PoF or engage with the contents of this forum (as we see, that's precisely what happens, or should I say, does not happen).

I think the key factor here is whether we are starting from self-observation of the imaginative space and then expanding from the inside-out, so to speak, toward the deeper biophysical spaces. Try to put yourself in the position of encountering all these 'drawings and diagrams' of the complete spiritual-psycho-physical organization of man, as revealed by spiritual science, without any preliminary work in attaining the phase-shift of cognitive perspective. Even if someone tells you, "don't take this as an actual model of reality but only as artistic representations of ideal processes", will this caveat mean much of anything to you? Would you be able to sufficiently distinguish "ideal processes" at an experiential level from the mechanical processes we imagine unfolding in the bodily organization with the intellect?

Remember, plenty of people say they are not confusing their models for reality (Levin et al. come to mind), but that doesn't ensure that their models are not functionally standing in for reality and increasingly becoming the sole means through which they interface with reality. Only the phase-shift in cognitive perspective can ensure that, no matter how much we are tempted to scratch the idolatrous itch, we can effectively resist it and remain relatively conscious of how it is influencing our imaginative states. Otherwise, we simply convince ourselves that we are not confusing models for reality but, for all intents and purposes, we are and we don't realize it because we lack consciousness of the deeper scale from which the soul itch proceeds.

You are right: the caveat would not mean much to me. I distinctly remember the first time I read TCT, when I read that caveat, I did not understand it. I read it multiple times, but couldn't get a real idea of what the distinction was pointing to. I realized it was important, and that it probably had to do with changing perspectives, but that's it. However, that confusion was far from useless. Understanding goes in a slow progression. And I have no reason to doubt it could work the same for many others who are generally interested in 'knowledge', if only their intellect could be exposed to the stunning correspondences spiritual science reveals, closely related to the science they are into.

We need to clearly distinguish between "proper clairvoyance" and the cognitive phase-shift that I am speaking about above. The latter is more along the lines of the 'healthy human understanding' that we have discussed before, and what Steiner is referencing in the quote. It would be interesting to see how often Steiner refers back to PoSA, KHW, and similar things in some of these later lecture cycles. I can distinctly remember quite a few lectures where he told the audience that the methods to healthily understand what he is speaking about are contained in those books and corresponding exercises. Once we clearly distinguish clairvoyance and HHU, then we can also distinguish HHU from the 'preliminary steps' of abstractly working with diagrams and correspondences. In many places, Steiner warns precisely against the latter, including the quotes you have shared about how modern people tend to think only in words. They hear etheric-astral-ego, moon-sun-saturn, limb-chest-head, etc., and find endless connections and correspondences between the concepts, but never really stop to feel the intuitive meaning they are living in and steering through when working with such concepts. They don't stop to do that because they have no foundation to suspect that it is even possible or worthwhile, a foundation that is established through PoF and resulting HHU.

I agree, these are three distinct phases: preliminary, HHU, and clairvoyance. And I too remember how often Steiner refers audiences to his books. Yes, the preliminary phase implies the risk that the intellect never steps aside. But without it, there is simply nothing to contextualize HHU, to allow it to surge. I think it's necessary to play with fire in these times. One cannot count on people bumping into PoF at the library, reading the first pages, and saying to themselves: "Oh yeah, let's keep reading, this really looks like the open sesame to deep knowledge of all worlds".

[Federica]

It's all fine, Federica. I'm glad I wrote about these things. They have some potential to be spiritualized, as I've tried, for example, through the phonograph metaphor. What needs to be overcome for this to happen, however, is seeing things as an entirely mathematical equilibrium, which by its nature is a timeless picture. Mathematics seems to move only because we ourselves traverse the ideal relations through the temporal metamorphosis of our thinking activity. But the relations themselves are not subject to temporality. Like the conversation on the other thread, this is the perfect environment for keeping the split between perceptual activity (we can call such the thinking that is completely glued to perceptions and their memory replicas) and the deeper intuitive gestures. We continuously try to find our reality within mathematical thoughts. For example, if we imagine a far more complicated PE field - that of our brain, and the movements of chemicals (KE), we can once again picture things in a very general way. There's this configuration space of an unthinkable number of degrees of freedom (each particle has at least three coordinates, and three more for the velocity vector), but nevertheless, our momentary brain state is a single point within that space, corresponding to the momentary positions, velocities, etc., of all brain particles. Our brain state is represented by an inertially rolling marble through this multidimensional configuration space, and its velocity arrow is still nudged toward the steepest descent. Even though we do not understand the details, the general picture is this - that's what the physicist says. But it is the mode of cognition that is interesting here. Basically, we call this 'understanding' if our thinking can become like the rolling marble and follow the gradient curvature. The illusion of freedom is seen as stemming from the fact that, just like the marble in the complicated landscape, we always move inertially in some direction, while the PE gradient bends it along another direction - that of the steepest descent. Thus, a kind of hysteresis. In other words, this thinking can only be satisfied if it eliminates its troublesome freedom and feels that its every transformation is dictated by a mathematically precise gradient. This could be different if the KE and PE aspects spiral together (like the Euler's disc) in such a way that we feel ourselves not only as a brain state but as the whole World state. Then our activity once again seeks to eliminate itself, in the sense that the out-of-phase condition should be reconciled, but for this to be achieved, we would have to walk the full evolutionary path into the Eternal, becoming/uncreating the Universe in the process. So, we see once again confirmation of what Steiner said: that all evil is nothing but good out of its proper time. The intellect striving to reconcile the wobble is actually good, but when it is taken in such a narrow domain, it becomes evil, because it now paralyzes the evolutionary development. The intellect aims to prematurely find the intuitive curvature that, when fully aligned with, no longer leads to the experience of questions, no longer demands to ask "What should I do next?". If the intellect's dream is achieved, then its solution would act as the perfect oracle, every next thought would emerge through iron logical necessity from the followed curvature. It is premature because it is not realized that we need to that for the whole World-state, not just our intellectual brain-patch. And this is also the reason why this dream of the intellect is impossible. Such perfect in-phaseness can never be achieved only for the brain-intellect experience in isolation. As the cracks in the pipe, our intellectual state is always 'venting' in and out of the World state, and this ensures that its fragile equilibrium cannot be sustained for long.

Thank you for this expansive glimpse, Cleric. The understanding of mathematics as lawful refuge, where the intellect seeks a dream of objectivity inside the illusion of disconnected perception, is inspiring. Then the realm of quantities ruled by fixed laws is like a symbol of the modern disconnect between the condition of sharpening sense perception/fading spiritual vision on the one hand, and the emergence of the I-consciousness on the other. Perhaps one could say that fading spiritual vision reached a null point in our epoch, and then it kept going, and went negative. In inverse proportion, our sense perceptions have become sharper and sharper with the help of technology. For example, it was in the recent news that now the human eye can see a "new color" called “olo”, when stimulated by particular laser rays.

But the emerging I-consciousness could not grow strong enough to break the trade-off sense vision-spirit vision, before spiritual vision went negative and sense perception soared. Jesus Christ lifted us above the abyss of degeneration, but today we are still roaming in the flatland of negative awareness of the Spirit, growing more and more isolated from it, from each other, and from self-knowledge, while the I is still not strong enough to input the necessary degrees of freedom and give rise to a new dimension of being human, out of that deadly trade-off.

And maybe the urge to model reality mathematically points to this flat space of negative spirituality, where anchoring is searched for in unanchored mathematical forms. At the same time, the I struggles to fight the material engulfment of head-thinking while in the body. Consciousness is awake enough to search for lawfulness, but not awake enough to see the lawfulness of the entire PE realm, beyond the more and more aggressive sense distractions, and the aspiration to know the contextual order is reduced to a dream of determinism.