Philosophical Speculations

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that the effects of our prior (or subsequent) content of thought eliminate objectivity from our experiences. They shape it. And, in shaping it, they will bring aspects of it to the foreground and curve out aspects into the background. I'm pretty sure we agree on this, but I realized that the way I put it might sound like I'm saying there is nothing objective being experienced if it is being shaped by prior expectations or thought content. We could have five different shapings of the phenomena, each of which revealing (or obscuring) different aspects of it; all of which being objective experiences to a significant degree.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Tue Oct 01, 2024 10:41 pm For instance, my eventual rich imagination of how Steiner experienced angels was only possible by a combination of my intention to have that experience, my careful reading of his lectures, and my hard work at these basic exercises, and many others as you know. Without all of that context, if I had never come across Steiner or had my own clairvoyant experiences, I probably would have used the development from these exercises in the context of elaborating Gregory Bateson's work in the context of human development via therapeutic conversation. I like Bateson, but I'm glad my destiny had other ideas

I started drafting a response to discuss the other points of your post, but I wonder if exploring the above a bit more might be helpful to harmonize our perspectives on the conceptual 'context' further. Could you elaborate on this imagination a bit more? How has it oriented you to the intuition of the angel's inner perspective and its role in contextualizing the 'notes' of our ordinary thinking experience?

Can you rephrase the question with less reference to specific beliefs about angels? My statement wasn't an attempt for us to begin talking about the ontology of angels. Are you just asking me to say more about how my submergence in Steiner's worked helped me get a richer sense of what kind of experiencing Steiner was referring to in the context of 'angels'?

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 2:28 pm Can you rephrase the question with less reference to specific beliefs about angels? My statement wasn't an attempt for us to begin talking about the ontology of angels. Are you just asking me to say more about how my submergence in Steiner's worked helped me get a richer sense of what kind of experiencing Steiner was referring to in the context of 'angels'?

Yes, pretty much that question.

Until reading Steiner, my only exposure to written or verbal descriptions of what it is like (regardless of validity) to encounter an angelic being was limited to descriptions that fit the typical narrative of such encounters. In other words, I had not read a description that involved the kinds of differentiated phenomenologies that Steiner presents in various lectures. His examples and analogies allowed me to begin working with those as imaginative exercises and relate them to nascent and subtle personal experiences. Regardless of the consequences of my believing that there was overlap between the two, even just the richness of reading Steiner's accounts was something very different from the traditional descriptions. The changes in consciousness that came with vastly increased concentration on attentional activity itself - the increased fluidity this brings to cognition and perception - then worked with the rich descriptions Steiner gave to make them more vivid and graspable as examples of such encounters.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 02, 2024 6:27 pm Until reading Steiner, my only exposure to written or verbal descriptions of what it is like (regardless of validity) to encounter an angelic being was limited to descriptions that fit the typical narrative of such encounters. In other words, I had not read a description that involved the kinds of differentiated phenomenologies that Steiner presents in various lectures. His examples and analogies allowed me to begin working with those as imaginative exercises and relate them to nascent and subtle personal experiences. Regardless of the consequences of my believing that there was overlap between the two, even just the richness of reading Steiner's accounts was something very different from the traditional descriptions. The changes in consciousness that came with vastly increased concentration on attentional activity itself - the increased fluidity this brings to cognition and perception - then worked with the rich descriptions Steiner gave to make them more vivid and graspable as examples of such encounters.

Thanks, so I'd like to try and build from this, since we are definitely on the same page that concentrating on the movements of attentional activity, combined with an artistic exploration of Steiner's communications on spiritual 'processes', leads us directly to the contextual hierarchy of attentional activity in which our daily thoughts are embedded. I will return to this in a subsequent post.

To briefly comment on some earlier points you raised, I can see how my brief post on 'conceptual study' would lead to a misunderstanding. I did not intend to suggest that we need to first build up a representational lens through which we view our spiritual experiences. I understand this will happen to some extent because we must first approach spiritual concepts abstractly and click the 'puzzle pieces' of mental pictures together into some kind of seemingly coherent system that we rely upon, but what's really important for attaining higher insights is that we transition from such reliance on the abstract system to approaching the concepts more like we approach artwork.





Through this artistic symbol, we can sense the inner meaning of the 'choppy waves' of our soul life, dragging us hither and thither, tossing us around quite independently of our intents. Yet concealed within the 'darkness' of our subconscious is also the superconscious, the inner life and strength to tame those chaotic psychic curvatures and bring them more within the sphere of our creative "I" agency, gradually purifying their qualities. We are first made more inwardly sensitive to these underlying chaotic currents that we were previously merged with and, by becoming more conscious of them in this way, we gain the opportunity to creatively modulate their unfoldment. Again, these concepts are all symbolizing the first-person flow of living experience when we are on a spiritual thinking path.

Can we say that using this artwork as a portal to the inner meaning of 'taming choppy waves of soul life with inner cognitive agency' gives us a certain lens that shapes the corresponding inner experiences, this inner meaningful narrative that we all share as humans and made more sensitive to on the spiritual path? Perhaps, but not in the sense that we have become dependent on the symbolic representation to understand the inner experience. The imagistic symbol heightens our attention to these inner experiences, it kindles our intuitive movements to steer through deeper meaning within the soul life, but also leaves us free to explore that meaning.

This is in stark contrast to what happens in NDEs, for example, when people must interpret their OBE according to some fixed cultural beliefs, traditions, dogmas, and other similar concepts. They are entirely dependent on the lens of those rigid concepts to orient to the inner realities and, more importantly, they have no clear consciousness of this reliance. The living idea that the inner realities could also be understood through other imagistic symbols, taken from many other different conceptual systems (lenses), is missing. They are forced to rely on the narrow lens they have instinctively inherited from nature and culture just as we ordinarily rely on our ingrained and unquestionable temperament, preferences, beliefs, etc. to make judgments about sensory events around us.

So by 'conceptual study', I meant that it is vital to learn to work with the conceptual lenses artistically and freely. We can't make much progress if we decide to avoid the lenses altogether because they are always there, whether we know it or not. Then we have simply lost consciousness of the lenses and confuse the imagistic experiences for 'raw' realities-in-themselves. I think a proper phenomenology always finds a way to incorporate the lenses in an artistic way. Imagine that I was presenting this phenomenology to someone else and, after the first few posts about intuitive movements and whatnot, I simply provided a list of concentration exercises and invited them to experiment. This would be practically of little use - better than nothing, but only slightly. There is a vital purpose to exploring these inner realities through many metaphors, illustrations, lines of reasoning, etc. that approach the same core intuitive movements from different angles. It allows us to more effectively live through those inner movements and become sensitive to them. The artistic concepts also refine our intuition for the contextual hierarchy of intuitive curvatures and its patterned movements, bringing it into clearer focus.

"Thanks, so I'd like to try and build from this, since we are definitely on the same page that concentrating on the movements of attentional activity, combined with an artistic exploration of Steiner's communications on spiritual 'processes', leads us directly to the contextual hierarchy of attentional activity in which our daily thoughts are embedded. I will return to this in a subsequent post."


Leveraging this 'angelic' detour to continue the phenomenology, let's explore the imagistic life in which our thought-sequences unfold. When we discuss the nature of the various inner constraints with concepts, as we are doing now, it is as if we are dimly swimming through mental pictures of their felt meaning, extracting more limited packets of meaning from that flow and ‘encoding’ those packets as verbal concepts. As always, we are not speaking of any exotic dimensions or objects in which these ‘encodings’ exist, but only using that as an artistic symbol for our intuition of the contextualized experiential flow of inner phenomena.

For example, we can consider how we wordlessly remember events in our lives when we were particularly active, like a sporting event we participated in, as if 'surfing' through a panorama of memory images. This memory intuition of the event constrains the way we move our remembering activity - we aren’t interested in recalling any images, for example, an image of happenings on Mars or what we had for breakfast yesterday, but only those which fit harmoniously within the ‘intuitive curvature’ of the sporting event. Then, if we want to express these images more precisely to ourselves or others, we ‘condense’ them into verbal forms that are constrained by our acquired languages, our speech skills, the particular organization of our throat and larynx, etc.

In that sense, our verbal concepts and mental pictures symbolizing the constraints are also genuine experiences of the constraints themselves, i.e. encodings of the living intuitions. The experiences that formed the basis of these encodings are still living in our present state. When we verbalize the words, “That was a great game but I could have played better”, we are experiencing the same meaning we experienced during the game, although undoubtedly a great deal of the latter’s qualitative significance is lost in the translation, including the quality of temporal immediacy. Analogous to how a large computer image may lose a lot of its crisp resolution when it is compressed into a smaller format, the inner constraints become something smaller, nebulous, insubstantial, and distant when we focus attention solely on their conceptual encodings. What we were sensing, thinking, feeling, and doing during the sporting event, in their rich and immediate qualities, will mostly be obscured by the later encodings.

But, again, there is no reason to assume this experience has disappeared into an external void that we conceive as ‘the past’. Ironically and paradoxically, if such a void existed, we would never be able to conceive of it. We can only conceive the mental picture we imbue with the meaning ‘void of the past’ within our present state. What is the inner nature of these mental pictures that we are always 'surfing' to form verbal encodings and think? Here I will invoke Cleric's recent essay again because he provided a profoundly helpful metaphor for orienting to it.

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Mental images as scaled symbols of temporal scenes of existence

To better understand the contextual nature of our temporal experience, consider a simple clock. We can very easily imagine the movement of the seconds arrow. It feels comfortable because this ticking pace feels not too fast, not too slow. Now consider the hours arrow. We can hardly detect any movement. Nevertheless, we do have some intuition for what an hour feels like. For example, we can say “An hour is the continuous experience that we flow through as the hours arrow moves one tick.” Yet, when we symbolize this intuition we generally imagine the hour clock moving a lot faster. Instead of taking an hour to move from 1 to 2, we imagine it as in a timelapse movie and the movement happens in a few seconds. If we were to imagine the true movement from 1 to 2, we would have to support unbroken imagining activity for a whole hour. Thus, we certainly do have some intuition about the greater spans of time, yet when we try to think about them, we focus them into scaled-down symbols. For example, actual counting to ten could take about ten seconds (if we spend one second on pronouncing each number), while the symbol ‘counting to ten’ compresses the intuition for this temporally extended flow into words that can be pronounced in one second. This is true even for much longer periods of time. For example, when we think of an year, we can imagine a picture of the Sun and how the Earth makes one revolution around it. Yet, obviously this imagining takes only a few seconds. It is only a scaled-down symbol of something that could otherwise be beheld only through unbroken observation for a whole year at some vantage point in outer space. Things are not that different when we move toward the faster paces. For example, if we imagine a microseconds arrow, it would have to turn so fast that it would appear as a blurry disc. Thus, once again, what we can think of and imagine is only a symbol for a process that we can’t hold comfortably at our ordinary ticking pace. We can illustrate this in the following way:





We see that we as human beings, live consciously in a very narrow temporal band. Things that are too slow feel as the gradually morphing context of our existence, while things that are too fast are mostly missed because of our crude resolution in relation to them. This doesn’t prevent us from extending our intuition toward these regions but in the end, we can only symbolize it with mental images at our comfortable ticking pace. Additionally, even though we speak of a ‘band’, our inner experience doesn’t feel like a geometric band. Instead, it seems that our meso-scale sphere of conscious experience encompasses the micro-scale within it, yet most of it passes right through the openings of our conscious net, so to speak.

What kinds of experiences this narrow band consists of? To answer that we need to put aside our mental assemblies for a moment and concentrate entirely on our real-time bodily and sensory life. What we find is the movements of our body, the flow of visual and auditory perceptions, the production of verbal sounds, feelings like pain, pleasure, and so on. As we explained previously, our inner life wiggles out as a kind of ‘double vision’ overlaid on these raw bodily phenomena and we can then experience mental images representing past experiences or anticipating future ones. However, we would be able to do very little if our inner life was limited to only real-time reproductions of bodily experiences. Instead, we continuously resort to the scaling depicted above. We use the replicated images of our real-time bodily experiences as symbols for greater or lesser time spans of experience. For example, when we think in our mind ‘a year’, as far as the purely auditory content is concerned, this is a replica of a real-time verbal bodily experience at the meso scale. Producing the mental sound takes roughly the same time as the physical pronunciation of the word. However, the intuition that is anchored in this replica of bodily sound compresses (scales down) our intuitive sense of what one year of time is. We can only think about greater periods of time (memories of the past or plans for the future) if we shrink them to images at the scale of our bodily experiences. If we could remember our two-week vacation last summer only in real-time, it would take us two full weeks to do so. Instead, we grasp our overall intuition for the past period and we can anchor it in a symbol ‘my summer vacation last year’ which is a replica of real-time bodily speech. Now we can intuitively move through the landscape of these memories and condense more concrete images of the actual happenings, which in the end are also instances of real-time bodily experiences. We do something similar when we make a plan for our next summer vacation. We should get a really vivid feel for this. Consider how our verbal thinking can only flow at the pace of our physical speech and is indeed its replica, yet the words continuously focus intuitions that span greater or lesser, future or past time spans. When we think about greater periods we need to compress them. For example, when we look at a calendar we behold a real-time visual perception, yet we grasp it as a compressed symbol of our intuition for all the days in the year. When we think about faster periods – for example, the flapping of bee wings – we need to imagine them slowed down. Our real-time imagination looks like the physical perception of waving condor wings, however, we grasp that as a scaled-up image of our intuition for the rapid process. Today we also use technological aids to produce these compressed or expanded images. For example, we could hardly perceive the transformation of clouds before timelapse photography, nor the flapping of bee wings before slow motion video.

***

Let's pause here. I am very interested in how your own intuitions and meditative experiences align (or not) with the above after you have vividly worked through the examples. As we have discussed, the latter is the most important part of this phenomenological exploration. In art and literature, we are given many implicit symbols for our life of inner meaningful movements. For ex., the imagistic content of the painting we looked at above do not resemble the 'soul life' and 'taming the soul life with living cognitive agency', but they point us in that direction if we take the time to participate with the intuitive movements expressed through their qualities. In the phenomenological exploration, the contents of the conceptual symbols have become explicit pointers to these same kinds of inner movements. That is necessary due to our modern intellectual constitution when we are no longer so inwardly sensitive to 'occult' images and stories but can only grow that inner sensitivity through the sharply defined conceptual life. Yet that only bears its full fruit when we approach the conceptual symbols as artwork, immerse ourselves in their qualities, and inwardly participate in their expressive movements.

That's a lot of different thoughts to respond to. I'm into it! But I'll need to take it parts when I have time open up. Thanks and I'll be back!

Because of time constraints and the large sequential amount of worthy ideas you packed into the above, I'll just have to go in bits and pieces over the next several days:

"Then, if we want to express these images more precisely to ourselves or others, we ‘condense’ them into verbal forms that are constrained by our acquired languages, our speech skills, the particular organization of our throat and larynx, etc."

I would only want to add that, for me, the original images are already shaped by the way language implicitly functioned both in its original formation (Federer learning to hit his backhand and then doing so 'unconsciously' thousands of times, some of which he may at one point remember) and it any rememberance of it. I certainly agree that in shifting from the felt-meaning to any form of explication (words, sign language, dance), it again crosses new meshes of constraints, all allowing for novelty and new insights each step of the way. Often, in modern science, constraints are only seen as de-purifying something that is pure. Whereas, I think that phenomenology shows us that 'constraints' are the essential ingredient to evolving any living process into it's (possible) next more intricate and developed form. But: the next form should NOT be taken as only it's content. There is never a division between the form and how it is in the process of being reformed, a process which is not perceptible but is deeply cognizable.

I say this to show that I'm fully agreeing with the above, but if we disagree about the implicit role language plays in even the forming of the orginal experience, we should at least mark that spot for the future. I imagine you will agree, but I know many people in our hills who talk about a kind of human experience which is yet untouched by even the implicit functioning of already had universals.

Nobody would be surprised if it after 40 years of remembering a reflexive backhand winner, Federer was able to grasp a phrase one of his mentors used when correcting a bad habit he had at one point earlier in his career. The spontaneous and seemingly only behavioral backhand has countless linguistic aspects functioning in it implicitly every time it happens. And, not that I need to keep repeating this, but implicit functioning is something we are directly always experiencing even if our current science claims that everything experienced (and real) is a finished form. I only repeat this because, sometimes, my use of this language is taken to point to merely intellectual models/concepts and not something we can notice acting in each moment of the forming of this ongoing experience.

"The experiences that formed the basis of these encodings are still living in our present state. When we verbalize the words, “That was a great game but I could have played better”, we are experiencing the same meaning we experienced during the game, although undoubtedly a great deal of the latter’s qualitative significance is lost in the translation, including the quality of temporal immediacy. Analogous to how a large computer image may lose a lot of its crisp resolution when it is compressed into a smaller format, the inner constraints become something smaller, nebulous, insubstantial, and distant when we focus attention solely on their conceptual encodings. What we were sensing, thinking, feeling, and doing during the sporting event, in their rich and immediate qualities, will mostly be obscured by the later encodings."

Again, it would be a whole other conversation to unpack our meanings here. I think we agree on much and I see areas where we have a different point of view. None of it seems to stop me from tracking the careful attention we are paying to our experience.

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I don't think that we have an intuition of what an hour is. I think we will generate an utterly unique intuition anything a context arises in which it becomes relevant to consider an hour. This explains why we can say, "I can't believe we only have one tiny hour left to wait!" or "I can't possibly wait an entire hour". I understand that a certain kind of assumption will model this in a way that suggests there is 'an' intuition of 'an hour' that THEN gets modified by the context. I don't think that is as true to the phenomenology of the process of intuitions forming in the moment. Again, these is all fascinating details but nothing that stops me from paying close attention to the exercise.

"What kinds of experiences this narrow band consists of? To answer that we need to put aside our mental assemblies for a moment and concentrate entirely on our real-time bodily and sensory life. What we find is the movements of our body, the flow of visual and auditory perceptions, the production of verbal sounds, feelings like pain, pleasure, and so on. As we explained previously, our inner life wiggles out as a kind of ‘double vision’ overlaid on these raw bodily phenomena and we can then experience mental images representing past experiences or anticipating future ones."

We've gone over this in other context and I'd rather not pursue it in this context, but I need to simply say that I don't agree that the 'movements of our body, the flow of visual and auditory perceptions, the production of verbal sounds, feelings of pain, pleasure..." are there to be turned to when we decide to focus on them by 'putting aside our mental assemblies for a moment', as if we turn to what was there before turning. That is true enough in terms of getting through the day and communicating well. I can say, "Hey, I just realized that the sounds from the fan has been bugging me." No need to become phenomenologist in that moment and says, "What I really mean to say is that I've just radically transformed one experience into another by attending to it in a very specific manner and only referred to the 'sound' as if it was 'the same' because it would be too confusing to point out the actual nature of the experience." That would be...rough But in response to such claims in this context, I do feel I should at least mark the spot where i simply don't agree that there are these visual and auditory and sensory (and inner percepts) percepts we can notice by bracketing off 'our mental assemblies' or whatever terms we use to refer to supposed conceptual structures that must be removed to see what is 'underneath' or prior or more fundamental.

Regarding the painting; I believe the interpretation isn't 'found' by our sensitive attending. I believe it is created and generated. This is far from the radical post-modern claim that interpretation or the creation of meaning is arbitrary. Just because there are countless true understandings of Hamlet, many of which will deeply contradict each other, many meanings will not carryforward the experience of reading Hamlet; those are poor. However, when a careful and sensitive reader crosses their experience with the intricacy of the text, a new and never before depth of Hamlet is both 'seen' and 'created'. Somebody once told me that 'we don't re-experience Golgotha, we evolve it in recognizing it's very nature.' Sure, this could sound just like a Yoda claim. I get that. But I think attention to even the generation of a daily metaphor (My brother is a truckload of information) is generating the similarity in the process of 'seeing'. Outside of Gendlin's work (and Barfield implicitly), nearly every idea stated about language is that a metaphor is pointing out already existing similarities between the tenor and vehical. Barfield's fundamental experience was that metaphors created new meaning and he tracked that into his study of consciousness. I know you know. I only mention these things for context.

So, yes, artistic attention to our experience is not only helpful; it is a prerequisite to actually even having and noticing the kind of experience worth having and noticing. A superficial state of selfish screen scrolling can only be actually perceived when a loving and deeply sensitive attention is already in the process of re-creating it.

The thing or process that we reflect (not intellectual reflection) upon is the reflected upon thing or process, not the thing or process. The key is to see that this isn't creating any distance between us and the supposed thing itself. The assumption typically is that if we are only ever attending upon the reflected upon process, we must not be merged intuitively. The phenomenology is that unless we are also observing the 'change' made in the re-cognition, we will miss the nature of the actual process of 'knowing'. To the intellect, noticing 'change' implies at least two static images or representations; how else could you notice a 'change.' But what many here would call the 'consciousness soul' sees this in the reverse, as mentioned above. That is my experience.

Again, this is a difference that I think has implications, but the reason I came into this thread was because I'm appreciating attending to attentional activity and seeing if there is enough overlap between our experiences to say, "Yeah, I track that with ya." So far, I think there has been enough overlap for that. Seems like the only spot where you might want me to attend more carefully regards the experience of how experience is always freshly forming.