Meditation

[AshvinP]

before we have taken any steps of imaginative meditation, we can sense the Cosmic intentionality in the movements of nature only through conceptual apprehension. In other words, we make logical inferences that there is this intentionality based on our well-grounded belief that reality is spiritual in essence. We don't experience the intentionality like we do with our own thought-perceptions, even if we are thinking in unintelligible gibberish. There is no need to conceptually apprehend the latter because it is immediately and inwardly experienced as being the case.

Sure?

Ashvin,

I propose that we resume the discussion from your words above and drop the other exchange. It takes me effort not to reply to your last post just above, but I agree that it wouldn't be productive in terms of higher cognition.

Since I wrote that in the movements of nature, one can sense the Cosmic intentionality in standard cognition" you have referred multiple times to my "confusion about the difference between conceptual apprehension of 'intentionality' in nature and experiencing that intentionality in the imaginative state."

I think your argument forgets that the modes of cognition are not compartments, and that beyond the conceptual conclusion that reality is spiritual in nature, it is possible to evolve one's soul state holistically towards a realization of the spiritual essence of natural bodily sensations like wind, rain, or sunshine. When I say holistically I mean by actively merging thinking with feeling and will, including in artistic ways. You haved forgotten feeling. That's why I said "sense" the Cosmic intentionality. I believe this is easier with dynamic or meteorological phenomena and away from man-made direct environments. Now, I don't fantasize that this is imaginative cognition, but it's an evolution of the soul state that can't be dismissed as "confusion".

Also, that there's no need to conceptually apprehend things when we immediately and inwardly experience them, seems a strange statement. If there's an image there should definitely by a concept. Do you mean that in imaginative cognition the phenomenology of cognition as in PoF is not relevant? That's not my understanding.

Federica,

Imagine you are walking down the street and, simultaneously, you close your eyes and try to focus on your intuitive will that animates the walking. It is absolutely the case that walking is a direct expression of this intuitive will activity - we could say the experience of walking is modulating the experience of the intuitive will, as in the Moire patterns. Everything you experience as a result of this walk is a Moire pattern over the underlying will activity. They are entirely overlapping. But it will simply be impossible to concentrate on the intuitive will activity while also expressing the outer walking activity. To make the overlapping experience a conscious reality, the outer activity needs to be sacrificed.

The same principle applies to our conceptual activity. We have to be able to release the latter to some extent before the imaginative activity animating it shines forth, just like we need to stop walking, sit down, close our eyes, and concentrate before the will activity animating our physical body can be properly observed. All too often, the conceptual activity mistakes its outer probing for inner spiritual experience and this can lead to quite inverted conclusions. The probing itself is of utmost value and should never be avoided (think of Cleric's rock climbing hold metaphor), but the problem is when definite conclusions about spiritual reality are derived from only the probing, the grasping of climbing holds (and metaphors are generally a great way for conceptual activity to probe witbout getting too entrenched in forming rigid conclusions). Then the intellect may build a very nice theory of 'spiritual reality' that can also block the inflow of deeper insight. When you say:

"I believe this [sensing the Cosmic intentionality] is easier with dynamic or meteorological phenomena and away from man-made direct environments"

I think that is a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling. It is generally true we can resonate in our feeling life with natural environments more easily than mostly man-made ones, but is it true that we can resonate in our first-person life of thoughtful intention more easily? It is similar to the discussion we had surrounding MS' take on the object exercise. We can more easily resonate with the intentions that structure a man-made environment than those that structure the natural environment (and most of all we resonate with the intention that structures our thought-perception). These differentiations are really important because they also reflect the gradient of higher cognition on the 'unmanifest side' of our experience. We need to be inwardly clear from where our "I"-consciousness is starting before we can radiate it outwards in concentric spheres to encompass more Cosmic intentionality. Our conceptual reasoning can definitely help us attain that inner clarity but it has to be pursued faithfully, dispassionately, and independently of our feeling life, which to begin with is entangled completely in our personal temperament, sympathies-antipathies, beliefs, expectations, etc. To regain the archetypal feeling of imaginative activity, the personal feeling of intellectual activity needs to be sacrificed.

I will stop there and allow you a chance to respond. I hope that what is presented above so far seems coherent and makes sense.

[Cleric K]

I think that what Federica meant concerns the fact that every higher experience's intuitive context ultimately has to be focused down (stepped down) in the intellect as a clear concept. It is true that we have to get off the intellectual thinking train and pass through the portal of concentration in order to emerge in the realm of living deeds of beings within soul space (who practically bend Time in various ways) but these experiences would remain like fuzzy dreams if their intuitive content can't come into focus as a human thought. In other words, it is not possible to say "I understand the experience at the Imaginative level but my intellect knows nothing about it." In the end, it is precisely the intellect that should know something about the higher experience (of course, being fully aware that the conceptual knowledge are only the bones of the higher state).

[AshvinP]

I think that what Federica meant concerns the fact that every higher experience's intuitive context ultimately has to be focused down (stepped down) in the intellect as a clear concept. It is true that we have to get off the intellectual thinking train and pass through the portal of concentration in order to emerge in the realm of living deeds of beings within soul space (who practically bend Time in various ways) but these experiences would remain like fuzzy dreams if their intuitive content can't come into focus as a human thought. In other words, it is not possible to say "I understand the experience at the Imaginative level but my intellect knows nothing about it." In the end, it is precisely the intellect that should know something about the higher experience (of course, being fully aware that the conceptual knowledge are only the bones of the higher state).

Yes, certainly, in which case we return to the question of whether something is being conceived about the spectrum of higher cognition that allows one to evaluate the functionality of analogies to that spectrum. In a certain sense, we have to still or quiet the conceptual activity as a means of theorizing or philosophizing about the spectrum to become aware of what we are really doing in our conceptual activity and what we really possess in the way of clear concepts about it. Then we can evaluate clearly how these skeletal concepts (that we surely hold) relate to the 'skin' of the holistic principles we have discerned, which themselves are only the outer expression of the more inward and subtle fluids, air, and warmth of higher states. I don't think at any time in this early process it is much use to instruct our concepts by what we 'sense/feel' about the layers of Cosmic intentionality (outside of limited domains such as aesthetic practices).

I also think it is very difficult to convey how one conceptually reasons through spiritual principles without theorizing about them at the same time, although you have illustrated it many times with climbing holds, bones, and so forth. It is a deeply ingrained habit for us to retreat to firm support at every step of the way, which we normally find in our (often passionate) beliefs and theories. Our conceptual activity has to become like an artistic practice but without undue influence from the sphere of our personal feelings. When we sculpt, paint, or compose music, we are hardly concerned with building a theoretical framework, although we have definite ideas of the curvature along which our activity-states should unfold. Apart from imaginative meditation itself, or prayer and faith in the Spirit that animates our thinking (which is clearly the most important), what can we do to cultivate this conceptual art?

[Federica]

Federica,

Imagine you are walking down the street and, simultaneously, you close your eyes and try to focus on your intuitive will that animates the walking. It is absolutely the case that walking is a direct expression of this intuitive will activity - we could say the experience of walking is modulating the experience of the intuitive will, as in the Moire patterns. Everything you experience as a result of this walk is a Moire pattern over the underlying will activity. They are entirely overlapping. But it will simply be impossible to concentrate on the intuitive will activity while also expressing the outer walking activity. To make the overlapping experience a conscious reality, the outer activity needs to be sacrificed.

The same principle applies to our conceptual activity. We have to be able to release the latter to some extent before the imaginative activity animating it shines forth, just like we need to stop walking, sit down, close our eyes, and concentrate before the will activity animating our physical body can be properly observed. All too often, the conceptual activity mistakes its outer probing for inner spiritual experience and this can lead to quite inverted conclusions. The probing itself is of utmost value and should never be avoided (think of Cleric's rock climbing hold metaphor), but the problem is when definite conclusions about spiritual reality are derived from only the probing, the grasping of climbing holds (and metaphors are generally a great way for conceptual activity to probe witbout getting too entrenched in forming rigid conclusions). Then the intellect may build a very nice theory of 'spiritual reality' that can also block the inflow of deeper insight. When you say:

"I believe this [sensing the Cosmic intentionality] is easier with dynamic or meteorological phenomena and away from man-made direct environments"

I think that is a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling. It is generally true we can resonate in our feeling life with natural environments more easily than mostly man-made ones, but is it true that we can resonate in our first-person life of thoughtful intention more easily? It is similar to the discussion we had surrounding MS' take on the object exercise. We can more easily resonate with the intentions that structure a man-made environment than those that structure the natural environment (and most of all we resonate with the intention that structures our thought-perception). These differentiations are really important because they also reflect the gradient of higher cognition on the 'unmanifest side' of our experience. We need to be inwardly clear from where our "I"-consciousness is starting before we can radiate it outwards in concentric spheres to encompass more Cosmic intentionality. Our conceptual reasoning can definitely help us attain that inner clarity but it has to be pursued faithfully, dispassionately, and independently of our feeling life, which to begin with is entangled completely in our personal temperament, sympathies-antipathies, beliefs, expectations, etc. To regain the archetypal feeling of imaginative activity, the personal feeling of intellectual activity needs to be sacrificed.

I will stop there and allow you a chance to respond. I hope that what is presented above so far seems coherent and makes sense.

Thank you for your thoughts, both.

Ashvin, yes, I agree that one can’t perform the exercise of concentration while walking down the street, or while going through an intellectual reasoning (more precisely, I can’t see myself trying it, though I believe it is possible for spiritually developed individuals). So you say: we can’t move into imaginative cognition without sacrificing the M.O. of standard conceptual cognition. Yes, one has to sit down in a calm environment and try to focus attention.
But here’s the thing: to improve the consciousness of our intuitive context, concentration is only one way. I believe we can also work from the side of standard cognition up, which is the part that you are not inclined to grant.

It’s as if we had to build a tunnel under a mountain. I’m saying, if we want to work effectively towards our future quality of consciousness, we can start digging from both sides of the mountain, because, after all, our end goal is to open a traversing breach that connects the multiple entry points.

We want to transform our intuitive context holistically, so that in the end we won’t have “stages of cognition”, but a unified field of intuitive context. One way is, as Cleric has specified above, to work top-down: jump up into imaginative cognition stage first, and then let that state impress itself in the standard intellect, in the form of intelligible concepts that the intellect can use for orientation once it’s ‘all alone’ again.

Beyond that, what I’m saying is, we can also attempt to work bottom-up, from the standing point of standard cognition up (I'm reminded of Levin's cell intelligence model). The way I see it, sensing Cosmic intentionality through the experience of a storm, for example, is a way to do that. Of course, I don’t imagine I am in a superior cognitive state then, nonetheless I am trying to push my standard cognition to transform itself.

We want to give it a chance to do better than only moving within its usual Moire patterns, or aliased state. Hence we don’t aim to sacrifice conceptual thinking and the feeling-will that accompanies it. On the contrary, we need to keep with us and put to work all the forces of our standard state. We are not trying to concentrate. We are trying to enlarge the splits in the Moire patterns, so to say. Yes, through those enlarged splits we risk hitting a blind end, that we could read the wrong way. But also, next time the holes will align again, we will have a better aperture on the intuitive big picture.

I would think that these efforts are as necessary as the top-down ones. Yes, we "bump into ourselves" when we don’t discard our normal thinking-feeling life, but the orientation coming from the higher levels can help reduce those effects. I may be wrong, but I have some confidence that there’s a place for this bottom-up work too, because I notice some improvements of intuitive context. I am becoming more and more aware of so-called coincidences/synchronicities. Every day I am able to notice some. That was not the case before. The work on the Moire patters yields some effects.

For example, this is becoming more and more evident to me in the connections of the thoughts/words we use in our posts. These coincidences create a sort of database, examples of things that made it through the enlarged Moire splits, so to say. This information can be used to try and open the cracks even more, and then incorporate the findings in the conscious portion of the flow of becoming. A silly example to make this clear: few days ago, out of 'nowhere', I thought I could change the placing of a big potted plant I have on my balcony, down from a stand it’s been on top of for years. I didn’t do it. Yesterday a big storm came, the wind threw the vase off of the stand and the vase broke. By realizing this connection, I now know a little better the form of that Moire slit - experientially - and that sense allows me to focus attention there and try to enlarge that perspective around the aliased intersection. Hopefully, the next intersecting event that will share 'something' with this one, will be some more exposed and intelligible, in this way.

So when you say, about my feeling-imbued experience of the movements of nature, that it’s “a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling” and that it’s a problem because it leads to unjustified spiritual conclusions, I feel it is a bit of a rigid principle to abide by, and that - as long as we don’t fantasize that we are navigating in higher cognition - we should strive for more creativity, not only in sensory artistic forms, but also in this type of cognitive creativity.

[Federica]

Post Scriptum

I wrote this:

So when you say, about my feeling-imbued experience of the movements of nature, that it’s “a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling” and that it’s a problem because it leads to unjustified spiritual conclusions, I feel it is a bit of a rigid principle to abide by, and that - as long as we don’t fantasize that we are navigating in higher cognition - we should strive for more creativity, not only in sensory artistic forms, but also in this type of cognitive creativity.

before I read this:

Our conceptual activity has to become like an artistic practice but without undue influence from the sphere of our personal feelings. When we sculpt, paint, or compose music, we are hardly concerned with building a theoretical framework, although we have definite ideas of the curvature along which our activity-states should unfold. Apart from imaginative meditation itself, or prayer and faith in the Spirit that animates our thinking (which is clearly the most important), what can we do to cultivate this conceptual art?

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Imagine you are walking down the street and, simultaneously, you close your eyes and try to focus on your intuitive will that animates the walking. It is absolutely the case that walking is a direct expression of this intuitive will activity - we could say the experience of walking is modulating the experience of the intuitive will, as in the Moire patterns. Everything you experience as a result of this walk is a Moire pattern over the underlying will activity. They are entirely overlapping. But it will simply be impossible to concentrate on the intuitive will activity while also expressing the outer walking activity. To make the overlapping experience a conscious reality, the outer activity needs to be sacrificed.

The same principle applies to our conceptual activity. We have to be able to release the latter to some extent before the imaginative activity animating it shines forth, just like we need to stop walking, sit down, close our eyes, and concentrate before the will activity animating our physical body can be properly observed. All too often, the conceptual activity mistakes its outer probing for inner spiritual experience and this can lead to quite inverted conclusions. The probing itself is of utmost value and should never be avoided (think of Cleric's rock climbing hold metaphor), but the problem is when definite conclusions about spiritual reality are derived from only the probing, the grasping of climbing holds (and metaphors are generally a great way for conceptual activity to probe witbout getting too entrenched in forming rigid conclusions). Then the intellect may build a very nice theory of 'spiritual reality' that can also block the inflow of deeper insight. When you say:

"I believe this [sensing the Cosmic intentionality] is easier with dynamic or meteorological phenomena and away from man-made direct environments"

I think that is a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling. It is generally true we can resonate in our feeling life with natural environments more easily than mostly man-made ones, but is it true that we can resonate in our first-person life of thoughtful intention more easily? It is similar to the discussion we had surrounding MS' take on the object exercise. We can more easily resonate with the intentions that structure a man-made environment than those that structure the natural environment (and most of all we resonate with the intention that structures our thought-perception). These differentiations are really important because they also reflect the gradient of higher cognition on the 'unmanifest side' of our experience. We need to be inwardly clear from where our "I"-consciousness is starting before we can radiate it outwards in concentric spheres to encompass more Cosmic intentionality. Our conceptual reasoning can definitely help us attain that inner clarity but it has to be pursued faithfully, dispassionately, and independently of our feeling life, which to begin with is entangled completely in our personal temperament, sympathies-antipathies, beliefs, expectations, etc. To regain the archetypal feeling of imaginative activity, the personal feeling of intellectual activity needs to be sacrificed.

I will stop there and allow you a chance to respond. I hope that what is presented above so far seems coherent and makes sense.

Thank you for your thoughts, both.

Ashvin, yes, I agree that one can’t perform the exercise of concentration while walking down the street, or while going through an intellectual reasoning (more precisely, I can’t see myself trying it, though I believe it is possible for spiritually developed individuals). So you say: we can’t move into imaginative cognition without sacrificing the M.O. of standard conceptual cognition. Yes, one has to sit down in a calm environment and try to focus attention.
But here’s the thing: to improve the consciousness of our intuitive context, concentration is only one way. I believe we can also work from the side of standard cognition up, which is the part that you are not inclined to grant.

It’s as if we had to build a tunnel under a mountain. I’m saying, if we want to work effectively towards our future quality of consciousness, we can start digging from both sides of the mountain, because, after all, our end goal is to open a traversing breach that connects the multiple entry points.

We want to transform our intuitive context holistically, so that in the end we won’t have “stages of cognition”, but a unified field of intuitive context. One way is, as Cleric has specified above, to work top-down: jump up into imaginative cognition stage first, and then let that state impress itself in the standard intellect, in the form of intelligible concepts that the intellect can use for orientation once it’s ‘all alone’ again.

Beyond that, what I’m saying is, we can also attempt to work bottom-up, from the standing point of standard cognition up (I'm reminded of Levin's cell intelligence model). The way I see it, sensing Cosmic intentionality through the experience of a storm, for example, is a way to do that. Of course, I don’t imagine I am in a superior cognitive state then, nonetheless I am trying to push my standard cognition to transform itself.

We want to give it a chance to do better than only moving within its usual Moire patterns, or aliased state. Hence we don’t aim to sacrifice conceptual thinking and the feeling-will that accompanies it. On the contrary, we need to keep with us and put to work all the forces of our standard state. We are not trying to concentrate. We are trying to enlarge the splits in the Moire patterns, so to say. Yes, through those enlarged splits we risk hitting a blind end, that we could read the wrong way. But also, next time the holes will align again, we will have a better aperture on the intuitive big picture.

I would think that these efforts are as necessary as the top-down ones. Yes, we "bump into ourselves" when we don’t discard our normal thinking-feeling life, but the orientation coming from the higher levels can help reduce those effects. I may be wrong, but I have some confidence that there’s a place for this bottom-up work too, because I notice some improvements of intuitive context. I am becoming more and more aware of so-called coincidences/synchronicities. Every day I am able to notice some. That was not the case before. The work on the Moire patters yields some effects.

For example, this is becoming more and more evident to me in the connections of the thoughts/words we use in our posts. These coincidences create a sort of database, examples of things that made it through the enlarged Moire splits, so to say. This information can be used to try and open the cracks even more, and then incorporate the findings in the conscious portion of the flow of becoming. A silly example to make this clear: few days ago, out of 'nowhere', I thought I could change the placing of a big potted plant I have on my balcony, down from a stand it’s been on top of for years. I didn’t do it. Yesterday a big storm came, the wind threw the vase off of the stand and the vase broke. By realizing this connection, I now know a little better the form of that Moire slit - experientially - and that sense allows me to focus attention there and try to enlarge that perspective around the aliased intersection. Hopefully, the next intersecting event that will share 'something' with this one, will be some more exposed and intelligible, in this way.

So when you say, about my feeling-imbued experience of the movements of nature, that it’s “a result of deriving the conclusion from the conceptual activity which indeed is imbued with feeling” and that it’s a problem because it leads to unjustified spiritual conclusions, I feel it is a bit of a rigid principle to abide by, and that - as long as we don’t fantasize that we are navigating in higher cognition - we should strive for more creativity, not only in sensory artistic forms, but also in this type of cognitive creativity.

Federica,

Thanks for these thoughts and I think we are all clearly coming closer together within a common language in relation to this question of exploring the higher states.

One thing we could contemplate is the simple wisdom, "by their fruits shall you know them". If the bottom-up conceptual activity that experiences the Cosmic intentionality of a storm is really bridging the gap to the top-down higher states, then shouldn't the metaphors/analogies become easier to follow and resonate with? That they are not and remain confusing or unhelpful, indicates to me there is some discontinuity.

If we analogize to the rhythmic cycle of our sleeping (higher intuitive) and waking (lower conceptual) states, I don't think it is accurate to say we try to plunge into the higher states during sleep and then, upon awakening, we try to also patch together these higher states from the bottom-up with our perceptions and concepts. Instead, the higher experiences during sleep provide intuitive impulses that then seed the transformation of our conceptual states while we are awake. The former acts as a magnetic field that organizes the 'iron filings' of our normal conceptual states through a process of resonance. It attracts the flow of our normal states towards its intended purposes. In that sense, on the path of higher development, our conceptual activity aims to remember the intents that it experienced during sleep through a process of attunement.

This is why I also posed the question to Cleric in the last post - because I sense that it is a very thin line between the 'cognitive creativity' you speak of, or the 'conceptual art' as I called it, and the habit of theorizing with our conceptual activity, which is less like resonance/attunement with higher states and more like the patchwork mode which remains mostly within its own plane of fragmented experience. I suppose that, as always, the first step is to try and become more conscious of whether we are engaged in one or the other. And then we need to practice, practice, practice at deconditioning from the theoretical approach and cultivating the symbolic-artistic approach through various strategies which will no doubt include prayer and meditation. But I am interested to hear both of your thoughts on this question.

[AshvinP]

This is why I also posed the question to Cleric in the last post - because I sense that it is a very thin line between the 'cognitive creativity' you speak of, or the 'conceptual art' as I called it, and the habit of theorizing with our conceptual activity, which is less like resonance/attunement with higher states and more like the patchwork mode which remains mostly within its own plane of fragmented experience. I suppose that, as always, the first step is to try and become more conscious of whether we are engaged in one or the other. And then we need to practice, practice, practice at deconditioning from the theoretical approach and cultivating the symbolic-artistic approach through various strategies which will no doubt include prayer and meditation. But I am interested to hear both of your thoughts on this question.

It just occurred to me that one of the best ways to cultivate this art is through phenomenological thinking, such as when we move our thinking through Cleric's latest essay. It is conceptual activity that explores its own inner contours while resisting the impulse to form rigid 'rules' or expectations about what it has discovered along the way. If the concepts thus formed can always relate back to some aspect of our intimate thinking experience, then we are no longer so tempted to codify them into theoretical structures. The intimate experience and insight won is generally sufficient to satisfy our intellect's craving for firm support and deeper knowledge.

[Federica]

Federica,

Thanks for these thoughts and I think we are all clearly coming closer together within a common language in relation to this question of exploring the higher states.

One thing we could contemplate is the simple wisdom, "by their fruits shall you know them". If the bottom-up conceptual activity that experiences the Cosmic intentionality of a storm is really bridging the gap to the top-down higher states, then shouldn't the metaphors/analogies become easier to follow and resonate with? That they are not and remain confusing or unhelpful, indicates to me there is some discontinuity.

If we analogize to the rhythmic cycle of our sleeping (higher intuitive) and waking (lower conceptual) states, I don't think it is accurate to say we try to plunge into the higher states during sleep and then, upon awakening, we try to also patch together these higher states from the bottom-up with our perceptions and concepts. Instead, the higher experiences during sleep provide intuitive impulses that then seed the transformation of our conceptual states while we are awake. The former acts as a magnetic field that organizes the 'iron filings' of our normal conceptual states through a process of resonance. It attracts the flow of our normal states towards its intended purposes. In that sense, on the path of higher development, our conceptual activity aims to remember the intents that it experienced during sleep through a process of attunement.

This is why I also posed the question to Cleric in the last post - because I sense that it is a very thin line between the 'cognitive creativity' you speak of, or the 'conceptual art' as I called it, and the habit of theorizing with our conceptual activity, which is less like resonance/attunement with higher states and more like the patchwork mode which remains mostly within its own plane of fragmented experience. I suppose that, as always, the first step is to try and become more conscious of whether we are engaged in one or the other. And then we need to practice, practice, practice at deconditioning from the theoretical approach and cultivating the symbolic-artistic approach through various strategies which will no doubt include prayer and meditation. But I am interested to hear both of your thoughts on this question.

There is much discontinuity, for sure, not only some. But does that mean the effort is useless? For sure the line is thin, and of course, the idea also expresses a preference, so I can’t be entirely sure it is valuable.

Regarding the metaphors and their usefulness, I have started reading Steiners Stages of Higher Cognition in the Archive.


Interestingly he presents the four stages of cognition in this way:

1. Standard
Ego - concept - image - sensory object <---

2. Imaginative
Ego - concept - image <---

3. Inspirative
Ego - concept <---

4. Intuitive
Ego


He also calls inspirative cognition “cognition of the nature of will”, a stage where the thought-image (sensory or spiritual) is no longer needed in order to grasp the concept/the intent/the will. It becomes transparent that a certain idea is willed by a conscious intention, without the need of a condensation of the idea in form-image (be it sensory or imaginative).

Now, thinking back to our discussions on the metaphors, I wonder: why do we need the intermediate stage of the thinking gesture between 2 and 3, hence the metaphors of gibberish, for example? In other words, why can’t we simply say that understanding stage 3 is analogous to understanding the thinking gesture/the meaning in our standard experience?

Incidentally, I notice Steiner repeats multiple times that it is absolutely necessary to have individualized guidance in the process of developing higher cognition. Do you think things have changed since he wrote that book in 1905?

[AshvinP]

Federica,

Thanks for these thoughts and I think we are all clearly coming closer together within a common language in relation to this question of exploring the higher states.

One thing we could contemplate is the simple wisdom, "by their fruits shall you know them". If the bottom-up conceptual activity that experiences the Cosmic intentionality of a storm is really bridging the gap to the top-down higher states, then shouldn't the metaphors/analogies become easier to follow and resonate with? That they are not and remain confusing or unhelpful, indicates to me there is some discontinuity.

If we analogize to the rhythmic cycle of our sleeping (higher intuitive) and waking (lower conceptual) states, I don't think it is accurate to say we try to plunge into the higher states during sleep and then, upon awakening, we try to also patch together these higher states from the bottom-up with our perceptions and concepts. Instead, the higher experiences during sleep provide intuitive impulses that then seed the transformation of our conceptual states while we are awake. The former acts as a magnetic field that organizes the 'iron filings' of our normal conceptual states through a process of resonance. It attracts the flow of our normal states towards its intended purposes. In that sense, on the path of higher development, our conceptual activity aims to remember the intents that it experienced during sleep through a process of attunement.

This is why I also posed the question to Cleric in the last post - because I sense that it is a very thin line between the 'cognitive creativity' you speak of, or the 'conceptual art' as I called it, and the habit of theorizing with our conceptual activity, which is less like resonance/attunement with higher states and more like the patchwork mode which remains mostly within its own plane of fragmented experience. I suppose that, as always, the first step is to try and become more conscious of whether we are engaged in one or the other. And then we need to practice, practice, practice at deconditioning from the theoretical approach and cultivating the symbolic-artistic approach through various strategies which will no doubt include prayer and meditation. But I am interested to hear both of your thoughts on this question.

There is much discontinuity, for sure, not only some. But does that mean the effort is useless? For sure the line is thin, and of course, the idea also expresses a preference, so I can’t be entirely sure it is valuable.

Nothing is useless. Even the results of our most counter-productive efforts can be redeemed along the way and thereby made useful in an entirely unsuspected way. All these results, which we normally might call 'errors' or 'failures', serve as a 'dataset' for our higher self (within our sleeping organism) to use in modifying the curvatures of the conceptual space (of the waking organism) so that we are given better opportunities to triangulate the correct/successful results in subsequent iterations of our rhythmic development. The old cliche that "it's the effort that really counts" is confirmed to be true by esoteric insight. That is the process of individual-collective evolution (but we shouldn't imagine the higher self "analyzes" the conceptual dataset in any cold intellectual way, rather it permeates the dataset with holistic aesthetic and moral insight that works back into our stream of becoming).

The pursuit of modern initiation strives to gain for our waking organism more and more of an 'advance preview' of this dataset that our higher self works with, so we can also start condensing the amount of iterations we need to cycle through before triangulating the proper insights and actions to steer our stream of becoming in attunement with higher ideals. I am reminded of Steiner's discussion of how, just as awakening in the etheric body can provide a holistic memory tableau of our past curvature of destiny in a given incarnation, awakening in the astral body can provide a holistic tableau of the future curvatures of destiny we must encounter to fulfill our tasks in the Earth's evolution. Again, the holistic tableau is not something we analyze with the intellect but is experienced and integrated as moral insight.

Of course, that is a rather advanced stage of initiation, but in the context of our discussion, the principle could mean that, when we gain some insights (however dim at first) that our conceptual activity is reflecting our preferences or other aspects of our personalized soul-structure, we can proactively start working on deconditioning it through our waking organism without exclusive reliance on the methods of our sleeping organism. That is practically the process of resonance/attunement with the higher self, as we are stripping our ordinary self of those contents and qualities that make it incompatible with the intuitive activity of the higher self. The latter can then more freely shine forth into the waking personality and spiritualize its conceptual and emotional activity.

Regarding the metaphors and their usefulness, I have started reading Steiners Stages of Higher Cognition in the Archive.


Interestingly he presents the four stages of cognition in this way:

1. Standard
Ego - concept - image - sensory object <---

2. Imaginative
Ego - concept - image <---

3. Inspirative
Ego - concept <---

4. Intuitive
Ego


He also calls inspirative cognition “cognition of the nature of will”, a stage where the thought-image (sensory or spiritual) is no longer needed in order to grasp the concept/the intent/the will. It becomes transparent that a certain idea is willed by a conscious intention, without the need of a condensation of the idea in form-image (be it sensory or imaginative).

Now, thinking back to our discussions on the metaphors, I wonder: why do we need the intermediate stage of the thinking gesture between 2 and 3, hence the metaphors of gibberish, for example? In other words, why can’t we simply say that understanding stage 3 is analogous to understanding the thinking gesture/the meaning in our standard experience?

Incidentally, I notice Steiner repeats multiple times that it is absolutely necessary to have individualized guidance in the process of developing higher cognition. Do you think things have changed since he wrote that book in 1905?

I will let Cleric address these questions, as I'm sure his responses will be more useful.

[Cleric K]

There is much discontinuity, for sure, not only some. But does that mean the effort is useless? For sure the line is thin, and of course, the idea also expresses a preference, so I can’t be entirely sure it is valuable.

Regarding the metaphors and their usefulness, I have started reading Steiners Stages of Higher Cognition in the Archive.


Interestingly he presents the four stages of cognition in this way:

1. Standard
Ego - concept - image - sensory object <---

2. Imaginative
Ego - concept - image <---

3. Inspirative
Ego - concept <---

4. Intuitive
Ego


He also calls inspirative cognition “cognition of the nature of will”, a stage where the thought-image (sensory or spiritual) is no longer needed in order to grasp the concept/the intent/the will. It becomes transparent that a certain idea is willed by a conscious intention, without the need of a condensation of the idea in form-image (be it sensory or imaginative).

Now, thinking back to our discussions on the metaphors, I wonder: why do we need the intermediate stage of the thinking gesture between 2 and 3, hence the metaphors of gibberish, for example? In other words, why can’t we simply say that understanding stage 3 is analogous to understanding the thinking gesture/the meaning in our standard experience?

Federica, thanks for bringing this in. I’m aware that there are discrepancies between what I described here and the way Steiner had, and I was thinking about mentioning that myself, so I’m glad that you did.

First we have to consider what distinguishes sensation and image because at the bottom they are both perceptions, aren’t they? Hallucination can be indistinguishable from sensory perception. So they key is that the image is something in which we feel active. The simplest case is bringing a memory afterimage. We can’t mistake that for sensation because we’re aware that we’re summoning it through our forces.

Then the Imaginative state also has gradations. For example, taking a psychedelic also pumps into our consciousness imagery but since we confront it with our sensory habits, we expect to see things as we see tables and chairs (in Steiner’s words). This is the lowest form of Imagination, a kind of visionary experience which however remains as a mysterious wall.

With the widespread of use of psychedelics today, it is a real danger that people imagine they look into the objective spiritual world in these images, while in fact they contemplate the processes at the borderline between the physical and etheric body – where the Imaginative mineralizes. For this reason I’ve always stressed that the Imaginative realm has to be seen as impressions of living spiritual activity (the thought gestures). As we have mentioned on other occasions, if the Imaginative is pictured as a curtain, then its movements result from various wind currents. We can never find the beings in the curtain itself. Instead, the movements of the curtain are testimonies about their activity.

Here I want to mention once again that the sensory perceptions have deeper origin, they are not simply imagined. We can picture that the curtain’s fabric may be fixed at certain points to the wall or window (these points need not remain stationary). It can wiggle around but these points constrain it. When we stare from the Imaginative state towards the sensory, it feels as if the Imaginative is sucked into them, as if it becomes lost in a black hole. It is important to keep in mind this distinction because otherwise we can easily imagine that the sensory can simply be reimagined (like in the painter’s fallacy). That’s why in meditation we need to temporarily let go of the senses in order to liberate the movements of our soul body around the fixed points (these movements are reflected in the etheric as the actual images).

I agree that by stressing so much on the thinking gestures in the Imaginative states, I may have overshot the goal. At that stage these gestures are only the feeling that in our environment there’s something living, spiritual, which impresses its motions in the soul substance, even though we experience only our personal perspective of the impressions and form ideas about them.

These thinking gestures become real when we transition to Inspiration. Then we really begin to grasp something of this “cognition of the nature of will” that works creatively in the Cosmos. So probably my mistake is that I describe Imagination from the point of view of Inspiration, where we already know the thinking will of the beings. Then in retrospect we can understand the Imaginative as living amidst the thinking gestures impressing in our soul substance which however still have gibberish meaning (and thus are only felt as the mysterious activity of some Intelligence) and so our consciousness still lives in our individual soul understanding of the rippling curtain. The images need to be deciphered. Of course, not through intellectual calculations but by following their threads and relations.

And needless to say, we can never fully separate the stages of consciousness into completely distinct and mutually independent states. The feeling of the spiritual working in the Imaginative is already like the Inspirative pressing into our state but in still indistinct way. Also we couldn’t conceive of beings without Intuition, which as Steiner says, initially is only the Intuition of our own ego. So it would be better to comprehend every state as a superposition of all states of cognition where they manifest with different intensity. But the important thing is that there’s no ‘pure’ state of say Inspiration. Whatever we experience in that state can only be what it is because of the full spectrum. Even in Intuition – although we reach the inner being of reality, this doesn’t mean that we leave reality. We’re still enmeshed in its complicated folds. Maybe here we can use again the sock metaphor. We can gain consciousness within the primordial fabric but this doesn’t mean that everything becomes unfolded – we're still anchored in the multiple folds.

Incidentally, I notice Steiner repeats multiple times that it is absolutely necessary to have individualized guidance in the process of developing higher cognition. Do you think things have changed since he wrote that book in 1905?

I think the reasons here are similar to what was mentioned about acquisition of language and the fact that babies can't get if from mechanical sources that only reproduce the air vibrations. If we start inner development from a quite egoic state (which is normal for our age) and have no interactions with other people, it is very likely that we'll build for ourselves an inner chamber of images and remain alone there. Interacting with living people, like we do here even though through such digital medium, already impels us to move beyond our boundaries. Of course, this doesn't mean that a pack of blind men who interact within themselves will surely become seeing. There's always the need to draw upon higher sources. But still, interaction with others can help us notice things that would be completely merged with the background if we were to work on our own. My understanding is that higher development will become natural as it becomes part of culture (even if very small part initially).

We shouldn't imagine that here at the forum we're doing something groundbreaking. As we can see, most of the things that we speak about have been elucidated more than a century ago. Yet what is new is that we're simply average people who try to integrate these things in our life so that they become part of culture. In that sense, guidance is achieved by comparing our intuitions. But we should also be aware that a whole culture can become stuck in a local, even if collective, bubble of the spiritual world. So just having mutual agreement within a group is not a sure indicator for Truth. That's why we have to cultivate the Love for Truth, that continually shatters the old forms and pours into new. Our desire to rediscover the Christ consciousness in us, every day in ever new forms, can be seen as a kind of compass.

External guidance is no longer needed once we attune to the Inspirations of the inner Master. But even then, external feedback is necessary because even highly developed human beings may develop subtle filtering that hears only some of the Master's Inspirations while conveniently quieting others. So there's no algorithmic way to achieve that. But as long as our highest ideal is to work for Love, Wisdom and Truth, the course corrections will come to us by both inner Inspirations and outer influences. Sometimes if the Master can't get through to us, he may inspire another being to knock us on the head, so to speak, in order to make us think.