Thinking, Memory and Time (Part II)

[AshvinP]

This may be of interest to fans of (or potential fans of) Terrence Malick's beautiful cinematography, in which he attempted to "transcend metaphysics" in a way that Heidegger came close to but was unable. I was re-minded of it by a tweet from Jonathan Pageau.

[Cleric K]

An interesting question to ponder - if we accept that thought-forms can be perceived as 'external' sensations, could a person's memory be perceived as 'outward' part of their physical body?

The following may be of interest:

It may be said that in the etheric spectrum of the human being after death something happens that could have happened in life, but has not. A picture of happenings which could have been happenings of life may be experienced in this death spectrum. This is a very significant esoteric connection. The human individuality (Ego and astral body) passes over almost immediately after death to a kind of cosmic existence and for some days is still connected with the death spectrum (the etheric body), so that the karma-will of the individuality is playing from the cosmos into the death spectrum. Then, after a few days, what belongs to the cosmic spheres is loosened from what has received its specific, unique character from the connection with the physical human being and has only assumed the form of the physical human being because it has been enclosed within the human physical body. The Ego and the astral body have not this physical form of the human being; but the death spectrum, the etheric body has, in a certain respect, also the physical form of the human being. The death spectrum loses this human form only in the course of days. When the soul has been freed from the physical body it loses this human form. The physical body, through its forces, has preserved this death spectrum in its form; but now that the spectrum is outside the physical body, it takes on other forms, determined by the external forces of the cosmos.

It is therefore understandable that a true description of the emergence of the human individuality together with the etheric body from the physical body must indicate the death spectrum rising up, as it were, in the form which has been that of the physical body. If, therefore, somebody wants to describe the moment of death truly, he will describe how the etheric body rises up like a kind of cloud, still manifesting the form of the physical body with its arms and other limbs, and how this gradually dissolves into the more spiritual forces working in from the cosmos. This is a transformation, a metamorphosis, a transition.

The picture revealed by clairvoyance is difficult for us, because in physical life the human being is bound to time and space, and indeed to those forms of time and space which are at our disposal precisely when we are in the physical body, namely, ordinary three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time, with its past, present and future. And so, many people are inclined to connect with purely spiritual perceptions, three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time with its past, present and future. We can speak of time and space in connection with the spiritual world too; but there they are altogether different. The difficulty is that words coined for the physical world are inadequate and imperfect when used for portrayal of the spiritual world.

In conceptions of time in the physical world, the past is ... well, the past. The past lies behind us and we can only preserve it in memory. It is only the present that can be there before us in immediate perception. In the spiritual world it is not like this, nor even in the elementary world; there the past can be before us just as the present is before us in the physical world.

In the spiritual world, therefore, we can look at what is past, what has happened, what can only be preserved by the physical individuality in memory. When we have passed through the Gate of Death we can look from a later point of time at an earlier point of time. It is just as if, from a later period, we were looking at what is physically past as something that is immediately present, just as from this point where I am standing I can look, physically, into the corner. The past is actually there, living before us, surrounding us.

The Problem of Death II

It is possible then for the person concerned to go forward in his exercises and to arrive at the point where he can, in turn, eliminate this soul content, put it away, in a certain sense render his consciousness void of what he himself has brought into this consciousness, this thought content upon which he has concentrated, and which has enabled him to possess a real thinking constituting a sense of touch for the soul. It is rather easy in ordinary life to acquire an empty consciousness; we need only to fall asleep. But it requires an intense application of force, after we have become accustomed to concentrating upon a definite thought content, to put away such a content of thought in connection with this very strengthened thinking, thinking which has become a reality. But we succeed in putting aside this content of thinking in exactly the same way in which we acquired at first the powerful force needed for concentration. But, when we have succeeded in this, something appears before the soul which has been possible previously only in the form of pictures of episodes in one's memory: the whole inner life of the person appears in a new way before the eyes of his soul, as he has passed through this life in his earthly existence since birth, or since the earliest point of time to which one's memory can return, at which one entered consciously into this earthly existence. Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If some one carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. A precise picture of the life of the person is now created out of that which appears in an episodic manner, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock, at the moment of drowning, for instance, when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul — to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

Supersensible Knowledge: Anthroposophy as a Demand of the Age

(the above is little out of context and might easily be mistaken for Oriental void meditation. But it's not. The elimination of the soul content has a different effect when it goes through the path of concentration of spiritual activity. In spiritual scientific training we being with concentration on a thought-image. The goal of this is to become more and more aware of our spiritual activity instead of the 'thinking machine'-like spitting out of words in the mind. It's not so much the thought-image that we're concentrating on - it's only an anchoring point - it's the living experience of the activity we're performing that's important. The more we manage to concentrate with great intensity (intensity is key!) the more we become aware of the spiritual forces that shape our own thinking in everyday life. Through the concentration on a thought-image we gradually begin to sense how we form the thoughts through deeper forces of Thinking. When we have sufficiently mastered this, we gradually learn to live fully consciously within the deeper forces themselves. This is the point at which we can render our consciousness void. We eradicate only the thought-image but we continue to live with our fully conscious cognitive spiritual activity - we simply don't allow it to reach the density of rigid thought forms. If we use QM terminology (it's just an analogy) it can be said that we learn to live fully consciously within the formative forces our thinking - which we can imagine something akin to a wavefunction - without allowing it to collapse to formed thoughts. Now we think in higher-order supersensible pictures which would require many pages to describe, yet we encompass them as high-density meaning Imaginations. The memory plateau is revealed in this kind of Imaginative panoramas. If we allow ourselves to decohere this panorama, to produce thoughts and ordinary space-time pictures in the brain, we arrive at what everyone of us knows as the regular capability of remembering)

We can really appreciate how difficult it must have been for Steiner to speak of these things hundred years ago. QM and GR were not yet a thing back then. The general scientific consciousness was pretty much shaped into the Newtonian framework. The supersensible perceptions are what they are, we must struggle to fit them with the intellectual concept-vocabulary at our disposal. We should be really grateful for the advances of mainstream science because even without knowing it, it builds out of scientific experiment, concepts that we can use to much more precisely speak of the higher worlds. Note that QM and relativity are not strictly needed. We shouldn't think that we're going to explain away the higher worlds through reducing them to a wave function. It's the other way around. We must seek living spiritual experience of the higher order realities. From there we can explain QM and GR. We can't build the higher worlds from the intellectual fragments of a scientific theory.

In the above sense, it should be much easier today for people to approach what actually is meant with the death spectrum, for example. Just think how alien and even crazy this sounds for a mind conditioned in Newtonian universe - there's simply no point of contact! It sounds as complete fantasy. This is the kind of resistance spiritual science had to deal with (not that it is much different today). Today when we hear "A picture of happenings which could have been happenings of life may be experienced in this death spectrum" is so much easier to integrate by the intellect when we consider things as superposition. But as said, this is still only an intellectual gradient. We should always seek the conscious reality and not build a purely abstract theory of it.

[AshvinP]

An interesting question to ponder - if we accept that thought-forms can be perceived as 'external' sensations, could a person's memory be perceived as 'outward' part of their physical body?

The following may be of interest:

We can really appreciate how difficult it must have been for Steiner to speak of these things hundred years ago. QM and GR were not yet a thing back then. The general scientific consciousness was pretty much shaped into the Newtonian framework. The supersensible perceptions are what they are, we must struggle to fit them with the intellectual concept-vocabulary at our disposal. We should be really grateful for the advances of mainstream science because even without knowing it, it builds out of scientific experiment, concepts that we can use to much more precisely speak of the higher worlds. Note that QM and relativity are not strictly needed. We shouldn't think that we're going to explain away the higher worlds through reducing them to a wave function. It's the other way around. We must seek living spiritual experience of the higher order realities. From there we can explain QM and GR. We can't build the higher worlds from the intellectual fragments of a scientific theory.

In the above sense, it should be much easier today for people to approach what actually is meant with the death spectrum, for example. Just think how alien and even crazy this sounds for a mind conditioned in Newtonian universe - there's simply no point of contact! It sounds as complete fantasy. This is the kind of resistance spiritual science had to deal with (not that it is much different today). Today when we hear "A picture of happenings which could have been happenings of life may be experienced in this death spectrum" is so much easier to integrate by the intellect when we consider things as superposition. But as said, this is still only an intellectual gradient. We should always seek the conscious reality and not build a purely abstract theory of it.

That was of great interest, thanks!

Yes, we take for granted so many revolutionary intellectual concepts of the 20th century which most previous thinkers simply did not have access to in normal cognitive states. With someone like Steiner, we look at the words he wrote with our mere intellect, compare them to the mere intellectual concepts of recent scientific theories and then say, "clearly he was wrong because these things do not match up!". It's amazing how much we can miss by simply starting from flawed assumptions we are not aware of. For idealists, it should be significantly easier because we already take as a starting assumption that exterior forms of objects, words, etc. do not capture the essence of these images which have interiority. That interiority is generally best captured by what we call "meaning, functions, etc." in everyday intellectual language. But so many times we unconsciously revert back to the materialist perspective of only exterior forms and forget about the essential meanings which constitute them. The QM analogy with "death spectrum" is a great example - it takes awhile to get used to the way in which the meanings correspond between QM concepts and spiritual science teachings, but, as for all skills, with persistent practice it eventually does start to become 'second-nature' to see these deep relations.