Federica wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 2:34 pm
Thanks for your patience, Ashvin! Trying to keep it as short as possible here below.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 4:26 am
Federica,
I meant that the 'unconscious' isn't the best way to speak of this aperture of first-person becoming which generally implicates a process extending into 'past' and 'future'. Normally I would use the unconscious or subconscious to mean that which is beyond even this aperture, like our experiences during sleep. That is where we normally have gaps in our stream of becoming, or before a certain time in our current incarnation. Of course these experiences are also critical to understanding our current state of being, but they are not within the aperture of conscious phenomena which I would call the "given".
Yes, that was understood. Which means that - because for you the given is in practice the short name of the phenomenology of standard cognition - you prefer not to use the term unconscious to describe that phenomenology. This is all I meant with my remark.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 4:26 am
We have to make certain thinking-gestures when we want to recall something in memory, right? That is what I would call a 'reaching into the subconscious', again with the caveat we are using 'subconscious' here in a broad sense. Or we could call it a reaching into the 'not immediately perceptual consciousness'.
Yes, now it's clear, because you said you don't prefer to use 'subconscious' in broad sense.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 4:26 am
Here is a passage from Steiner to consider:
(...)
So it is similar to imagining a 'pure field of percepts' without the concepts linking them into a harmonious whole. This 'inner feeling for time' is what I am placing within the given conscious aperture of intuitive becoming. I would not call this an 'interfering of time and memory with observation', in the sense that we are constructing a model which goes beyond the givens of thinking observation. If we want to call it an 'inner model', I guess that's fine, but I think it's misleading to imply that this is going beyond the givens of our normal intuitive stream of becoming. Or if by 'observation' we mean pure sense-perception in the present moment, then of course that can't be equated with the actual givens.
Yeah yeah, I get what you are placing in the given. But it seems you believe I wanted to only place the field of percepts in the given. This has never been the case.
I would rather see the given as continuous revolving of
final products (in the sense ML speaks of "products") under the eyes of our conscious observation. If I can borrow a Steiner metaphor you recently shared, it’s as if we were looking at a glass of soda water
from above ('from above' was not in the metaphor). So we could see that the given of experience is indeed a process. It’s the process of transformation of the continuously bubbling
surface. That is our given. The depth of the water in the glass is not experienced consciously, it’s not given, nor is given the process of bubble formation and traveling through the depth of the water to reach the surface. To get the whole story, we need to add reasoning (phenomenology of cognition) to the given of experience.
This would be, for me, the logical and easiest way to use the expression "immediate given of experience". This said, I do understand and of course accept your more extensive way to use it.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Feb 17, 2023 4:26 am
As said previously, I don't think the "given" is something to define with rigid contours from the outset of reading the essay. It refers to a background intuition we all have of our metamorphosing thinking states of being. The meaning of this intuition will be fleshed out in the process of reasoning through the phenomenology of thinking, if we remain flexible and open to normally unfamiliar configurations of our own thinking. This is the critical purpose of the phenomenology - it shouldn't only be an exercise in gaining a conceptual model of 'thinking as spiritual activity', but a living experience of our own thinking beginning to discern itself from the inside-out. A newcomer shouldn't really understand these things from the outset - if they feel that they have such an understanding right away, that would mean they are considering it all abstractly. Actually I find this to universally be the case when anyone "agrees" very quickly with something which is no doubt unfamiliar to modern habits of thinking. The desire for clear cut definitions of inner experiential activity is really what needs to be sacrificed for the phenomenology to reveal its deeper meaning.
Right, one has to have enough thirst for knowledge and enough dissatisfaction with the broadly available 'systems', to persist and go through the iterative experience of testing the cognitive processes. Sure, I agree (not quickly
) with that. Certainly definitions can hardly be clear-cut, because we are pushing vocabulary to its limits, but understanding should aim to become clear-cut, I would say, although through an iterative process. In this sense, I feel that what really needs to be sacrificed is the expectation of the eureka moment. One has to accept that it's a
progressive opening to the deeper meaning.
That's a great metaphor! The only thing I want to be clear on is how expansive is this bubbling surface. We are clear that it's not only sense-perceptual spatial phenomena, but also inner cognitive experiences temporally extended. It is also the intuitive stream of becoming which manifests these outer-inner experiences and allows for continuity of consciousness. We may not have any intellectual model for these things in clear cut concepts, but they are all embedded within our background intuition which is not entirely subconscious, in the sense that we can discern it quite easily if we simply pay more close attention to our life of metamorphosing conscious phenomena. We don't need to take the phenomenology into the depths of our being for discerning this "given".
So this is all still the very bubbling surface of consciousness. The depth layers of these final products, in which I include our intuitive sense of "me", i.e. the nested imaginative, inspired, intuitive activities of higher beings, are quite unimaginable for ordinary sense-based cognition, except by way of analogies and illustrations such as Cleric and Steiner have provided. Those forces reside in the genuine supra-conscious and structure the substances-processes of the subconscious, i.e. the physical, life, and soul processes, at individual and collective scales. Our given conscious aperture is always mediating between these two spheres of ideal forces and perceptual outer-inner phenomena, sort of like a porous membrane through which they flow and swirl into a vortex we experience as 'present I-state of being'.
Steiner wrote:I have been trying to make clear to you the world in which our Ego lives during sleep. This world is not held together by the inherent forces of the physical and etheric bodies. These bodies, however, are alone responsible for the clear consciousness of earthly man; they are the source of the judgments we form, in accordance with our feelings and our will, on our own actions, our inward experiences and thoughts. Hence, when we are awake, we judge our external life according to the thoughts we have been able to imprint in our physical and etheric bodies. But it is not only a human being himself who has something to say about his experiences; his experiences and actions are the concern of the whole spiritual Cosmos. The Cosmos judges whether an action, a thought or feeling is to be declared good or bad. Between waking and sleeping we are left to form our own opinions about ourselves. As I have sufficiently shown during these lectures, the spiritual content of the Cosmos takes the moral as its natural law, and what the Cosmos has to say about our true nature and our actions is experienced by the Ego during sleep. Inspired cognition shows how the Ego, even during the shortest sleep, experiences over again everything the individual has gone through from his last moment of waking until his present sleep — however long or short this period may be. So a man, in the successive states of waking, sleeping, waking, sleeping, experiences again in sleep whatever he went through during his last waking time, especially where his own activities were concerned.
So these are the ideal-moral forces which weave the depths of our being-becoming and which our phenomenology, if pursued deeper and deeper inwardly through rhythmic spiritual practice and study, will lead us to. They are none other than the forces which are experienced across the threshold of sleep and death. Without these moral forces, none of our natural perceptual-cognitive experience can be made sense of in any holistic way. They remain, in relation to our holistic sense of being, as a 'pure field of percepts' or a person with no memory remains in relation to more narrowed states of being - confusing, random, chaotic, unintelligible, anxiety-inducing and frightening, often leading to resentment.
When in earthly life you look back on your ordinary memories, you always leave out your periods of sleep, as if your only experiences had been those lived through by day. And so it goes on right back to the time after birth when your memories cease.
In fact it is like this with the panorama that appears during those two or three days after death. Then, later, comes a period when soul and spirit have gained sufficient strength to experience in the spiritual world all that could manifest only unconsciously, in picture form, while we were asleep at night during our life on Earth. It now comes before us as experience. A man then passes through a period — lasting about one-third of his life on Earth, approximately the time normally spent in sleep — when he experiences his nights again, but in a backward direction.
I am providing these quotes just to give a sense of how radically different the depths of our soul-waters are from the 'given' bubbling surface when we view the latter only from above (from outside-in). Nevertheless, that bubbling surface will lead us into the depths if we don't arbitrarily abstract it, chop it up, or otherwise restrict it to what will support our desired conclusions about the depths. We are tempted to do that not only with outer perceptual givens, but especially with inner conceptual givens, as we saw frequently on the other threads (take some parts of scripture here, some parts of NDE accounts there, etc.). Of course almost none of this restriction is done consciously, but subconsciously. Yet by subconsciously restricting the givens and subverting the inner phenomenology, we cut off the only means by which we can find leeway within the subconscious to expand the aperture of givens and progressively avoid premature distractions from the phenomenology, which are born of the personal soul-life. So it becomes a catch 22 for the intellect, and the pinhole of cognition requires intense, persistent, prayerful effort to continually travel through.
Unfortunately this inner striving for moral perfection is the deeper reason why so many resist pursuit of the phenomenology of spiritual activity. They read through a text once, with half-devoted attention, and say, 'well that sounds pretty interesting, but it's not really relevant to what I am interested in exploring.' They may get a bit more sophisticated with the excuses, like some we know
. Things are superficially "agreed" with or declared "too complex to comprehend", for the same purpose of avoiding any deeper consideration. No further questions are asked for clarification. No further readings are undertaken, whereas you and I both know a minimum of 5-10 readings of PoF, for ex., are necessary to scratch beneath the surface. And the 'Kantian' boundary to living spiritual knowledge always lurks in the background, manifesting itself in all sorts of varied forms which all express the same inner split and go unnoticed.
Living consciousness through phenomenology of spiritual activity comes with increasing creative responsibility, i.e. creative power of a morally perfected nature - ultimately that is the
telos the Divine Cosmos strives towards for all its nested waves of beings in the ceaseless process of intuitive becoming. If we have a throbbing headache at the surface of our consciousness, we are very likely to take some action to address its causes. We may dim the lights, put in the earplugs, and probably pop up a few pills in the modern age. But the tumor which is growing in the depths of our organism can be ignored for a good long while, since the symptoms are all manifesting below the threshold of our consciousness. Of course bringing the tumor into the light of consciousness doesn't force us to address it - we can freely choose to live with the cancerous growth and associated pain if we desire to, but it's very unlikely any reasonable person would so choose.
It is why Eugene places the limit of soul evolution on Earth at the level of the individual. If it is livingly acknowledged that there is a first-person evolving perspective within the Divine Self, concentric with our own, whose soul-life unfolds as the nested hierarchy of families, nations, species, and the Earth kingdoms as a whole, then a certain orientation of responsibility towards healing these divisions becomes necessary. Then we can no longer keep the personal black box where it is only one of infinitely many hierarchies in the spiritual multiverse, none of which can be verified until after our own personal death. We simply imagine that we can float off into another non-Earthly evolutionary worldline after death, maintaining continuity of consciousness, and leave the remaining Earthy souls to deal with the tumor which our previous karma helped create. Sorry, I have clearly gone beyond the 'givens' of our original discussion now
. But I hope it's clear how it all relates.
