Anthroposophy for Dummies

[AshvinP]

I must simply add that when you are defining a human's best option as the one you're given, that just veers eerily close to a theatrical narrative presupposition for me given it's insistent on a 'right answer for all' and the lack of falsifiable traits that prepackaged narratives must necessarily present with. The accused cannot even admit to spinning one, being that they themselves cannot see the folly behind their selfishness. However, if anything looked like one of those narratives, it's a 'right answer for all'. So here's hoping it's not despite sounding a lot like that.

If only communism was even that transparent about it...

All the best, from some irate reformed sinner who never wanted to start pointing hands at the miscarriages of others (not referring to you as an example at all here) for wont of hypocrisy but is just fed up of current society and it's superabundance of 'perfect solutions'

That was quite the screed

Ironically, I disagree with almost none of it. I am a consumer bankruptcy attorney and business has really started picking up. This is usually the time of year when things slow down, so that goes to show the overall state of crushing financial burden on people in my neck of the woods. There are fewer things which trigger more stress, frustration, anxiety, shame, guilt, etc. than crushing financial debt in a capitalist economy. But there are always a few clients who seem to fare better in their cases than others - they are more motivated to stay organized, provide the documents I need, listen to my counsel, and generally cooperate without letting ego get too involved. The difference is not in their circumstances, which are just as dire as anyone else's, but in their self-awareness of their circumstances and how they got there.

I only identified this difference recently, even though it has always been there, because I now know to look for it. So I completey agree that coercive state-run or church-run "solutions" will never lead anywhere, only genuine transformation at the individual level which allows one to clearly perceive one's own flaws, shortcomings, and lack of knowledge. And if you were to look through my posts on the old BK forum, you would also see that I was incessantly commenting on the need to avoid collectivist policies and applauding JP's stance against anything which limits free speech, which is practically synonymous with free thinking and the path towards becoming aware of our co-creation of the phenomenal world. As I wrote in the latest essay:


viewtopic.php?f=5&t=619

From our considerations in this essay, the pathological phenomena of mechanism could be summed up as a general failure to ask questions. It manifests most acutely when our holistic attention is thrust down into fragmented digital pictures of what people who we "follow" had for dinner or what books they are claiming to read; of viral memes which claim to capture deep "wisdom" in a few prosaic words. The cure to this pathology of mechanism could be summed up as Self-knowledge. But, both of those abstract summations are generally counter-productive, since they rely on the same mechanistic mindset that they are claiming to critique. The same applies to blanket policies of any sort, targeted at materialistic desire, but conjured up with little thought and imposed on the population under the guise of "environmental protection" - these policies seek quick and dirty "solutions" by coercing is targets into an 'arranged marriage' between Nature and cognitive activity. As Barfield rightly observed, "those who mistake efficiency for meaning inevitably end by loving compulsion".

But to only perceive the negative qualities within oneself is just as one-sided as any other approach. We should also perceive our capacity to genuinely transform ourselves and the world around us, in whatever seemingly limited ways possible, through our Self-knowledge. As we come to understand ourselves better and more deeply, we come to understand the phenomenal world and vice versa, as well as the noumenal relations underlying both. It is that understanding which mitigates our projection of repressed and ignored negative qualities onto the world around us. I think it is no understatement to say this sort of projection via unawareness underlies a huge portion of our fragmented political, social, and cultural relations. And I feel much of your post above is projection onto spirituality. Your name is "idle curiosity", and idle hands can truly be the devil's playground. We idle from serious investigation of the spiritual through our own cognitive activity because, to not idle means to take on an increasingly large amount of responsibility, and who really wants that? Steiner called his philosophy "ethical individualism" and that is truly what it is - each individual taking responsibility of their own destiny.

Humanity risks losing those fruits if it, through each of its individual members, fails to manifest its intention to continue evolving with Nature through a deeply thoughtful participation in her appearances. To right our ship and remain connected to Nature's ship is nothing more complicated than syncing our temporal cognitive rhythms with hers. It is nothing more complicated than treating all of her appearances like answers to deep questions which we have not thought to ask yet. The cognitive activity that we fear is most time-consuming and difficult is actually what makes experiential time accelerate and what makes all of our daily tasks so much more easier to accomplish, by making them all the more rich in meaning. To avoid becoming what we all too often perceive ourselves to be - lifeless machines - we only need to start Thinking.

[Anthony66]

It's time for another A/SS 101 question!

BK argues the case for idealism on 3 broad fronts: parsimony, QM, and neuroscience. If one had to provide a short argument for idealism under A/SS, what would constitute the key elements of that case?

[AshvinP]

It's time for another A/SS 101 question!

BK argues the case for idealism on 3 broad fronts: parsimony, QM, and neuroscience. If one had to provide a short argument for idealism under A/SS, what would constitute the key elements of that case?

Anthony,

One must remember A/SS always goes at least one, usually several, layers deeper than speculative metaphysical philosophy. So it would ask why criteria like parismony, or analogies to QM, etc. are necessary in the first place. They are necessary because one is speculating abstractly! They fill the gaps between what is concretely experienced and reasoned out by the speculator and what the speculator wishes to say about Reality. That is the only reason why BK must appeal to "parsimony" or analogies to "whirlpools", DID, and the like in his case for idealism. A/SS does not seek to speculate on the nature of Reality whatsoever, but to only say what can be concretely perceived in the phenomenal relations by way of careful observation and cognitive activity. Ironically enough, the core truth of monist idealism can be perceived in the phenomenal relations in this manner, which provides a much more solid experiential and reasoned basis for one's confidence in monist idealism. But, for that reason, it cannot be abstractly boiled down to "key elements". Since you asked for some to start this thread, I provided a list of 10, but Cleric and myself both cautioned against keeping them as abstract elements.

Of course, I hope you realize that by requesting 10 short and concise points, this means that each one of them will have to be expanded by you. So don't be discouraged if they seem abstract to you. Think of them as seeds that must watered, nurtured and grown with, until they become mighty trees, whose branches intermingle and penetrate every phenomena of the World Content.

[Anthony66]

It's time for another A/SS 101 question!

BK argues the case for idealism on 3 broad fronts: parsimony, QM, and neuroscience. If one had to provide a short argument for idealism under A/SS, what would constitute the key elements of that case?

Anthony,

One must remember A/SS always goes at least one, usually several, layers deeper than speculative metaphysical philosophy. So it would ask why criteria like parismony, or analogies to QM, etc. are necessary in the first place. They are necessary because one is speculating abstractly! They fill the gaps between what is concretely experienced and reasoned out by the speculator and what the speculator wishes to say about Reality. That is the only reason why BK must appeal to "parsimony" or analogies to "whirlpools", DID, and the like in his case for idealism. A/SS does not seek to speculate on the nature of Reality whatsoever, but to only say what can be concretely perceived in the phenomenal relations by way of careful observation and cognitive activity. Ironically enough, the core truth of monist idealism can be perceived in the phenomenal relations in this manner, which provides a much more solid experiential and reasoned basis for one's confidence in monist idealism. But, for that reason, it cannot be abstractly boiled down to "key elements". Since you asked for some to start this thread, I provided a list of 10, but Cleric and myself both cautioned against keeping them as abstract elements.

Of course, I hope you realize that by requesting 10 short and concise points, this means that each one of them will have to be expanded by you. So don't be discouraged if they seem abstract to you. Think of them as seeds that must watered, nurtured and grown with, until they become mighty trees, whose branches intermingle and penetrate every phenomena of the World Content.

So perhaps a better way of asking this question is what is the trajectory of Thinking that reveals a monist idealism? What are the key landmarks that attend a careful investigation of the nature of reality?

[AshvinP]

So perhaps a better way of asking this question is what is the trajectory of Thinking that reveals a monist idealism? What are the key landmarks that attend a careful investigation of the nature of reality?

I will stand by my original 10 plus Deep MAL essay. If we come to understand those by careful reasoning, then we have made a lot of progress (basically that list reflects all the progress I have made so far with intellectual reasoning, which is very little, but still a pretty solid foundation).

[findingblanks]

Since this is an explicit Anthroposophy thread I thought it was the right place for this inquiry:

Many years ago when I was a student at Rudolf Steiner College, i remember one of the teacher trainers reading us a quote from Steiner about what can be observed when watching children knit at different ages. I remember that Steiner went into great and very precise detail about the movement of the fingers, and then he connected this to other kinds of changes in thinking as they grew older. I have found lectures with similar topics, but if anybody knows exactly which lecture this was I'd be so grateful. I often use this as one of my examples of how incredibly observant Steiner could be.

[findingblanks]

Hey Cleric. I thought I remember reading that you had created a sub-group for general discussion of Steiner. Is this it?

[Anthony66]

Is Steiner saying percepts in and of themselves are pure givens, and it is only with the attendant thinking that we can infer their nature? In other words, one doesn't import any presuppositions about their nature. If that is so, how does Steiner understand percepts after the operation of thinking? Do they correspond to BK's ideations of M@L?

I'll add something to what Ashvin already said.

One way to think about it, is that perceptions are like the negative picture of ideas (knowing, meaning). In other words, everywhere we perceive something, we have absence, vacuum of ideas. We need to really stir our Imagination here. We can practically imagine how perceptions exercise a specific kind of suction on our thinking being. It's like perceptions are vacuum sinks that try to suck out the ideal thinking element which will fill the voids. The more the ideal element flows into the voids, the more the balance is restored.

Imagine a perception of a rectangle. It exercises the mentioned suction on our spiritual being. The act of thinking is like flowing our spiritual essence into the void that sucks us in. When we fill it, our essential being ('made of' meaning/knowing/idea) assumes the shape of that void and we experience it from within - that is, we experience the meaning of the concept of rectangle. In this way, the answer to the question "what happens with percepts after the act of thinking" would be that they no longer exist. Our meaningful essence has filled them and assumed their 'shape' which we experience as knowing from within.

To this it might be objected that after we think about the rectangle, even though we experience the concept of it, we still see it quite clearly - the visual stimuli don't at all disappear! The solution to this riddle is that perceptions are very compound.

Some time ago, in another context I gave an example to findingblanks with thinking about a pencil. You may want to take a look at it.

In short, we may say "I look at the pencil but even after I experience the meaning of 'pencil', the perception is still there. If I have filled the perception-void with the concept, why is the perception still there?" The reason is that there are in fact infinite number of ideas that are being sucked in through the visual perception. The concept of 'pencil' is only one of them. So the visual perception really exercises the suction of all possible ideas, like wood, yellow, paint, graphite, peeled, hexagonal, etc. and of course - pencil. 'Pencil' is only one of them and when we flow our thinking essence into this void it really is filled - yet all other infinity-minus-one voids remain and the perception invites us to fill them with meaning too.

This process takes much more complete form when we observe thinking. Our thoughts-forms are also perceptions filled in with our thinking essence. In fact, it is our active essence that gives the shape of the already filled voids of thought-forms. But if this is the case, if thought-forms were voids shaped exactly as our meaning, why do we still perceive them? There shouldn't be any perception of them, as it should have been perfectly filled with meaning?

The reason we can at all speak of thought-perceptions is because even though we think actively and create the primary void filled with the meaning projected in it, this void is part of a more general environment and its 'surface' can never be completely perfect.

Let's try to clarify this. Let's imagine ourselves in a Godly state, where there's nothing but our innerly experienced Cosmic Spirit. If at that stage we were to think the thought 'circle', our spirit would assume the 'shape' of the meaning of 'circle'. Our whole reality would consists of the meaning of 'circle' - there would be no need for thought-perception of it, because we experience the perfect meaning of it - our spirit is one and the same with the idea, the meaningful quality of 'circleness' through and through. There's nothing that a perception could add to the idea that we experience as the entire meaning of our Divinity. In fact, if there was a perception of 'circle' this would immediately mean that there's also a question to be asked. If we have a perception in our Divine mind then this means that there's at least one more idea present - the idea of perception. In the first state, our whole Universe was made of the meaning of 'circle'. Now in addition to that, we experience also the idea of 'reflection', something which I have thrust out of myself in order to symbolize the meaning of 'circle' which was previously my complete reality. In certain sense I must suck out (not in) my own spiritual essence and create a void shaped as circle. If we fill it completely with our spiritual essence everything becomes the invisible meaning of 'circle' again. But we don't allow this to happen. We resist the suction and we keep the void open. Now this void exists for our Divine being similarly to the pencil. We can now experience many other ideas in relation to it. In certain sense the void tries to suck in from our meaningful essence an infinity of possible ideas that can try to approximate its shape (every idea except 'circle', which would close the void perfectly). For example, we can try to fill the void with meaningful essence in the shape of a 'hexagon'. It's like saying: "this thing (we can't address it with its real concept because that would immediately fill the void perfectly and the perception would vanish) looks to me like a hexagon." The void sucks in our ideal nature into itself and we assume the meaning-shape of a hexagon. Yet, just like the pencil, the perception doesn't completely disappear because the idea that we experience is not a perfect fit. The hexagon fills the circle but there are six sectors of the circle that remain:

Now these sectors will continue to exercise suction on our essential being, which would suggest infinity of other shapes of meaning that could fill the sectors. If we imagine this process even further we can picture how a whole Universe of perceptions and meaning can sprout forth.

Now please don't take this as the literal mechanism of Creation. It is true that the above analogy contains something fundamentally essential, something which in the past was known only by Initiates in the deepest secrecy of the Mystery schools, but there are so many, many, many more things to be known for this to become true knowledge.

So in the light of the above we can glimpse at the mystery of idea and perception and also why even our own thoughts are not perfect mirrors of meaning. We do fill voids with the concepts of our human thinking but they don't fit the voids perfectly, there are 'sectors' left and that's why we perceive our thoughts. The thought perceptions basically tell us "we, your thought perceptions, exist only because the meaning that you think doesn't yet fit the Divine Cosmos perfectly. We stand here as 'cut out sectors' testimony that you must keep refining your spiritual essence, such that it can assume better and better the true shape of the Cosmos, with less and less 'sectors' being left out.

It should be noted that this holds true even for simple qualities as, say, 'red'. Even if we imagine that our human consciousness was filled entirely with pure perception of red, when we fill the void with our intellectual concept of 'red', this wouldn't make the redness disappear. The reason is that our intellectual concept of red is very imperfect fit for the red void that tries to suck in our human spirit. It is in fact possible that we reach the point where color is filled nearly perfectly with meaning and practically the perception ceases to exist. This is achievable only through the highest form of cognition - Intuitive consciousness - where we live in color as in a Cosmic Being - we live and experience reality from the meaningful perspective of a Divine being, whose shadow in our human state we perceive simply as the quality of color. The more this Divine perspective becomes a perception, the more it means that the ideal essence through which we try to fill the perceptual voids is imperfect and there's a lot left out, which continues to remind us: "I, the color perception, continue to stand in front of you because your concept of color doesn't yet capture my true essence. Only in the highest of worlds, you're free enough from your human form, such that you can assume the shape of the Divine spiritual essence that can fill me completely, and then you'll know my Divinity from the inside."

I've been pondering this post and trying to work out how intuitions fit in. Ethical intuitionists understand moral intuitions as being immediately apprehended by our understanding, self-evident propositions. I'm seeing tension here with Cleric's great post some time back. Whatever the moral intuitive percepts, our thinking rushes in to fill the void of meaning. There is no self-evident proposition served fully cooked on a platter ready for consumption, rather a dynamic interaction with our thinking essence which supplies the meaning. But then, there does seem to be a quality to intuitions where they do indeed seem to present fully cooked.

[AshvinP]

I've been pondering this post and trying to work out how intuitions fit in. Ethical intuitionists understand moral intuitions as being immediately apprehended by our understanding, self-evident propositions. I'm seeing tension here with Cleric's great post some time back. Whatever the moral intuitive percepts, our thinking rushes in to fill the void of meaning. There is no self-evident proposition served fully cooked on a platter ready for consumption, rather a dynamic interaction with our thinking essence which supplies the meaning. But then, there does seem to be a quality to intuitions where they do indeed seem to present fully cooked.

Anthony,

As we await a response from Cleric, you may find it helpful to consider this passage. Ethical intuitions, or conscience, is exactly what has evolved in our ordinary cognitive experience which takes us furthest towards the inner perspective of the spiritual Cosmos, even though it remains dim and fleeting for most people now. He also wrote about it recently here with respect to meditation.

If one looks nowadays with a more than ordinarily perceptive eye at the human race all over the earth, one becomes aware that it possesses two human qualities that were simply not present in antiquity. This is a fact susceptible of proof. The two new qualities are compassion and conscience, and they will go on developing more and more fully as man submits his soul-life to spiritual schooling. Compassion and conscience were new acquisitions at a certain point in evolution.

Much that is called compassion is not worthy of the term. True compassion is the capacity to forget oneself and enter another's being so completely that one feels his suffering as he feels it. One's own ego is quite forgotten in such fellow-feeling; one lives entirely in the other's experience.
...
Conscience is the other. It speaks to our innermost being; the listener follows the bidding of a voice that penetrates to where his ego lives. He subjects the self to something larger than itself. Compassion and conscience are thus forces that man is presently engaged in developing. Consciousness will build further on the foundation of the forms that compassion and conscience have thus far taken, going on to develop the spiritual vision that was previously attainable only in abnormal states of consciousness. To say this is not to make a prophecy but to state a fact determined by strictly scientific means... Those in whom compassion and conscience have borne fruit will say, however, that although birth saddles us with predispositions that cannot be thrown off, we are also endowed with something that is not bound up with matter and that enables us to rise above ourselves and enter the spiritual world. There is one realm — the realm of one's own soul — where there will be direct spiritual vision. Human beings will affirm that although they are tied on the one hand to physical matter, on the other the soul harbors a radiant helper capable of lifting us beyond ourselves, it is a feeling that suggests the following comparison. Suppose there were someone who found it hard to believe that air everywhere surrounds us and fills every empty space. All he has to do to convince himself is to create a vacuum and observe how the air rushes into it. Just such an empty space is created in the soul by compassion and conscience, both of which detach us from our ego. Into that vacuum streams the spiritual entity whom we know as the Christ. This gives us personal experience of the fact that we can receive Christ into ourselves. Christ Who is present in the spiritual atmosphere just as air is present in the physical atmosphere and flows into every Space it finds empty.

[Cleric K]

I've been pondering this post and trying to work out how intuitions fit in. Ethical intuitionists understand moral intuitions as being immediately apprehended by our understanding, self-evident propositions. I'm seeing tension here with Cleric's great post some time back. Whatever the moral intuitive percepts, our thinking rushes in to fill the void of meaning. There is no self-evident proposition served fully cooked on a platter ready for consumption, rather a dynamic interaction with our thinking essence which supplies the meaning. But then, there does seem to be a quality to intuitions where they do indeed seem to present fully cooked.

Anthony, I'm not sure I could follow. But maybe that's because I'm half asleep already. I'll see it again tomorrow.

Otherwise, I wanted to ask you, if you're willing to share, whether something noticable has changed for you in the last years? I'm not asking about new metaphysical ideas that you may have encountered but about living experience. For example, if you have to explain to someone how you experience and understand reality, how would you go about that?