Anthroposophy for Dummies

[Anthony66]

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?

What you ask is a very difficult question for me. I've tried on a few occasions to describe to people I know how I view reality but have been very disappointed in my ability to do so.

Let me not answer the question first and make a few surrounding comments. I have been amazed that this whole stream of esoteric, occult, hermetic, initiatic thought has escaped my gaze up until this point in my life. A lot of the time I have the sense that here at last is where the answers to the riddles of reality are to be found. But I still have a slight hesitancy given my evangelical Christian influence. I react to some of the use of scripture which defies what might be viewed as sound exegetical patterns. I sometimes feel that it brings us down to the lower realms and lower beings rather than raising our gaze to the transcendent divinity. I also wonder about the contrast between the personal relationship with Jesus or the Lord which typifies the evangelical experience verses the more impersonal "gradient of being", "resonant harmonic relations" and the like. A harmonization or integration between the esoteric streams and the classical streams is important to me, hence my line of questions surrounding non-dual practice which is the bedrock of so many ancient and contemporary spiritual life.

I'd say that my view of reality is definitely leaning towards the esoteric but to be honest, the lived experience spoken of here eludes me to this point.

Adding a little clarification to my last post, I'm speaking of moral intuitions as percepts which arise in our inner experience, for example, an immediate apprehension of an inclination against taking that which is not mine. An associated thought appears, "I should not steal". My question pertains to how fully formed this apprehension is when it arises in consciousness. What is it that our thinking contributes to that initial appearance?

[AshvinP]

But I still have a slight hesitancy given my evangelical Christian influence. I react to some of the use of scripture which defies what might be viewed as sound exegetical patterns. I sometimes feel that it brings us down to the lower realms and lower beings rather than raising our gaze to the transcendent divinity. I also wonder about the contrast between the personal relationship with Jesus or the Lord which typifies the evangelical experience verses the more impersonal "gradient of being", "resonant harmonic relations" and the like. A harmonization or integration between the esoteric streams and the classical streams is important to me, hence my line of questions surrounding non-dual practice which is the bedrock of so many ancient and contemporary spiritual life.

Anthony, I just want to mention that I can relate to the above. I may have mentioned before my few year period of evangelical Christian influence. I ended up in quite a few arguments with people who seemed to be defying the 'exegetical' or 'literal' understanding of scripture, for ex. Scott As it so happens, that was a key milestone on my way here, because Scott introduced me to Barfield. Then I forgot about it for awhile until, after listening to Jordan Peterson, I was reminded of Barfield again and decided to ask Scott about him, which led me to BK and this forum, and then to Cleric and Steiner/PoF.

A clear point of contact between exoteric-esoteric is that of faith in and love for the Spirit. The difference is that the esoteric doesn't only view the Spirit as an abstract placeholder for a remote Divinity, but as the life force which animates our inner activity of thinking, through which we encounter the World and redeem the appearances as they enact suction on our spirit. After we persist in our thoughtful devotion to the Spirit for some time, we are naturally guided to experiencing the birth of its reality within. The role of exoteric religion, and of all historical cultural traditions, becomes more and more clearly woven into the holistic tapestry of our spiritual evolution - they are not diminished by this knowledge, but greatly enriched.

I won't get into details on my understanding of that connection now, but will share the following passage, which is entirely in accord with the Anthroposophical path even if it doesn't seem that way at first. We can find many parts of Steiner's lectures which echo this understanding.

FAITH is the experience of divine breath; HOPE is the experience of divine light; and LOVE is the experience of divine fire. There is no authentic and sincere religious life without faith, hope and love; but there is no faith, hope and love without mystical experience or, what is the same thing, without grace. No intellectual argument can awaken faith; what it can do, at best, is to eliminate obstacles, misunderstandings and prejudices, and thus help to establish the state of interior silence necessary for the experience of the divine breath. But faith itself is the divine breath whose origin is found neither in logical reasoning, nor in aesthetic impression, nor in human moral action.

The divine and flaming Word shines in the world of the silence of the soul and “moves” it. This movement is living faith—therefore real and authentic—and its light is hope or illumination, whilst all springs from the divine fire which is love or union with God. The three “ways” or stages of traditional mysticism—purification, illumination and union—are those of the experience of divine breath or faith, divine light or hope, and divine fire or love. These three fundamental experiences of the revelation of the Divine constitute the triangle of life—for no spirit, no soul and equally no body would be able to live if entirely deprived of all love, all hope and all faith.

Anonymous . Meditations on the Tarot (p. 71). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[Cleric K]

I also wonder about the contrast between the personal relationship with Jesus or the Lord which typifies the evangelical experience verses the more impersonal "gradient of being", "resonant harmonic relations" and the like. A harmonization or integration between the esoteric streams and the classical streams is important to me, hence my line of questions surrounding non-dual practice which is the bedrock of so many ancient and contemporary spiritual life.

Thank you, Anthony, for sharing! I would like to note that the esoteric deepening of consciousness doesn’t invalidate our personal relation with the Divine. Instead, this relationship becomes even more profound and infinitely more intimate. That’s understandable through the fact that the Macrocosmic Christ being is the inspirer of the “I” within our microcosm. The Divine “I am” principle is ‘stepped down’ from the sublime Macrocosmic heights to the microcosmic perspective and in the process it becomes more and more similar to the human “I”-experience. This has been accomplished through the events two thousand years ago when the living Word adapted itself to the human form, it stepped down all the way, so to speak, it united with the flesh. This is very significant because this Divine being, even though of the highest origin, is at the same time the closest to our innermost experience. Of all the higher beings, the Christ is a special case in that we have a special overlap with him – we both know the experience of the Earthly human condition. An angel doesn’t know this experience. The Christ knows it because he has gone through what it means to be a human in the sensory spectrum. And this experience is no other but to experience death. In this way the evolutionary backbone of humanity is set in place through which the human “I” can grow into the Cosmos. A point of overlap has been provided between the human experience and the Cosmic.

The experience of Paul on the way to Damascus is possible. The Christ can be experienced as a being relatable to us because he has gone through the human experience. The Christ is by no means a simple being. It has different expressions depending on the world where we relate to him. He’s a friend, a Master, an Angel, a God.

It is for such reasons that even exoteric Christianity has had its rightful place in the evolution of mankind. Man had to first identify with Christ-the human. By delving into the gospels and co-experiencing his destiny, we gradually discover this archetypal human experience that each one of us is also going through. What the Christ has left as teachings is secondary. The secret goal has always been by submerging into the gospels to share in the life of the Savior. Not to read the gospels as a story about some trials that someone has experienced but to seek the first-person experience and merge with it – what it is to be a Divine being, to descend into human flesh, be devoured by the world and then resurrect for eternal life in the spirit and drag the world along. If the world hadn't killed the Christ it wouldn't have anything to share with him. Our Earth would slowly fade away undisturbed, much like scientists today predict the heat death. But things happened in such a way that he was killed and thus the World inflicted upon itself Karma. Now the World will suffer the consequences - it will be melted and transfigured by Love and Light. This is what you get when you mess with the Divine.

This aspect of Christianity remains fully valid. In one way or another we need to find the personal experience of Christ-the human within ourselves and the gospels have been the traditional way to accomplish this identification. But today the Christ wants to share with us not only his human aspect but also the increasingly Cosmic ones. So we shouldn’t look on exoteric and esoteric Christianity as being in fundamental conflict. The former can really be the preparation for the latter – we start from the personal relation with Christ-the human and go deeper to know him as a Cosmic being that has stepped down to become relatable to our human consciousness. This path however, requires certain preconditions which are largely the result of Karma. We need some innate faith in the Christ and not everyone arrives with such a soul constitution.

The spiritual scientific way of initiation can be seen as the path for those souls who have grown strong in their individual thinking and can no longer experience the gospels in the way a religious person could. If they were to read the gospels, such a person does what the modern theologians do – they take the Christ, put him on a petri dish and begin dissecting him. All of this without ever questioning what does the conscious “I” who does the dissecting, has to do with the living Christ. For such a soul, initially the Christ can only be found as the mysterious inner life that energizes our individual thinking and guides it toward convergence.

Adding a little clarification to my last post, I'm speaking of moral intuitions as percepts which arise in our inner experience, for example, an immediate apprehension of an inclination against taking that which is not mine. An associated thought appears, "I should not steal". My question pertains to how fully formed this apprehension is when it arises in consciousness. What is it that our thinking contributes to that initial appearance?

When thinking about the sensory world we arrive at certain intuitions like inertia, pressure, temperature and so on. This may lead us to believe that higher intuition, which reveals the moral dimension of the Cosmos, analogously reveals moral laws, as some articles, paragraphs, points. This however is not the case. A law like ‘don’t steal’ is only the outermost conclusion one can draw once we understand the inner workings of reality. If we read ‘don’t smoke cigarettes’ this is not some fundamental law of the universe but a conclusion that can be made when we observe the workings of the physical body in the light of health and sickness. In our soul and spirit we exist within the moral order of reality which is not weaved of abstract rules but living currents of being. Then a moral intuition is our inner comprehension of the way these thought-beings manifest. Moral laws as we think of them are only the outermost summaries of these realities when projected on our very specific human conditions (and which are obviously valid for a certain epoch).

It’s important to understand that the moral order of reality is not simply some harmony of relations between completely self-contained soul atoms. This makes it sound like even if all atoms are at war in the spiritual world, we could still go into our inner world and have a little time off. This however is not the case because when we lose the shell of the body, the spiritual world is the inner world. We don’t have a private space where we can be alone with our thoughts. The spiritual world constitutes our organs of existence, so to speak. If the moral order could be corrupted this wouldn’t simply mean that our external environment will be uncomfortable while we maintain the unity of our inner world but instead, it would be more like our existence falls apart, as if lobes of our Cosmic brain are excised and we progressively lose consciousness. In this sense, the moral order of the Cosmos is the very essence of our spiritual being, it’s not some assessment of the surrounding conditions in the spiritual world, whether they are harmonious or dissonant.

[Anthony66]

When thinking about the sensory world we arrive at certain intuitions like inertia, pressure, temperature and so on. This may lead us to believe that higher intuition, which reveals the moral dimension of the Cosmos, analogously reveals moral laws, as some articles, paragraphs, points. This however is not the case. A law like ‘don’t steal’ is only the outermost conclusion one can draw once we understand the inner workings of reality. If we read ‘don’t smoke cigarettes’ this is not some fundamental law of the universe but a conclusion that can be made when we observe the workings of the physical body in the light of health and sickness. In our soul and spirit we exist within the moral order of reality which is not weaved of abstract rules but living currents of being. Then a moral intuition is our inner comprehension of the way these thought-beings manifest. Moral laws as we think of them are only the outermost summaries of these realities when projected on our very specific human conditions (and which are obviously valid for a certain epoch).

It’s important to understand that the moral order of reality is not simply some harmony of relations between completely self-contained soul atoms. This makes it sound like even if all atoms are at war in the spiritual world, we could still go into our inner world and have a little time off. This however is not the case because when we lose the shell of the body, the spiritual world is the inner world. We don’t have a private space where we can be alone with our thoughts. The spiritual world constitutes our organs of existence, so to speak. If the moral order could be corrupted this wouldn’t simply mean that our external environment will be uncomfortable while we maintain the unity of our inner world but instead, it would be more like our existence falls apart, as if lobes of our Cosmic brain are excised and we progressively lose consciousness. In this sense, the moral order of the Cosmos is the very essence of our spiritual being, it’s not some assessment of the surrounding conditions in the spiritual world, whether they are harmonious or dissonant.

Focusing on the highlighted text, how do we understand this from a PoF perspective? What is the percept here? What is it that our thinking supplies meaning to and is all this thinking, this "inner comprehension", behind the veil, in the realms of higher cognition?

[Cleric K]

Focusing on the highlighted text, how do we understand this from a PoF perspective? What is the percept here? What is it that our thinking supplies meaning to and is all this thinking, this "inner comprehension", behind the veil, in the realms of higher cognition?

That’s a great question. The polarity perception-intuition is really the fundamental axis of being. Yet it is experienced differently at each level of convolution. It is only in our Earthly stage where perceptions and concepts are experienced in such an orthogonal way. This is what allows us to experience ourselves as a thinking ego that is clearly distinct from the perceptions, except in thinking itself, where the two come together.

In our ordinary Earthly consciousness we’re not yet dealing with the higher spiritual realities, yet moral intuitions are possible in the spirit of PoF. In that case the perceptions are our normal sensory ones. Think for example about the parable of the Good Samaritan. When he sees the injured man he has completely normal perceptions. Against these perceptions he unites the intuition of moral action. Of course, in that particular case the samaritan has probably acted quite instinctively, out of simple good heart but today we can cultivate the conditions for such intuitions by working consciously for greater understanding of reality and ennobling our feelings. Such knowledge is not simply theoretical but aligns us with the flow of reality and our intuition becomes heightened for ideas that are in harmony with it. For this reason, the normal sensory perceptions are seen differently, they evoke different ideas, we see opportunities for different actions.

Things transform when we step into the Imaginative world. In our ordinary consciousness, if we are in the dark or with eyes closed, we can describe our state as an all-encompassing perception of darkness and here and there our own thoughts sparkle, memory images or fantasies flash. These flashes are united with certain intuition. For example, if a random memory image flashes up, it is experienced together with certain meaning, we simply know what we have remembered, there’s often implicit intuitive context about where and when the thing happened. In other words, the intuition of the memory image fits in the overall intuitive landscape of our present life (for example, if only the sensory content of a memory image of ours was to flash in someone else’s consciousness, it would be like a random photo without any context). It is similar with thinking. All these cognitive experiences can be described as fragmentary flashes within the more encompassing volume of soul content.

When we cultivate the proper feelings and ideas (which act as a fertile soil), we can meditate on a single thought-image while leaving in the periphery everything else. With practice, we’re able to support this single flash for prolonged periods of time and if we succeed to relax the geometry of our ego (which otherwise tries to feel as a container of the flash) then the nature of the flash begins to fill our whole consciousness. Our whole inner world becomes of the nature of a thought-image, yet this thought-image has life of its own that feeds back on our activity. Normally we don’t notice this life of a thought. This is easy to understand when for example we try to sing. Then we may find out that the sound that comes out is not exactly what we intend it to be (thus it has some life of its own). It is similar even in our thinking but vastly more difficult to notice because thoughts in general are so tightly coupled with our intuitive intents. Yet thought perceptions are not under our absolute control. As a simplified example, we can try to think white color, to fill our whole inner world with white. Then we find out that we can’t get it quite right. There’s all kinds of noise that pollute the whiteness. What is this noise? In the most general sense, it’s the World Process of which our body is also a part. Whatever that noise is, it tells us something of the World Process and it does that by feeding back on our intuition, it modifies it so to speak. This is true even in materialism. There’s some neural activity which causes the experience of the noise, so in a sense it tells us something of the physical world process. If we could imagine pure white then our whole inner world would be filled also with the pure idea of whiteness. But when that whiteness is resisted, our intuition is modified. It is as if the noise punches holes in our intuitive-substance and we understand: “These holes were supposed to be filled with the laminar intuition of whiteness through and through, yet something works back on me and forces me to experience different intuition against these holes.”

This gives us some idea of Imaginative cognition. Our whole inner world is illuminated with our intense thinking ray, yet the World Process works back and modifies the intuition that we project. Cognition in this state depends on a delicate balance. If we’re too oppressive with our spiritual activity we simply become insensitive to the gentle modifications of our activity. It’s like we have the will to move our hand but no sense of touch that feeds back. On the other hand we can be too passive and allow our soul state to be completely dragged by the World Process. This results in a flow of phenomena but they remain inexplicable, just like a stream of letters remains just perceptions if we don’t try to connect with it the intuition attained by reading.

So instead of having perceptions and forming concepts of them, in the center of our consciousness we place our spiritual activity which supports certain intuition but now all our interest is to experience how this activity is being modified, resisted, amplified, etc. by the World Process. We don’t think about the World Process. All thinking has been concentrated into only one single thought which now fills our entire consciousness. From the perspective of the Imaginative state our thinking ego is completely still, it supports a single expanded thought. Yet the way this expanded thought is being modified in the most various ways, is experienced in our holistic intuition. Gradually we begin to grasp the contours of our body within this expanded thought-substance, starting from the head region. This can be called the experience of the etheric body. It has to be stressed how different this is from simply having some visionary experience to which we decide to attach the concept of an etheric body. That should be considered a hallucination.

So we see how many things have to be considered if we are to understand how this polarity of perception-intuition transforms as we go through the first deconvolution. If the above is grasped it should be clear how we gain consciousness of the World Process in a completely different way compared to what we do in science and philosophy. Yet to come to these experiences we need a specific kind of surrender. We can’t pretend that our inner world is completely our dominion. Through the mentioned balance we have to make our expanded meditative thought the higher sense organ in which we intuit the World Process. In contrast to ordinary sense perception, where our “I” is the only conscious being in our inner world, in this experience of the World Process we’re clearly conscious of the activity of many spiritual beings. That is, these modifications are not simply lifeless mechanical effects that we interpret anthropomorphically but every modification has something to do with complicated interference of spiritual intents of beings.

The experiences in the etheric body reveal entirely new secrets to us. In our physical body we’re just a being that beholds perceptions and thinks, feels and wills. In the etheric body a whole new world emerges. This ‘body’ shouldn’t be imagined simply as some energy body made of electricity and magnetism or whatever. It can only be grasped as thought essence. The etheric body also has temporal structure. In a certain sense, just like a tree has its tree rings which are accumulation of wood through different periods of time, so the etheric body can be metaphorically conceived as stacked shells of our states of being through our life. Our state of fertilized egg, our child state, our adult state are all stacked together. The etheric body is like the telos or time curvature which exists as something whole and within which the physical states unfold.

We can continue in a similar way also for the other deconvolutions, which lead us to the Inspirative and Intuitive stage, yet things get more difficult to describe. Each stage has to be investigated individually. As it should be clear, we can’t simply take the polarity of percept and concept and abstractly extrapolate it to understand the Imaginative state. We have to enter in the concrete experiences, we can’t simply think them out through combinations of abstract concepts. The other direction however, is trivial. It is transparently obvious from the Imaginative state how our Earthly consciousness comes about, since the latter is only a more rigidified Imaginative state, where the flow is polarized into concepts and perceptions in a kind of hysteresis process. So in PoF it is fundamentally true that all existence evolves through this integration of percept and intuition, yet it is not a smooth linear process. It passes through ‘phase-transitions’, so to speak, as the folds of reality are deconvoluted. Hopefully this helps to see that the question ‘what is the percept to which intuition unites’ should be answered differently depending on the stage of consciousness. As a general rule, in our intellectual consciousness we have the most polarized state, where on one side we have concepts, on the other – perceptions of a world that seems completely opaque and has nothing to do with our inner experience. This polarity is brought one step towards integration in the Imaginative state where it is already clear that our ideal activity is being modified by likewise ideal activities, even though we still grasp this through the way the imaginative soul ‘substance’ is being stamped by these activities. In Inspiration and Intuition we live closer and closer with the actual inner activity of the beings, thus there’s no longer an experience of a physical or elemental world where our activities meet.

[Anthony66]

Focusing on the highlighted text, how do we understand this from a PoF perspective? What is the percept here? What is it that our thinking supplies meaning to and is all this thinking, this "inner comprehension", behind the veil, in the realms of higher cognition?

That’s a great question. The polarity perception-intuition is really the fundamental axis of being. Yet it is experienced differently at each level of convolution. It is only in our Earthly stage where perceptions and concepts are experienced in such an orthogonal way. This is what allows us to experience ourselves as a thinking ego that is clearly distinct from the perceptions, except in thinking itself, where the two come together.

In our ordinary Earthly consciousness we’re not yet dealing with the higher spiritual realities, yet moral intuitions are possible in the spirit of PoF. In that case the perceptions are our normal sensory ones. Think for example about the parable of the Good Samaritan. When he sees the injured man he has completely normal perceptions. Against these perceptions he unites the intuition of moral action. Of course, in that particular case the samaritan has probably acted quite instinctively, out of simple good heart but today we can cultivate the conditions for such intuitions by working consciously for greater understanding of reality and ennobling our feelings. Such knowledge is not simply theoretical but aligns us with the flow of reality and our intuition becomes heightened for ideas that are in harmony with it. For this reason, the normal sensory perceptions are seen differently, they evoke different ideas, we see opportunities for different actions.

Things transform when we step into the Imaginative world. In our ordinary consciousness, if we are in the dark or with eyes closed, we can describe our state as an all-encompassing perception of darkness and here and there our own thoughts sparkle, memory images or fantasies flash. These flashes are united with certain intuition. For example, if a random memory image flashes up, it is experienced together with certain meaning, we simply know what we have remembered, there’s often implicit intuitive context about where and when the thing happened. In other words, the intuition of the memory image fits in the overall intuitive landscape of our present life (for example, if only the sensory content of a memory image of ours was to flash in someone else’s consciousness, it would be like a random photo without any context). It is similar with thinking. All these cognitive experiences can be described as fragmentary flashes within the more encompassing volume of soul content.

When we cultivate the proper feelings and ideas (which act as a fertile soil), we can meditate on a single thought-image while leaving in the periphery everything else. With practice, we’re able to support this single flash for prolonged periods of time and if we succeed to relax the geometry of our ego (which otherwise tries to feel as a container of the flash) then the nature of the flash begins to fill our whole consciousness. Our whole inner world becomes of the nature of a thought-image, yet this thought-image has life of its own that feeds back on our activity. Normally we don’t notice this life of a thought. This is easy to understand when for example we try to sing. Then we may find out that the sound that comes out is not exactly what we intend it to be (thus it has some life of its own). It is similar even in our thinking but vastly more difficult to notice because thoughts in general are so tightly coupled with our intuitive intents. Yet thought perceptions are not under our absolute control. As a simplified example, we can try to think white color, to fill our whole inner world with white. Then we find out that we can’t get it quite right. There’s all kinds of noise that pollute the whiteness. What is this noise? In the most general sense, it’s the World Process of which our body is also a part. Whatever that noise is, it tells us something of the World Process and it does that by feeding back on our intuition, it modifies it so to speak. This is true even in materialism. There’s some neural activity which causes the experience of the noise, so in a sense it tells us something of the physical world process. If we could imagine pure white then our whole inner world would be filled also with the pure idea of whiteness. But when that whiteness is resisted, our intuition is modified. It is as if the noise punches holes in our intuitive-substance and we understand: “These holes were supposed to be filled with the laminar intuition of whiteness through and through, yet something works back on me and forces me to experience different intuition against these holes.”

This gives us some idea of Imaginative cognition. Our whole inner world is illuminated with our intense thinking ray, yet the World Process works back and modifies the intuition that we project. Cognition in this state depends on a delicate balance. If we’re too oppressive with our spiritual activity we simply become insensitive to the gentle modifications of our activity. It’s like we have the will to move our hand but no sense of touch that feeds back. On the other hand we can be too passive and allow our soul state to be completely dragged by the World Process. This results in a flow of phenomena but they remain inexplicable, just like a stream of letters remains just perceptions if we don’t try to connect with it the intuition attained by reading.

So instead of having perceptions and forming concepts of them, in the center of our consciousness we place our spiritual activity which supports certain intuition but now all our interest is to experience how this activity is being modified, resisted, amplified, etc. by the World Process. We don’t think about the World Process. All thinking has been concentrated into only one single thought which now fills our entire consciousness. From the perspective of the Imaginative state our thinking ego is completely still, it supports a single expanded thought. Yet the way this expanded thought is being modified in the most various ways, is experienced in our holistic intuition. Gradually we begin to grasp the contours of our body within this expanded thought-substance, starting from the head region. This can be called the experience of the etheric body. It has to be stressed how different this is from simply having some visionary experience to which we decide to attach the concept of an etheric body. That should be considered a hallucination.

So we see how many things have to be considered if we are to understand how this polarity of perception-intuition transforms as we go through the first deconvolution. If the above is grasped it should be clear how we gain consciousness of the World Process in a completely different way compared to what we do in science and philosophy. Yet to come to these experiences we need a specific kind of surrender. We can’t pretend that our inner world is completely our dominion. Through the mentioned balance we have to make our expanded meditative thought the higher sense organ in which we intuit the World Process. In contrast to ordinary sense perception, where our “I” is the only conscious being in our inner world, in this experience of the World Process we’re clearly conscious of the activity of many spiritual beings. That is, these modifications are not simply lifeless mechanical effects that we interpret anthropomorphically but every modification has something to do with complicated interference of spiritual intents of beings.

The experiences in the etheric body reveal entirely new secrets to us. In our physical body we’re just a being that beholds perceptions and thinks, feels and wills. In the etheric body a whole new world emerges. This ‘body’ shouldn’t be imagined simply as some energy body made of electricity and magnetism or whatever. It can only be grasped as thought essence. The etheric body also has temporal structure. In a certain sense, just like a tree has its tree rings which are accumulation of wood through different periods of time, so the etheric body can be metaphorically conceived as stacked shells of our states of being through our life. Our state of fertilized egg, our child state, our adult state are all stacked together. The etheric body is like the telos or time curvature which exists as something whole and within which the physical states unfold.

We can continue in a similar way also for the other deconvolutions, which lead us to the Inspirative and Intuitive stage, yet things get more difficult to describe. Each stage has to be investigated individually. As it should be clear, we can’t simply take the polarity of percept and concept and abstractly extrapolate it to understand the Imaginative state. We have to enter in the concrete experiences, we can’t simply think them out through combinations of abstract concepts. The other direction however, is trivial. It is transparently obvious from the Imaginative state how our Earthly consciousness comes about, since the latter is only a more rigidified Imaginative state, where the flow is polarized into concepts and perceptions in a kind of hysteresis process. So in PoF it is fundamentally true that all existence evolves through this integration of percept and intuition, yet it is not a smooth linear process. It passes through ‘phase-transitions’, so to speak, as the folds of reality are deconvoluted. Hopefully this helps to see that the question ‘what is the percept to which intuition unites’ should be answered differently depending on the stage of consciousness. As a general rule, in our intellectual consciousness we have the most polarized state, where on one side we have concepts, on the other – perceptions of a world that seems completely opaque and has nothing to do with our inner experience. This polarity is brought one step towards integration in the Imaginative state where it is already clear that our ideal activity is being modified by likewise ideal activities, even though we still grasp this through the way the imaginative soul ‘substance’ is being stamped by these activities. In Inspiration and Intuition we live closer and closer with the actual inner activity of the beings, thus there’s no longer an experience of a physical or elemental world where our activities meet.

Thanks Cleric for another illuminating post. I feel like I have a better grasp of what imaginative cognition means and the goals of meditation. But...I'm still not settled in regard to my line of questioning here.

It is often spoken of here of Thinking precipitating into (dead) thought percepts. In the "The Center of the Central Topic (Part 1)" you described a hysteresis process - a polarity between what we do as thinking and what we are thinking about. In my understanding to this point, when we apprehend a moral intuition with our everyday, "lower cognition", it it freezes so to speak. It becomes a thought percept which invites further thinking. For example it might lead to us attaching the concept "moral intuition". Or it might lead to a particular course of action in a given situation.

There is a parallel process between the generation of sensory perceptions (of which we might get to the bottom of in the other thread) and the generation of moral perceptions.

How far off the mark is this?

[Cleric K]

Thanks Cleric for another illuminating post. I feel like I have a better grasp of what imaginative cognition means and the goals of meditation. But...I'm still not settled in regard to my line of questioning here.

It is often spoken of here of Thinking precipitating into (dead) thought percepts. In the "The Center of the Central Topic (Part 1)" you described a hysteresis process - a polarity between what we do as thinking and what we are thinking about. In my understanding to this point, when we apprehend a moral intuition with our everyday, "lower cognition", it it freezes so to speak. It becomes a thought percept which invites further thinking. For example it might lead to us attaching the concept "moral intuition". Or it might lead to a particular course of action in a given situation.

That's right. In the most simple terms, the key in PoF is that moral intuitions are not based on predefined (already frozen) rules but it is like we're creating the rule of action always anew from insight into the concrete case and its wide context.

To understand this we need to feel how it clashes with our secular intuition. In general, we feel that human beings are unreliable. They are driven by egoistic desires and if they are to act from their own insight, chaos will ensue because everyone will be pulling towards their own interest. This is not because people are necessarily evil but because we view the Universe as inherently random. Even with best of intentions it is assumed that the Brownian motion of agents will result in collisions. That's why it is assumed that some kind of rules are needed which enforce an envelope of conduct.

The depth of PoF, which turns out is very hard to grasp for many, leads us to the idea that the more we undress the layers of conditioning of personality, family, nation, race, gender, religion, the more we discover ourselves as a spiritual being that draws upon a holistic source of inspiration, which is inherently coherent.

Think of the Pauli exclusion principle which says that two electrons can only occupy the same orbital only if they have opposite spins. There's no way that two electrons can fight over the same orbital. Such is the case when we come in contact with our innermost spiritual being. The holistic ground of reality has unique orbital for every being. If beings fight over the same orbital it is because they don't know their innermost being but have been swayed by unlawful desires. To resolve the conflict the beings would have to undress the clothes of desire and ignorance, and draw inspiration from their more coherent core. However, to draw that inspiration we need to be developed as an individual spiritual being, we can't depend on the church to be intermediary between our soul and the Source. This Source of coherency is approached gradually. As said in the previous post, we find it as a human being, a friend, a Master and so on to the Divine.

The point of all this is that yes, we crystalize moral intuitions for each concrete case but it is always a creative act through which we seek to express the Divine coherency, where all orbitals can flow without friction and fighting for the same slot.

There is a parallel process between the generation of sensory perceptions (of which we might get to the bottom of in the other thread) and the generation of moral perceptions.

How far off the mark is this?

We'll have to continue with the question about perceptions but for the time being I think that it would be more appropriate to see the two not as parallel but as opposite. If we imagine sensory perceptions as crystalizing similar to our thoughts this would lead to quite false (and somewhat solipsistic) view that all reality consists of the screen of our consciousness and the outer world is simply pixels flashing on and off. Instead, sensory perceptions can be thought of as our intercourse with beings. We crystalize our thoughts and actions but other beings do the same and their sum total activity feels to us as the World of which our body, brain, nerves and sensory organs are also part (and are also colonies of elemental beings). So the key is not to imagine that the perceptions of the world precipitate from within our perspective in a way similar our thoughts do. Instead, they are our 'rubbing against' the freedom of spiritual beings, which invites us to know these beings.

Take the case with perceiving another human being. If we imagine that the perceptions of them are generated in a way similar to our thoughts, then this leads us to a quite solipsistic view where people, animals, plants, minerals are only crystalized pixels in our Divine imagination. Instead, these pixels should be seen as impressions of the activities of beings whose inner life we're not yet acquainted with. This includes our bodily organs themselves too.

[Anthony66]

Thanks Cleric for another illuminating post. I feel like I have a better grasp of what imaginative cognition means and the goals of meditation. But...I'm still not settled in regard to my line of questioning here.

It is often spoken of here of Thinking precipitating into (dead) thought percepts. In the "The Center of the Central Topic (Part 1)" you described a hysteresis process - a polarity between what we do as thinking and what we are thinking about. In my understanding to this point, when we apprehend a moral intuition with our everyday, "lower cognition", it it freezes so to speak. It becomes a thought percept which invites further thinking. For example it might lead to us attaching the concept "moral intuition". Or it might lead to a particular course of action in a given situation.

That's right. In the most simple terms, the key in PoF is that moral intuitions are not based on predefined (already frozen) rules but it is like we're creating the rule of action always anew from insight into the concrete case and its wide context.

To understand this we need to feel how it clashes with our secular intuition. In general, we feel that human beings are unreliable. They are driven by egoistic desires and if they are to act from their own insight, chaos will ensue because everyone will be pulling towards their own interest. This is not because people are necessarily evil but because we view the Universe as inherently random. Even with best of intentions it is assumed that the Brownian motion of agents will result in collisions. That's why it is assumed that some kind of rules are needed which enforce an envelope of conduct.

The depth of PoF, which turns out is very hard to grasp for many, leads us to the idea that the more we undress the layers of conditioning of personality, family, nation, race, gender, religion, the more we discover ourselves as a spiritual being that draws upon a holistic source of inspiration, which is inherently coherent.

Think of the Pauli exclusion principle which says that two electrons can only occupy the same orbital only if they have opposite spins. There's no way that two electrons can fight over the same orbital. Such is the case when we come in contact with our innermost spiritual being. The holistic ground of reality has unique orbital for every being. If beings fight over the same orbital it is because they don't know their innermost being but have been swayed by unlawful desires. To resolve the conflict the beings would have to undress the clothes of desire and ignorance, and draw inspiration from their more coherent core. However, to draw that inspiration we need to be developed as an individual spiritual being, we can't depend on the church to be intermediary between our soul and the Source. This Source of coherency is approached gradually. As said in the previous post, we find it as a human being, a friend, a Master and so on to the Divine.

The point of all this is that yes, we crystalize moral intuitions for each concrete case but it is always a creative act through which we seek to express the Divine coherency, where all orbitals can flow without friction and fighting for the same slot.

There is a parallel process between the generation of sensory perceptions (of which we might get to the bottom of in the other thread) and the generation of moral perceptions.

How far off the mark is this?

We'll have to continue with the question about perceptions but for the time being I think that it would be more appropriate to see the two not as parallel but as opposite. If we imagine sensory perceptions as crystalizing similar to our thoughts this would lead to quite false (and somewhat solipsistic) view that all reality consists of the screen of our consciousness and the outer world is simply pixels flashing on and off. Instead, sensory perceptions can be thought of as our intercourse with beings. We crystalize our thoughts and actions but other beings do the same and their sum total activity feels to us as the World of which our body, brain, nerves and sensory organs are also part (and are also colonies of elemental beings). So the key is not to imagine that the perceptions of the world precipitate from within our perspective in a way similar our thoughts do. Instead, they are our 'rubbing against' the freedom of spiritual beings, which invites us to know these beings.

Take the case with perceiving another human being. If we imagine that the perceptions of them are generated in a way similar to our thoughts, then this leads us to a quite solipsistic view where people, animals, plants, minerals are only crystalized pixels in our Divine imagination. Instead, these pixels should be seen as impressions of the activities of beings whose inner life we're not yet acquainted with. This includes our bodily organs themselves too.

Thanks Cleric! That was very helpful and addresses my questions.

[LukeJTM]

Would anyone like to go into more detail about what Rudolf Steiner called "the exceptional state" in Philosophy of Freedom?

He describes it as the state when we observe thinking itself, rather than the content of thoughts (i.e. what we are thinking about). And this is true, it is sort of exceptional, because it's overlooked. An example I know of is, well what am I doing right now to formulate this comment? There's something to explore. But that is going off track from my point. Imagine, a table. Normally, when we are looking at a table and maybe we describe it with someone and we say, "I am observing a table", but, we are actually having thoughts about a table and not merely observing. There is a conceptual component that interlaces with what is percieved through the senses. This applies for anything we can observe. But, as Steiner pointed out, this works differently with feelings. For ex. he gave the example of things like how sense impressions make us feel, "this table makes me feel pleased" is an example I guess. We don't say "I am observing the table" when speaking of feelings, which is an interesting observation.

And, since I brought up the so-called hard problems in science and philosophy a while ago, I will use that as an example for my point. Let's use David Chalmers (who coined the hard problem of consciousness) for a semi-fictional example.
He talks about all this knowledge of how the nervous system (in particular the brain) works and processes information that enters the other sense organs, and all this knowledge of sub-atomic particles, and physical forces. For example, looking at an apple, he describes why it appears red, because of all the various physical forces and facts about wavelengths and the nervous system; and how the apple is made of atoms and particles, etc. But despite that, there is an explanatory gap between that and the felt experience of something (which he calls "qualia"). He calls this mystery of subjective experience "the hard problem of consciousness". And that is valid. But, the problem to point out is that Chalmers (at least in this semi-fictional example) seems to be overlooking the fact that what he is seeing is actually a thought-construct of atoms, particles, and mechanical biological computational processes, that help explain for him what the red object is (the "red apple"). He is not seeing that, only the mechanical processes. Or rather, he is actually only seeing his thought constructs about atoms and various mechanical physical processes. It seems more a vague mental picture of the world that doesn't really mean anything if I think about it. But, this isn't recognized unless we start observing the thinking activity going on rather than just being absorbed in what we are thinking about (in that ordinary state, we just see the mechanical processes and get caught in some hard problem).

Brief edit/addition: so what does this mean? It points to thinking being more than just a subjective thing or process, or a mere "qualia".

If anyone wants to go further into this I am happy to do so. Any feedback is welcomed. Thanks.

[Cleric K]

Would anyone like to go into more detail about what Rudolf Steiner called "the exceptional state" in Philosophy of Freedom?
...
Brief edit/addition: so what does this mean? It points to thinking being more than just a subjective thing or process, or a mere "qualia".

If anyone wants to go further into this I am happy to do so. Any feedback is welcomed. Thanks.

These are very significant questions, Luke. One approach would be to fall into a kind of agnosticism and say that all we know is conscious phenomena and our thoughts about them, and that we can never have any certainty about reality beyond our inner soul sphere (it can be a dream, a matrix, physical world, etc.) But the observation of thinking holds a key. When we contemplate the thinking process we actually are on our way towards true observation of reality.

To make this more clearer we can start with the basic goal of today’s science. Basically it tries to make an intellectual model of reality (mathematical, philosophical, metaphysical, etc.) and understand the laws (of whatever kind – mechanical, spiritual) that govern the transformation of the model through time.

We make a decisive step towards knowledge when we step back and instead of using our thoughts to make models, we realize that the continual metamorphosis of our state of being is the only reality we ever know. It is the true state that science tries to model. By state of being it’s meant the full spectrum of experience – all perceptions, imagination, feelings, thoughts too. Through our thinking, feeling and willing on one hand we intuitively steer the metamorphosis of the state, while on the other, the state transforms through unknown laws, which in general we call the mystery of the World. There’s no sharp boundary between the two, thus our state of being can be considered to be one and the same with the World state, even though at our present stage the vast majority of that state faces us as a mystery quite independent of our intentions.

We can illustrate this in the following way:



The continuous metamorphosis of our state of being is like moving through a tunnel that makes different degrees of sense to us. Our thoughts can be depicted as writing on the walls. It might be more appropriate to imagine that we move through that tunnel backwards – our thoughts and perceptions manifest as if from the unknown behind us and then become perceptible as they pass around us. The length of the tunnel in front of us doesn’t symbolize spatiality but the fact that our experiences become memory and we can somewhat encompass, for example, what we have been thinking about in the last few minutes.

In our ordinary life we’re barely conscious of this temporal flow in such a way. Instead, we simply experience the meaning of the thought-glyphs which are about something, for example the table, the universe and so on.

The exceptional state gives a higher standpoint through which we become aware of the fact that we’re constantly moving through this temporal tunnel. Here the materialist will say “big deal, this is simply the output of my brain” and then keep arranging glyphs in the shape of a model of the supposed Cosmos and brain. The mystic will say “this is simply the unquestionable manifestation of consciousness” and simply ignore the lawfulness of the flow altogether. But if we take this experience seriously it may become for us the gateway towards an unsuspected higher form of consciousness. We can become aware of more subtle aspects of our spiritual activity, through which we, so to speak, steer the metamorphosis of the tunnel. This steering is not a mechanical action but a higher form of thinking – in our ordinary state our intuitive activity expresses itself in the glyphs and we barely pay attention to this. We just live in the meaning of what we express (and as a rule that meaning has nothing to do with the activity of expressing itself). But when we step back in the exceptional state, the meaning we experience now is about the flow of reality itself. We’re not intuiting some theoretical model of reality but we observe and intuit the true flow of reality as experienced in the flow of the glyphs.

With practice we can become acquainted with unsuspected deeper soul forces that have been hitherto steering our stream of becoming completely unconsciously. The exceptional state turns out to be only the starting point of a journey where we discover the inner geometry of our soul and its flow, which later turn out to be really one with the World Soul and its flow. We begin to discover ways to work with the geometry of the tunnel, its bifurcations, textures and so on. In the meditative states, instead of going through linear sequences of glyphs, as if gluing our gaze to the fragments, it's rather that we live in the soul forces that bend the geometry of the tunnel. Then our ordinary glyph-thoughts and their arrangements are seen as letters embedded into higher order intuitive activity.