A clean room for a specific exploration

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sidenote to those interested:

In another thread I posted a quote from Owen Barfield:

“It’s like Heidegger would say, thinking is thought thinking through me…. that our job is not to produce thought but our job is to put our mind into thought so that thought can actualise itself, or thought can be present in our mind. I want a word like open illumination.”

A few years ago, I was in an online conversation in which a group of very learned Anthroposophists were sneering at David Boem for not understanding the important of transforming cognition according to their understanding of Rudolf Steiner. I then posted the Barfield Quote without attribution and they literally tore it to pieces. They all immediately could teach and show how it shows a very ignornant person. They used quotes from POF to show that nobody firmly grounded in thinking would speak so horribly.

Then I said, "Oh, that was from Owen Barfield...."

Can you imagine what the common response was? Yep.

And to be clear: Many of the phrases I've used in 'the long thread' were slight variations of Steiner himself, just in my own words but hardly altered. I do enjoy watching how a person like Cleric will take those words and teach everybody how they are proof that the speaker simply hasn't even begun to grasp the basics. In other groups, we can study that pattern, but --- to be boring-- I think it mainly comes down to a very ridged dogma and an idenitty that absolutely needs to be correct and to have the 'right' forms of being correct. That is why it KNOWS it is right when it attackes even ideas and articulations that it would praise if simply attached to the "right" person. It's more complex than that, but I'm just saying that in general I find that kind of 'teacher' to be working from that kind of attachment. From the outside we can only guess. Although, ironically, many of those various 'teachers' will claim they are certain when they call other people on being dogmatic or overly attached to a certain identity.

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SJ: yes, I think Soul will basically respect that this is my thread and I'm not 'misusing' it in my hope for him to be a bit more generous with regard to not censoring Ashvin or anybody who might takes swipes at my personality. But he can be surprising!

[Soul_of_Shu]

Also, and you may not respect this, this is my thread and so I'd very much hope you never censor Ashvin when he decides to disparage me. I don't mind. However, slander and lying is different and I know you have your eyes out for that sort of thing and I'm very grateful.

The difference is between what I take to be facile taunting and baiting intended to provoke antagonism and antipathy, and what I take to be a forceful cross-examination demeanour intended to get at the core of a philosophical disagreement, which can be taken as disparaging and triggering, but is not necessarily intended that way. Nonetheless, perhaps I need to be more attentive to how the cross-ex demeanour, even if not intended to be disparaging, can be taken that way, and thus still trigger antagonism and antipathy. I trust that in reading this, participants will now take it to heart, and it will thus be preemptive with respect to my needing to intervene. But again, if anyone feels that I'm failing in that regard, then feel free to PM me about it.

[findingblanks]

Yes, some of my tediousness is by design. Not that I want it to sound tediousness. I know that people like Justin read my typical posts and see that I'm not forcing anything that I'm open to discussion and disagreement without any of this messy nonsense.

Before 'the long thread' happened, you can go back and see lots of great conversations I was having with folks here. Lots of warm comments back and forth between me and Soul.

But, sure, when a couple of our 'teachers' came and started taking over I wanted to see if they could be engaged thoughtfully.

But, hey if you need proof, go see what it was like up above during the period of time that Ashvin was working so hard not to project shadow into our explorations together. See that? I love that. So much more enjoyable.

Can you find the exact spot that it changed in the other thread. Was it caused by me getting tedious or disparaging? Right. And so I came back here rather than clutter up another thread just to pretend we are talking logically when we are really just shadow dancing. By 'we' I mean him, yes.

[AshvinP]

Ah, look team! Yes, Ashvin decided to not comment on my integrity or engage in a long paragraph of all the other things we must fully understand before we can even begin to talk about if Steiner is correct in claiming white people must achieve their mission in about 1,500 years if non-white people will ever have a chance to integrate with the Christ the way only white people can now. That is a relief.

You are right, there is only one thing we must fully understand before that claim in bold can even have meaning, let alone be talked about in a meaningful and productive way. That is The Central Topic, which it seems you have decided not to read, based on your comment below,

For anyone interested, I also posted a short "essay" which could be considered a complement for understanding our own concrete Thinking as a living and evolving organism - The High Ideal of Metamorphosis

"1) Are you presuming to know what the "vast majority of people on this list" can find easy to follow before most of them have even read it?"

I think it is technically possible to know for sure, but I haven't done nor do I wish to do any of the things it would take to know for sure if over 51% of the people here would say Cleric isn't very clear to them. However, I could explain why I think it is a reasonable inference to assume that at least 51% of us here might like Cleric but find that we don't think he's very clear or often even correct in his assumptions let alone his conclusions.

Yes, we agree that people can ask questions when they are curious. And if we find that people aren't asking us many questions, we can ask ourselves what can be the various causes of that. I don't assume the answer is simple.

All I can say is, it's amazing the intellectual gymanastics modern man will jump through to make excuses for himself. He will use 100x more effort than it would have taken to simply confront the issue head on without excuse, and will consider that a 'victory'.

"2) How did you find Cleric's post and what did you take away from it?"

My typical experience of reading Cleric is that I don't agree with many of his presuppositions and I find that it isn't easy or very enjoyable to try to strike up a conversation bout that. That's partially on me, but I see the same thing with many others here. I already know that he doesn't find me to be clear and I understand that on many levels. So while I blame myself for part of my finding him very unclear, I think it mainly comes down to simply not sharing many of his assumptions and conclusions. It was cool that he can comfortably say that Steiner was just palin wrong in his clairvoyant explanation as to why exactly red is the color that causes the bull to go wild. I predict that within 12 years he'll have a same comfort in seeing how Steiner was wrong about what causes non-white skin to form (for the next 1,500 years).

For TM: tell me if you think I said anything in this post that implies psychological reasons that Ashivin evades or doesn't engage 'correctly' or with 'integrity.' Also, tell me if you think I've said anything that implies there is a 'moral' way that they should be engaging with me. I'd love your feedback as you are super observant on this stuff.

It sounds like you chose to ignore the essay and instead speculate on why or why not you won't be able to understand something you haven't even tried to understand yet. I will stand corrected, however, if you can copy and paste one of these "presuppositions" from his essay which you disagree with, along with a brief explanation of why you disagree, in response.

[AshvinP]

sidenote to those interested:

In another thread I posted a quote from Owen Barfield:

“It’s like Heidegger would say, thinking is thought thinking through me…. that our job is not to produce thought but our job is to put our mind into thought so that thought can actualise itself, or thought can be present in our mind. I want a word like open illumination.”

You do this a lot, FB. I am pointing this out as a helpful reminder, even though I realize chances are very high it won't be taken that way at all.

You fragment the living and holistic philosophies underlying these thinkers into a bunch of isolated claims here and there, like the quote above, then you wonder why people have a hard time connecting it back to that holistic meaning of the philosophy they are familiar with. You have basicallly acknowledged at this point that you are super interested in how you feel Steiner or Barfield or Bohm or... Jung's wife... was feeling and thinking when they made this or that comment, gave this or that lecture, shook some person's hand, made an update to some paragraph in a book, etc. When someone tries to bring the discussion back to the holistic meaning flowing through the philosophy or spiritual tradition, you ignore those attempts altogether as irrelevant. I point this out because I know that at least Cleric and myself think that's 99.999% relevant and all these little fragmented incidents you like to focus on are bound to cause more confusion than understanding. That is precisely for the reasons he and I stated in recent posts that I have linked here. So maybe that is the "presupposition" you are referring to that you disagree with - that it actually matters to focus on the philosophy as a whole, as a living organism, rather than isolated and momentary events going on hither and thither.


viewtopic.php?t=691

The theories that have been woven around the "pure idea" of metamorphosis reflect how we reduce it for our own comprehension. We have then comprehended some portion of the pure idea, from some limited spatiotemporal perspective, but this process of reduction is itself the most difficult thing for modern man to remember. Once the reductive process has taken place, we become completely enamored with our own reduced creations. While we gaze at these abstract thought-creations in wonder, our memory of how they came into being evaporates.
...
All of these difficulties are born of the same reductive process that we are constantly forgetting we are engaged in. We may have even forgotten about that process while reading the above and trying to follow the logic as we briefly dipped into the abstract explanations. We must confront this honestly and see how fragile our current thinking organism has become; how little resilience it has when confronted with even the smallest amount of abstract resistance; the tiniest involution into the phantom layer of abstractions.

[findingblanks]

"You fragment the living and holistic philosophies underlying these thinkers into a bunch of isolated claims here and there, like the quote above, then you wonder why people have a hard time connecting it back to that holistic meaning of the philosophy they are familiar with."

1) Please don't comment (except for the squid squad) on the irony of Ashvin saying the above. Or at least go read how the Steiner-Schopenhauer 'debate' was framed. I know. Amazing!

2) I don't believe Steiner is right when he says red causes a bull to go wild. I think that his being wrong is interesting. Sue me. I don't think that Steiner is right when he says that non-white skin only appears because it is rejecting the Christ. I think his being wrong is interesting. So sue me. I don't think my curiousity and willingness to comment on these things matches was Ashvin says. And I take all the people who have been grateful to explore these things as evidence that I'm not alone. And I don't deny that there are a huge amount of people who would defend Steiner just as Ashvin is. Finally, I have almost no doubt that I have much more respect for Steiner that Ashvin does but that's just my opinion. You have to really know a person before you can love them and respect them as a whole and not just use them for spiritual bypassing. Yes, I shadow-danced there a bit. Let's see if it was loved.

3) Yes, that was another example of Ashvin implying that conversations are suppose to be structured in HIS preferred manner. Notice that I never was addressing him in my comments and notice that there were other people who responded to my original comments without any drama. You actually can notice who the people are who NEED drama in this space.

[AshvinP]

"You fragment the living and holistic philosophies underlying these thinkers into a bunch of isolated claims here and there, like the quote above, then you wonder why people have a hard time connecting it back to that holistic meaning of the philosophy they are familiar with."

1) Please don't comment (except for the squid squad) on the irony of Ashvin saying the above. Or at least go read how the Steiner-Schopenhauer 'debate' was framed. I know. Amazing!

2) I don't believe Steiner is right when he says red causes a bull to go wild. I think that his being wrong is interesting. Sue me. I don't think that Steiner is right when he says that non-white skin only appears because it is rejecting the Christ. I think his being wrong is interesting. So sue me. I don't think my curiousity and willingness to comment on these things matches was Ashvin says. And I take all the people who have been grateful to explore these things as evidence that I'm not alone. And I don't deny that there are a huge amount of people who would defend Steiner just as Ashvin is. Finally, I have almost no doubt that I have much more respect for Steiner that Ashvin does but that's just my opinion. You have to really know a person before you can love them and respect them as a whole and not just use them for spiritual bypassing. Yes, I shadow-danced there a bit. Let's see if it was loved.

3) Yes, that was another example of Ashvin implying that conversations are suppose to be structured in HIS preferred manner. Notice that I never was addressing him in my comments and notice that there were other people who responded to my original comments without any drama. You actually can notice who the people are who NEED drama in this space.

There is no drama, FB. I am not defending Steiner, except insofar as he happens to share my critique (or I should say, greatly aided in me in forming my critique). I am critiquing the modern age temptation to abstract and therefore reduce/fragment the world content into isolated phenomena, which are then reified by our intellect into 'things-themselves' with no overarching ideal Unity underlying them. The reason you feel I am "personally" attacking you is because you have reified your own thought-approach into something "personal" to you, when I claim there is no such thing as "personal worldviews" in Reality to begin with. There are only shared overarching Ideas which precipitate into mineralized thought-forms, are carved up, and then configured and re-configured into various forms. If we want to find genuine novelty, we will only find it in the holistic Ideas which are evolving and structure the phenomenal world, not the abstract thought-configurations which have been extracted from them.

That is why I was pressing you to provide the holistic context of these supposed claims that you think Steiner was "wrong" about. It is the very fact that you think of these things as "right" and "wrong", "proven" and "unproven", that reveals you are not concretely thinking from the holistic perspective. You probably feel this is an empty argument and therefore I am only putting it forth as "drama", but nothing could be further from the truth. This argument is the entire foundation of my Thinking approach. And Steiner, unsurprsingly, made this same argument more than once. So if you are going to claim to be an authority on interpreting Steiner, and claim to know what Steiner intended in his assertions, I think you at least need to take heed of that basic fact. Or, if you have forgotten that fact, then you should take my comments and the quotes below as a helpful reminders.

This makes it explainable to us how people can have such different concepts, such different views of reality, in spite of the fact that reality can, after all, only be one. The difference lies in the difference between our intellectual worlds. This sheds light for us upon the development of the different scientific standpoints. We understand where the many philosophical standpoints originate, and do not need to bestow the palm of truth exclusively upon one of them. We also know which standpoint we ourselves have to take with respect to the multiplicity of human views. We will not ask exclusively: What is true, what is false? We will always investigate how the intellectual world of a thinker goes forth from the world harmony; we will seek to understand and not to judge negatively and regard at once as error that which does not correspond with our own view. Another source of differentiation between our scientific standpoints is added to this one through the fact that every individual person has a different field of experience. Each person is indeed confronted, as it were, by one section of the whole of reality. His intellect works upon this and is his mediator on the way to the idea. But even though we all do therefore perceive the same idea, still we always do this from different places. Therefore, only the end result to which we come can be the same; our paths, however, can be different. It absolutely does not matter at all whether the individual judgments and concepts of which our knowing consists correspond to each other or not; the only thing that matters is that they ultimately lead us to the point that we are swimming in the main channel of the idea.

- Rudolf Steiner, Goethean Science (1883)

A certain deeper penetration is needed to find the harmony between what is so easily given today in ordinary science, the experiences of physical research, and what is given to us through the knowledge of the spiritual, the higher, the supersensible consciousness. One must gradually grow accustomed to see deeper into this harmony, and then one will find what a beautiful harmony exists between what is maintained by the spiritual researcher and the statements or enumeration of facts that can be brought forward by physical research. One must not, on this account, be too unjust towards those who cannot understand anthroposophists; they lack all the preparation that is definitely required in order to be able to grasp the results of spiritual research. And so in the majority of cases, they cannot help but think something quite different from what is intended — both in the words and in the ideas. Therefore, in wider circles a greater understanding for spiritual science can be achieved only if one speaks quite openly and frankly from the spiritual standpoint, even before an unprepared public.

Among these unprepared people, there will then be a great number who say, “That is all stupidity — fantastic things, puzzled-out nonsense.” But there will always be a few who, from inmost need of their soul, will get an inkling that there is, nevertheless, something behind it. They will go further and gradually familiarize themselves with it. And it is on such patient study that anthroposophy must depend, and at which we can aim. It will be very natural for a large part of those who come to a lecture on spiritual science from pure curiosity to give vent afterwards to the opinion: “That is a sect that only spreads its own particular gibberish!” But when one knows the difficulties, one will also wait patiently for the selection that must arise. Persons among the public will themselves find their way and form a nucleus through whom spiritual science will then gradually flow into our whole life.

A special example shall be given today to show how easy it is for prepared students of spiritual science, who have already grown accustomed to think and live in the conceptions aroused by spiritual science, to come to terms with the apparently most difficult reports given out by physical-sensible research. The learner will gradually become aware that the farther we advance, the more we will realize what a good foundation spiritual research is for universal knowledge. And that will give the seeker the necessary calmness to meet the storms pouring out against spiritual science, because it speaks quite a foreign language. If we have the patience to accustom ourselves to this harmony, we shall gain more and more assurance. Then when people say, “What you tell me does not agree with the most elementary researches of science,” the anthroposophist will answer, “I know that through what spiritual science can give, full harmony can be found with all these facts, although it is perhaps impossible to come to an understanding in a moment.”

- The Astral World Lecture II

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" I am critiquing the modern age temptation to abstract and therefore reduce/fragment the world content into isolated phenomena..."

Yep, we all agree with this and it's not what I'm focusing on when I notice certain kinds of errors. Neither was Steiner focused on that when he pointed out simple errors of logic and observation in other great thinkers. He merely understood the great value in noticing when they make false assumptions or incorrect observations. If somebody accused him of falling into the temptation of the age, they would be wrong and Steiner would be right.

Dozens of conversations can be had. I am having (in the other thread) one which focuses on simple errors and their implications. Steiner found one error of logic in a great thinker and declared that this defeated the thinker's entire structure of thought. Steiner may have been wrong in that assessment to some degree, but he certainly felt confident that it was fine to make a big deal out of a small error.

[findingblanks]

For those studying the post Soul made with the video about David Bohm.

Look carefully at the sequence starting with Soul's sharing. At what point do you notice a major shift both in terms of content and in terms of tone? Is this connected to a pattern in many other interesting threads? Does this affect the group? If so, how? Is anybody creatively interacting with this dynamic?

I received a private message last night that said Soul has said somewhere that he will not be allowing threads to be hijacked. . .Bless his soul. That will be very hard to figure out but I can imagine a few ways to get there possibly.