(Essay) A Phenomenology of Mechanism: The Liminal Spaces of Perception

[Federica]

In other words, moving forward in any direction becomes a dilemma. A concentric, lawful structure is there and organizes everything, but that Logic I cannot access, I cannot measure anything against it, as I have not reached there. On the other hand, I am called to have an active, responsible, and moral approach to thinking-feeling-willing. It has to be intuitive, also, because there is no lawfulness to rely upon.

Federica, I think the above dilemma will be resolved for you if you take a more 'interactive' way of looking at things.

Let's look at this in the context of the speech/writing split. Seen phenomenologically, in our stream of becoming we're continuously impressing our spiritual activity in the perceptual stream. With our spiritual activity we weave in intuitively grasped meaning. When we think, we express in perceptual verbal artforms the invisible meaning that we live in.

These two poles are not independent. Many times the metaphor of the riverbed has been given. Through our intuitively willed spiritual activity we impress the forms of the riverbed but at the same time this activity is being shaped by the riverbed. So we have a classical example of an unitary system which is only seen from two different angles. The best example is probably General Relativity where "Matter tells space how to curve, and curved space tells matter how to move". In our case we can say something like "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve (how to fit the perceptions), and intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move." Of course this by no means should remain simply as an abstract conundrum for the intellect (basically perpetuating the bi-stable mode). Instead, it is perfectly possible for modern man to enter livingly into this flow of reality.

In ordinary consciousness we're tempted to anchor ourselves within something apparently stable. We can anchor ourselves either in the perceptual stream and see only the "Perceptions tell intuition how to curve" part (basically materialism or contemplative mysticism) or we anchor ourselves in the 'mind-stuff' and see only how the "intuitive spiritual activity tells perceptions how to move" (idealism which however fails to understand why this activity is constrained).

The reason that this bi-stable mode can't be overcome is that in both cases the human mind seeks only an intellectual statement about reality. The mind tries to extricate itself from the flow of reality and make a bystander-statement about what reality is. It is clear that we need different cognitive skills if we're to overcome this mode. We need to find a new anchor point which is neither within some particular perception nor within some particular concept. To make an analogy with sound - if a membrane moves very slowly we have a bi-stable situation - the membrane is now here, then there. But when the frequency increases we have something qualitatively different - tone which is stable in itself. Similarly, when through concentration we place ourselves in the very process of becoming, we no longer step outside the process and seek external intellectual statements about it. Instead, our becoming turns into a completely practical matter, exactly like a form of art.

When we learn some form of art we develop our motor skills and make them fit to express artistic intuition. So it's the same basic principle at all levels. The perceptual world - the stone, clay, canvas, paints, keys, strings, our body and senses - curve and restrict our intuition. At the same time our intuition tells the art materials how to move and arrange. When we come to our soul life we have the same process. Through our activity we're shaping our character which in turns acts as the riverbed for future activity. So much like with Hegel, we have this dialectic evolution, through which the spirit impresses itself in the resisting perceptual spectrum and transforms it such that in turn it can express even greater degrees of freedom.

When we see things in this way it should be much easier to resolve the apparent duality between speech and writing. It is really a difference between the art forms that we give to our intuitive spiritual activity. In thinking we spiritually gesticulate to transform the perceptual stream primarily in the spectrum of imagination. In speech we allow our activity to penetrate the larynx and will it's movements. Thus we can say that we impress our intuitions into artforms consisting of pressure waves in the air. These waves can affect other conscious perspectives and eventually they can discover the intuitive ideal content which was impressed in the waves in the first place. Written language is yet another way to impress our spiritual activity in the perceptual stream. Building a house is yet another way. We transform the perceptual stream in certain way which proceeds from our ideas and goals. The one seeing the house can understand it when he unites with the ideas and goals we invested in it.

So we need not place artificial separations between speech, writing or any other form of manifesting our spiritual activity. The bottom line is that we continually impress our spiritual activity in the stream of perceptions in the most varied ways. In this sense the whole World content is a full-spectrum script that we're all writing. Through speech we impress sound into the world. Through writing we impress ink or shapes in the sand.

It is all so simple. First we collectively have to develop the consciousness that we're continually impressing our spiritual activity in the stream of perceptions. Everyone contributes in some way. Second we need to realize that the perceptual stream is at the same time a symbol for the riverbed which constricts the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity. These constraints are not only of human origin. The archetypal riverbed of the stream of becoming is impressed by spiritual activity which still evades human consciousness.

This is something that can be relatively easily experienced in meditation - simply because it is so general, it's ubiquitous, everything we experience is an example of it. We have to simply condense this ubiquitous experience into clear consciousness. Previously you said that you're distracted in meditation by wondering whether the feeling you're bathing in is the right one. This still maintains somewhat external view on the matter. The feeling is seen as a dress that we should put on. We look at the red, the blue, the short one, the laced one, and wonder which is the right one for the ball with the prince. But in this case our inner goals and our outer means are still not organically united. In the same sense, when we wonder about the right feeling to focus on, we're not yet organically one with the feeling, we still see it as something extraneous which we want to attach to ourselves and we wonder if that will get us closer to our goal (which obviously is not the feeling itself).

This is directly related with our previous conversations about the plumbing. As long as we see our concentration as an indirect activity which is supposed to lead us to some expected state, the meditation is not yet as it should be. At some point we have to approach the matters directly. It's like saying "I like to have things, to travel here and there and thus I need to get a job in which I'm otherwise not particularly interested". We're still divided as long as we see concentration as something boring which we need to get through in order to arrive at something more interesting. On the contrary, when we really begin to align with our stream of becoming, this simplest flow in itself becomes supremely interesting for us. We understand how all our life we've been flying above our own reality, which is under the intellect's nose, so to speak, yet it requires certain effort to attune to it. Seen in this way, there can't be a question about the rightness of the feeling because the feeling permeates organically our cognitive becoming. The feeling grows as an aura around our genuine interest in our stream of becoming.

It is indeed possible to start with feeling in the way you suggest. One can suppress the wondering and simply focus on the Love of God, humility, prayer and so on. This can also work (as a point of departure) but it requires certain soul disposition which is not available to everyone - it depends on their particular riverbed, i.e. - their karma. In some people disbelief simply outweighs everything else. But the development which passes through cognition is available to everyone simply because everyone can think. When we concentrate on our stream of thoughtful becoming, when we realize that in the way we lay down thoughts our intuition tells perceptions how to move, and when we perceive, perceptions tell our intuition how to curve, then to this kernel ingrows also the feeling element which Ashvin aptly quoted "Within this book thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression - when he is living in thought, he is living in the cosmos."

This is the key. As long as we're wondering whether we're bathing in the right feeling, the thinking that tries to bath itself still speaks from the background. Cinderella wonders which dress is the right one to impress the prince. But when the wondering itself becomes the center of experience, then even without aiming for it, soon it becomes impossible to have any other feeling than that we're living in Cosmic reality. Our cognitive becoming is the Cosmic World process. Our wondering about the dress is more real than the dress. It is precisely within this wondering activity that we'll begin to find our true being hidden in the background until recently. The feeling then comes through the natural expansion of this process which gradually includes not only becoming from thought to thought but also the longer term becoming of our being and the World at large.

I want to reference a great practical example of what Cleric also illustrated above from one of Steiner's lecture. It also points to why my own abstract reflections on this polar dynamic, in contrast to the interactive approach, may be perpetuating the dilemma. That's why I try to sprinkle in these quotes - right now I have trouble translating what I experience inwardly into interactive illustrations and practical examples, so I figure it's often best to quote others who can do so. On no account should these be taken to suggest we should simply incorporate the ideas from external authorities, imitating the concepts in our abstract schema, rather than winning through to them from our own observation of living experience and our sound reasoning. It is the latter which makes all the difference to our cognitive evolution. (the astral-ego discussed below associates with our intuitive spiritual activity and the physical-etheric with impressed riverbed i.e. perceptual stream)

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA059/En ... 03p01.html

I am yet again amazed by the unreal realness of this situation.. Thank you.


Ashvin, your reflections, old and new, constantly bring me new insights, not perpetuations of dilemmas! With speech and writing I have been wrestling with many details, the discussion was larger, but I was following (I still have to reply to that post). I look forward to reading this new lecture.


Cleric, I fully recognize that oftentimes I make intellectual statements. I guess it shines through my written words. Sometimes I do have a clearer sense of the flow of reality. I experience it as very gentle, faint swirls of breeze, not like a real breeze but like an ideal breeze, disclosing a sort of silent attention that lasts perhaps one or two seconds. The rest of the time I rely on the memory of that, so to speak. Apart from a couple of attempts, I have not really started training the artform in meditation, so I hope I will enter a more unified sense of reality by working on it. In the meantime I do my best with what I have. On speech and writing, it does look very simple in this context. Rather than the relation between the two, we see that they are both expressions of the same process of impression, in which they are united. Because absolutely everything is meaning, even the voids between words are, and any discontinuity is riverbed constraints.

Regarding meditation, I have been cautious, but the new impression I am receiving today is positively encouraging and I feel I can try again in a more neutral mood. The river image looks very inviting and welcoming to me.

The two times I have tried, I have been distracted not directly by wondering about the feeling, but by becoming aware of a racing heart beat first. The sensation of the heart pumping made me think “I’m doing something wrong” and because the thing I had been doing was focusing on summoning feelings, that became my thought, and it was the end.
I don’t really recognize wearing the feeling in the way you describe, like a dress to impress. If it was a dress, rather than beautiful and laced, it was simple and ripped. I can assure you that I was not seeing the concentration as something boring, rather as an unknown, and a little frightening. I was keeping these instructions in mind, starting from feeling lost in cosmic void:

the important thing is that the thought-image is imbued with deep feeling. If we avoid being prejudiced about it, we could say that these feelings should be of religious magnitude.
…
The thought-image should be like a condensation of something of Cosmic magnitude, which initially can only be anticipated as a feeling.

Another feeling referenced as necessary to cultivate, that I have felt, is the immersive feeling of being lost in the cosmic void without clues about our own being.

This is an amazing feeling when we begin to forebode the immensity of the spiritual Cosmos. It is true that through knowledge we begin to orient but the thing that really makes the difference is Love. Only when we begin to feel that this immensity within and without us is focused on us, the tiny speck on Earth, the terror and panic of the beyond begins to transform into the Love of the Divine. For some the Divine Fire is the fire of hell, while for others it is the Fire of Divine Love.
…
So the question is: what/who will we give our heart to? To that which can make us a living spring that never runs dry and goes in the meadows to quench the thirst of its fellow beings? Or to those that will take the little water we have and leave us on the sands for the vultures to feast.

Imagine that someone throws an object and shouts "Watch out!". You don't see the object but cover your head with your hands and freeze in anticipation of the impact. You expect to come into contact with something external to you. Well, in our meditations we should also be open to go beyond ourselves. ...If they were to take seriously that we should go beyond our intellectual self in meditation, the first reaction would be to simply freeze in anticipation of something to fall on our head from the spiritual world. That's why we need to find the religious feeling
...
If it feels slightly disturbing that our thoughts are like overtones modulated over deeper Cosmic Thoughts thought by living Intelligence, then we're on the right track. If we don't feel that this is at least a tiny bit scarily intimate, then we're probably holding the idea only as a floating concept in our mind, which has no power to nudge our ego from its throne (thus the saying "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom").
…
The symbol for concentration is especially effective when it is imbued with these deep religious feelings. And I beg you once again not to mistake the word 'religious' for naive belief. It is only to suggest we need this intellectual inversion, to feel that the forces over which our intellectual activity is modulated, are far greater and more powerful than our conscious personality. In other words, we need to find once again the sacred dimension of being.

The mood I had evoked was imbued with gratitude, but also with something along the lines of fear. Maybe it was not embodied enough. The riverbed meditation looks like an easier start, but I also feel an affinity to the image of the turning round shapes that you shared. I don’t yet know what I will do next time.

[AshvinP]

I am yet again amazed by the unreal realness of this situation.. Thank you.


Ashvin, your reflections, old and new, constantly bring me new insights, not perpetuations of dilemmas! With speech and writing I have been wrestling with many details, the discussion was larger, but I was following (I still have to reply to that post). I look forward to reading this new lecture.
...
The two times I have tried, I have been distracted not directly by wondering about the feeling, but by becoming aware of a racing heart beat first. The sensation of the heart pumping made me think “I’m doing something wrong” and because the thing I had been doing was focusing on summoning feelings, that became my thought, and it was the end.

Thanks, Frederica!

For what it's worth, I had all kinds of physical oddities occur in earlier phases of meditative life and still do. The heart racing was definitely one of them. Also various sharp pains in seemingly random places. A thumping between the eyes and sometimes in the larynx area. As you can imagine, there are spiritual scientific reasons for all these sudden awakening and stirrings of our bodily organism. I'm somewhat familiar with those reasons but not enough to comment too helpfully on it. I mention this only to say it's completely natural and a sign of progress. We certainly shouldn't be discouraged by such things or shy away from them, rather we should shine the light of thinking consciousness even brighter on them and observe them calmly and patiently. I found that to always help no matter what the distraction.

Also, I think perhaps Cleric was suggesting the practice of 'summoning feelings' in meditations is not the proper orientation, still externalizing our spiritual activity to some extent. It's also a much more difficult path to travel into the meditation, as opposed to steering one's thinking activity into an actively willed thought-image, uniting what we are doing with our thinking to what we are thinking about. If one gets caught up in thinking about how to summon feelings, then this union cannot occur - the activity of thinking itself isn't becoming the object of our thinking. From this thinking path, the Cosmic feeling will naturally grow from within, as our imaginative thinking activity is of Cosmic nature. That has been my experience as well and it seems especially valid for someone who is naturally a more 'feeling' type to begin with.

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

Please stop misrepresenting me. I have never said, "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens".

My apologies if I have misrepresented you. But that's my impression based on things you've said in the past, like here:

PS: From a soul perspective, I came here not to go higher but to get grounded. Where we would agree, I suspect, is that the word 'humble' derives from the Greek humus and means earthly or grounded.

[Lou Gold]

Cleric,

Please stop misrepresenting me. I have never said, "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens".

My apologies if I have misrepresented you. But that's my impression based on things you've said in the past, like here:

PS: From a soul perspective, I came here not to go higher but to get grounded. Where we would agree, I suspect, is that the word 'humble' derives from the Greek humus and means earthly or grounded.

In reincarnation, as you know, we go back and forth for different purposes, sometimes to learn the lessons of the garden of evolution and sometimes to be helpful. The point is heaven and earth are connected and not separate and our karma/work/mission/purpose/destinies are interdependent. It's always a co-arising dynamic process involving many beings and forces, here and there. The language, which is dualist, reflects a starting position as we travel up, down and around the mountain. But, yes, the lessons of humility seem to require groundedness.

[AshvinP]

Cleric,

Please stop misrepresenting me. I have never said, "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens".

My apologies if I have misrepresented you. But that's my impression based on things you've said in the past, like here:

PS: From a soul perspective, I came here not to go higher but to get grounded. Where we would agree, I suspect, is that the word 'humble' derives from the Greek humus and means earthly or grounded.

In reincarnation, as you know, we go back and forth for different purposes, sometimes to learn the lessons of the garden of evolution and sometimes to be helpful. The point is heaven and earth are connected and not separate and our karma/work/mission/purpose/destinies are interdependent. It's always a co-arising dynamic process involving many beings and forces, here and there. The language, which is dualist, reflects a starting position as we travel up, down and around the mountain. But, yes, the lessons of humility seem to require groundedness.

Allow me to express the above another way,

"As you know, the Universe spawns life and takes it back into its field of infinite energy for many different purposes of evolution. Sometimes the co-arising whirlpools of complexified energy form ecosystems to renew physical processes of the Earth, sometimes to become conscious and show gratitude and love to each other and the Universe, to commune with the planets and stars. The constant flux of matter/energy/emergent qualities/consciousness takes its course in manifold ways, with many purposes, and leads to many different co-dependent, interweaving results. The flows of energy move up, down, sideways, round and round. There are all sorts of energies and forces and intelligent creatures involved. The heavenly stars formed us and to them we will return and the cycle will continue."


The point is, once our concepts become so abstractly broad, they can apply to just about any reality whatsoever, even completely hypothetical and fantasized ones which cannot be known, ranging from the most materialistic to the most idealistic. The string of concepts will be technically "correct" and, indeed, many of the most 'enlightened' worldviews today consist of just such a string of concepts. They fancy themselves tolerant and humble because they have diluted the content of the concepts so much that they encompass everyone else's beliefs, opinions, speculations, and revelations equally. This is the criticism - it's not so much the content of the concepts, but their lack of precise content. Moreover, it's the satisfaction with this sort of contentless thinking. There is no thirst for scientific knowledge of what all these concepts are pointing to. What precisely happens between death and rebirth, for ex., which is half of all our existence within the Earthly evolution? It is the last phase of materialism because it appropriates all higher spiritual ideas to itself through familiar, pre-formatted, materialized concepts. It seemingly obviates the need to courageously face the unknown, unfamiliar, living details weaving their activity across the threshold of death into our daily consciousness - to not only revere the mysteries but to gradually unveil them with full clarity of consciousness.

[Lou Gold]

My apologies if I have misrepresented you. But that's my impression based on things you've said in the past, like here:

In reincarnation, as you know, we go back and forth for different purposes, sometimes to learn the lessons of the garden of evolution and sometimes to be helpful. The point is heaven and earth are connected and not separate and our karma/work/mission/purpose/destinies are interdependent. It's always a co-arising dynamic process involving many beings and forces, here and there. The language, which is dualist, reflects a starting position as we travel up, down and around the mountain. But, yes, the lessons of humility seem to require groundedness.

Allow me to express the above another way,

"As you know, the Universe spawns life and takes it back into its field of infinite energy for many different purposes of evolution. Sometimes the co-arising whirlpools of complexified energy form ecosystems to renew physical processes of the Earth, sometimes to become conscious and show gratitude and love to each other and the Universe, to commune with the planets and stars. The constant flux of matter/energy/emergent qualities/consciousness takes its course in manifold ways, with many purposes, and leads to many different co-dependent, interweaving results. The flows of energy move up, down, sideways, round and round. There are all sorts of energies and forces and intelligent creatures involved. The heavenly stars formed us and to them we will return and the cycle will continue."


The point is, once our concepts become so abstractly broad, they can apply to just about any reality whatsoever, even completely hypothetical and fantasized ones which cannot be known, ranging from the most materialistic to the most idealistic. The string of concepts will be technically "correct" and, indeed, many of the most 'enlightened' worldviews today consist of just such a string of concepts. They fancy themselves tolerant and humble because they have diluted the content of the concepts so much that they encompass everyone else's beliefs, opinions, speculations, and revelations equally. This is the criticism - it's not so much the content of the concepts, but their lack of precise content. Moreover, it's the satisfaction with this sort of contentless thinking. There is no thirst for scientific knowledge of what all these concepts are pointing to. What precisely happens between death and rebirth, for ex., which is half of all our existence within the Earthly evolution? It is the last phase of materialism because it appropriates all higher spiritual ideas to itself through familiar, pre-formatted, materialized concepts. It seemingly obviates the need to courageously face the unknown, unfamiliar, living details weaving their activity across the threshold of death into our daily consciousness - to not only revere the mysteries but to gradually unveil them with full clarity of consciousness.

Ashvin, let me see if i might be able to move it out of the adversarial frame. Yes, there is something to learn from any move in any direction. No, this does not mean that anything goes. One can have faith, as I do, in awareness itself and be devoted to its growth knowing that it will self-correct in the case of error. I'm not being mystical or mysterious or unscientific, The shaman, for example, brings the revelations of the plant spirit to other shamans for peer review and replication and the community quickly learns whether the remedy works.

It seemingly obviates the need to courageously face the unknown, unfamiliar, living details weaving their activity across the threshold of death into our daily consciousness - to not only revere the mysteries but to gradually unveil them with full clarity of consciousness.

If life, death and awareness are held dearly, such devotion quickly provides feedback that forces correction. My exchange with Cleric is an excellent example. My earlier statement - From a soul perspective, I came here not to go higher but to get grounded. Where we would agree, I suspect, is that the word 'humble' derives from the Greek humus and means earthly or grounded -- was easily misunderstood or misrepresented because it needed to be elaborated to clarify the fact that grounding with its challenges and forced humility functions to expand awareness in ALL directions. Grounded humility is an ongoing process not a stopping place as if full clarity of consciousness has been attained in a last gasp of materialism. It's an expansion of awareness in general including new horizons in many directions. And these learnings, even (or especially) when difficult and challenging, are, as Cleric likes to point out, something to be grateful for. Such gratitude is for me a devotion and firming of my faith in awareness (or the God of many names).

[Federica]

Federica,

I think we have really narrowed down the core issues through this dialogue. I see an implicit thread running through these recent comments. If I were to put it in words from your perspective, it would be, "a phenomenology should only stick to how we experience phenomena from first-person perspective at any given time, 'as it is', and go no further until our experience changes." In my view, it's actually the opposite - the phenomenology of cognition-perception gives us a means of reaching out beyond where we are, experientially, at any given time, and discerning the logic which necessitates certain conclusions about Reality itself (all that we can ever know about it, which means first-person perspective), and this Reality itself must necessarily include our participatory act of cognition. Phenomenology of cognition becomes epistemology - what it means 'to know' - which becomes ontology. In other words, Reality is the evolving, differentiating-integrating process of knowing. This spiraling together of appearance and reality only works if the latter is of thought-nature - not simply consciousness, awareness, experiencing, etc., but actively willed, feeling-imbued, thought-nature. Before I had any noticeable meditative results, I knew that higher cognition was the only logical option.

You are right, Ashvin, that was my understanding of phenomenology, hence the need to complement it with ‘sound reasoning’. So you say, phenomenology goes beyond direct experience, through discerning a logic, and drawing the necessary conclusion that this logic implies. How to separate these necessary conclusions from generalizations? All the difficulty is to discern the logic without extrapolating from personal constraints to generality. Logic seems to be the very means to extrapolation. Isn’t logic the very method to come to conclusions that lie beyond personal experience?
When I read PoF for instance, I am presented with a logic. How do I engage with it? First I have the trust or affinity that allows me to seriously explore it, then I check that I can’t find objections. There is both a feeling for it and an intellectual approach, they go in parallel. Same for what Cleric explained yesterday. It’s both amazingly simple, it feels right, and it also explains the problem at hand in a satisfactory, comprehensive way that seems impossible to infirm. But, if we really wanted to push logic to the extreme (which to be clear I don't feel any need to do) couldn’t we say that this is Cleric’s personal experience which has been generalized? In which case the only way out would be to resort to the higher structure, which simply makes the explanation true? I could also turn the question this way: if the phenomenology that becomes epistemology could really also become an ontology - on ground of this logical approach that delivers necessary conclusions before one gets noticeable meditative results - why would one need these results? It seems to me that the ontology level can only be reached after one has experienced that landscape. Before that, it remains an inquiry. One can be fully confident, inspired, in love with the path, but the circle will only be closed (or opened) with the experience of realizing that structure. That’s why it’s a path - because it is not yet an ontology. Isn’t it so? The only other (unsatisfactory) way to reach an ontology would be the traditional way: making at least one hypothesis, throw it in the air, and start running after it.
I know, I am probably still expressing that lack of ‘interactivity’... it’s this word “logic” that makes me react, I believe : )

Now what all this suggests about our participatory cognition and what we are actually participating in stretches very far. Let me first touch on this issue of Steiner's lecture. I think we should be clear that Steiner never introduces any duality between what the Gods create and what humans "invent". Everything humans do is intimately bound up with what the Gods are also doing on the higher planes of consciousness, which are none other than the higher layers of our own consciousness, within the nested TC spectrum. This is ontologically speaking. It's true we can draw a distinction between those times when humanity began to act through their own inner free agency, feeling ourselves to be individual, self-enclosed, egoic beings, just like this develops at the individual level between infancy and adolescence. It is simply the process of becoming more conscious of what is always happening and how we participate. The development of writing was certainly an important step in that process. Although we can note that, even in the ancient Egyptian civilization and earlier part of ancient Greece, it was felt that hieroglyphs, for ex., were inspirations from the Gods. Beyond that, I think it's clear that Steiner concluded with a section on writing without feeling the need to mark the transition because the continuity between speech-writing was taken as a given.

On this topic of the lecture, I don’t want to leave it at a point where it looks like I made a false statement. Therefore I feel the need to make this pedantic and, at this point, not so relevant comment.
Steiner didn't “conclude with a section on writing”. It’s not a section on writing, it’s a section on the necessity, based on the overarching parable on language he has drawn, to consider and approach language in itself (not only in literature) as an artistic expression and to ”reawaken the linguistic artist in us”. Because the historical overview comes to its end reaching the (then) present day, it can hardly include any examples of the artistic essence of language without indirectly referring to written word (for the obvious reasons we know). It’s exclusively in this matter-of-factly sense that the reference to writing occurs in this conclusion. Nothing substantial whatsoever is there about the nature of writing, the phenomenon of writing, the effects of writing, or its connections, in themselves, which would have made this conclusion on writing. Instead, it’s only that, with the purpose of speaking of the artistic nature of language, some (loose) references are given where one understands that the language in question happened to be of written nature.
This being said, everything else you elaborate about the lecture, I follow and like. There might be something liminal, or at least indicative, in the fact that you are/were using the word ‘speech’ in such an extended sense, including both audial and written expression, even to the extent of referring to “written speech”, an oxymoron that really makes my personal organization shudder : )

Here are some other quotes from him about PoF:

“For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn’t make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog’s hind legs, where the front ones belong.”

“Catharsis is an ancient term for the purification of the astral body by means of meditation and concentration exercises. If a reader takes this book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of herself, the books organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis.”

“Within this book thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression, when he is living in thought, he is living in the cosmos. This relatedness to cosmic mysteries is the red thread running through the book.”

Now how is any of this possible if the structure of the writing, the syntax, so meticulously intended by certain authors, doesn't invite the reader's reasoning and imagination into its liminal spaces? That's something to consider.

From this comment, I can appreciate indirectly the quite different landscapes or riverbeds we are moving on, specifically when it comes to the concepts of space, sight, articulation, arrangement in space, interconnection of elements… Maybe it’s related to what you were describing as your perception of space becoming more and more like time and vice versa. For example - I noticed that before - you use the word ‘syntax’ in a very extensive sense, you almost use it as if Raffaello could speak of the syntax on the canvas of the various characters composing his School of Athens!

For me the answer to “How is any of this possible?” is: because the “structure of the writing” is conceptual, not visual - to be ‘generous’ I could say, only minimally visual. And so goes for the syntax, which to me means arrangement/organization of words in eminently conceptual, abstract sense, responding to specific rules of subordination, coordination, etcetera, in a non-spatial manner. All there is of essence and relevance to a syntax, as far af verbal language is concerned, including in these examples here, is conceptual to me, and does not depend on the texts’ visual form. It has a correspondence in form, but does not emerge from form. By contrast, that the visual form of these quotes matters, comes down to saying that, for example, the reader’s reasoning and imagination are invited differently into the quote’s liminal spaces depending on the text being published in a Times New Roman versus an Oxygen font.

I realize by now I am talking about my riverbed here, and that, as counter-intuitive as it is for me, Oxygen actually does make a difference, compared to Times New Roman. And looking at my experience on this Oxygen-based forum I can almost realize what this difference could be, on a first-person basis : )
(PS: I appreciate the creative quotation above!)

Returning to the base issue - yes, I do claim our spiraled-together imaginative cognition is not limited to only one way of looking at the bi-stable perception. In our times it's wise to say, "don't think, just do", but what if we can think and do at the same time? But what's most important is to establish the underlying principles why our cognition is fundamentally not so limited. I am not limiting my logic to what I have experienced so far (I cannot actually perceive the bi-stable states simultaneously), but extending it to what necessarily encompasses those spheres of Being which reach out beyond my personal experiences. What you describe about writing is perfectly valid from your current first-person perspective, but we must also integrate that into a holistic tapestry of our spiritual evolution, discerned by sound reasoning and always tied to our current experience through the threads of logic. Remember, it is thinking which constitutes our first-person perspective into a continuous whole of experience. If it couldn't discern states of being beyond its current state, there would be no religion, philosophy, art, or science. Logical thinking is what links us through the entire gradient of experience.

Yes, merging the two bi-stable views is the interactive approach, but that “logical thinking is what links us through the entire gradient of experience” revives the question I have put in the first paragraph. Expressed in yet another way: if this logic is ‘sharable’ and apt to lead to an ontology, why would the emphasis on transformation of cognition as a means to know the living greater intelligence be so key?

We should also remember that nothing in an evolutionary process occurs in isolation. We don't simply divide the unified flow of Being into two streams and then stop our consideration there, because we still experience the two streams (speech and writing, in this discussion) - that is the basis of modern dualism. Stopping when we get to the discontinuity and then projecting that onto the structure of Reality. Instead, we can view the seeming division as the necessary descent which makes possible the free ascent in greater individuated consciousness. But we aren't simply returning to where we were before - something is added through that individuated consciousness ascending in freedom. What is logically necessitated also becomes the basis for genuine novelty of experience and freedom of activity. At the smaller scale, consider what we are actually doing here on this forum, in this discussion, through our writing.

You characterized it as simply carriers of meaning, and that would be true if our thinking was purely mechanical, an exchange of intellectual content, without going any further. But here we are using it to make thinking-gestures which point, not only to the content of what we are writing, but the activity of writing itself. In other words, thinking-gestures which point to our deeper thinking-gestures and logical faculty which weave the content together. If we were limited to speech, then it would all have to be done in practically 'real-time'. We would only have oral tradition passed on from generation to generation, which certainly worked well for a while, but not so much for modern civilization. Likewise, we wouldn't have the inspired hieroglyphs to decode from ancient Egypt. We wouldn't have scripture, poems, literature, etc. which lift our collective vision to the higher worlds when we take a break from the sensory world. We wouldn't have mathematical thinking which sends rockets into actual outer space. I wouldn't have learned the Greek words for "I appreciate the quote" or come to see speech-writing as a nested polar relation, which I hadn't really considered before your insightful comments on this thread.

Absolutely. There are endless reasons to be deeply grateful for written language. (Side note: these were not Greek words, only made-up words reflecting the sound of the English words signified through similar-sounding Greek letters).

What matters here is not so much the content of any of these writings or events in isolation, but the holistic cognitive pattern they reflect back to us. It is likewise with our words, sentences and syntactical structure, down to the very shape of the characters. These are all degrees of freedom our cognition has won through. And there is certainly a price to pay for that freedom - the price of abstraction, suffering, and death. But we have paid that price voluntarily, when we factor in the holistic logical tapestry, and we can likewise voluntarily choose to realize the fruits of what we paid for. We are doing it right here and now, but can go much further. What we come to know about knowing, in a living way, determines whether we will evolve through this dark night of the soul. It is when we stop moving through the perceptions and conceptions of the world, including ourselves - i.e. idolatry - that we atrophy and die. That's the real danger of abstraction and, unfortunately, it's the reifying habit which constantly tempts us, to think of the sensory world as a fixed 'dashboard of dials', for ex., which prevents us from evolving through the abstraction with the integral help of the abstractions and the telos of redeeming those same abstractions. These are, in their essence, thought-beings which had to die so that we may live.

"For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished."

These last words are speaking to me from another level of clarity. They seem more active and dimensional. As per the language lecture: the creativity you put in them is perceivable - thank you!

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I think we have really narrowed down the core issues through this dialogue. I see an implicit thread running through these recent comments. If I were to put it in words from your perspective, it would be, "a phenomenology should only stick to how we experience phenomena from first-person perspective at any given time, 'as it is', and go no further until our experience changes." In my view, it's actually the opposite - the phenomenology of cognition-perception gives us a means of reaching out beyond where we are, experientially, at any given time, and discerning the logic which necessitates certain conclusions about Reality itself (all that we can ever know about it, which means first-person perspective), and this Reality itself must necessarily include our participatory act of cognition. Phenomenology of cognition becomes epistemology - what it means 'to know' - which becomes ontology. In other words, Reality is the evolving, differentiating-integrating process of knowing. This spiraling together of appearance and reality only works if the latter is of thought-nature - not simply consciousness, awareness, experiencing, etc., but actively willed, feeling-imbued, thought-nature. Before I had any noticeable meditative results, I knew that higher cognition was the only logical option.

You are right, Ashvin, that was my understanding of phenomenology, hence the need to complement it with ‘sound reasoning’. So you say, phenomenology goes beyond direct experience, through discerning a logic, and drawing the necessary conclusion that this logic implies. How to separate these necessary conclusions from generalizations? All the difficulty is to discern the logic without extrapolating from personal constraints to generality. Logic seems to be the very means to extrapolation. Isn’t logic the very method to come to conclusions that lie beyond personal experience?
When I read PoF for instance, I am presented with a logic. How do I engage with it? First I have the trust or affinity that allows me to seriously explore it, then I check that I can’t find objections. There is both a feeling for it and an intellectual approach, they go in parallel. Same for what Cleric explained yesterday. It’s both amazingly simple, it feels right, and it also explains the problem at hand in a satisfactory, comprehensive way that seems impossible to infirm. But, if we really wanted to push logic to the extreme (which to be clear I don't feel any need to do) couldn’t we say that this is Cleric’s personal experience which has been generalized? In which case the only way out would be to resort to the higher structure, which simply makes the explanation true? I could also turn the question this way: if the phenomenology that becomes epistemology could really also become an ontology - on ground of this logical approach that delivers necessary conclusions before one gets noticeable meditative results - why would one need these results? It seems to me that the ontology level can only be reached after one has experienced that landscape. Before that, it remains an inquiry. One can be fully confident, inspired, in love with the path, but the circle will only be closed (or opened) with the experience of realizing that structure. That’s why it’s a path - because it is not yet an ontology. Isn’t it so? The only other (unsatisfactory) way to reach an ontology would be the traditional way: making at least one hypothesis, throw it in the air, and start running after it.
I know, I am probably still expressing that lack of ‘interactivity’... it’s this word “logic” that makes me react, I believe : )

Let's consider one small example. We could take our experience of life on Earth with a physical body. Observation reveals this body is composed of the same elements and through the same physical forces we see around us in the mineral kingdom. It also reveals that when we die, this same body decomposes and returns to that kingdom. Careful reasoning here suggests to us that there must be something else, in addition to the physical body, which keeps the latter intact, growing, maintained, etc. for a certain portion of our lives. This something else - referred to as etheric body, life body, vital body, body of formative forces - is supra-sensory, so it cannot be directly perceived by the normal waking intellect. This is a really simplistic version of the argument and we can go into more details if necessary. Here we have an example of current living experience/observations and logical reasoning concluding a reality which is beyond our current conscious awareness. I shouldn't have said it is beyond experience before - what we can logically reason to is always bound up with our experience, since we couldn't experience anything without conceptual activity. And we are always seeking to understand these supra-sensory bodies, not only as isolated concepts, but in terms of our current living, holistic experience. If it doesn't have practical ramifications for our first-person experience of the world, then it's still too abstract and generalized.

You are correct that we should not confuse the logical conclusion for knowledge proper, as in, consciousness of this etheric body from the inner perspective. The normal waking intellect is conscious of how its inner thinking activity relates to its physical body, to some limited extent (much less than what is normally assumed), but it can't say the same for the etheric body. To become inwardly conscious of this body is to start becoming creatively responsible for the unfolding of its development, however limited at first. So the only reason we can say we are arriving at an 'ontology' is because we have concluded, on phenomenological grounds, that the only Reality we can become aware of is of thought-nature which is, of course, the same thought-nature which lives in us. Our concept of 'etheric body', integrated into a living, holistic idea, is a real aspect of the etheric body itself and its functions in our experience. This is how our logical thinking can participate in spiraling together appearance and reality through its living concepts even prior to becoming inwardly conscious of various aspects of that reality. Average humanity has almost no consciousness of inner perspectives responsible for most aspects of its living experience, but if we couple this logical approach with meditative practice, there is endless practical experience and insights we can attain in our current lifetime.

Just to be clear, the real spiritual convictions do arise through inner experience. Nothing can substitute for the experience of having worked something out conceptually and then discovering it as inner reality via higher consciousness, or discovering it within and then coming across the same thing in conceptual form. These are immensely powerful 'road to Damascus' moments. Yet we should get in the habit of understanding the whole thing as a gradient of experience - there is nothing we work out conceptually which will prove to be insignificant for future inner revelations. Outer events in general, during the collective course of human evolution, are being re-experienced inwardly in the human soul. The physical plane and all its forms serve quite definite purposes in aiding this re-membering of the spiritual worlds through us. Since you made it through PoF, it may be worthwhile to start on Theosophy and see how it all fits into a holistic logical tapestry for you. We don't need to call what we are reaching "ontology", if we simply understand that we are reaching firm conclusions about ever-deepening aspects of the only thought-reality we can ever know.

This isn't a separate pursuit than higher cognitive knowledge. It actually serves as the basis for what we can perceive and comprehend in higher modes of thinking. We are gaining more and more refined conceptual instrumentation which can resonate with various aspects of higher worlds. Similarly, meditative and non-meditative investigation of higher worlds are not completely separate. The approaches are certainly different and we should maintain strict boundaries between them, i.e. we shouldn't use higher consciousness to navigate the sensory world, but the approaches and knowledge should also be complementing one another the entire way, bridging the gap. What I imaginatively discern from my inner life should elucidate what I gain from outer conceptual reasoning and vice versa, each one giving living feedback on how to adjust and improve the other. It is very much the same as all polar relations, such as our spiritual activity and its impressions into written texts

Now what all this suggests about our participatory cognition and what we are actually participating in stretches very far. Let me first touch on this issue of Steiner's lecture. I think we should be clear that Steiner never introduces any duality between what the Gods create and what humans "invent". Everything humans do is intimately bound up with what the Gods are also doing on the higher planes of consciousness, which are none other than the higher layers of our own consciousness, within the nested TC spectrum. This is ontologically speaking. It's true we can draw a distinction between those times when humanity began to act through their own inner free agency, feeling ourselves to be individual, self-enclosed, egoic beings, just like this develops at the individual level between infancy and adolescence. It is simply the process of becoming more conscious of what is always happening and how we participate. The development of writing was certainly an important step in that process. Although we can note that, even in the ancient Egyptian civilization and earlier part of ancient Greece, it was felt that hieroglyphs, for ex., were inspirations from the Gods. Beyond that, I think it's clear that Steiner concluded with a section on writing without feeling the need to mark the transition because the continuity between speech-writing was taken as a given.

On this topic of the lecture, I don’t want to leave it at a point where it looks like I made a false statement. Therefore I feel the need to make this pedantic and, at this point, not so relevant comment.
Steiner didn't “conclude with a section on writing”. It’s not a section on writing, it’s a section on the necessity, based on the overarching parable on language he has drawn, to consider and approach language in itself (not only in literature) as an artistic expression and to ”reawaken the linguistic artist in us”. Because the historical overview comes to its end reaching the (then) present day, it can hardly include any examples of the artistic essence of language without indirectly referring to written word (for the obvious reasons we know). It’s exclusively in this matter-of-factly sense that the reference to writing occurs in this conclusion. Nothing substantial whatsoever is there about the nature of writing, the phenomenon of writing, the effects of writing, or its connections, in themselves, which would have made this conclusion on writing. Instead, it’s only that, with the purpose of speaking of the artistic nature of language, some (loose) references are given where one understands that the language in question happened to be of written nature.
This being said, everything else you elaborate about the lecture, I follow and like. There might be something liminal, or at least indicative, in the fact that you are/were using the word ‘speech’ in such an extended sense, including both audial and written expression, even to the extent of referring to “written speech”, an oxymoron that really makes my personal organization shudder : )

I hesitate to keep debating the Steiner lecture, because clearly the question is whether there actually is a discontinuity, not whether Steiner says there is one or not. I am curious what you think about Cleric's post about the continuity between spiritual activity impressed in airwaves and that same activity impressed in the sand (paper, etc.), for ex.

I am pretty confused as to how you say the mention of writing at the end of the lecture is completely tangential, though. Let's take one more look at that last paragraph.

"If true presentations of spiritual-scientific material, for example, are examined, 8 it will be found that the true spiritual scientists who have written these things also seriously worked on them to form each sentence creatively, that the position of the verb is not an arbitrary decision."

The formation of sentences and positioning of verbs is exactly what we have been calling 'syntax'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax

In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/)[1][2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency),[3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics).

Add to this the PoF quotes which also reference the syntax. And I can assure you he lectures on it in other places as well.

Here are some other quotes from him about PoF:

“For in the case of a book like this, the important thing is so to organize the thoughts it contains that they take effect. With many other books it doesn’t make a great deal of difference if one shifts the sequence, putting this thing first and that later. But in the case of The Philosophy of Freedom that is impossible. It would be just as unthinkable to put page 150 fifty pages earlier as it would be to put a dog’s hind legs, where the front ones belong.”

“Catharsis is an ancient term for the purification of the astral body by means of meditation and concentration exercises. If a reader takes this book as it was meant and relates to it in the way a virtuoso playing a composition on the piano relates to its composer, reproducing the whole piece out of herself, the books organically evolved thought sequence will bring about a high degree of catharsis.”

“Within this book thinking is experienced in a way that makes it impossible for a person involved in it to have any other impression, when he is living in thought, he is living in the cosmos. This relatedness to cosmic mysteries is the red thread running through the book.”

Now how is any of this possible if the structure of the writing, the syntax, so meticulously intended by certain authors, doesn't invite the reader's reasoning and imagination into its liminal spaces? That's something to consider.

From this comment, I can appreciate indirectly the quite different landscapes or riverbeds we are moving on, specifically when it comes to the concepts of space, sight, articulation, arrangement in space, interconnection of elements… Maybe it’s related to what you were describing as your perception of space becoming more and more like time and vice versa. For example - I noticed that before - you use the word ‘syntax’ in a very extensive sense, you almost use it as if Raffaello could speak of the syntax on the canvas of the various characters composing his School of Athens!

For me the answer to “How is any of this possible?” is: because the “structure of the writing” is conceptual, not visual - to be ‘generous’ I could say, only minimally visual. And so goes for the syntax, which to me means arrangement/organization of words in eminently conceptual, abstract sense, responding to specific rules of subordination, coordination, etcetera, in a non-spatial manner. All there is of essence and relevance to a syntax, as far af verbal language is concerned, including in these examples here, is conceptual to me, and does not depend on the texts’ visual form. It has a correspondence in form, but does not emerge from form. By contrast, that the visual form of these quotes matters, comes down to saying that, for example, the reader’s reasoning and imagination are invited differently into the quote’s liminal spaces depending on the text being published in a Times New Roman versus an Oxygen font.

I realize by now I am talking about my riverbed here, and that, as counter-intuitive as it is for me, Oxygen actually does make a difference, compared to Times New Roman. And looking at my experience on this Oxygen-based forum I can almost realize what this difference could be, on a first-person basis : )
(PS: I appreciate the creative quotation above!)

I'm glad you made that observation at the end

I really feel what was written previous to that is sacrificing interactive experience with the text for abstract intellectual reflection towards a certain preferred conclusion. That the structure/syntax of writing is not also heavily visual simply cannot be justified on the basis of any experience of writing. After all, what most clearly distinguishes writing from speech is the fact that the former is visual.

Returning to the base issue - yes, I do claim our spiraled-together imaginative cognition is not limited to only one way of looking at the bi-stable perception. In our times it's wise to say, "don't think, just do", but what if we can think and do at the same time? But what's most important is to establish the underlying principles why our cognition is fundamentally not so limited. I am not limiting my logic to what I have experienced so far (I cannot actually perceive the bi-stable states simultaneously), but extending it to what necessarily encompasses those spheres of Being which reach out beyond my personal experiences. What you describe about writing is perfectly valid from your current first-person perspective, but we must also integrate that into a holistic tapestry of our spiritual evolution, discerned by sound reasoning and always tied to our current experience through the threads of logic. Remember, it is thinking which constitutes our first-person perspective into a continuous whole of experience. If it couldn't discern states of being beyond its current state, there would be no religion, philosophy, art, or science. Logical thinking is what links us through the entire gradient of experience.

Yes, merging the two bi-stable views is the interactive approach, but that “logical thinking is what links us through the entire gradient of experience” revives the question I have put in the first paragraph. Expressed in yet another way: if this logic is ‘sharable’ and apt to lead to an ontology, why would the emphasis on transformation of cognition as a means to know the living greater intelligence be so key?

I think this was sufficiently addressed above, but if not we can return to it.

[AshvinP]

In reincarnation, as you know, we go back and forth for different purposes, sometimes to learn the lessons of the garden of evolution and sometimes to be helpful. The point is heaven and earth are connected and not separate and our karma/work/mission/purpose/destinies are interdependent. It's always a co-arising dynamic process involving many beings and forces, here and there. The language, which is dualist, reflects a starting position as we travel up, down and around the mountain. But, yes, the lessons of humility seem to require groundedness.

Allow me to express the above another way,

"As you know, the Universe spawns life and takes it back into its field of infinite energy for many different purposes of evolution. Sometimes the co-arising whirlpools of complexified energy form ecosystems to renew physical processes of the Earth, sometimes to become conscious and show gratitude and love to each other and the Universe, to commune with the planets and stars. The constant flux of matter/energy/emergent qualities/consciousness takes its course in manifold ways, with many purposes, and leads to many different co-dependent, interweaving results. The flows of energy move up, down, sideways, round and round. There are all sorts of energies and forces and intelligent creatures involved. The heavenly stars formed us and to them we will return and the cycle will continue."


The point is, once our concepts become so abstractly broad, they can apply to just about any reality whatsoever, even completely hypothetical and fantasized ones which cannot be known, ranging from the most materialistic to the most idealistic. The string of concepts will be technically "correct" and, indeed, many of the most 'enlightened' worldviews today consist of just such a string of concepts. They fancy themselves tolerant and humble because they have diluted the content of the concepts so much that they encompass everyone else's beliefs, opinions, speculations, and revelations equally. This is the criticism - it's not so much the content of the concepts, but their lack of precise content. Moreover, it's the satisfaction with this sort of contentless thinking. There is no thirst for scientific knowledge of what all these concepts are pointing to. What precisely happens between death and rebirth, for ex., which is half of all our existence within the Earthly evolution? It is the last phase of materialism because it appropriates all higher spiritual ideas to itself through familiar, pre-formatted, materialized concepts. It seemingly obviates the need to courageously face the unknown, unfamiliar, living details weaving their activity across the threshold of death into our daily consciousness - to not only revere the mysteries but to gradually unveil them with full clarity of consciousness.

Ashvin, let me see if i might be able to move it out of the adversarial frame.

Why are we discriminating against the prosecution-defense dependent co-arising?

Yes, there is something to learn from any move in any direction. No, this does not mean that anything goes. One can have faith, as I do, in awareness itself and be devoted to its growth knowing that it will self-correct in the case of error. I'm not being mystical or mysterious or unscientific, The shaman, for example, brings the revelations of the plant spirit to other shamans for peer review and replication and the community quickly learns whether the remedy works.

Can you elaborate on the specifics of these revelations and peer review?

[Lou Gold]

Allow me to express the above another way,

"As you know, the Universe spawns life and takes it back into its field of infinite energy for many different purposes of evolution. Sometimes the co-arising whirlpools of complexified energy form ecosystems to renew physical processes of the Earth, sometimes to become conscious and show gratitude and love to each other and the Universe, to commune with the planets and stars. The constant flux of matter/energy/emergent qualities/consciousness takes its course in manifold ways, with many purposes, and leads to many different co-dependent, interweaving results. The flows of energy move up, down, sideways, round and round. There are all sorts of energies and forces and intelligent creatures involved. The heavenly stars formed us and to them we will return and the cycle will continue."


The point is, once our concepts become so abstractly broad, they can apply to just about any reality whatsoever, even completely hypothetical and fantasized ones which cannot be known, ranging from the most materialistic to the most idealistic. The string of concepts will be technically "correct" and, indeed, many of the most 'enlightened' worldviews today consist of just such a string of concepts. They fancy themselves tolerant and humble because they have diluted the content of the concepts so much that they encompass everyone else's beliefs, opinions, speculations, and revelations equally. This is the criticism - it's not so much the content of the concepts, but their lack of precise content. Moreover, it's the satisfaction with this sort of contentless thinking. There is no thirst for scientific knowledge of what all these concepts are pointing to. What precisely happens between death and rebirth, for ex., which is half of all our existence within the Earthly evolution? It is the last phase of materialism because it appropriates all higher spiritual ideas to itself through familiar, pre-formatted, materialized concepts. It seemingly obviates the need to courageously face the unknown, unfamiliar, living details weaving their activity across the threshold of death into our daily consciousness - to not only revere the mysteries but to gradually unveil them with full clarity of consciousness.

Ashvin, let me see if i might be able to move it out of the adversarial frame.

Why are we discriminating against the prosecution-defense dependent co-arising?

Yes, there is something to learn from any move in any direction. No, this does not mean that anything goes. One can have faith, as I do, in awareness itself and be devoted to its growth knowing that it will self-correct in the case of error. I'm not being mystical or mysterious or unscientific, The shaman, for example, brings the revelations of the plant spirit to other shamans for peer review and replication and the community quickly learns whether the remedy works.

Can you elaborate on the specifics of these revelations and peer review?

In the traditional communities the shamans are known to each other and the villagers. There are a range of health issues for which shamans have produced remedies and the general population is aware of what works (or doesn't). Often, when asked how a medicine was discovered, the shaman responds that he was told by the plant. The research and writings of anthropologist Jeremy Narby are a rich source of reports, especially from Amazonia. Of course, there are modern scientific remedies as well, so it's not a contest between approaches. My point is that they are different approaches sharing common methods of peer review and replication. Narby's most recent book, Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge is co-authored with the Shawi healer Rafael Chanchari Pizuri and offers an interesting dialog on how the modern and shamanic modalities can work together, with each having something unique to offer.