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

[Federica]

Ok Ashvin, sorry for having implied that you had not read properly. Thank you for the comments, I have to revisit them further. I admit that while I see that I have transposed my experience to reality, I can't properly connect every piece and close the circle. Also I have this very strong sense, conviction or whatever the right word is, standing in the way, that there is something very off with interpreting the typographic spaces in that way, and I have to find out, even if I am wrong, where this sense comes from…

No worries. The most likely culprit is always what we refer to as the 'Kantian divide' or duality. This is a deeply ingrained habit of thinking in the modern age. Kant as a personality was simply the original and most influential vehicle of its expression. If we consider it in terms of the TC spectrum, we could say the idea of the Kantian divide is still precipitating its influence into our thinking states of being. It doesn't matter if we have heard of Kant or know anything about philosophy, it is still active in all of us. Why does this habit keep reasserting itself?

1) Convenience - it is easier to have hard and fast rules which we use to conceptualize the world phenomena. We then have a certain epistemic confidence in the face of unending complexity of the world forms, such as spoken and written languages. Each new particular form doesn't need to evaluated on its own merit, so to speak.

There is definitely great value in such a conceptualization process. In my law practice, when I come across a new 'fact pattern' for a client, the first thing I do is try to discern what overarching statute, rule of law, etc. is most applicable to it. This directs my attention to the resources I will need to further evaluate the situation. Yet if I stop there, then I could easily miss significant issues at play in the fact pattern which are not so evident at first. I should also pay more attention to the specifics of any given case.

How much more instructive would be a truly intuitive metaphysics, which would follow the undulations of the real! True, it would not embrace in a single sweep the totality of things; but for each thing it would give an explanation which would fit it exactly, and it alone. It would not begin by defining or describing the systematic unity of the world: who knows if the world is actually one?

Experience alone can say, and unity, if it exists, will appear at the end of the search as a result; it is impossible to posit it at the start as a principle. Furthermore, it will be a rich, full unity, the unity of a continuity, the unity of our reality, and not that abstract and empty unity, which has come from one supreme generalization, and which could just as well be that of any possible world whatsoever. It is true that philosophy then will demand a new effort for each new problem. No solution will be geometrically deduced from another. No important truth will be achieved by the prolongation of an already acquired truth. We shall have to give up crowding universal science potentially into one principle.

2) Addiction - this goes back to the essay on dualism and Cleric's post. Our habits are deeply entrenched and, in the case of this particular habit, unlike a substance addiction, we have no experience of what it means to think without being entrenched in the habit. Everything in our modern environment, from education to academia to entertainment to technology, is structured so as to reinforce the habit from the moment we are able to start thinking independently.

3) Secret desire - if we are addicted to smoking or drinking, and we find it terribly difficult to quit, we do well to ask ourselves how much we actually desire to free ourselves from it? Freeing ourselves from the habit means more responsibility and our modern environment, especially mechanistic technology, is likewise structured to give us ways of surviving with the least amount of creative responsibility possible. Our inner life has become adapted to this condition of perpetual addiction, seemingly free of responsibility.

Of course, man does not become conscious of the fact that such forms produce quite definite effects; they occur in the unconscious. He cannot be rationally clear about what is happening in his soul. Many people believe that the materialism of our modern time arises because so many materialistic writings are read. The occultist, however, knows that this is only one of the lesser influences. What the eye sees is of far greater importance, for it has an influence on soul processes that more or less run their course in the unconscious. This is of eminently practical importance, and when spiritual science will one day really take hold of the soul, then will the practical effect become noticeable in public life. I have often called attention to the fact that it was something different from what it is today when one in the Middle Ages walked through the streets. Right and left there were house façades that were built up out of what the soul felt and thought. Every key, every lock, carried the imprint of him who had made it. Try to realize how the individual craftsman felt joy in each piece, how he worked his own soul into it. In every object there was a piece of soul, and when a person moved among such things, soul forces streamed over to him. Now compare this with a city today. Here is a shoe store, a hardware store, a butcher shop, then a tavern, etc. All this is alien to the inner soul processes; it is related only to the outer man. Thus, it generates those soul forces that tend towards materialism. These influences work much more strongly than do the dogmas of materialism. Add to these our horrible art of advertising. Old and young wander through a sea of such abominable products that wake the most evil forces of the soul. So likewise do our modern comic journals. This is not meant to be a fanatical agitation against these things, but only indications about facts. All this pours a stream of forces into the human soul, determining the epoch that leads the person in a certain direction. The spiritual scientist knows how much depends upon the world of forms in which a man lives.

Everything really comes back to the depths of our soul-plumbing in the end, and the fear of what we may find when attempting to clean it out. Now I want to be clear, I am not saying any of the above is 100% responsible for your line of thinking on this thread. It is just the most likely culprit in these situations where discontinuities pop up between ideas and perceptions. I am sure there are aspects of the essay which fall short, perhaps over-emphasizing the visual spaces without enough of a conceptual/metaphorical foundation for why they matter. You are certainly correct to identify the overall abstract, prosaic nature of our outer world today, including our written language, which apparently removes it from the sphere of our creative soul life. The main takeaway should be that, the destiny of abstracted and prosaic forms in the outer world lies in our own thinking consciousness and how much we free the soul from these mechanized habits of thinking. In aesthetics, like poetry, as well as technology, we can clearly discern the seeds of a perceptual world shaped much more by our own creative ideation, for worse or for better.

There was no other way of developing the manifold capacities of Man than by placing them in opposition to each other. This antagonism of powers is the great instrument of culture, but it is only the instrument; for as long as it persists, we are only on the way towards culture.
...
As surely as all human individuals, taken together, with the power of vision which Nature has granted them, would never succeed in observing a satellite of Jupiter which the telescope reveals to the astronomer, so beyond question is it that human reflection would never have achieved an analysis of the infinite or a critique of pure reason, unless Reason had become dismembered among the several relevant subjects, as it were wrenched itself loose from all matter and strengthened its gaze into the Absolute by the most intense abstraction...

But can Man really be destined to neglect himself for any end whatever? Should Nature be able, by her designs, to rob us of a completeness which Reason prescribes to us by hers? It must be false that the cultivation of individual powers necessitates the sacrifice of their totality; or however much the law of Nature did have that tendency, we must be at liberty to restore by means of a higher Art this wholeness in our nature which Art has destroyed.

- Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795)

I am yet again finding great value in these last comments and quotes, or at least I am under such an impression, thank you.

[Federica]

When I have now been trying to sit down and take a moment for concentration, as soon as the bigger distractions start fading away, my heart starts beating hard and fast and I get distracted again by that, wondering if it’s the wrong type of feeling that I’m bathing in. If anything, I feel I am too earthly grounded and run no risk of over-spiritualizing. Maybe we are talking about two different things, I don’t know.

Hi Federica,
a quick note about the grounding.

Lou, for example, often says "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens". Such a view usually results from the conception that through spirituality we somehow lift ourselves from Earthly reality and care only about higher things. But this isn't so when we speak about genuine spirituality, in the way demanded by proper evolution.

We can note that 'grounding' may hold different meanings for different people. For some, to be grounded means to be entangled in Earthly happenings, for example, drinking beer, going to the movies, having a nice meal, laughing with friends. Such a person may say "I'm down on Earth man. I live in the Earthly reality. The spirituality you speak about is up in the clouds, it's volatile. I prefer to hold on to something substantial."

Interestingly, this is not really grounding in the deeper sense. Actually, compared to the grounding we speak of, it is really only a vague dream life. When we dream at night we may also feel to be sticking firmly to the dream content and we may feel 'down on Earth', grasping at something substantial.

Grounding in the proper sense is begins by concentrating our (thinking) spiritual activity. Our consciously willed spiritual activity and its reflections are the marriage of Heaven and Earth. In meditation it's not the goal to move away from our center and seek reality in the spiritual clouds.

There's an interesting exercise we can do to make it clearer what this center is about. When walking outdoors (assuming safe and calm environment) we can try concentrating roughly in the head area and conceive how we are always at the center of existence. No matter where we are in space or along time, we never really move away from our own center. So we can experiment to feel how we're stationary, at the center of All and only our perceptual content changes. As a rough analogy, if we look at a video like this, it's clear that we're stationary and only the pixels on the screen change. Similarly, when we're able to stabilize our concentration in a point in the head region we may get a feeling that we're not really moving, we're at the same center we've always been and only the World Content metamorphoses (This exercise shouldn't be turned into some kind of one-sided goal. The center that we can experience within ourselves is still a subject of metamorphosis, so we should avoid absolutizing it).

My point is that being grounded, doesn't really have anything to do with being carried along by sensory perceptions. We're really grounded when we find the absolute point of reference within ourselves. This is not something that we see externally in front of us but, as it has been explained elsewhere, it's like a growing sense for a center of gravity around which World phenomena revolve.

Of course it will be prideful to imagine that World phenomena revolve round our Earthly perspective. That's why the hidden order of these revolutions unveils only when we begin to resonate with the World "I" which is concentric to our limited sense of self, yet the latter oscillates hectically as an electron cloud around the deeper spiritual well.

So there are two main points in all the above.
1. We're grounded in the true sense not when we are swayed by Earthly affairs but when we begin to sense the center of gravity of our being, which is the same in the waking life, in dreaming and deep sleep, on Earth and in the life between death and new birth. Thus we're grounding not in sensory perceptions, neither in nebulous spiritual ideas but in the immediate reality of our being. When we do that in the proper way we begin to feel that in the experience of our concentrated spiritual activity, we're neither on Earth, nor in some imaginary Heaven but in the only reality we ever know. If we think about it, even from materialistic perspective, when we take an electron in our brain we can say that it is floating in Cosmic space, like asteroids float. Similarly, when we focus on our spiritual activity we don't need to go anywhere, we don't need to fly away in some clouds. We're already in Cosmic space, it's only that our spiritual activity has previously been entrained by patterns of perceptions and habitual thinking/feeling/willing.

2. Ascent to higher worlds doesn't consist into flying away either. Our concentrated activity becomes the kernel around which the World Content and the living ideational activity of the Cosmos integrates. We speak of higher worlds insofar that consciousness encompasses the greater meaningful order of the first-person World Content metamorphosis. For an ordinary person life consists into transitions from sensation to sensation, desire to desire, etc. For the initiate, whose organization has been attuned to the Cosmic organism, life is seen as hierarchical superposition of ideational activity of intelligences. It's like living in a movie with clear consciousness of the intelligences that art in real time the general plot, the chapters, the scenes, the details. It is of great import to understand that we don't rise to the higher order being of the Cosmos by flying away from our Earthly center but by slowly and patiently integrating the Divine activity around our grounded center. On archetypal level this also why the Christ had to appear in the flesh. This is the grounding at Cosmic scale. The Sun Spirit has impregnated the Earth. Now the Earth is like the grounded kernel which like a caterpillar will metamorphose through its future states. In the same sense there's something of our feeling of centeredness, when we do the above exercise, which will persist through all evolution. The Spiritual Cosmos will inflow into consciousness through that center.

Thank you, Cleric. Indeed I was not very clear what I was speaking of in that passage. Now it is clearer.

[AshvinP]

I am yet again finding great value in these last comments and quotes, or at least I am under such an impression, thank you.

You may also find value in this lecture I came across recently. Normally I would provide some comments also, relating it to our discussion, but my brain is fried today. I think the connections are pretty clear, though.

https://rsarchive.org/GA/GA0059/19100120p02.html

When we speak of human language, we feel sufficiently how all the significance, dignity and the whole of the human being are connected with that which we call language. Our innermost existence, all our thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will flow outward to our fellow human beings and unite us with them through language. Thus we feel the possibility of expanding our being infinitely, the ability to make our being extend into our environment through language. On the other hand, anyone who can enter into the inner life of significant personalities will be able to feel particularly how language can also become a tyrant, a force which exercises power over our inner life. We can feel how our feelings and thoughts, those things of a special and intimate nature which pass through our soul, can be expressed only poorly and inadequately in the word, in language. And we can also feel how even the language within which we are placed forces us into specific modes of thinking. Everyone must be aware how the human being is dependent on language as far as his thinking is concerned. It is words to which our concepts are generally attached; and in an imperfect stage of development the human being will readily confuse the word or that which the word inculcates in him with the concept. Here lies the cause for the inability of some people to construct for themselves a conceptual framework which reaches beyond what is contained in the words commonly used in their environment. And we are aware how the character of a whole people who speak a common language is in a certain way dependent on that language. The person who observes national character more closely, the character of languages in their context, must realise that the way in which the human being is able to transform the content of his soul into sounds in turn acts back on the strengths and weaknesses of his character, on the way his temperament is expressed, even on his conception of existence as a whole. The configuration of a language can tell much about the character of a people. And since a language is common to a people, the individual is dependent on a common element, an average quantity, as it were, which prevails among that people. He is thus subject to a certain tyranny, to the rule of commonality. But if one realises that language contains on the one hand our individual spiritual life and on the other the spiritual life of the community, then one comes to see what might be called the “secret of language” as something of special significance. A considerable amount can be learnt about the soul-life of the human being if one observes how this being expresses itself in language.
...
Today human beings are satisfied if what they want to say comes out in any way, no matter what form it takes. How many people realise — which is absolutely necessary in the field of spiritual science — that an artistic feeling for language is necessary to express anything? 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. Each sentence will be seen as a birth, because it must be experienced inwardly in the soul as immediate form, not simply as a thought. And the sentences are connected not only consecutively, but the third one has to be formed in essence at the same time as the first one because they are interconnected in their effect. In spiritual science it is impossible to work without a creatively active sense of language. Everything else is inadequate. It is important to free oneself of being slavishly tied to words. But we cannot do that if we think that any word is suitable to express a given thought; that already is an error in our linguistic creativity. The expression of super-sensible facts cannot be gained from words which are coined only with a view to the sense world. If the question is asked “How is one to express the ether body or the astral body in a concrete manner in reality by means of a word?” nothing of this has been understood. Only the person has understood something of this who says: I will understand what the ether body is if in the first instance I investigate from one particular aspect and it is quite clear that I am dealing with artistically formed reflected images; and then I investigate three more aspects. The matter has then been presented from four different sides. When it is thereafter expressed in language, in walking round the topic as it were, we are presenting an artistic image of the matter.

[Federica]

You may also find value in this lecture I came across recently. Normally I would provide some comments also, relating it to our discussion, but my brain is fried today. I think the connections are pretty clear, though.

https://rsarchive.org/GA/GA0059/19100120p02.html

When we speak of human language, we feel sufficiently how all the significance, dignity and the whole of the human being are connected with that which we call language. Our innermost existence, all our thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will flow outward to our fellow human beings and unite us with them through language. Thus we feel the possibility of expanding our being infinitely, the ability to make our being extend into our environment through language. On the other hand, anyone who can enter into the inner life of significant personalities will be able to feel particularly how language can also become a tyrant, a force which exercises power over our inner life. We can feel how our feelings and thoughts, those things of a special and intimate nature which pass through our soul, can be expressed only poorly and inadequately in the word, in language. And we can also feel how even the language within which we are placed forces us into specific modes of thinking. Everyone must be aware how the human being is dependent on language as far as his thinking is concerned. It is words to which our concepts are generally attached; and in an imperfect stage of development the human being will readily confuse the word or that which the word inculcates in him with the concept. Here lies the cause for the inability of some people to construct for themselves a conceptual framework which reaches beyond what is contained in the words commonly used in their environment. And we are aware how the character of a whole people who speak a common language is in a certain way dependent on that language. The person who observes national character more closely, the character of languages in their context, must realise that the way in which the human being is able to transform the content of his soul into sounds in turn acts back on the strengths and weaknesses of his character, on the way his temperament is expressed, even on his conception of existence as a whole. The configuration of a language can tell much about the character of a people. And since a language is common to a people, the individual is dependent on a common element, an average quantity, as it were, which prevails among that people. He is thus subject to a certain tyranny, to the rule of commonality. But if one realises that language contains on the one hand our individual spiritual life and on the other the spiritual life of the community, then one comes to see what might be called the “secret of language” as something of special significance. A considerable amount can be learnt about the soul-life of the human being if one observes how this being expresses itself in language.
...
Today human beings are satisfied if what they want to say comes out in any way, no matter what form it takes. How many people realise — which is absolutely necessary in the field of spiritual science — that an artistic feeling for language is necessary to express anything? 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. Each sentence will be seen as a birth, because it must be experienced inwardly in the soul as immediate form, not simply as a thought. And the sentences are connected not only consecutively, but the third one has to be formed in essence at the same time as the first one because they are interconnected in their effect. In spiritual science it is impossible to work without a creatively active sense of language. Everything else is inadequate. It is important to free oneself of being slavishly tied to words. But we cannot do that if we think that any word is suitable to express a given thought; that already is an error in our linguistic creativity. The expression of super-sensible facts cannot be gained from words which are coined only with a view to the sense world. If the question is asked “How is one to express the ether body or the astral body in a concrete manner in reality by means of a word?” nothing of this has been understood. Only the person has understood something of this who says: I will understand what the ether body is if in the first instance I investigate from one particular aspect and it is quite clear that I am dealing with artistically formed reflected images; and then I investigate three more aspects. The matter has then been presented from four different sides. When it is thereafter expressed in language, in walking round the topic as it were, we are presenting an artistic image of the matter.

I have now taken another look at my post viewtopic.php?p=18019#p18019
to understand its dualism and to get to the bottom of that strong sense that I was speaking of, that the actual spaces between the letters, words, sentences, etc. cannot count to illustrate the principle of liminal spaces. I also read with great interest the Steiner lecture on language. Among other things it has done, the lecture has actually strengthened that sense, which I have tried to put into words a few times now. For this reason, please allow me to yet again elaborate. I would be very interested in reading any further comments or ‘duality check’.
In fact, I have more to say about thought process in connection with my experience along this exchange, but it’s a different topic. I prefer to focus on the object of diverge here and keep the rest for a separate post.


Your point:

the physical spaces, attained through the written syntax, signify the pauses which would occur if I were reading it out loud.

The key here is “if I were reading it out loud”. But I am not. There is obviously a correspondence between the two, just as there is one between the symbols on the written page and the sounds of speech. This being recognized, I have to maintain that the written spaces, as well as the written symbols for that matter - written language - is not meaningful in itself for the sake of linguistic meaning but only as a carrier of meaning.


I have a new example to illustrate that. Let’s say I send you written language consisting of this text: “I appreciate the quote”. Your position is that the visual appearance of this message, its written quality, counts. It participates in the meaning that you will mine from it. The visual aspect includes the spaces and the specific form of the graphical signs as well. So let’s look at written language in the specifics of the signs (letters) this time, rather than of its syntax. Who knows, maybe this change of focus will finally serve the idea that I have been trying to convey so many times now. Now let’s say that you know the Russian or the Greek alphabet, say the Greek. What if I now send you this text: “αι απρηχιειτ θ κουοτ”, which is not a translation to Greek, but simply the transliteration to Greek characters of the original English text. The same English words in the first text are now supported, rendered by closely sounding Greek letters. If read out loud, the sentence would sound roughly the same as “I appreciate the quote”. This has been done quickly so a philologist would not like it, but let’s not go there, we got the idea. Now, once realized - amidst the relative discomfort of decoding the words / ‘uploading’ them to your space in speech form - that I am telling you that I liked the quote, would you state that the Greek characters themselves, as opposed to the English ones, have contributed to the meaning you have gained from the message, in a way that is specific to them?


To me the clear answer is no. Once you are apprehending the fact that I liked the quote, creatively mining your own meaning out of that, symbols and spaces, the bearers of the message - its hangers, in all their typographic symbolic splendor - are gone, aren’t they? Their function is fulfilled and terminated. They have been sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning. They have died, for the purpose of bringing the meaning to you, without being the meaning, because meaning and symbols lie on different planes. And so do the spaces also. There is nothing that can be co-created on their behalf on the plane of linguistic meaning. In the Steiner lecture you have shared, on the origin and the higher logic underlying language, it’s noticeable that it’s all about the sound, the element of air and the beings that live in it, in connection with the larynx, and the spirit that lives in the speech. It is never, not once in the whole lecture, a matter of written language and symbols. This I wrote before you shared the lecture:

Spoken word is breath, it’s spirit.

Language is unitary in its essence. Language is speech, auditory. It’s imbued with the voice’s quality, presence, and absence, during the meaningful pauses. Above language there are concepts (not yet language) below language there are expedients, workarounds (not language anymore in themselves, not in their essence), such as symbolic transposition of language into visuals, for easy transfer.

Do you see dualism in what I'm saying? Dualism cannot consist in the fact that I took language, split it into spoken and written, and that makes for a duality, can it? Your wrote as an objection:

with such a rule, we are then disconnecting written language from first-person thinking perspective, treating it as a separate thing which has been 'abstracted' and floats around. Notice how this makes the process of mining meaning from written language independent of one's own cognitive development. ... We are washing our hands of the responsibility for the difficulties entailed of mining meaning from written speech.

This is not true. No matter the Greek or English alphabet, and the syntax that comes with those, you will in any case have full responsibility for mining meaning from the written message. The result of this process will be fully dependent on your cognitive development and abilities. It is a fact - and I have good hopes you will agree - that if I had to send that same written message “I appreciate the quote”, in whatever alphabet and spacing, to x different recipients here, the mined meaning would be quite variable across the sample’.
One can mine enormous value from written language, which would remain undisclosed to someone else with lesser ability to mine meaning. But that value comes from the meaning plane, not the visual plane. First I have to ‘upload’ the visual as speech percept to my thinking. In that conjunction, I am working at forming the meaning, on a plane where any traces of visual signs, specific symbols and spaces are lost. You quoted:

Each thinking gesture expresses a 'shape' of meaning. Thinking lives in meaningful time-patterns. The patterns are not something that we perceive externally and then interpret with thinking. They are the geometry of meaning itself.

Yes, it’s PoF’s Chapter 4. Thinking does not apply itself to perception and then reads it. Instead, it co-creates meaning, it becomes meaning, in the act of conjunction with the percept. I got that, I believe. And that is precisely why, from the same written page, or scripture, a variety of meanings can be mined or not mined. This does not in the least infirm my point, that, unlike its visual token, spoken word is living, resounding, creative expression, essentially full of meaning. The essence of language is sound. The essence of written language is transfer and practicality. From the same lecture (I have added the emphasis):

Today we will try to illuminate aphoristically so to speak, in broad outline, language, its development and its connection with the human being from a spiritual-scientific point of view as we have been applying it to man and his development.
It is this connection which in the first instance seems so mysterious when we use a word to describe an object, an event, a process. What is the link between a particular combination of sounds which form a word or sentence and that which is within us which the object, expressed as word, means? (…) The question is quite simple, and yet it is so difficult to answer: why did the human being, when faced with some object or event in the outside world, produce this or that particular sound from within himself as an echo of that object or event?

[AshvinP]

...

Federica,

I want to first throw out a metaphysical consideration here, which, despite all our criticism of abstract metaphysics, is still useful in this situation. How is it possible that our perceptions of word-forms and the syntactical structure of written text are of an essentially different character, in relation to our cognition, than any other sense-perceptions? It's very difficult to justify this discontinuity, metaphysically speaking. One must deny the validity of liminal spaces altogether, which is effectively denying any participatory relation between our cognition and the ordering of perceptions, or simply live with a major discontinuity. This is at the heart of all dualism - a discontinuity is introduced somewhere along the gradient of Idea-Perception. I am wondering whether you noticed this and, if so, whether you have thought of a metaphysical workaround?

I have a new example to illustrate that. Let’s say I send you written language consisting of this text: “I appreciate the quote”. Your position is that the visual appearance of this message, its written quality, counts. It participates in the meaning that you will mine from it. The visual aspect includes the spaces and the specific form of the graphical signs as well. So let’s look at written language in the specifics of the signs (letters) this time, rather than of its syntax. Who knows, maybe this change of focus will finally serve the idea that I have been trying to convey so many times now. Now let’s say that you know the Russian or the Greek alphabet, say the Greek. What if I now send you this text: “αι απρηχιειτ θ κουοτ”, which is not a translation to Greek, but simply the transliteration to Greek characters of the original English text. The same English words in the first text are now supported, rendered by closely sounding Greek letters. If read out loud, the sentence would sound roughly the same as “I appreciate the quote”. This has been done quickly so a philologist would not like it, but let’s not go there, we got the idea. Now, once realized - amidst the relative discomfort of decoding the words / ‘uploading’ them to your space in speech form - that I am telling you that I liked the quote, would you state that the Greek characters themselves, as opposed to the English ones, have contributed to the meaning you have gained from the message, in a way that is specific to them?

To me the clear answer is no. Once you are apprehending the fact that I liked the quote, creatively mining your own meaning out of that, symbols and spaces, the bearers of the message - its hangers, in all their typographic symbolic splendor - are gone, aren’t they? Their function is fulfilled and terminated. They have been sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning. They have died, for the purpose of bringing the meaning to you, without being the meaning, because meaning and symbols lie on different planes. And so do the spaces also. There is nothing that can be co-created on their behalf on the plane of linguistic meaning. In the Steiner lecture you have shared, on the origin and the higher logic underlying language, it’s noticeable that it’s all about the sound, the element of air and the beings that live in it, in connection with the larynx, and the spirit that lives in the speech. It is never, not once in the whole lecture, a matter of written language and symbols. 

I disagree. First, in the Steiner lecture, the part I quoted at the end is specifically about written text. 

"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."

Second, the key element in whether, in your example, the words have been "sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning" is whether I understand English and/or Greek and how well I understand them in verbal and written form, i.e. my own cognitive development at any given time. If I come to the experience of the quote exactly as I am now, then perhaps you are correct that the Greek characters don't contribute any additional meaning. But I can't imagine that would remain true if I was very well-versed in ancient Greek and, better still, its whole history as a spoken and written language. Then I imagine the Greek characters would certainly have a new imaginative life within me and would help me investigate the idea of "I appreciate the quote" from more distinct angles, 'walking round the topic as it were'. 

This seems to be the core issue - it is whether we can do a phenomenology by 'coming as we are' to the phenomena and then extrapolating our interaction to Reality itself, i.e. the essence of the relations between cognition and perception. The purpose of a phenomenology of cognition is quite the opposite - to distinguish precisely what we are bringing to the experience through our own peculiar organization - body and soul - and what speaks to us from the experience as a universal, transpersonal spiritual element. The distinctions you are making between spoken language and written language are clearly justified to some extent, especially in our modern age. We can more easily discern the Spirit breathing through speech than we can in the densified reflections of written text. But there is an entire gradient here - why would we distinguish between prosaic and poetic writing, otherwise?

This is not true. No matter the Greek or English alphabet, and the syntax that comes with those, you will in any case have full responsibility for mining meaning from the written message. The result of this process will be fully dependent on your cognitive development and abilities. It is a fact - and I have good hopes you will agree - that if I had to send that same written message “I appreciate the quote”, in whatever alphabet and spacing, to x different recipients here, the mined meaning would be quite variable across the sample’.

One can mine enormous value from written language, which would remain undisclosed to someone else with lesser ability to mine meaning. But that value comes from the meaning plane, not the visual plane. First I have to ‘upload’ the visual as speech percept to my thinking. In that conjunction, I am working at forming the meaning, on a plane where any traces of visual signs, specific symbols and spaces are lost.

Again, how are you separating off the 'visual plane' from the 'meaning plane'? I think we both agree that typographical spaces, and syntax in general, signify the ways in which the words would be spoken as well. So why are you treating the 'spaces' between verbal and written as essentially different in their relation to mining meaning? There is no doubt that, for average waking intellect, more meaning can be mined from spoken speech, since it is also more directly imbued with forces of body and soul. Yet that doesn't render the visual plane of written text, by which I mean the syntax, irrelevant to the meaning-mining process. But the "average waking intellect" is also critical - all perceptions, spoken or written, audial or visual, proceed from and are received by our own mode of spiritual activity.
 
On the broader evolutionary level, the flow of spiritual evolution is precisely what transfigures reflected images, which grow increasingly attenuated from the living Spirit as they develop inner freedom, back into living, creative agencies. That happens through beings at their "human" stage in every cycle and their equivalent of imaginative cognition. The textual forms, like the elements, minerals, and such, are only devoid of Spirit in our current cognition. There are no two different essences involved (this can only be dualism). The Spirit is everywhere and in everything - omnipresent. This doesn't mean we will continue typing on forums and writing books like we are now, but the essential activity which we call 'writing' will live on in a more spiritualized form. Moreover, we can begin to discern the fruits of that spiritual evolution right now through our own higher cognitive development.  

"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

[Federica]

...

Federica,

I want to first throw out a metaphysical consideration here, which, despite all our criticism of abstract metaphysics, is still useful in this situation. How is it possible that our perceptions of word-forms and the syntactical structure of written text are of an essentially different character, in relation to our cognition, than any other sense-perceptions? It's very difficult to justify this discontinuity, metaphysically speaking. One must deny the validity of liminal spaces altogether, which is effectively denying any participatory relation between our cognition and the ordering of perceptions, or simply live with a major discontinuity. This is at the heart of all dualism - a discontinuity is introduced somewhere along the gradient of Idea-Perception. I am wondering whether you noticed this and, if so, whether you have thought of a metaphysical workaround?

I have a new example to illustrate that. Let’s say I send you written language consisting of this text: “I appreciate the quote”. Your position is that the visual appearance of this message, its written quality, counts. It participates in the meaning that you will mine from it. The visual aspect includes the spaces and the specific form of the graphical signs as well. So let’s look at written language in the specifics of the signs (letters) this time, rather than of its syntax. Who knows, maybe this change of focus will finally serve the idea that I have been trying to convey so many times now. Now let’s say that you know the Russian or the Greek alphabet, say the Greek. What if I now send you this text: “αι απρηχιειτ θ κουοτ”, which is not a translation to Greek, but simply the transliteration to Greek characters of the original English text. The same English words in the first text are now supported, rendered by closely sounding Greek letters. If read out loud, the sentence would sound roughly the same as “I appreciate the quote”. This has been done quickly so a philologist would not like it, but let’s not go there, we got the idea. Now, once realized - amidst the relative discomfort of decoding the words / ‘uploading’ them to your space in speech form - that I am telling you that I liked the quote, would you state that the Greek characters themselves, as opposed to the English ones, have contributed to the meaning you have gained from the message, in a way that is specific to them?

To me the clear answer is no. Once you are apprehending the fact that I liked the quote, creatively mining your own meaning out of that, symbols and spaces, the bearers of the message - its hangers, in all their typographic symbolic splendor - are gone, aren’t they? Their function is fulfilled and terminated. They have been sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning. They have died, for the purpose of bringing the meaning to you, without being the meaning, because meaning and symbols lie on different planes. And so do the spaces also. There is nothing that can be co-created on their behalf on the plane of linguistic meaning. In the Steiner lecture you have shared, on the origin and the higher logic underlying language, it’s noticeable that it’s all about the sound, the element of air and the beings that live in it, in connection with the larynx, and the spirit that lives in the speech. It is never, not once in the whole lecture, a matter of written language and symbols. 

I disagree. First, in the Steiner lecture, the part I quoted at the end is specifically about written text. 

"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."

Second, the key element in whether, in your example, the words have been "sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning" is whether I understand English and/or Greek and how well I understand them in verbal and written form, i.e. my own cognitive development at any given time. If I come to the experience of the quote exactly as I am now, then perhaps you are correct that the Greek characters don't contribute any additional meaning. But I can't imagine that would remain true if I was very well-versed in ancient Greek and, better still, its whole history as a spoken and written language. Then I imagine the Greek characters would certainly have a new imaginative life within me and would help me investigate the idea of "I appreciate the quote" from more distinct angles, 'walking round the topic as it were'. 

This seems to be the core issue - it is whether we can do a phenomenology by 'coming as we are' to the phenomena and then extrapolating our interaction to Reality itself, i.e. the essence of the relations between cognition and perception. The purpose of a phenomenology of cognition is quite the opposite - to distinguish precisely what we are bringing to the experience through our own peculiar organization - body and soul - and what speaks to us from the experience as a universal, transpersonal spiritual element. The distinctions you are making between spoken language and written language are clearly justified to some extent, especially in our modern age. We can more easily discern the Spirit breathing through speech than we can in the densified reflections of written text. But there is an entire gradient here - why would we distinguish between prosaic and poetic writing, otherwise?

This is not true. No matter the Greek or English alphabet, and the syntax that comes with those, you will in any case have full responsibility for mining meaning from the written message. The result of this process will be fully dependent on your cognitive development and abilities. It is a fact - and I have good hopes you will agree - that if I had to send that same written message “I appreciate the quote”, in whatever alphabet and spacing, to x different recipients here, the mined meaning would be quite variable across the sample’.

One can mine enormous value from written language, which would remain undisclosed to someone else with lesser ability to mine meaning. But that value comes from the meaning plane, not the visual plane. First I have to ‘upload’ the visual as speech percept to my thinking. In that conjunction, I am working at forming the meaning, on a plane where any traces of visual signs, specific symbols and spaces are lost.

Again, how are you separating off the 'visual plane' from the 'meaning plane'? I think we both agree that typographical spaces, and syntax in general, signify the ways in which the words would be spoken as well. So why are you treating the 'spaces' between verbal and written as essentially different in their relation to mining meaning? There is no doubt that, for average waking intellect, more meaning can be mined from spoken speech, since it is also more directly imbued with forces of body and soul. Yet that doesn't render the visual plane of written text, by which I mean the syntax, irrelevant to the meaning-mining process. But the "average waking intellect" is also critical - all perceptions, spoken or written, audial or visual, proceed from and are received by our own mode of spiritual activity.
 
On the broader evolutionary level, the flow of spiritual evolution is precisely what transfigures reflected images, which grow increasingly attenuated from the living Spirit as they develop inner freedom, back into living, creative agencies. That happens through beings at their "human" stage in every cycle and their equivalent of imaginative cognition. The textual forms, like the elements, minerals, and such, are only devoid of Spirit in our current cognition. There are no two different essences involved (this can only be dualism). The Spirit is everywhere and in everything - omnipresent. This doesn't mean we will continue typing on forums and writing books like we are now, but the essential activity which we call 'writing' will live on in a more spiritualized form. Moreover, we can begin to discern the fruits of that spiritual evolution right now through our own higher cognitive development.  

"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

Ashvin,

Thanks for taking the trouble to go in every detail. Before I come to the question, a word on this:

I disagree. First, in the Steiner lecture, the part I quoted at the end is specifically about written text.

"If true presentations of spiritual-scientific material, for example, are examined, 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."

I’m not frivolous enough to pretend that Steiner never quotes literature, and never refers to certain books having been written, some even with the goal of forming sentences creatively. It’s not needed to disagree with that, it was not my point. Nevertheless in Steiner’s illustration, speech is an invention of the higher beings of air that was put into the human body as the larynx. That’s the process he cares to illustrate, when tackling the nature of language. Conversely, written language is a human invention, no word is spent on its nature. To my intuition, that suggests a major divide between language proper and its written rendition. Yes, it’s maybe arbitrary of me to see here a coherence with my view of language, but some move in some direction I have to take, and the options seem restricted...


Now to the question of discontinuity. I don’t see why first-person experience would need metaphysical workarounds. But I certainly see the discontinuity. How is it possible that it is there? I don’t know! It appears in the experience of making (sense of) the world content. I'm not making it up as a fantasy. There is a before and after learning to read a musical score. There is a before and after learning to read and write. After that, we can’t look at a written page the same way anymore. Writing creates discontinuity, it puts a fork on our way. Can you stare directly at a written text and resist reading it? I can’t. I am sure it’s possible, with an exactly right stance on the hysteresis trade-off. But the discontinuity is undeniable, the code pulls us through it. Is it only my personal experience? I doubt that, although it certainly depends on cognitive ability. Anyway, for me it’s impossible to control the participatory relation between cognition and the ordering of perception to that level of… creativity! I simply have to read the text. The only way to not read it would be to somehow unlearn the alphabet, go back to ‘illiterate mode’.


It reminds me of the bi-stable perception. I can either look at it as form, but only if I ignore the code, or I read it, if I know the code. I cannot do both, while from your comments to my example I understand that you can do both. And the description you have provided is useful, I’m seeing a possible mapping of both viewpoints in one image, like this. Let’s say our flow of perception-cognition is a river. When I approach the experience of written language, for me it is like there’s a big boulder in the middle of the river. It’s so big that the river splits in two at that point. Coming to it, I have no choice, the experience has to flow to one of the two sides, the reading one, and from there I can’t go against the stream and try to make it flow back up to the other segment. All that could be available on the other segment is lost, not accessible to me. In your case it seems like the stone is much smaller, and the water unites again after the stone. Encoded and not encoded meanings are both accessible. Or maybe there is no stone at all and no discontinuity.


For me the discontinuity emerges in the acted flow of that participatory relation you speak of, which is experienced as reality. I engage in that act with certainly biased cognition, and so experience discontinuity in the ideal continuum of the ordering of perception you speak of. At this point I hear your next comment strike: “So the difference between speech and writing is in your cognition, it’s not essential, check the Merriam-Webster.” And it’s true, despite the hints I get from connected ideas, I am tying to make sense of reality by expanding from my personal experience. So yes, I might have unduly extended it to the essence of written language itself, in the common Merriam-Webster sense of the word 'essence'. But here I want to ask you: while in a dualistic system it is quite straightforward to understand what ‘essence’ means, don’t you agree that on the path you speak of, where cognition-perception is understood and experienced as it is, the essence of things acquires a non-Merriam-Webster kind of meaning? In your opinion, how am I supposed to speak of the essence of written word? Or should I maybe not speak of the essence of anything at all, because that essence rests in a creative flow coming from within a higher order structure that I don’t have access to? And if so, why would you even be interested in discussing the liminal spaces?


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. As in the Bergson quote, every new situation should only be inquired for itself, without any assumptions. In practice, the way I am supposed to proceed is phenomenology, and more generally, first-person inquiry. But of course pure phenomenology doesn’t really exist by itself. As per one of your recent posts - I haven’t found the exact post, please correct me if I’m wrong - to careful and unprejudiced exploration of the given, we should add sound logical reasoning to complement observation. In practice, if we don’t add it, we stand still with our phenomenology. Still, it should be the type of sound reasoning that does not find or create discontinuities, because the surface of the gradient idea-perception is sleek. If a discontinuity is found it’s simply because the logic behind it is not Logic enough, or not at all.
So... I am called to be intuitive, but without access to the real means for that. I am called to do phenomenology and use logical reasoning, to identify ‘what speaks to me from the experience as a universal, transpersonal spiritual element’ but there's no lawfulness to support that inquiry and separate what is justified from what is not. Well there is one, but it’s off-limits. And the threat of dualism lies in wait at every corner. How am I supposed to move forward, if I may ask? Concentration? But that also requires not to be messed up. Prayer? Grace? Anything that I am overlooking?

[AshvinP]

...

Federica,

I want to first throw out a metaphysical consideration here, which, despite all our criticism of abstract metaphysics, is still useful in this situation. How is it possible that our perceptions of word-forms and the syntactical structure of written text are of an essentially different character, in relation to our cognition, than any other sense-perceptions? It's very difficult to justify this discontinuity, metaphysically speaking. One must deny the validity of liminal spaces altogether, which is effectively denying any participatory relation between our cognition and the ordering of perceptions, or simply live with a major discontinuity. This is at the heart of all dualism - a discontinuity is introduced somewhere along the gradient of Idea-Perception. I am wondering whether you noticed this and, if so, whether you have thought of a metaphysical workaround?

I have a new example to illustrate that. Let’s say I send you written language consisting of this text: “I appreciate the quote”. Your position is that the visual appearance of this message, its written quality, counts. It participates in the meaning that you will mine from it. The visual aspect includes the spaces and the specific form of the graphical signs as well. So let’s look at written language in the specifics of the signs (letters) this time, rather than of its syntax. Who knows, maybe this change of focus will finally serve the idea that I have been trying to convey so many times now. Now let’s say that you know the Russian or the Greek alphabet, say the Greek. What if I now send you this text: “αι απρηχιειτ θ κουοτ”, which is not a translation to Greek, but simply the transliteration to Greek characters of the original English text. The same English words in the first text are now supported, rendered by closely sounding Greek letters. If read out loud, the sentence would sound roughly the same as “I appreciate the quote”. This has been done quickly so a philologist would not like it, but let’s not go there, we got the idea. Now, once realized - amidst the relative discomfort of decoding the words / ‘uploading’ them to your space in speech form - that I am telling you that I liked the quote, would you state that the Greek characters themselves, as opposed to the English ones, have contributed to the meaning you have gained from the message, in a way that is specific to them?

To me the clear answer is no. Once you are apprehending the fact that I liked the quote, creatively mining your own meaning out of that, symbols and spaces, the bearers of the message - its hangers, in all their typographic symbolic splendor - are gone, aren’t they? Their function is fulfilled and terminated. They have been sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning. They have died, for the purpose of bringing the meaning to you, without being the meaning, because meaning and symbols lie on different planes. And so do the spaces also. There is nothing that can be co-created on their behalf on the plane of linguistic meaning. In the Steiner lecture you have shared, on the origin and the higher logic underlying language, it’s noticeable that it’s all about the sound, the element of air and the beings that live in it, in connection with the larynx, and the spirit that lives in the speech. It is never, not once in the whole lecture, a matter of written language and symbols. 

I disagree. First, in the Steiner lecture, the part I quoted at the end is specifically about written text. 

"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."

Second, the key element in whether, in your example, the words have been "sacrificed on the altar of verbal meaning" is whether I understand English and/or Greek and how well I understand them in verbal and written form, i.e. my own cognitive development at any given time. If I come to the experience of the quote exactly as I am now, then perhaps you are correct that the Greek characters don't contribute any additional meaning. But I can't imagine that would remain true if I was very well-versed in ancient Greek and, better still, its whole history as a spoken and written language. Then I imagine the Greek characters would certainly have a new imaginative life within me and would help me investigate the idea of "I appreciate the quote" from more distinct angles, 'walking round the topic as it were'. 

This seems to be the core issue - it is whether we can do a phenomenology by 'coming as we are' to the phenomena and then extrapolating our interaction to Reality itself, i.e. the essence of the relations between cognition and perception. The purpose of a phenomenology of cognition is quite the opposite - to distinguish precisely what we are bringing to the experience through our own peculiar organization - body and soul - and what speaks to us from the experience as a universal, transpersonal spiritual element. The distinctions you are making between spoken language and written language are clearly justified to some extent, especially in our modern age. We can more easily discern the Spirit breathing through speech than we can in the densified reflections of written text. But there is an entire gradient here - why would we distinguish between prosaic and poetic writing, otherwise?

This is not true. No matter the Greek or English alphabet, and the syntax that comes with those, you will in any case have full responsibility for mining meaning from the written message. The result of this process will be fully dependent on your cognitive development and abilities. It is a fact - and I have good hopes you will agree - that if I had to send that same written message “I appreciate the quote”, in whatever alphabet and spacing, to x different recipients here, the mined meaning would be quite variable across the sample’.

One can mine enormous value from written language, which would remain undisclosed to someone else with lesser ability to mine meaning. But that value comes from the meaning plane, not the visual plane. First I have to ‘upload’ the visual as speech percept to my thinking. In that conjunction, I am working at forming the meaning, on a plane where any traces of visual signs, specific symbols and spaces are lost.

Again, how are you separating off the 'visual plane' from the 'meaning plane'? I think we both agree that typographical spaces, and syntax in general, signify the ways in which the words would be spoken as well. So why are you treating the 'spaces' between verbal and written as essentially different in their relation to mining meaning? There is no doubt that, for average waking intellect, more meaning can be mined from spoken speech, since it is also more directly imbued with forces of body and soul. Yet that doesn't render the visual plane of written text, by which I mean the syntax, irrelevant to the meaning-mining process. But the "average waking intellect" is also critical - all perceptions, spoken or written, audial or visual, proceed from and are received by our own mode of spiritual activity.
 
On the broader evolutionary level, the flow of spiritual evolution is precisely what transfigures reflected images, which grow increasingly attenuated from the living Spirit as they develop inner freedom, back into living, creative agencies. That happens through beings at their "human" stage in every cycle and their equivalent of imaginative cognition. The textual forms, like the elements, minerals, and such, are only devoid of Spirit in our current cognition. There are no two different essences involved (this can only be dualism). The Spirit is everywhere and in everything - omnipresent. This doesn't mean we will continue typing on forums and writing books like we are now, but the essential activity which we call 'writing' will live on in a more spiritualized form. Moreover, we can begin to discern the fruits of that spiritual evolution right now through our own higher cognitive development.  

"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord."

Ashvin,

Thanks for taking the trouble to go in every detail. Before I come to the question, a word on this:

I disagree. First, in the Steiner lecture, the part I quoted at the end is specifically about written text.

"If true presentations of spiritual-scientific material, for example, are examined, 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."

I’m not frivolous enough to pretend that Steiner never quotes literature, and never refers to certain books having been written, some even with the goal of forming sentences creatively. It’s not needed to disagree with that, it was not my point. Nevertheless in Steiner’s illustration, speech is an invention of the higher beings of air that was put into the human body as the larynx. That’s the process he cares to illustrate, when tackling the nature of language. Conversely, written language is a human invention, no word is spent on its nature. To my intuition, that suggests a major divide between language proper and its written rendition. Yes, it’s maybe arbitrary of me to see here a coherence with my view of language, but some move in some direction I have to take, and the options seem restricted...


Now to the question of discontinuity. I don’t see why first-person experience would need metaphysical workarounds. But I certainly see the discontinuity. How is it possible that it is there? I don’t know! It appears in the experience of making (sense of) the world content. I'm not making it up as a fantasy. There is a before and after learning to read a musical score. There is a before and after learning to read and write. After that, we can’t look at a written page the same way anymore. Writing creates discontinuity, it puts a fork on our way. Can you stare directly at a written text and resist reading it? I can’t. I am sure it’s possible, with an exactly right stance on the hysteresis trade-off. But the discontinuity is undeniable, the code pulls us through it. Is it only my personal experience? I doubt that, although it certainly depends on cognitive ability. Anyway, for me it’s impossible to control the participatory relation between cognition and the ordering of perception to that level of… creativity! I simply have to read the text. The only way to not read it would be to somehow unlearn the alphabet, go back to ‘illiterate mode’.


It reminds me of the bi-stable perception. I can either look at it as form, but only if I ignore the code, or I read it, if I know the code. I cannot do both, while from your comments to my example I understand that you can do both. And the description you have provided is useful, I’m seeing a possible mapping of both viewpoints in one image, like this. Let’s say our flow of perception-cognition is a river. When I approach the experience of written language, for me it is like there’s a big boulder in the middle of the river. It’s so big that the river splits in two at that point. Coming to it, I have no choice, the experience has to flow to one of the two sides, the reading one, and from there I can’t go against the stream and try to make it flow back up to the other segment. All that could be available on the other segment is lost, not accessible to me. In your case it seems like the stone is much smaller, and the water unites again after the stone. Encoded and not encoded meanings are both accessible. Or maybe there is no stone at all and no discontinuity.


For me the discontinuity emerges in the acted flow of that participatory relation you speak of, which is experienced as reality. I engage in that act with certainly biased cognition, and so experience discontinuity in the ideal continuum of the ordering of perception you speak of. At this point I hear your next comment strike: “So the difference between speech and writing is in your cognition, it’s not essential, check the Merriam-Webster.” And it’s true, despite the hints I get from connected ideas, I am tying to make sense of reality by expanding from my personal experience. So yes, I might have unduly extended it to the essence of written language itself, in the common Merriam-Webster sense of the word 'essence'. But here I want to ask you: while in a dualistic system it is quite straightforward to understand what ‘essence’ means, don’t you agree that on the path you speak of, where cognition-perception is understood and experienced as it is, the essence of things acquires a non-Merriam-Webster kind of meaning? In your opinion, how am I supposed to speak of the essence of written word? Or should I maybe not speak of the essence of anything at all, because that essence rests in a creative flow coming from within a higher order structure that I don’t have access to? And if so, why would you even be interested in discussing the liminal spaces?


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. As in the Bergson quote, every new situation should only be inquired for itself, without any assumptions. In practice, the way I am supposed to proceed is phenomenology, and more generally, first-person inquiry. But of course pure phenomenology doesn’t really exist by itself. As per one of your recent posts - I haven’t found the exact post, please correct me if I’m wrong - to careful and unprejudiced exploration of the given, we should add sound logical reasoning to complement observation. In practice, if we don’t add it, we stand still with our phenomenology. Still, it should be the type of sound reasoning that does not find or create discontinuities, because the surface of the gradient idea-perception is sleek. If a discontinuity is found it’s simply because the logic behind it is not Logic enough, or not at all.
So... I am called to be intuitive, but without access to the real means for that. I am called to do phenomenology and use logical reasoning, to identify ‘what speaks to me from the experience as a universal, transpersonal spiritual element’ but there's no lawfulness to support that inquiry and separate what is justified from what is not. Well there is one, but it’s off-limits. And the threat of dualism lies in wait at every corner. How am I supposed to move forward, if I may ask? Concentration? But that also requires not to be messed up. Prayer? Grace? Anything that I am overlooking?

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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."

[Cleric K]

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.

[AshvinP]

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.

...
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.

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

Thus for all the opportunities someone might have to pass through experiences which could deepen his musical appreciation, to awaken in his soul a profound musical life, it could not be developed if he did not have a musical ear, if the physical and etheric formation of his ear did not permit him to establish the harmony between the outer and the inner human being. In order for the human being to be whole, all the members of his being have to form a unity, to be in harmony. That is why all the opportunities which a person with an unmusical ear might have to go through experiences which would enable him to rise to a higher level of musical appreciation have to remain in the soul, have to resign themselves. They cannot come to fruition because the boundary is drawn each morning by the structure and form of the internal organs. These things are not dependent merely on the more rough structures of the physical and ether bodies but on very subtle relationships therein. Every function of the soul in our current normal life has to find expression in an organ; and if the organ is not formed in a suitable way then this is prevented.
...
Is the human being completely powerless, then, to transfuse into his physical and ether bodies the events and experiences which he has taken into his astral body and ego? For when we look at people we can see that the human being can even shape his physical body within limits. One only needs to observe a person who has spent ten years of his life in deep inner contemplation: the gestures and physiognomy will have changed. But this occurs within very narrow confines. Is it always the case?
...
Thus two currents are active together in the normal course of human life: an inner and an outer. These two currents reveal themselves to us in parallel in the physical and the ether bodies on the one hand and in the astral body and the ego on the other. What can the human being do between birth and death in relation to the physical and ether bodies? Not only the astral body is exhausted by the life of the soul, but the organs of the physical body and the ether body are also exhausted. We can now observe the following: whilst the astral body is in the spiritual world during the night, it also works on the physical body and the ether body to restore them to their normal state. Only in sleep can what has been destroyed during the day in the physical and ether bodies be restored. Thus the spiritual world does indeed work on the physical and ether bodies, but with limitations. The abilities and structure of the physical body and ether body are given at birth and cannot alter except within very narrow margins. Two streams are active in cosmic development, as it were, which cannot abstractly be made to harmonize. If someone tried to unite these two streams in abstract reflection, tried to develop lightly a philosophy which said: “Well, the human being has to be in harmony, therefore the two streams have to be harmonious in man!” he would be making an enormous error. Life does not work according to abstractions. Life works in such a way that these abstract visions can only be achieved after long periods of development. Life works in such a manner that it creates states of equilibrium and harmony only by passing through stages of disharmony. This is the living interaction in the human being and indeed it is not meant to be made harmonious by reflection.
...
[see full lecture for more context here]
The sentence “healing is good, healing is a duty” is correct. But so is the other sentence “death is good when it occurs as the result of illness; death is beneficial for overall human development.” Although these two sentences contradict one another, both of them contain living truths which can be recognised by living knowledge. Precisely where two streams, which can only be made harmonious in the future, enter human life it is possible to see the error of thinking in stereotypes and the necessity to regard life in broad outline. It has to be clearly understood that so-called contradictions, when they refer only to experience and a deeper knowledge of the matter, do not limit our knowledge but lead us gradually into a living knowledge because life itself develops towards harmony.

Normal life proceeds in such a manner that we create abilities from experiences and that the things which we cannot assimilate between birth and death are woven into the fabric which we then make use of between death and a new birth. Healing and fatal illness intertwine with this normal course of human life in such a manner that every healing is a contribution to the elevation of the human being to a higher stage, and every fatal illness, too, leads the human being to higher levels. The former as far as the inner human being is concerned and the latter as far as the outer human being is concerned. Thus there is progress in the world in that it moves not in one but in two opposing currents. It is precisely in sickness and healing that the complexities of human life become visible. If sickness and health did not exist, normal life could only proceed in such a manner that the human being would spin the thread of his life hanging on to the apron strings of existence, never going beyond his limits. And the forces to construct his body anew would be given to him from the spiritual world between death and a new birth. In such a situation the human being would never be able to unfold the fruits of his own labour in the development of the world. These fruits can be unfolded by the human being in the close confines of life only in that he can err. For only by a knowledge of error can truth be arrived at. It is only possible to assimilate truth such that it becomes part of the soul, such that it influences development, if it is extracted from the fertile soul of error.

[Lou Gold]

Lou, for example, often says "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens". Such a view usually results from the conception that through spirituality we somehow lift ourselves from Earthly reality and care only about higher things. But this isn't so when we speak about genuine spirituality, in the way demanded by proper evolution.

Cleric,

Please stop misrepresenting me. I have never said, "I'm on Earth to ground myself, not to ascend to the Heavens". I have referenced the New Age trope, "We are not human beings trying to be spiritual. We are spiritual beings trying to be human." And this about learning a lot about acceptance and compassion and the works of reducing suffering on earth. About "grounding', it is not exclusively of superficial territoriality. It includes the depths as well as the heights and the vast surround. My view of spiritual directionality is symbolized in the merkaba symbol that I use and is well aligned with this recent presentation by Mark Vernon.