AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Aug 26, 2022 11:34 pm
Let's consider one small example. We could take our experience of life on Earth with a physical body. Observation reveals this body is composed of the same elements and through the same physical forces we see around us in the mineral kingdom. It also reveals that when we die, this same body decomposes and returns to that kingdom. Careful reasoning here suggests to us that there must be something else, in addition to the physical body, which keeps the latter intact, growing, maintained, etc. for a certain portion of our lives. This something else - referred to as etheric body, life body, vital body, body of formative forces - is supra-sensory, so it cannot be directly perceived by the normal waking intellect. This is a really simplistic version of the argument and we can go into more details if necessary. Here we have an example of current living experience/observations and logical reasoning concluding a reality which is beyond our current conscious awareness. I shouldn't have said it is beyond experience before - what we can logically reason to is always bound up with our experience, since we couldn't experience anything without conceptual activity. And we are always seeking to understand these supra-sensory bodies, not only as isolated concepts, but in terms of our current living, holistic experience. If it doesn't have practical ramifications for our first-person experience of the world, then it's still too abstract and generalized.
You are correct that we should not confuse the logical conclusion for knowledge proper, as in, consciousness of this etheric body from the inner perspective. The normal waking intellect is conscious of how its inner thinking activity relates to its physical body, to some limited extent (much less than what is normally assumed), but it can't say the same for the etheric body. To become inwardly conscious of this body is to start becoming creatively responsible for the unfolding of its development, however limited at first. So the only reason we can say we are arriving at an 'ontology' is because we have concluded, on phenomenological grounds, that the only Reality we can become aware of is of thought-nature which is, of course, the same thought-nature which lives in us. Our concept of 'etheric body', integrated into a living, holistic idea, is a real aspect of the etheric body itself and its functions in our experience. This is how our logical thinking can participate in spiraling together appearance and reality through its living concepts even prior to becoming inwardly conscious of various aspects of that reality. Average humanity has almost no consciousness of inner perspectives responsible for most aspects of its living experience, but if we couple this logical approach with meditative practice, there is endless practical experience and insights we can attain in our current lifetime.
Just to be clear, the real spiritual convictions do arise through inner experience. Nothing can substitute for the experience of having worked something out conceptually and then discovering it as inner reality via higher consciousness, or discovering it within and then coming across the same thing in conceptual form. These are immensely powerful 'road to Damascus' moments. Yet we should get in the habit of understanding the whole thing as a gradient of experience - there is nothing we work out conceptually which will prove to be insignificant for future inner revelations. Outer events in general, during the collective course of human evolution, are being re-experienced inwardly in the human soul. The physical plane and all its forms serve quite definite purposes in aiding this re-membering of the spiritual worlds through us. Since you made it through PoF, it may be worthwhile to start on
Theosophy and see how it all fits into a holistic logical tapestry for you. We don't need to call what we are reaching "ontology", if we simply understand that we are reaching firm conclusions about ever-deepening aspects of the only thought-reality we can ever know.
This isn't a separate pursuit than higher cognitive knowledge. It actually serves as the basis for what we can perceive and comprehend in higher modes of thinking. We are gaining more and more refined conceptual instrumentation which can resonate with various aspects of higher worlds. Similarly, meditative and non-meditative investigation of higher worlds are not completely separate. The approaches are certainly different and we should maintain strict boundaries between them, i.e. we shouldn't use higher consciousness to navigate the sensory world, but the approaches and knowledge should also be complementing one another the entire way, bridging the gap. What I imaginatively discern from my inner life should elucidate what I gain from outer conceptual reasoning and vice versa, each one giving living feedback on how to adjust and improve the other. It is very much the same as all polar relations, such as our spiritual activity and its impressions into written texts
(...)
I hesitate to keep debating the Steiner lecture, because clearly the question is whether there actually is a discontinuity, not whether Steiner says there is one or not. I am curious what you think about Cleric's post about the continuity between spiritual activity impressed in airwaves and that same activity impressed in the sand (paper, etc.), for ex.
I am pretty confused as to how you say the mention of writing at the end of the lecture is completely tangential, though. Let's take one more look at that last paragraph.
"
If true presentations of spiritual-scientific material, for example, are examined, 8 it will be found that the true spiritual scientists who have written these things also seriously worked on them to form each sentence creatively, that the position of the verb is not an arbitrary decision."
The formation of sentences and positioning of verbs is exactly what we have been calling 'syntax'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax
In linguistics, syntax (/ˈsɪntæks/)[1][2] is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency),[3] agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics).
Add to this the PoF quotes which also reference the syntax. And I can assure you he lectures on it in other places as well.
(...)
It seems to me that the careful reasoning you exemplify here can only be conducted by one who has already integrated the basics of what reality is, and how it arises, as per the PoF. It doesn't seem to be something that we can immediately and exclusively extract from mere observation. For instance, I doubt the naive realist would adhere to this logic. They would maybe accept that “there must be something else” which science has not yet discovered - as they would put it - but that this ‘something else’ is supra-sensory, I doubt they would accept, as a necessary logical consequence of observation. I am trying to say that this logical reasoning requires a pre-existing worldview, it descends from it. Yes, it provides a means to go beyond current conscious awareness, but only when the primacy of thinking as the supra-principle that brings reality to life is leveraged. Without such a foundation, the bridging cannot be acted, not exclusively from within the given. So I can’t see a real distinction between this supposedly pre-occurring phenomenology and the philosophy of freedom in itself.
“Our concept of 'etheric body', integrated into a living, holistic idea, is a real aspect of the etheric body itself and its functions in our experience.” Right, this is the one thing that I need to pin down and secure into place, and keep in focus all the time, so it doesn’t slip back to its dualistic nest while I'm not looking. Still not self-evident!
To recap - I do see, as you explain it, the role of logic in the spiraling together of maya and thought-nature of reality, as one of the two sides that can be activated. Only I don’t see how this can be done as a purely phenomenological step, prior to PoF.
Though the concept of gradient of experience is particularly useful to someone like me, who has a tendency to tidy up the playground conceptually, as it were, in a rigid way, and needs to take a more interactive approach to things. I see this same tendency at a higher magnitude in my parents for example, when I happen to have conceptual discussions with them. I consider myself much more fluid in comparison, but clearly I haven’t completed that work of freeing myself from that ingrained habit. I have to immerse myself more in the idea of unity in all its possible dimensions of manifestation.
Thanks for suggesting the appropriate next book! I am eager to move on to it, and especially one that explains the four bodies, why they are called bodies and more, like Theosophy seems to do (reading the lecture you have lately suggested about sickness, it became clear that I am lacking a basic understanding of these. Therefore I put the lecture on standby). However, I might need to stay a little longer with PoF. I cannot say I fully "made it through it" yet. I reread some chapters sometimes, hoping they will feel completely natural and straightforward, but it’s often not yet the case. I still have to go slowly, and I doubt I’d be able to properly explain everything organically to someone else including countering objections, which to me is the sign that I am not yet on top of things as I would like. On a side note, one thing I did catch at first reading, is the almost imperceptibly humorous strokes woven in the reasoning here and there. I imagine this is not the most common type of comment one can find on PoF, so I thought I would mention it. One such passage that I remember is:
Steiner wrote:Dualism makes the mistake of transferring the opposition of object and subject, which has meaning only within the perceptual realm, to purely fictitious entities outside this realm. Now the distinct and separate things within the perceptual field remain separated only so long as the perceiver refrains from thinking. For thinking cancels all separation and reveals it as due to purely subjective conditions.
Maybe I'm weird, but I find this humorous : ) No doubt this could be used in various situations, with spectacular effects on materialistic, scientistic, or gladiatorial pride : ) With this, I hope I’m not giving off the impression that such nuances are my main takeaway from the book. In fact, my idea was to soon go to your recent ‘PoF Summarized’ post and revisit the book content through that check. I will see if I find the time. I have to be careful with being carried away and spending time that I don’t have, even if I know this is the most important thing I am doing with my time. I have been shrinking down the time I used to put into work preparation, and although that’s been instructive, making me realize that I can do just as good or maybe even better work, with less preparation and more improvising, I shouldn’t push it too far. The other day I was late to an online meeting. That had never, ever happened before. The hard to admit truth is that I didn’t login to the meeting because I was lost somewhere here, reading… until a kind email popped up from the background, 9 minutes in... I want to be very careful not to fall into such amateur behavior again.
Back to PoF, a note I want to make that could be useful to new readers is this. It’s important to have two translations at hand. One can have a preferred one, but as soon as a sentence sounds dubious or difficult, it’s important to check alternatives and contrast. Because sometimes the translators are mistaken. Some of those mistakes are typos, but in other cases it is more substantial. For me this approach has proven useful on more than one occasion. Most often, comparing two translations is enough to intuit and clarify the meaning indirectly, in their intersection. Other times I had no other choice than checking the original text, which I can grasp, with effort. For example here, the two translations I was using are saying quite different things:
Translation 1:
The procedure is different when we examine knowledge, or rather the relation of man to the world which arises within knowledge.
Translation 2:
The process presents itself differently when knowledge, when the relationship of man to the world which arises I knowledge, is regarded.
It was then necessary to check the German text to see that the second translation is the correct one - although there’s a typo in it. It should have been: “the world which arises
in knowledge”.
If one stays on the first translation only, one could get confused and wonder if something of the supposed difference between knowledge and the relationship of man to the world that arises in it, has been missed. But no, it’s obviously the same thing, and the first translation is misleading. What I am trying to say here is, when the text appears to be difficult, it might be worthwhile to check around, be creative and use whatever we have at our disposal, instead of getting stuck or just skip the difficulty.
Briefly to conclude, on the debated lecture on language, my fingertips are burning on the keyboard to counter-argument : ) but I want to refrain from further debate. I will only reassert that the question of discontinuity is not anymore relevant. I have moved past it, and realized that it’s my personal discontinuity. That’s why I wrote that my last comment on the lecture was at that point not so relevant anymore. Regarding Cleric’s post you are asking me to comment, I haven't found any with airwaves and sand, unless you mean his most recent one, with the advice of taking an interactive look at things? If so, I have already expressed what I think in my reply to that post:
Federica wrote: ↑Thu Aug 25, 2022 10:44 pm
On speech and writing, it does look very simple in this context. Rather than the relation between the two, we see that they are both expressions of the same process of impression, in which they are united. Because absolutely everything is meaning, even the voids between words are, and any discontinuity is riverbed constraints.
This is the goal towards which the sixth age of humanity will strive: the popularization of occult truth on a wide scale. That's the mission of this age and the society that unites spiritually has the task of bringing this occult truth to life everywhere and applying it directly. That's exactly what our age is missing.
