Phenomenological idealism: definitions of common terms

[findingblanks]

".I am concerned, not with the way in which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives." - Steiner

Yes, I believe there is some very good phenomenology in PoF. However, I primarily believe that Steiner is making an argument about the nature of thinking itself. An aspect of his argument deals with experience, especially in the specific changes he makes in the additions added in 1918. But I don't think his characterization is accurate, for instance, of what happens in our experience of noticing a bird flying from a bush. I've very much enjoyed over the years asking people who have studied and practiced PoF very seriously to describe their experiences such as that (figuring out a situation at various levels of simplicity and complexity) and write the most careful phenomenology they can. I'd love to read Scott's. I began doing this when I realized the problems associated with taking the notion of 'attaching' phenomenologically. I understand 'attach' as an intellectual metaphor. But many people claim that Steiner was speaking phenomenologically in the use of that characterization and many others.

[AshvinP]

".I am concerned, not with the way in which science, so far, has interpreted consciousness, but with the way in which we experience it in every moment of our lives." - Steiner

Yes, I believe there is some very good phenomenology in PoF. However, I primarily believe that Steiner is making an argument about the nature of thinking itself. An aspect of his argument deals with experience, especially in the specific changes he makes in the additions added in 1918. But I don't think his characterization is accurate, for instance, of what happens in our experience of noticing a bird flying from a bush. I've very much enjoyed over the years asking people who have studied and practiced PoF very seriously to describe their experiences such as that (figuring out a situation at various levels of simplicity and complexity) and write the most careful phenomenology they can. I'd love to read Scott's. I began doing this when I realized the problems associated with taking the notion of 'attaching' phenomenologically. I understand 'attach' as an intellectual metaphor. But many people claim that Steiner was speaking phenomenologically in the use of that characterization and many others.

FB,

What is the practical significance of this distinction for you? Whatever you want to call what Steiner was doing, it was an approach which was immanent to our perception and cognition of the world content, showing clearly and precisely the primacy of Thinking in any consistent monist epistemology (which IS the phenomenology of "knowing", as Scott indicated), ontology, and ethics. PoF is about getting back to the inner meaning of Thinking experience within the mere outer forms of abstract metaphysical concepts. Obsessing over labels of PoF which have no practical significance, while ignoring the core spirit of the groundbreaking philosophy Steiner was engaged in, seems like a great example of the abstracting process that humanity needs to move away from in its current evolutionary stage.

[findingblanks]

HI,

It's not about labels for me when somebody says 'this is how this appears' and I say, "Oh, not only is that not how it appears to many people, but some of your characterization is incoherent' So, for me it isn't about finding our favoiite labels and then arguing about who gets to put them on the 'thing' we all are looking at it.

It is a very important and fascinating project of describing different aspects of our experience and checking in with others. And so we can ask people to describe what happens in their experience when they turn and go, "Oh, it was that bird flying away that made the bush make noise..." their different answers are interesting for different reasons.

If somebody says, "I first saw a meaningless group of colors and knew I need to find the right concept to attach to them before I knew what I was looking at..."

that is great! and it is very different than somebody saying,

"Well, first I attached the concept bird to some chaotic colors and then I found the concept 'cause' and knew that it might be connected to the early chaos of sound and then..."

and that is great. And it is very different than somebody saying,

"Nobody can even know there is a bush there until they first encounter a raw set of percepts and then search for the correct concepts."

That's good. I'd notice differences in their claims and want to know more. I'd notice that the last person even left his experience and began to generalize about how it MUST be for all humans.

or:

"I sort of noticed a sound in the direction of the bush but it was peripheral. Then when the bird shot up in the sky, I just stared at it's beauty. Then I realized that the bird must have caused the sound of the bush shaking."

Each person has started a conversation that is somewhat phenomenological and can become more so if we stay with experience. I love that. And I don't find one motivation for loving it. So while there are some practical aspects to it, I can't think of one value or reason that is the most. Sometimes it is simply the quest for truth that pushes. Sometimes it is that I notice that via communal exploration advances get made in field like epistemology and phenomenology. Sometimes it has to do with my interest in the different ways Steiner commented on his frustration with himself for mischaracterizing his experiences. But I don't have one motivation when I notice curiosity. In this case there is a blend it seems.

Thanks for asking.

[Güney27]

So, going back to the testcases, let's take this one:
1. "Conscious experience arises from energy" per JW claim. JW cognizes a meaning of energy form observing nature (just like Goethe cognized a meaning of "flower" from observing flowers) and a meaning of idea that "consciousness emerges from energy". That is a fully legit meaning, not a "fancy", it could very well be true.
2. "Conscious experience does not arise from energy" per idealism. A spiritual practitioner cognizes from their spiritual experience the meaning of "Awareness/Consciousness" and the idea "Cosnciousness does not emerge from anything". That is also a fully legit meaning, not a "fancy", it could very well be true.

But they can not be both true, there is only one way consciousness actually is. So, which of those are actually true? Or both? One none? What does it mean for an idea or meaning to be "true"? And what is the method to find out which one is true?

Eugene, I'll skip your immediate question at this time. Instead I would like to offer you a meditation that we can do together. Since (hopefully) we've made some progress with the understanding of the Idea, I would like to make this even more lucid. From such a lucid foundation questions like the above will be easier to tackle.

I'm not a big fan of the form-formless polarity. For me it is not very practical because what is formless in one state of consciousness is quite structured from the higher one (even though not structured in the sense of mineral structure). Furthermore I'm not sure if there are two persons around here who imagine the same thing when they hear these terms - I don't except myself from this. Nevertheless I'll try to relate these terms in the way I believe they are used by you (I might be wrong).

We begin by quieting down the mind, relaxing the body - the standard stuff. Now we begin to gently go through core subjects that are topics here - consciousness, ideas, thinking and so on. What are these? Thoughts in the mind. Packets of sensory-like verbal sounds going together with meaning. They are clearly within the field of awareness. Compared to that field, they are only small wave-packets. These thoughts are carriers of certain ideas. As we navigate through these thoughts we experience the meanings of the ideas. Then we begin to imagine how these ideas are interrelated, they exist in certain relations. We begin to imagine how any ideas conceivable can be related to that complex which grows as a sphere. But no matter how big and interrelated this sphere of interrelated ideas becomes it still exists only as content within awareness. Two other spheres appear - the egos of Ashvin and Cleric that snatch at the sphere and don't let go. Then you say "Guys, your're missing something. No matter how big and meaningful this sphere becomes it is still something that is experienced within the field of awareness. You're preoccupied with the sphere of meaning and lose from sight that everything happens in the field of awareness."

Let's now disregard the spheres. We throw them away and start again with clean mind. Let's look at the thought 'awareness'. It is a wave-packet of meaning within the field of awareness that carries the idea of 'awareness'. It's just a spark, a symbol in consciousness. By no means can the thought be even compared with awareness itself. Let's try to trace how this thought appears in the field.

If the thought simply pops into awareness we don't get much insight about its origin. In a similar way thoughts pop in when we listen someone speak. We don't know the deeper reasons for the thoughts, the words are simply being impressed in us by our correspondent and we experience them together with their meaning. But when we think the thought 'awareness' ourselves, there's difference. We feel active in the process of popping in. It might not be very clear what exactly we're doing but without any doubt we can feel completely involved. I say "can" because it is up to us focus our activity such that we experience this involvement. Everyday we go through torrents of thoughts but most of them simply pour in semi-automatic way. Here we want to pay closer attention to what exactly we're doing in order to produce the thought.

To make the transition easier, first we can simply produce the mind-sound 'awareness' without any focus on its meaning and simply try to feel how we literally speak it forth. To make sure we're not speaking the sound through well-trodden habits of mind, it is very useful to try and produce the sound in a different way than how we would normally do. For example, we can speak the sound very slowly 'aaawwaaaarrrneeessss' and try to experience as closely as possible how we produce every variation of the pitch, the vowels, the consonants. The goal is to to feel how we're fully involved in the production of the mind-sound, how we can be creative, how every mind sound follows perfectly our spiritual intentions.

Now the trickier part. Not only do we need to produce the sound but also experience its meaning. So we know that the word awareness symbolizes our inner experience of the total field of consciousness. Not only the field but everything that we become less and less able to follow as we move towards the periphery of awareness. This is the total reality for us. But how and what do we do in order to shrink this all encompassing reality into a mere verbal sound? Here things become slippery but we must try to acknowledge that the total experience of awareness is in itself something meaningful. When we look in our room, even if we don't look at anything particular or think anything concrete, we still feel that we experience some kind of general meaning. Our visual field doesn't look like TV static of which concrete objects become discernible only when we explicitly focus our attention on them and think their ideas. No, even though we don't speak it out as concrete word, we're aware that we're looking at our room. Experiments like this show us that awareness really has meaningful dimension to it. It is something that is simply there. We can't make the visual view of our room meaningless even if we try to. We can't convert it into meaningless blurry noise. However general this meaning might be, it is simply there and gives us implicit knowing of what we are seeing.

Now returning to our meditation, in a similar way our awareness is experienced as something that has dimension of meaning. We can simply contemplate this totality completely thoughtlessly, see it as a calm surface of a lake. In relation to our everyday experiences this contemplation can be quite indeterminate as far as meaning goes. There are no shocking revelations, convoluted philosophical ideas, psychedelic visuals - only calm awareness, yet with dimension of meaning, even though as simple as the mere knowing that this calmness is being experienced. This meaning is not an thought, it is not contained in this or that part within the field of awareness, it's simply the fact that there's awareness of be-ing. To be aware, in itself means that there's some quality of existence that is being known (there's no need to involve a question like 'known by who'). If that quality of existence was not known it would be the same as if there's no awareness of existence. To be aware means to know that something is happening - it's that simple. Here knowing is not related to thoughts - only to the implicit dimension of meaning inseparable from awareness. These are many words for something very simple but it's just to make sure everything is really clear.

After we have lived through this awareness for a while we can become active once again and produce the sound 'awareness'. Now we're in position to experience this in a much more dynamic way. We can feel how this implicit dimension of meaning somehow becomes focused, as if light rays are focused with magnifying glass and produce the verbal word. Not only that but we can feel how we're creatively involved in this process. We don't produce the dimension of meaning. It is there on its own. The focused word can by no means capture the full reality of this dimension. It's only a 'holographic' extract, a symbol. But if we try to feel from whence comes the meaning which distinguishes the mere verbal sound from the meaningful word, we'll have to recognize that it is not our product. We are active in the act of focusing of meaning but the meaning itself is not something that we create. It was there all along implicit in the meaningful dimension of awareness. All we did was to agitate our spiritual vocal cords and allow the dimension of meaning to sound through. It is like we're saying "This spiritual sound that I produce is the anchorage, the symbol for the meaning that I can't even encompass fully. This symbol is by no means the awareness. It can't even capture anything of its totality. Yet it is a token which when I experience, reminds me of the meaningful dimension which was concentrated in the act of producing the sound."

When we experience this meaning no longer as the unencompassable dimension but as localized meaning into the verbal sound, we speak of a concept. When we think intellectually, we throw around the verbal sounds or symbols that are focal points of such localized meanings. We speak of 'awareness', 'consciousness', 'feelings', 'thoughts' and so on but we rarely stop to experience each of these words in the meditative way above. Originally, each of these words has received its conceptual meaning through a process as we have gone through, even though not nearly as intimately. For example when we say 'joy' we have a sound with conceptual meaning but this meaning originally was extracted from awareness which was filled with the feeling of joy. This experience allows us to pass its meaningful dimension through our spiritual vocal cords and concentrate it in the word 'joy'.

Now these simple exercises can cardinally change the way we meditate. This is not something commonly found in Eastern style meditations. Instead, in what we performed above, the critical focus is on the fact that our spiritual activity is the fully conscious means through which the meaningful dimension of awareness is being condensed into a symbol. Depending on your meditative habits this may have been difficult. I know from my own experience that meditations can indeed become habitual and if we're used to meditate by continually letting go and simply passively contemplate the contents of awareness, a great resistance might be felt when we try to experience ourselves as the active force in producing the spiritual sounds. This doesn't require any metaphysical postulates of an "I", self or whatever. That we can experience full creative involvement in the production of the spiritual sound, is a fact of experience. It's completely independent of what metaphysical theories we might have about this creative force. Here we're simply trying to feel completely at one with the activity. Here a rigorously schooled Buddhist may feel great resistance because he may see this as an attempt to identify with something. But we're not identifying with anything. We are not contemplating the word and thinking that we are the word. We simply try to feel completely responsible for the production of the sound. If we feel the urge to dissociate from this act and rather contemplate how the Cosmos produces the sound, we're once again active but our activity moves into the blind spot - our activity is to merge with the background and passively observe. This is connected with the prejudice that what happens on its own is objective while what we feel involved in is subjective - thus, unreliable. This is a failed argument because when we choose to observe passively we're still determining the mode of investigation through our activity - we're just putting it in the blind spot. It's much better to face the facts and recognize that spiritual activity is legitimate part of the given. It is only a secondary judgment of thinking, to decide that spiritual activity in which we feel creatively involved is somehow only an illusion or a secondary product of those phenomena that we feel uninvolved with and thus seem more 'objective'. We must realize that only when we are one with the spiritual activity producing the sound, we have an example where thought is produced for which we're fully aware how it comes about and where its meaning comes from. Passive contemplation can never build that bridge between the dimension of meaning and the packets of conceptual meaning in the thought-symbols. We must insert ourselves as creative spiritual activity between these two poles and experience how we participate in the transduction of meaning into the symbol.

Now if it's not clear already, this meaningful dimension of awareness is what Goethe calls the Idea. Thus Idea is never separate from awareness. Small ideas and concepts are experienced only when this dimension is focused with the help of spiritual activity which speaks forth the symbols that anchor the unencompassable meaning into the localized symbols.

I might be wrong but I believe you call this unmanifested domain of awareness, the formless. It is the thing that is always beyond any particular thought and concept, it is the imperceptible Cosmic womb of all. At the moment we call it a womb, we have performed in a split second, quite instinctively, the whole meditation that has been stretched in time above. Then we have meaningful extract of meaning focused in the thought-symbol 'womb' but this meaningful extract can in no way be equated with the formless dimension of meaning from which it has precipitated.

What we've performed in this meditation is really only the rudimentary beginnings of something which can grow. It's the fully conscious spiritual activity which learns to focus the meaningful light of the formless into forms. In this way it is like we're probing the formless. This is the basis of what is called intuitive thinking. We're no longer simply rearranging symbols with limited meaning in the field of consciousness and asking questions about their logical relations but our thinking becomes the sense organ for the formless meaning. This sensing doesn't work in the usual way. We don't see the formless as we see color and sound. Instead, we live in it and allow it to pass through our spiritual vocal cords and be concentrated into a symbol with which the intellect can work too. In this way, by probing the most varied configurations of the formless awareness, we begin to gain consciousness of the logic of the formless. At this time I don't speak about anything esoteric! Let that be clear. It's much rather in the spirit of what Goethe said:

To judge by the plants and fish I have
seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to
India, not in order to discover something new, but in order to contemplate in my own way what
has already been discovered.

The absolutely same holds here. Initially there's no need to go beyond ourselves. It'll be a huge gain if we can experience how the words and concepts such as those that we looked at - awareness, joy - are produced by thinking through focusing the formless meaningful dimension spread out in the totality of awareness into thought-perceptions and concepts. If this is mastered, then everything which has to follow comes in completely natural and gradual way. Imaginative cognition is approached when our spiritual activity is able to produce images not only of static, mineral-like concepts extracted from the formless meaning dimension of awareness but of fluid metamorphic processes within the formless.

These are such exciting topics that I can keep writing on and on. But it is enough for now. Let's first see if what was so far described could be followed, not simply theoretically but in living meditative experience.

Hey Cleric,
Are you saying in this post that our thinking (spiritual activity), intuitions that exist independently, (concretizes) so that we can experience ideas?
When I look at a cloud and arrive at a concept, am I concretizing the intuitions of heaven, which exist platonically, or am I forming the concept based on the laws of sensory perception?
I cannot trace back how I formed the concepts of the objects of the sensory world.
There are many passages in PoF that I can't understand exactly because I don't have the appropriate thinking experience.

[Cleric K]

Hey Cleric,
Are you saying in this post that our thinking (spiritual activity), intuitions that exist independently, (concretizes) so that we can experience ideas?
When I look at a cloud and arrive at a concept, am I concretizing the intuitions of heaven, which exist platonically, or am I forming the concept based on the laws of sensory perception?
I cannot trace back how I formed the concepts of the objects of the sensory world.
There are many passages in PoF that I can't understand exactly because I don't have the appropriate thinking experience.

Guney, I'll be back with you in a few days.

[Güney27]

Hey Cleric,
Are you saying in this post that our thinking (spiritual activity), intuitions that exist independently, (concretizes) so that we can experience ideas?
When I look at a cloud and arrive at a concept, am I concretizing the intuitions of heaven, which exist platonically, or am I forming the concept based on the laws of sensory perception?
I cannot trace back how I formed the concepts of the objects of the sensory world.
There are many passages in PoF that I can't understand exactly because I don't have the appropriate thinking experience.

Guney, I'll be back with you in a few days.

Thank you very much, no need to rush.

[Cleric K]

Hey Cleric,
Are you saying in this post that our thinking (spiritual activity), intuitions that exist independently, (concretizes) so that we can experience ideas?
When I look at a cloud and arrive at a concept, am I concretizing the intuitions of heaven, which exist platonically, or am I forming the concept based on the laws of sensory perception?
I cannot trace back how I formed the concepts of the objects of the sensory world.
There are many passages in PoF that I can't understand exactly because I don't have the appropriate thinking experience.

Guney, I'll be back with you in a few days.

Thank you very much, no need to rush.

Guney, instead of responding directly I decided to post here an essay that I had drafted maybe an year ago. Hopefully it will give you some more hints.