Observation, logic, folklore and presuppositions

[findingblanks]

Yeah, I meant "folklore" in the way Rudolf Steiner used the term. He could distinguish the fact that many myths had some grounding in fact and yet still distinguish folklore from science.

And so when Steiner wanted to demonstrate that spiritual science can better explain everyday facts, we can notice what he took for granted as facts:

“You all know that there is a creature that gets especially excited by red..."

Is there a creature that gets especially excited about red? Maybe. It certainly isn't a bull. But, that said, I grew up in a culture in which we would see movies and sometimes footage from actual bull fights. They made me sad. But I did see the bull charge flags, most of which were red.

So I have no doubt that when I was a little boy I believed it was the red that made the bulls go wild. Since then, I've seen demonstrations that show a bull won't charge a red flag if it isn't moving and it will charge any color flag if it is waving. But it takes a little science to tease out the folklore if you want to see what really makes the bull go wild.



“You all know that there is a creature that gets especially excited by red...This is the bull. It is known that the bull gets terrible excited if it sees red. So that is one thing you know {Steiner goes on to say that humans don’t get nearly as wild upon seeing red} Well now; a bull goes wild....You see, when the eye looks at something red, red light passes through these very tiny blood vessels in the eye. And this red light has the particular property that it always destroys the blood a little bit. It destroys the nerve as well...The bull simply feels, as it sees the color red: “Heavens! All the blood in my head is being destroyed. I have to do something to defend myself against this! So it goes wild. For it does not want to have it’s blood destroyed.”


If somebody says that the slug dies because of the blue container, we can respect them even as we show them that their premise is factually incorrect.

[findingblanks]

So that is one example, for me, of how I can discover errors in thought by using careful observation and thinking. Steiner himself said that non-clairvoyants absolutely needed to spot the errors made my initiates. He said that one of the easiest ways to do this is to notice when a premise is factually incorrect and doesn't correspond to what healthy everyday observation can systematically explore.

I don't believe that Steiner's mistakes discount his brilliant observations. I agree with you, Soul, that if my friend strongly believed it was the blue container that caused the slugs to die, I would still be able to access other claims made by my friend with no problem. If my friend made a claim that I could not study ("At night we always dream of zig zags even if we don't remember") I'd just put it on the interesting shelf.

But if my friend simply couldn't understand what was wrong with is observation and logic concerning slugs, I'd be a bit concerned. And if my friends friends defended my friends claim about the color 'blue', then I'd start to think that other social pressures were playing a role in the claims. And that's interesting, too.

[AshvinP]

Yeah, I meant "folklore" in the way Rudolf Steiner used the term. He could distinguish the fact that many myths had some grounding in fact and yet still distinguish folklore from science.

And so when Steiner wanted to demonstrate that spiritual science can better explain everyday facts, we can notice what he took for granted as facts:

FB,

As you probably know, I already knew exactly what you were referring to, and that is what I was reponding to. Cleric also responded when you originally brought this up on the PU thread. So now you have now ignored two responses to the same argument you are making, almost pretending like they were never written. Again, what is lacking here is epistemic humility. I will just quote a portion of Cleric's response to you again, and I hope you will at least consider his points interesting enough to be worthy of your consideration and response, instead of completely ignoring it and passive-aggressively bringing up the same topic on another thread 6 months from now, dressing it up in vague references to your "friend" and changing "red" to "blue" and "bull" to "slug" for some unknown reason, as if it has never been addressed.

Yes, Steiner was wrong about the bull. We today know that cattle are color blind to red. They react to the motion of the muleta, not to its color. But this doesn't really change the essence of what he's speaking of. The reason is that his entirely human spiritual experience of red was not based on the observations of the bull. He didn't observe the bull, noticed its supposed reaction to red and from there on started to build psychological model on how red affects humans. This is simply not how spiritual investigation proceeds and is perfectly clear even if we have the most rudimentary understanding for these matters. The color experiences are connected with very deep processes in the soul. The color spectrum is not only for the sensory light but there's spectrum also for spiritual processes. Even ordinary psychology can recognize some elements of this. The red, warm shades are much more related with the expressions of individual life. It's not coincidental that such colors are preferred by companies like MacDonald's. The blue and violet send us more towards the spiritual, the universal. Of course even here there are so many more things to be said if this is not to become one-sided dogma. So Steiner's goal was to speak of the human experience of red. He used the bull as an example, which turned out to be incorrect, but this doesn't change the essence of what he wanted to communicate about the human soul itself.

[Soul_of_Shu]

Well, I must concede that I'm beginning to wonder of this 'friend' is on the spectrum.

[findingblanks]

Thanks guys.

Yeah, if my friend eventually said that he was wrong about slugs, I'd be interested if he could help me understand both how he failed to make the accurate observation and I'd then love to know what his experience was like when he thought he was directly observing the dynamics that caused the blue container to kill the slug.

[findingblanks]

Also, keep in mind that context matters. So if this same friend also told me that he could explain why, say, black people can't fully unite with the Christ for the next 2000 years, I'd take into account the fact that he is capable of making errors about very simple subjects, therefore when a subject begins to have many more variables (than simply noticing that salt killed the slug), I be on the lookout for other factors. And if my direct experience of slugs or black people suggested my friend was making an error, I'm sure it would not be taken as an attack on my part to say:

1) I believe you are wrong about slugs.
or
2) I believe you are wrong about black people.

And, for me, the best news is that despite there being some friends who simply show no evidence in enjoying such an exploration, there are others who do. The moment an initiate makes a mistake about bulls, I can almost promise you they will be very open to making a mistake about who can and who can't integrate with the deepest living evolutionary principal of Love. .

From Slugs to Christ.

Sounds like the title of a book of lectures.

[AshvinP]

Also, keep in mind that context matters. So if this same friend also told me that he could explain why, say, black people can't fully unite with the Christ for the next 2000 years, I'd take into account the fact that he is capable of making errors about very simple subjects, therefore when a subject begins to have many more variables (than simply noticing that salt killed the slug), I be on the lookout for other factors. And if my direct experience of slugs or black people suggested my friend was making an error, I'm sure it would not be taken as an attack on my part to say:

1) I believe you are wrong about slugs.
or
2) I believe you are wrong about black people.

And, for me, the best news is that despite there being some friends who simply show no evidence in enjoying such an exploration, there are others who do. The moment an initiate makes a mistake about bulls, I can almost promise you they will be very open to making a mistake about who can and who can't integrate with the deepest living evolutionary principal of Love. .

From Slugs to Christ.

Sounds like the title of a book of lectures.

Now you have gone from simple epistemic pride, which we all succumb to once in awhile, to outright mispresentations of Steiner. If this were from someone who never read Steiner and was simply googling his name and "racism" to come up with speculative claims, it would be more understandable, but coming from you it is much worse. It's pretty amazing you can claim "context matters" and then go on to claim Steiner claimed the above about "black people" without providing any context whatsoever. This time it is a respect and responsibility for truth which is lacking. From a haughty spirit to a fall sounds like the title of this thread you started, for apparently no other reason than to libel Steiner without providing any of the context which you already know is important for anyone to make a sound evaluation of the claims.

For anyone else who is actually interested in learning more about the deep spiritual dynamics Steiner speaks of, I encourage you to ask questions and consider the responses carefully and in humility. Here is more of Cleric's response to the "red flag" example:

The first thing to realize is that higher cognition is nothing like the fantasized mystical enlightenment. These concepts have become so twisted in popular culture that we'll suffer from these prejudices for a long time. The common prejudice is that once someone becomes 'enlightened' suddenly all secrets of the Universe lie open before him. This idea is one of the greatest hinderances for true higher development. It makes one think that it's all about some special spiritual 'hack', to tap into the Universal database. Nothing can be further from the truth. If an illiterate man enters the Library of Alexandria, what would he behold? Paper and ink in wonderful shapes. That's all. It's the greatest prejudice that this man could sit all day with eyes closed and legs crossed in the middle of the library and one day, the system will be hacked, and suddenly he'll understand every book. This is nothing but spiritual naivety, which unfortunately has very serious paralyzing effect on proper spiritual development. To understand the books in the library, not only we must first learn to read, but then we have to wrestle our way through the books and develop the concepts communicated there. This is the last thing that modern 'spiritualists' want to hear - that there's a long and difficult path, where we have to literally struggle for the forging of every concept and idea.

The other thing is that the physical phenomena is not that easy to trace directly from spiritual perception. This has to do with the fact that we penetrate the spiritual world from within outwards. We first begin to see our own soul structure - how ideas, desires, opinions, etc. shape our individual life. Gradually we begin to see the higher order spiritual processes, such as those that weave in the collective being of a nation and its language. As we go in that direction (towards the universal), things become perceptible also in the opposite direction - towards the fragmentary. We are mislead by our sensory perceptions that we know the physical world. In fact we're very far from the actual reality of the physical world. We're midway between the universal and the fragmentary and these two poles actually form a unity. This explains why it's much more difficult to say anything about the structure of the cell, molecules, atoms and so on, than it is about the soul, the astral body, the soul organs. These latter are much more immediate to us. The former we know only through abstract intellect. We practically use our scientific imagination to add details to the sensory perceptions. I don't say this to suggest that there's nothing in the Spiritual world behind cells and atoms - indeed there is. But the experiential reality of them is much different and accessible only through the highest forms of consciousness. Clairvoyance doesn't learn about atom by some spiritual vision that resembles a hi-tech microscope. We only learn about physical reality when we experience the world from the perspective of the highest spiritual beings, which so to speak, have sacrificed their spiritual substance, such that it becomes the arena of a metamorphic process.

All this I mention in order to bring some context. Steiner's goal was to spread as much seeds as possible in the span of a short human life, such that things can be taken on and developed further. As I mentioned some time ago, if Steiner was to save only one book of his colossal work, he would choose PoF. This was the central mission of his incarnation. The whole body of Anthroposophy and the methods of modern Initiation are also extremely important of course but can be seen as 'what follows for the human being once firm orientation within reality is attained'. This firm orientation is the key for everything else. Mistakes are inevitable. They can be found in his scientific courses, for example. This only confirms what I said above - that the more we try to approach the physical world with spiritual cognition, the more all-embracing it must become. Yes, Steiner in certain cases underestimated how convoluted the elemental world really is. He used his higher intuitions and tried to connect them to the physical theories of matter and biology of the time. This led to some mistakes. There are simply way much more convolution layers between the astral, through the etheric to the physical. This becomes indirectly evident, for example, through the knowledge of the astonishing complexity of the molecular cellular machinery. None of this was known at Steiner's time, so in a way he naively projected some of the higher facts directly to the physical. So why he didn't simply see these convoluted layers? This has to do exactly with the prejudice mentioned in the beginning. We, as human beings on Earth, can only see cognitively when we find the right concepts for what we behold spiritually. Without the concepts we simply see an amalgamation of phenomena, as any psychedelic user can confirm. The difference is that the latter is satisfied with what he experiences and doesn't occur to him that what he beholds must be penetrated with meaning. Every form, movement, color is language, the gesticulation of spiritual beings and processes. These we can only comprehend when we develop the concepts that allow us to understand what we experience. To flow joyfully with the amalgamation has nothing to do with spiritual cognition. In this sense, the parts of the elemental world belonging to the cells, for example, was such an amalgamation for Steiner at his time. He tried to elucidate that spiritual content with more general concepts. If he was to spend much more time on these topics he might begin to find the finer delineation of the elemental world, by forging the concepts of the cell, but that would take ages. He had much more and more important work to do. Furthermore, it was bad enough that he had to introduce so many concepts in spiritual science, which already repelled many. Imagine what it would be if he had to create a whole new vocabulary of spiritual terms that would correspond to DNA, ribosomes, replication, transcription, etc., etc. This would sound as a completely alien language and would be tremendously more prone to errors. Conventional and spiritual science don't work against each other. Everything that has been discovered in the last century, as long as it's not completely abstract fabrication of the mind, is a set of valuable concepts which in one way or another correspond to World processes. Spiritual cognition can use these concepts to relate them with other facts which can be known only through spiritual perception. Things are truly interconnected.

[findingblanks]

JM, you won the prize. This was the very first comment:

"Now you have gone from simple epistemic pride"

Congrats.

Let's see if there's anything useful and fun and wonderful to say. Please, you quite sweet little birds should chime in. Ashvin will throw shade but they are very gentle when you really stop and see the pattern.

[findingblanks]

I've already shared the entire lecture and said way too much about what you have to do to get it sent to you (the American branch has taken it out of all lecture cycles), but despite the ways Steiner is wrong in some spots, we can still respect his specific and pointed markings of the boundaries:

"If we consider the intrinsic character of the European-American and the Asiatic (disregarding any question of values) how can we fail to realise that the Asiatic peoples have retained certain cultural impulses of past earthly epochs, whereas the European-American peoples have advanced beyond, them?"

Rather than bash Steiner or judge him, why not take him seriously and ask yourself: Seriously, how could anybody who is being serious fail to see that the European-Amercians have advanced beyond people from Asia? I have some ideas on that but this context is more about showing how we can respect Steiner even when we find layers of agreement, disagreement and possible shades of both.

So when Steiner says something like:

"We must be clear that the sixth epoch which follows the fifth post-Atlantean times must necessarily belong to descent..."

We have to really look carefully at what he means by 'decent' and not just project our modern and personal meanings onto it.

Rather than assume you know everything, you can linger in the question when Steiner says:

"And what is the characteristic that must particularly develop in this fifth cultural-epoch? It is one that was kindled through the Mystery of Golgotha, namely, that spiritual impulses have been led flown right into the directly physically-human, that as it were the flesh must be laid hold of by the spirit. It has not yet happened."

Does Steiner mean 'flesh' in terms of just general human 'flesh' or is he speaking about specific and modern differences in 'flesh'? We must not jump too fast because he is ready to say more:

"It will not happen till Spiritual Science has one day spread more widely over the earth and many more men bring it to expression in direct life, until, one could say, the spirit comes to expression in every movement of hand, of finger, in the most everyday affairs."

You might be temped to simply assume that Steiner is speaking abstractly, as if he is speaking about all humans right now. This is projection. Steiner had very specific differentiations in mind that he knew we could all attend to in the present.

Our modern 'left' culture will be quick to project their meanings and our modern right culture will be quick to project their meanings. But it is very possible to simply notice what distinctions Stiener is making BEFORE we project our hopes and fears. What does Steiner say next:

"But it was for the sake of bringing down the spiritual impulse that Christ became flesh in a human body. And the characteristic of the mission of white humanity in general is to carry down the spirit, to impregnate the flesh with the spirit. Man has his white skin that the spirit may work in the skin when it descends to the physical plane."

If we don't treat Steiner as simply spouting off abstract general notions, we can see that at least to himself his ideas were visceral and very specific.

Now, he has already told us that we have not YET accomplished what this time period is about. He has also then directly distinguished the white people's mission from all others. So we know that when he speaks of the 'physical body' being prepared in THIS epoch, he is speaking of the white bodies:

"The task of our fifth cultural-epoch, prepared through the preceding four epochs, is to make the outer physical body a shrine for the spirit. We must acquaint ourselves with those cultural impulses which show the tendency to bring the spirit into the flesh, into everyday matters."

And Steiner knew that his audience's minds wondered and constantly tried to distort and flatten out his teachings, so he immediately tried to prevent what most egos would do with what he has already said:

"When we quite recognize this, then we shall also be clear that where the spirit has still to work as spirit— where in a certain way it has to stay behind in its development (because in our time it should descend into the flesh), where it stays behind takes a demonic character and does not completely permeate the flesh— there the white skin does not appear. Atavistic forces are present which do not let the spirit come into complete harmony with the flesh."

He goes on and on to make clear why for the next few thousand years it must be white skin that achieves this mission. And he then goes on to explain that if, and only if, white humanity achieves this union with the Christ, then (and only then) can white humanity impregnate non-white people with this impulse so that they can begin to ascend while white humanity rests.

Because the Anthroposophical Society has taken this lecture out of its cycle, you have to write to the library for them to send it to you. I recommend you do if you find it interesting or important. Otherwise, they don't get good feedback. But I'll send it to anybody who doesn't want to take the time to reach out to the library.

......

* Steiner quotes from GA: 174B, “The Christ Impulse as Bearer of the Union Of The Spiritual and Bodily”

* This age of the Consciousness Soul (5th PA Epoch), began when the spring equinox entered Pisces in 1413 and will end when it enters Aquarius in 3573. So mission of white people should end around the year 3573.

[findingblanks]

So we can appreciate that Steiner is very emphatic that he can explain with his clairvoyance why red is the cause for the bull's wild reactions. And he can also use his clairvoyance to assure us that white skin can not appear when the Christ Impulse is being rejected. Both are claims that all of us can approach with our own experiences. Or not. We can also pop away into justifications for why Steiner's bull comments were really about X and Y and his comments about non-white skin don't really imply that this must wait for another 1,500 years.

The ways he could be shortsighted and the ways his clairvoyance could be applied to his wrong assumptions (red/bulls or skin color/Christ) are very worthwhile subjects of contemplation and mediation. And worthwhile conversations amongst his students who might think there are other emerging Anthroposophical paths. Over the last ten years these alternative students have been slowly but steadily growing in really interesting ways. Of course there will always be a stream that defends him as being only misuderstood or treated with ill-will. But when you love and respect Steiner you sort of know it. You can't make a person from another very different stream 'feel' or 'know' it. But one possible sign of maturity is if you can see that even a stream you have serious concerns about is acting from an honest place within their hearts. I see the old and original stream as being very very earnest and trying their best to preserve what they think is being damaged. And that's a true impulse. And important.