As I've stated elsewhere, I have no affiliations with the anthroposophical society. Before I knew anything about Steiner, through various life circumstances I've already had encountered certain inner direction within consciousness for which one can ask in the fullest sense "How deep the rabbit hole goes". I found in the works of spiritual science what spoke precisely about what I had encountered in very fragmentary way.
I won't speak here of what is found down the rabbit hole. I just want to speak about the direction where the hole is to be found.
Almost all my posts here have always been focused on one single topic. Those who are able to grasp these things will see that I've been talking about the same thing from many different angles. I don't do that because I pretend to be the first to know of such things but because I realize the urgency of the times and how time slips through our fingers while we serve centuries old mental habits. Let me make one more attempt to point attention to that central theme.
Ever since ancient Greece, humanity entered the epoch of its evolution where the world content was seen not only as perceptions imbued with instinctive spiritual meaning (read spirits/gods behind phenomena) but was seen more and more through the prism of thoughts. It is as if meaning of the religious and mythological images began to decohere, to break down into thought-fragments. Now man began to investigate the relations of these fragments of meaning in their own right, which in the most general sense we can call logic. Where the ancients saw spirits within phenomena, modern man sees thoughts - laws of nature. The spirits gradually mineralized into thought-laws of nature. This is not some esoteric speculation, it's the natural conclusion of history and anthropology. I'm not even arguing if the spirits were real or not. It's the simple conclusion that the intellect gradually emerged from the spirits-imbued nature to the nature imbued with thoughts - thoughts which reflect the supposed laws of nature.
Especially in the last 500 years the intellect (the "I" operating in the thought-fragments) really picked up speed. Today it is quite obvious for those who have a unprejudiced eye for these things, that the intellect has already exhausted its headroom. We should understand this rightly. Consider this image:
This is something to which every modern person should have no problem to relate. Within the intellectual state we feel more or less as mind-container and within this container we experience the thoughts, perceptions, essentially - the contents of consciousness. We feel certain singularity within this consciousness which is the reason we can speak of an "I" or ego. Essentially all conscious phenomena are relatable to that singularity. Different people can give different names to that singularity. For some it's simply the human ego, for others its transpersonal One Consciousness but in all cases there's this one container of experience. This is symbolized on the figure as the apex of the cone. It's the vantage point which embraces conscious phenomena. We feel this apex as the top-level observation tower below which everything happens - everything which we're conscious of happens before the eye of consciousness. What's outside this consciousness cone (the thing-in-itself) is another story.
Practically all branches of modern human life utilize this mode of cognition which really consists of ordering thoughts in logical arrangements. Ever since the exploration of propositional logic, formal systems, universal computation (Turing machines, Lambda calculus, etc.) and things like that, the intellect has reached it's grounds so to speak. From this point onwards anything that may be discovered can be immediately shown to be equivalent to some of the axiomatic systems of thinking. For this reason, as far as the logical grounds of the intellect are concerned, the ceiling has been hit, so to speak. From now on it's all about refinement and filtration of the correct intellectual thoughts which supposedly should represent the laws of Nature. The state of philosophy is even more sorry because it is completely lost in abstractions which can hardly be related to anything of practical significance.
Ever since I began writing here I tried to point attention to one thing only - a direction, a degree of freedom, in which our thinking can move into. It can be illustrated thus:
The whole point is that instead of feeling as a top-level authority in the mind and all thought-fragments to be below us (in front our our mind's eye), we can understand our thinking activity to be in the middle and to be embedded within processes in which it flows. I used many different metaphors to speak of the same thing: We can say that there's a wave function of meaning within which our thoughts decohere (QM metaphor). It can be said that there's curvature of meaning within the 'geodesics' of which the thought-fragments flow (GR metaphor). It can be said that there's frequency domain of meaning and space domain of thought-perceptions (Fourier metaphor). All of these have one single goal: to point attention to this cognitive time-flow within which our thoughts are perceived.
Now here comes the hardest part. Today's thinking simply doesn't want to give up its top-authority perspective. Everything described in the paragraph above, for most people is conceived as thought-fragments entirely in the way of the first figure. All those metaphors, curvature of meaning, wave function, flow and so on, remain completely abstract thought-fragments within the top-down perspective of the mind.
In order for these metaphors to be seen as speaking of something real, we must try to enter livingly into them. Not to fantasize some abstract thinking flow forces (which effectively will be again figure 1) but to try and feel our own thinking and the way it flows. This is the absolutely critical point.
The whole idea is actually extremely simple. All these scientific metaphors actually make it look much more complicated that it really is. Yet we need some words to point attention. All our scientific and philosophical thinking in the last 500 years has been entirely as in figure 1. We have been the mind at the apex point and we've been trying to build arrangement of thoughts for which to say "This is the truth, this is what reality is and how it operates". Clearly the thoughts themselves are not the reality itself, they are only mental model of it. When we think about the wave function in QM, we imagine it through thought-fragments. We imagine the wave and how it decoheres into particles. What figure 2 represents is a change of perspective. Instead of imagining both the wave and its particles within the mind cone, we try to observe our thoughts as the actual particles that decohere. Not to fantasize them as particles or waves but simply to be conscious of them in the way they are. Then we can start to investigate how these thoughts come to be what they are. Not through theorizing in the cone but by in vivo investigation. For example, everyone in the other thread about Steiner, shared their opinions. The same can be tried by observing closely how the words we form are being shaped. How our ideas, sympathies, antipathies, beliefs, all serve as the living time-context within which our thinking forms the thoughts. Let's say that Eugene didn't feel antipathy towards SS. Then he would have expressed different thoughts. So in a way the feeling of antipathy serves as a wave function, or curvature of meaning within which our thoughts glide. The point is that we shouldn't work with abstract models in the mind-cone but make the living process of thoughtful becoming, the actual World Process which science tries to investigate.
The critical thing to realize is that this way of looking on the World Process requires very specific alteration in our scientific attitude. We can no longer pretend that we're above all reality and we can fit it in our thought-fragments. On the contrary, we must realize our thinking as if being midway between that which is below us, which we can grasp as perceptions (including thought-perceptions) and that which is above or behind our mind, which we grasp as meaning, which elucidates the perceptions. This meaning is not abstract but concrete. When we realize that we're thinking about something we dislike, our antipathy is something completely concrete. Our thoughts are flowing within the guides of it. So when we become conscious of this fact we don't simply have some psychological theory but we have meaningful observation. The meaning of this observation in itself elucidates what the connection between our thoughts and the feeling of antipathy is. Our thought about the feeling is below us but we can't say that while our thinking process is influenced by the antipathy, it is above it. We're submerged in it, it pulls us around. It is in this sense that we should realize that there are processes of which we can be conscious but which nevertheless are larger than us. We can't simply think them on and off, but instead our thinking flows in them. This ability to recognize both what is below us and also that within which we flow, is the hallmark of the scientific attitude in question. Please try to feel how one-sided all our scientific and philosophical endeavors have been in this respect. Everything - our inner life or the Cosmos - become only thought-tokens in our mind cone and we think about them from the top-down perspective.
Everything that I've tried to write about, practically has this single goal in mind. To bring to attention the extreme one-sidedness of the modern intellectual consciousness. This is the dualism that Ashvin speaks about - we recede quietly at the apex which turns into our blind spot and from there, as some God-like authority we rearrange our mental representations. This one-sidedness is overcome when we awaken to the fact that with our thinking we're inserted midway in the spectrum of reality. That not only we can scientifically work with mental content but we can be fully conscious also of the living time-context within which our thinking unfolds. The most important characteristic of this time-context is that it is concrete. It's not about fantasizing some hypothetical mind and its hypothetical time-context. All of this snaps back to the old habits and we arrange thoughts in the mind cone. Instead, we must seek our current time-context. This means that we must make our current thinking the object of investigation. This is the current World Process and not some imagined mental representation of supposed world process.
It's really very simple. Even a materialist would agree that our thinking brain is part of the World Process. Of course he imagines that this process somehow produces pixels of consciousness which can be at most representations of that very process. But undoubtedly we can make this thinking world process the object of itself. It is a completely arbitrary assumption that what we thus experience is only a representation of the real world process. For what we know, the world process that we experience in thinking is the only process that we ever know. So if this is the world process to which we have access, it's completely arbitrary decision to consider as significant only the mental representations below us and disregard the living time-context, which we can also be conscious of, even though through polar scientific attitude.
Clearly all this is not very easy in practice. One part of the difficulty is that average man of today is barely in control of his thoughts. Thoughts just seem to stream out as torrents, decohering from the wave function in whatever way it may be. It really requires some effort in concentration if we are to think and at the same time observe how thoughts are formed.
The second part is more deeper and was already mentioned above - it is our feeling life. Practically, people think what attracts them. We can be attracted both by pleasurable things (we think about things which we like) or by things that don't give us peace - fears, insults, etc.
These factors produce several levels (mis)understanding.
1/ Some people don't even understand what they are being spoken of. They hear only words and can't comprehend that these words refer to something real, something experiential. The words remain as purely abstract floating fragments, completely disconnected from reality (entirely figure 1).
2/ Others partially understand what is being spoken of but shudder in horror when they realize what this direction implies. It practically threatens to bring to light all that which the person has considered holy of holies - the most intimate and secret parts of the psyche - the kitchen were our thoughts are being cooked in the flames of desires. After this, thinking quickly reverts to its top-down authoritarian mentality in order to avoid confronting its gory details.
3/ Some understand that this inner depth is there but assume that it can be approached only through (aesthetic) feeling. This saves the thinking "I" from the disturbing possibility that the gory depths can be experienced fully consciously as meaningful dynamics.
4/ In other cases the depths are followed up to an extent but ultimately hit a brick wall. This wall is the moment when thinking which has become used to identify with the bodily perspective of a single human being, has to step beyond that perspective. Materialism simply declared that this is impossible because the depth can't go beyond the physical brain. Idealists postulate their own versions of the brick wall - dissociation boundaries, opaque bubbles of consciousness, etc.
My hope here is to pinpoint with maximum precision something fundamental. Note that none of this requires anything preconceived. It doesn't require spiritual science nor Steiner, nor anything else. It requires only our unprejudiced living thinking. The goal is elucidate the one-sided mental tendency which has hegemonized intellectual life in the past several centuries.
I'm interested first and foremost to hear if everyone understands what is here being talked about. Not if it's agreed with but simply if it is clearly understood about what direction I'm talking of. All talks that involve anything related to spiritual science are bound to succumb into chaos unless this central point is understood. I repeat that this point can be understood completely independently of any philosophical school. It's a matter of direct observation of our thinking process, of which every healthy mind is capable of.
