Cleric and Eugene on "Thinking" and The Central Topic

[Eugene I.]

More and more I'm finding it hard to distinguish between the above comment and Jim's comments. To say that it's not about dwelling on the mistakes but about pointing out the original 'mistake' of positing that integral Thinking is the key to parsing the deeper meanings and ideations beyond the 'veil' of dualistic thinking, and that is why he made some mistakes, is just so contradictory as to make me doubt your own fallible thinking process. If anything, Steiner made some mistakes because, being fallible, he did not always live up to the ideal of what was presented in PoF. To which I can only add, yet again, however brilliant he was, the guy was still fallible, like the rest of us. Get over it.

Hey no, you are talking about a different "veil" - the veil of dualistic thinking. I never questioned that, in fact always supported, and breaking through that veil has been the focus of all nondual practices and traditions. Steinerians actually disregard this kind of nondualistic perception and talk about breaking through a different veil - the veil that conceals from us the "guts" of the hierarchies and structures of noncorporeal realms. In their understanding it's only by breaking into the noncorporeal realms where we can find the unity and dispel duality. It's important not to confuse these, they have little to do with each other. You can exist in noncorporeal form still confused and perceiving the world dualistically, and you can live in human form veiled from the noncorporeal realms and yet perceiving the world non-dualistically.

[mikekatz]

Hello
I'm working on the initial great responses from Ashvin and Cleric to my original post.

A word to the moderator...

I specifically chose to place this post in the Topic-specific Discourse section, in order to prevent precisely what is happening now. The original topic is getting lost in this back and forth about Steiner. Can we not just stick to the subject of the post in this conversation?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Hello
I'm working on the initial great responses from Ashvin and Cleric to my original post.

A word to the moderator...

I specifically chose to place this post in the Topic-specific Discourse section, in order to prevent precisely what is happening now. The original topic is getting lost in this back and forth about Steiner. Can we not just stick to the subject of the post in this conversation?

Yes Mike, understood ... as mentioned, I'd rather not resurrect the same old unresolved issues from past discussions, carried out to no avail, that have been raised again here since it seems it just can't be let go of. Of course, there are always some subjective factors coming into play about what is relevant, and what is not relevant, and how to decide between the two, which is not fail-safe. So I'll let this be an advisement to all concerned that any more obsessive carrying on with endless points that have been made countless times before, rather than focusing on what you intended to focus on, will result in deletion of that commentary. Indeed, from here on I suggest that this discussion mainly be about participants responding directly to your questions/comments, and not getting side-tracked into some other discussion within that discussion.

Thanks for your patience, and your further participation, and I hope you do less lurking and more such participation going forward

[mikekatz]

Mike,

Thanks for this post! It is really appreciated that you are taking time to follow and understand the comments being made (some of my own, but mostly by Cleric) because it means we can potentially move on to deeper discussion of them, instead of going around in circles on the same few initial misunderstandings. I am eagerly anticipating Cleric's take on the Gurdjieff quote.

In brief response to the above, we simply can't observe our present Thinking at our cognitive stage. It is the formless "I" - just as the physical eye cannot perceive itself, neither can the spiritual "I". As Steiner said, you would literally have to split into another being to observe that Thinking while it takes place. When you remain unified, as soon as you begin observing what was your "present Thinking", it is no longer your present Thinking, because your present Thinking is now observing what previously was your "present Thinking". I hope that makes sense. It is very important for us to observe our thinking as a concrete reality, as you correncty point out, but this realization about "present Thinking" is quite important and instructive to our experience as well. For one thing, it serves as a sort of concrete "lure" which constantly draws our cogntive activity in towards our essential Self through the phenomenal world of outer-inner meaningful experience. The "present Thinking" is essentially the Divine Thinking which fashioned the entire Cosmos.

Hi Ashvin
Thanks for this response!

As I said in another post when you made the Steiner quote, I just don't agree. And unless I am mistaken, Cleric is also in his post not denying that one can stand back, as he puts it, and observe one's thinking.
This process is the basis of all spiritual seeking. Even if, as Cleric says, you get limited results, the fact is without this you get NO results, and you cannot even begin to understand any kind of spiritual path. Just from what I can see, anyway. And I think Ouspensky describes very clearly the value of self-remembering to himself.

I don't know whether the argument for consciousness based on philosophical zombies was ever raised on this forum. It states, very simply and therefore maybe inaccurately, that since I can conceive of making a copy of myself that is not conscious, and that I can further conceive that my clone can exist in the world just as I do, and look from the outside to be "normal", it follows that consciousness is an add-on to my physical body and is not in it. And here is Ouspensky describing in detail about how he moved into and out of zombie mode. And also, despite his already own accomplishments as author, scientist, and philosopher, he realized that he had been asleep (i.e. not self remembering) and a zombie through all of that.

Here's a question. If I can just requote your whole quote:

The reason why we generally overlook thinking in our consideration of things has already been given. It lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object we are thinking about, but not at the same time on the thinking itself... The observation of a table, or a tree, occurs in me as soon as these objects appear upon the horizon of my experience. Yet I do not, at the same time, observe my thinking about these things. I observe the table, and I carry out the thinking about the table, but I do not at the same moment observe this. I must first take up a standpoint outside my own activity if, in addition to observing the table, I want also to observe my thinking about the table.

This is apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a rule say, “I am thinking of a table,” but, “this is a table.” On the other hand, I do say, “I am pleased with the table.” This is just the peculiar nature of thinking, that the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. What occupies his attention is not his thinking, but the object of his thinking, which he is observing...

The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity... I am, moreover, in the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only subsequently take my experiences of my thinking process as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this I cannot do. There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the simultaneous contemplation of it.

As I pointed out originally, the last paragraph seems to me to contradict the first two paragraphs. When reading this whole quote again this morning, I noticed an ellipsis in this last paragraph after "activity". I'm wandering whether the context of the last section is therefore maybe different?

[Soul_of_Shu]

Ashvin, suffice to say we may have to agree to disagree here regarding your take on my take with respect to the epistemological challenges with discerning between mistakes, and claims of misconstruing 'knowledge' for mistakes. Again, please focus on directly addressing Mike's questions and comments, as any others may now be deleted.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, suffice to say we may have to agree to disagree here regarding your take on my take with respect to the epistemological challenges with discerning between mistakes, and claims of misconstruing 'knowledge' for mistakes. Again, please focus on directly addressing Mike's questions and comments, as any others may now be deleted.

Well that wasn't my claim at all... but I suppose you deleted my comment so quickly that was misunderstanding was destined to happen

[mikekatz]

Hi Cleric
Thanks for all this, you are a very generous and gracious soul!

After reading the quote you provided it's not difficult for me to see why the whole Thinking stuff doesn't seem agreeable to you. I understand how you see the funnel, the meta view, like stepping outside the movie and observing how our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, will, play their act. And this is very characteristic experience. It really feels as a layer of reality has become objective. Those who have experience with cannabis, for example, know the feeling of being high with other friends among people who are not high. For those high, it feels as if they are in an additional layer of reality which those not high simply don't notice and don't even understand. When those high look at each other it feels as if they operate at a different level of logic which others simply don't see. There are many jokes, for example, who only those high understand and they live in their shared meaning. From their perspective they are one degree outside the movie while those low, lurk in their roles. The latter can hardly understand or imagine it even if it is being explained to them. Of course, this depends largely on the character of the high persons, whether they'll see things in this way, and I'm in no way advocating such an approach, but just wanted to make an analogy, in case someone can relate to it.

The thing with self-remembrance is that we can hardly go much farther than it. Once we learn to step out of the movie and observe how our inner world acts along, this is pretty much as far as we can get. In certain sense we polarize (as Ouspensky tried to sketch) and observe our inner life as a movie but we can do that only if our self is quietly stepped in the background. In other words, in order to be able to do this observation unbrokenly, we must be fully receptive and not focused in activity.

I was trying to say that the Thinking stuff IS agreeable to me, because I see it up to now as equivalent to self-remembering. If we can move this perception, I'm game to try!

Also, when you say we can hardly go much further with it, you may be right. But, this state of consciousness is literally, for me, like waking from sleep. I see and understand much more, and I AM much more. Sometimes I can observe that I am about to react in a situation, out of some deep suffering that is driving my (bad) behavior, and I can catch it and do better. Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit).
It takes practice, and it requires Krishnamurti's effortless effort. If you try too much you are captured by your mind, but if you aren't receptive to it's possibility it can't happen.

And I would say again, that without having experienced this state of self-awareness, I would be utterly unable to understand what you, Steiner, Ouspensky, Spira, and kind of teacher, was actually getting at. Without this state of awareness, everything is just an intellectual game in tunnel mode.

When one has embraced the above experience it is difficult to point attention to what Thinking refers to. We can only understand this if we try to recognize that there are two distinct ways in which we can grasp the thinking activity.

The first is of the same character as any other process we observe. Imagine that you're observing how you make juice in the blender - you observe 'blending'. Certain perceptions in specific flow. This is the first way (and for most people the only way *coughJimcough*) in which they conceive of thinking. It's the stepping outside the movie and noticing how thoughts are 'thinking' themselves. We need to get a good feel for this. When we use 'thinking' in this way it is of the same nature as saying 'blending' about the juice - we observe objective process in the inner or the sensory world respectively, which unfold according to mysterious laws.

So here is something that was to me a most profound and tragic realisation. I'd ask you read what I say here, and then go back to the Gurdjieff quote and re-read it.

The fact is that most people do not even step outside the movie. They are just in the movie. They are blending, but they are not there when they are blending. They are asleep. They are NOT observing what they are doing. I'm like that most of the time too. I get up in the morning, go through my routine of toiletries, take my pills, eat my breakfast, but there may be not a single moment of watching the movie (self remembering, mindfulness, whatever) in all of that. I know I did all that stuff, or I must have, but I don't actually remember the exact experiences of doing them. And how could I, since I wasn't actually there!

I once explained this to Eugene in this way: Consider the sentence "I see X". X can be a simple object, a beautiful women, a distasteful situation, anything.

In sleep mode, we see X and nothing else. Our full attention is captured in X. There's nothing else there, there's just attachment to the object, and mechanical reaction to it as object - a reaction whose origin we don't even know. This is how we mostly live, in just the one word of the sentence.

Now, when we self-remember, are mindful, etc., it's different. We wake up. We observe that we see. We see X, and we know that we are seeing. And, if we remain in that state, we can further observe our mechanical reactions to this act of seeing, and again, we may be able to observe prejudices, past sufferings, etc., and even start to heal from them.
Here, we are living in two words of the sentence " I see X".

And the next level, is when we start asking who exactly is doing the seeing. So we have X, we have the seeing of X, and then we go deeper and ask who is this I who is seeing? The full sentence "I see X" is experienced. And it is only here that the real spiritual path can start.

I cannot explain it as well as Ouspensky, so I would ask you to reread the whole quote. To me, it's so vital. You can't get anywhere at all without this. Steiner, idealism, materialism, any-ism - until you get out of the tunnel and into the funnel of awareness, it's just a logic game we play to distract ourselves. We're debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

The second way is when we realize that we're the active spiritual force which thinks the thoughts. And here's the difficult part. It's difficult because it clashes with what you've come to cherish as the deepest experience - the ability to step out of the movie (into the funnel) and observe (experiencing, self-remembrance, etc.). From that perspective thinking feels as leaving the funnel and entering the tunnel.

The lure here is that if we observe thinking (in the sense of blending) from the funnel, we're in a superior position. But this isn't so. This kind of observing can never lead us to the experience of the rules which shape the movement of thoughts. We're practically dissociating from the thought process, such that we can assume the receptive funnel perspective and observe conscious phenomena as we observe blending.

But we can also experience how we actively will the thoughts, how the meaning that we weave through is being cast into thoughts (for example verbal). And here's the great difficulty because this willing of thinking is seen as inferior level of consciousness. It looks like we're sacrificing the funnel for the tunnel. This is why you don't resonate with the term Thinking. Because it smells like tunnel.

That's not how I experience it. I am often, when self-aware, coming up against previously unseen factors that have and are shaping me, and others.

Perhaps what you are calling Thinking is what I am calling the second or third level of awareness in the sentence "I see X", perhaps not. The difficulty here is talking with words and using them to describe experiences. Similar words may describe dissimilar experiences, and different words may describe similar experiences.

In certain sense it is completely true that concentrating thinking leaves a lot of things in the periphery. That's why it's called concentration - we concentrate certain forces while leaving the distractions in the periphery. The fact that we need to leave something in the periphery is felt to be very disagreeable. It seems that it neglects the experiential funnel. This is what Eugene has always protested against. He says "you guys focus too much on thinking while you neglect experiencing which is much more encompassing." And in certain sense this is correct but there's important detail - this kind of experiencing reaches a certain ceiling. Once we step out of the movie and encompass all our inner life, we really may get quite some insights but not too long after this, the insights are exhausted. We're left in a position which can't encompass anything more. Yet we feel that there must be more. And it is exactly at this moment that we come to the veil philosophy. We say "I stepped out of the movie, I made steps after steps backwards, distancing myself from the world content such that I can encompass it, yet I come to a halt. My back hits something. I can't go further back. So there's the veil. It's what separates the Earthly existence from the Cosmic. This veil will be removed only after death."

So my response to this is that I am still so far from even that. If I was living truly in a state of full self-remembering / mindfulness, whatever, then I know from my brief glimpses that I would be in a far better / advanced / awake state than now, and that it would be full of joy. And if my back does hit something, I'd be happy to look further then.

This is as far as we can reach through self-remembrance. Now I can speak further but my experience here shows that it will be ignored. I don't know if I've convinced anyone that I know what you are talking about. I understand it because I experience it. I can describe it as self-remembrance, as stepping out of the movie, experiencing, effortless effort mode and so on. You realize how difficult it has been for you to describe this to others. The question is, are you open for the possibility that there are levels of understanding? And that in the same way others don't understand you, so it might also be possible that you don't understand someone else who tries and tries to explain it?

I know you experience it, I can see it.
I'm very open to different levels of understanding, and I think I have made clear that I have experiences at shallower and deeper levels. I don't think it's just a matter of stepping out the movie. But unless you step out of the movie, you can't get anywhere.

You can see this with Eugene. He has pressed his back at the veil and says "Everything is in front of me, the thinking that you speak of is in front of me. I see you dabbling in that thinking in front of me but you can't extract anything of value there. The truth is behind my back. What you're thinking in the tunnel, I'm experiencing in the funnel. My perspective is wider than yours so you can't surprise me with any of your thought contraptions."

Would you join Eugene here? Would you say "your thinking is a kiddie toy in the tunnel. Come and press your back at the veil with me, so we can observe the movie together."? We can continue if you're at least partially open for the possibility that conscious development might not be all about stepping further and further out of the movie while observing everything as more and more blending.

The self-remembrance or stepping out, feels that it must expand more and more in order to grasp more of the periphery. Thinking seems too centered and that's why you would say "You're wasting your time. The truth is in encompassing the periphery." This is said even though the veil is hit and any further expansion is scheduled for after death. But Thinking doesn't focus in order to become constrained in the center. The thing is that even if it was possible to continue beyond the veil and encompass more and more of the world content, it would form an inexplicable panorama. Just like we don't understand the laws which move blending or thinking as long as we observe them as a movie, so the world would be a vast panorama of blending. Beautiful, magnificent but ultimately inexplicable. The focus on Thinking is not in order to become lost in the tunnel but because only in that way we can pass through the tunnel and emerge in the mirror funnel which, however, is now weaved out of meaning and not of inexplicable movie perceptions. This funnel of meaning is the same as the first but experienced 'inside-out' as the meaning implied by the spiritual activity of beings. This expansion can continue waaay further than the veil that is being hit in the purely receptive way. And in this moment Eugene says "You can't do that, the veil is there for a reason".

I'll leave it with this question. Is there openness for the possibility that it's not enough to step receptively outside the movie until we can't step any further, but we might need to be spiritually active in order that we turn inside-out through thinking and we find ourselves once again expanding, but this time also with cognition? Is there openness for the possibility that someone might be speaking from this expanded volume of meaning and their words are being dismissed, just as people inside the movie dismiss those that have learned to step outside of it?

So my answer to your question is that yes of course, I am always open to be able to be better.

What I don't see is that stepping outside the movie, and the experiences that it leads to, is passive. I experience it as active (although not activated by ME exactly).
I also don't see how any spiritual activity of any kind can happen without the process of being aware of what is happening in my thinking or Thinking. To be aware is precisely this self-remembering.

Thanks so much for this, I really appreciate it.
Just an FYI I have my grandson staying over this evening, so I won't be make here until late Sunday or maybe even Monday morning Eastern time.

[AshvinP]

Mike,

Thanks for this post! It is really appreciated that you are taking time to follow and understand the comments being made (some of my own, but mostly by Cleric) because it means we can potentially move on to deeper discussion of them, instead of going around in circles on the same few initial misunderstandings. I am eagerly anticipating Cleric's take on the Gurdjieff quote.

In brief response to the above, we simply can't observe our present Thinking at our cognitive stage. It is the formless "I" - just as the physical eye cannot perceive itself, neither can the spiritual "I". As Steiner said, you would literally have to split into another being to observe that Thinking while it takes place. When you remain unified, as soon as you begin observing what was your "present Thinking", it is no longer your present Thinking, because your present Thinking is now observing what previously was your "present Thinking". I hope that makes sense. It is very important for us to observe our thinking as a concrete reality, as you correncty point out, but this realization about "present Thinking" is quite important and instructive to our experience as well. For one thing, it serves as a sort of concrete "lure" which constantly draws our cogntive activity in towards our essential Self through the phenomenal world of outer-inner meaningful experience. The "present Thinking" is essentially the Divine Thinking which fashioned the entire Cosmos.

Hi Ashvin
Thanks for this response!

As I said in another post when you made the Steiner quote, I just don't agree. And unless I am mistaken, Cleric is also in his post not denying that one can stand back, as he puts it, and observe one's thinking.
This process is the basis of all spiritual seeking. Even if, as Cleric says, you get limited results, the fact is without this you get NO results, and you cannot even begin to understand any kind of spiritual path. Just from what I can see, anyway. And I think Ouspensky describes very clearly the value of self-remembering to himself.

I don't know whether the argument for consciousness based on philosophical zombies was ever raised on this forum. It states, very simply and therefore maybe inaccurately, that since I can conceive of making a copy of myself that is not conscious, and that I can further conceive that my clone can exist in the world just as I do, and look from the outside to be "normal", it follows that consciousness is an add-on to my physical body and is not in it. And here is Ouspensky describing in detail about how he moved into and out of zombie mode. And also, despite his already own accomplishments as author, scientist, and philosopher, he realized that he had been asleep (i.e. not self remembering) and a zombie through all of that.

Here's a question. If I can just requote your whole quote:

The reason why we generally overlook thinking in our consideration of things has already been given. It lies in the fact that our attention is concentrated only on the object we are thinking about, but not at the same time on the thinking itself... The observation of a table, or a tree, occurs in me as soon as these objects appear upon the horizon of my experience. Yet I do not, at the same time, observe my thinking about these things. I observe the table, and I carry out the thinking about the table, but I do not at the same moment observe this. I must first take up a standpoint outside my own activity if, in addition to observing the table, I want also to observe my thinking about the table.

This is apparent even from the way in which we express our thoughts about an object, as distinct from our feelings or acts of will. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, I do not as a rule say, “I am thinking of a table,” but, “this is a table.” On the other hand, I do say, “I am pleased with the table.” This is just the peculiar nature of thinking, that the thinker forgets his thinking while actually engaged in it. What occupies his attention is not his thinking, but the object of his thinking, which he is observing...

The reason why we do not observe the thinking that goes on in our ordinary life is none other than this, that it is due to our own activity... I am, moreover, in the same position when I enter into the exceptional state and reflect on my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking; I can only subsequently take my experiences of my thinking process as the object of fresh thinking. If I wanted to watch my present thinking, I should have to split myself into two persons, one to think, the other to observe this thinking. But this I cannot do. There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the simultaneous contemplation of it.

As I pointed out originally, the last paragraph seems to me to contradict the first two paragraphs. When reading this whole quote again this morning, I noticed an ellipsis in this last paragraph after "activity". I'm wandering whether the context of the last section is therefore maybe different?

Mike,

There is confusion here. Cleric's post was illustrating why you don't agree. Because when you are only backing up to view the contents of thinking and how "thoughts are thinking themselves", as you may observe juice contents blending in a blender, you are not also actively perceiving how your own Thinking is reponsible for those imagistic contents. Therefore, you have made it impossible for yourself to sense there is "present Thinking" which you are still not observing but which is responsible for the thoughts-thinking you are observing. I will re-paste some of the illustration below with emphasis
.

The first is of the same character as any other process we observe. Imagine that you're observing how you make juice in the blender - you observe 'blending'. Certain perceptions in specific flow. This is the first way (and for most people the only way *coughJimcough*) in which they conceive of thinking. It's the stepping outside the movie and noticing how thoughts are 'thinking' themselves. We need to get a good feel for this. When we use 'thinking' in this way it is of the same nature as saying 'blending' about the juice - we observe objective process in the inner or the sensory world respectively, which unfold according to mysterious laws.
...
This kind of observing can never lead us to the experience of the rules which shape the movement of thoughts. We're practically dissociating from the thought process, such that we can assume the receptive funnel perspective and observe conscious phenomena as we observe blending.
...
Once we step out of the movie and encompass all our inner life, we really may get quite some insights but not too long after this, the insights are exhausted. We're left in a position which can't encompass anything more. Yet we feel that there must be more.
...
In other words, in order to be able to do this observation unbrokenly, we must be fully receptive and not focused in activity.

The bold, according to my understanding, is referring to the present Thinking, but the 'backing up' receptive approach has made it impossible to discern this because it has dissociated from its own thinking activity. Therefore, it assumes the "something more" must be beyond the limits of our thinking capacity and erects the hard veil to explain why it cannot account for anything beyond the 'thinking-juices' it passively observed in the blender, unfolding according to 'mysterious laws'. The veil then makes you feel you had completely merged with your essential Thinking activity and whatever else exists 'behind' the veil is not of the same essence and/or can only be revealed after physical death.

When descrbing the development of Imaginative cognition, Steiner also speaks of the need to avoiding fixating on the imagistic contents and actually extinguish them with one's own free Thinking agency.

As has been pointed out already, he who engages in the exercises described in past lectures, thus intensifying his soul forces, notices at a certain moment in his development that another world enters his soul life. He must be able to notice, to have the knowledge to recognize, that the first form (Gestalt) in which the new, super-sensible world appears is nothing other than a projection, a shadow image, of his own inner soul life. These forces that he has developed in his soul life appear to him first in a mirror image. This is the reason that the materialistic thinker easily mistakes what appears in the soul life of the spiritual investigator for what can appear in the unhealthy soul life as illusions, visions, hallucinations, and the like. That objections from this side rest on ignorance of the facts has often been pointed out; this distinction, however, must be alluded to again and again. The unhealthy soul life, which beholds its own essence as in a mirror image, takes its own reflections for a real world and is not in a position to eliminate these reflections through inner choice. By comparison, in a true spiritual training it must be maintained that the spiritual investigator recognizes the first phenomena that appear as reflections of his own being; not only does he recognize them as such, but he is able to eliminate them, to extinguish them from his field of consciousness.

Just as the spiritual investigator is able through his exercises to intensify his soul forces so that a new world is conjured before him, so he must be able to extinguish this whole world in its first form; he must not only recognize it as a reflection of his own being but be able to extinguish it again. If he could not extinguish it, he would be in a situation comparable to something that occurs in sense observation and that would be unbearable, impossible in an actual development of the human soul. Imagine in ordinary sense observation that a person directed his eyes to an object and became so attracted to it that he could not avert his gaze. The person would not be able to look around freely but would be tied to the object. This would be an unbearable situation in relation to the outer world. With a spiritual development, it would mean exactly the same in relation to the super-sensible world if a person were not in the position to turn from his spiritual observation and extinguish what presents itself as image to his spiritual observation. He must pass the test expressed in the words, “You are able to extinguish your image,” overcoming himself in this extinguishing; if the image returns, so that he can know his reality in a corresponding way, then only does he face reality and not his own imaginings (Einbildung). The spiritual investigator therefore must be able not only to create his own spiritual phenomena and to approach them but also to extinguish them again.

re: the "present Thinking" quote from Steiner - yes some things were edited out, but they don't change the meaning of what he wrote there. It is from Pof Chapter 3. Here is the link and some more elaboration.

There are two things which are incompatible with one another: productive activity and the simultaneous contemplation of it. This is recognized even in Genesis (1, 31). Here God creates the world in the first six days, and only when it is there is any contemplation of it possible: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must be there first, if we would observe it.

The reason why it is impossible to observe thinking in the actual moment of its occurrence, is the very one which makes it possible for us to know it more immediately and more intimately than any other process in the world. Just because it is our own creation do we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in all other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly, namely, the relevant context and the relationship between the individual objects, is, in the case of thinking, known to us in an absolutely direct way. I do not on the face of it know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning; but I know directly, from the very content of the two concepts, why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. It does not matter in the least whether I have the right concepts of lightning and thunder. The connection between those concepts that I do have is clear to me, and this through the very concepts themselves.

[AshvinP]

Hello
I'm working on the initial great responses from Ashvin and Cleric to my original post.

A word to the moderator...

I specifically chose to place this post in the Topic-specific Discourse section, in order to prevent precisely what is happening now. The original topic is getting lost in this back and forth about Steiner. Can we not just stick to the subject of the post in this conversation?

Mike,

I wanted to mention one more thing here, so maybe we can avoid some of the traps which have occurred with Eugene and FB, and derailed threads for many days and weeks and months even.

Let's grant that Cleric is not lying or hallucinating during his imaginative forays into spiritual realm. I think you would agree. In these forays, Cleric claims there is unmistakable interaction with spiritual beings in this higher mode of cognition. Just as you would recognize a friend walking down the street, stopping to communicate something meaningful to you, he encounters spiritual beings and their meaningful activity (but not in a spatial-physical way). I am presuming, based on what has been written so far, you have not experienced higher cognition in that manner. But Cleric says this will unmistakably happen IF we remain actively engaged with the Ego-I who Thinks across the threshold.

So the point is to simply notice that you guys are, in fact, disagreeing on this spiritual approach to higher worlds. I am not saying you or he is correct at this point, just that we should not conflate Steiner and Cleric's approach with Gurdjieff and your own. As mentioned, I only bring this up because it has happened so many times here and it felt to be going in that direction with some of your recent comments. This false sense of "agreement" expressed by others before, IMO, is just another way of saying, "I don't like what you are saying and I feel like you don't know what you are talking about, Cleric, but I also don't want to explain why".

[Eugene I.]

What I don't see is that stepping outside the movie, and the experiences that it leads to, is passive. ...
I also don't see how any spiritual activity of any kind can happen without the process of being aware of what is happening in my thinking or Thinking. To be aware is precisely this self-remembering.

Mike, thanks for pointing that out. You are right, Anthroposophists believe that the non-dual practices are only about passive observation of the flow of phenomena, even though I said to them many times that it is not. Their philosophy and practice is only about cognizing the Thinking and the content it produces (the movie), they believe once you "actively perceive how your own Thinking is responsible for those imagistic contents" of the movie and discover all the meanings relevant to the movie and its creation, then you are done, you acquire the complete knowledge of the movie in its interconnected unity (the Idea of the Big Movie) and this is all you ever need to do, even though you continue to be identified with the movie and its character (or "the Character"). They see no value in comprehending the awareness of the movie, the fundamental unity of the movie in awareness, and disidentification from the movie's content from the awareness perspective. I tried to explain to them many times before the value and spiritual benefit of such perspective with no avail. On the other hand, they are right that there is a practical value in "actively perceiving how your own Thinking is responsible for those imagistic contents". My take on this is: each approach alone has its own benefits but still incomplete and a fusion of both is needed for healthy and wholistic spiritual development.

From the idealist standpoint Steiner's approach makes sense: the movie have not appeared out of nowhere. If everything is Consciousness than the movie was created and is being re-created by Consciousness (which we are inseparable part of), and it was created not just thougtlessly and randomly (or instinctively and non-metacognitively as BK claims), but intentionally and meaningfully by thinking activity of Consciousness. Therefore, all its meaningful content is in principle cognizable by thinking activity and there is no "Kantian divide" between our thinking activity and the "movie" with all its content.

But when thinking turns towards itself and towards all aspects of consciousness itself, then that becomes a different story. Consciousness (with Thinking as its immanent aspect) is not a result of thinking activity, is not a "movie", it is where the movie appears and it is what is aware of the movie. The movie is definitely inseparable from Consciousness, but Consciousness is not reducible to the content of the movie and all its ideal/meaningful content. Can Consciousness fully comprehend itself in its entirety and exhaustively by thinking?