Cleric and Eugene on "Thinking" and The Central Topic

[AshvinP]

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

The above is what the dogmatic Christian theist of the modern age, who is undeniably a metaphysical dualist, would write about his absolutely transcendent God. The content of the above would remain exactly the same and one abstract concept of "Consciousness" would be replaced for another one of "God".

[Eugene I.]

The above is what the dogmatic Christian theist of the modern age, who is undeniably a metaphysical dualist, would write about his absolutely transcendent God. The content of the above would remain exactly the same and one abstract concept of "Consciousness" would be replaced for another one of "God".

The "Consciousness" I was talking about is not an abstract concept. It is your own consciousness how you experience it from your 1-st person perspective, including all of its aspects. The reason you reduce consciousness to only thinking is because you experience it in a "tunnel" mode only - see Mike's posts.

[mikekatz]

Hi Ashvin
Again, thanks for this response!

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.

I truly think that much of what we are ostensibly discordant about is due to a) trying to express the non-verbal in words, and b) we each have our unique way of using words. Put these together and we are sometimes breaking our heads over nothing, lol.

What I am calling self-remembering is NOT a passive state, as my experience and I believe the quote from Ouspensky shows. It is an intensely active state. I fully understand and experience the backing up state and I further agree that in this state you are reporting on what you just experienced. You are NOT self-remembering. You are in the tunnel, and remembering what you just experienced, ala the Steiner quote.

And as I tried to explain to Cleric, I think Gurdjieff's most valuable contribution in this area is to point out what most traditions miss and what examination of our own internal lives can simply reveal, that self-remembering is non-trivial, rare, and is a skill or state one has to develop.

As regards the veil, I don't yet experience it. Perhaps it's further down the line for me. So anything I could possibly say about it would just be intellectual tunnel ramblings.

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.

This description is a good approximation of experiences I sometimes have. To me they are sacred, and rare for me. It's what I described to Cleric as "Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit)." It's a unity and understanding that everything, the world out there, and in here, is one. But these experiences are so non-verbal, and rare, there's not much I can say.

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.

Again, a good description of what self-remembering feels like.

[mikekatz]

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".

Agreed completely! In a forum like this, if you don't accept what people say, don't engage them.

I also, personally, have a huge problem with getting sucked into intellectual arguments and discussions. They lead nowhere. That's why I only lurk here lol.

As I focus more and more on the experiential, for example, I now realise that my many-year angst about materialism vs idealism is just another tunnel trap for me. It takes me away from self-remembering.

[mikekatz]

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?

Hi Eugene
Thanks for the response.

From what I see, a lot of the so-called differences are nothing more than terminological issues. I too, respond badly to the word "thinking" or "Thinking", but that's because I see thinking as only intellectual and therefore only a part of my awareness. Others are using the word "Thinking" to fully to encompass much more.

And for areas where issues of terminology are ironed out, I can't really take a stand on issues I don't experience myself directly. Hence my tiny amount of participation here.

[AshvinP]

I truly think that much of what we are ostensibly discordant about is due to a) trying to express the non-verbal in words, and b) we each have our unique way of using words. Put these together and we are sometimes breaking our heads over nothing, lol.

What I am calling self-remembering is NOT a passive state, as my experience and I believe the quote from Ouspensky shows. It is an intensely active state. I fully understand and experience the backing up state and I further agree that in this state you are reporting on what you just experienced. You are NOT self-remembering. You are in the tunnel, and remembering what you just experienced, ala the Steiner quote.

And as I tried to explain to Cleric, I think Gurdjieff's most valuable contribution in this area is to point out what most traditions miss and what examination of our own internal lives can simply reveal, that self-remembering is non-trivial, rare, and is a skill or state one has to develop.

As regards the veil, I don't yet experience it. Perhaps it's further down the line for me. So anything I could possibly say about it would just be intellectual tunnel ramblings.

...

This description is a good approximation of experiences I sometimes have. To me they are sacred, and rare for me. It's what I described to Cleric as "Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit)." It's a unity and understanding that everything, the world out there, and in here, is one. But these experiences are so non-verbal, and rare, there's not much I can say.

Perhaps you are right, so I will leave any further discussion about the actual meditative experience to Cleric and yourself, because I just don't have any such experience.

It seems what you quoted from Gurdjieff is a basic introduction to an initial discovery. Do you know if he elaborated on what he found in the process of "self-remembering", in terms of detailed activity of spiritual beings? He makes a reference to a "practical science" of psychology, and I am not sure if by that he is referring to something akin to Steiner's spiritual science. The latter endeavors to give each person tools of spiritual sight which allow us to perceive the inner logic through which all of our Thinking-Feeling-Willing experience is weaved (but not all at once, rather in gradual evolutionary stages of cognition). This inner logic is a reflection of higher order Thinking of spiritual beings. There are actual 'laws of soul-spirit' which can be discerned here, just as there are laws of natural science. Do you know what was Gurdjieff's understanding of the spiritual realms in that regard? I am assuming you have not personally perceived these things, so that's why I am asking about Gurdjieff.

[mikekatz]

I truly think that much of what we are ostensibly discordant about is due to a) trying to express the non-verbal in words, and b) we each have our unique way of using words. Put these together and we are sometimes breaking our heads over nothing, lol.

What I am calling self-remembering is NOT a passive state, as my experience and I believe the quote from Ouspensky shows. It is an intensely active state. I fully understand and experience the backing up state and I further agree that in this state you are reporting on what you just experienced. You are NOT self-remembering. You are in the tunnel, and remembering what you just experienced, ala the Steiner quote.

And as I tried to explain to Cleric, I think Gurdjieff's most valuable contribution in this area is to point out what most traditions miss and what examination of our own internal lives can simply reveal, that self-remembering is non-trivial, rare, and is a skill or state one has to develop.

As regards the veil, I don't yet experience it. Perhaps it's further down the line for me. So anything I could possibly say about it would just be intellectual tunnel ramblings.

...

This description is a good approximation of experiences I sometimes have. To me they are sacred, and rare for me. It's what I described to Cleric as "Occasionally, it brings the experience of consciousness / knowledge / bliss (satchitananda in Sanskrit)." It's a unity and understanding that everything, the world out there, and in here, is one. But these experiences are so non-verbal, and rare, there's not much I can say.

Perhaps you are right, so I will leave any further discussion about the actual meditative experience to Cleric and yourself, because I just don't have any such experience.

It seems what you quoted from Gurdjieff is a basic introduction to an initial discovery. Do you know if he elaborated on what he found in the process of "self-remembering", in terms of detailed activity of spiritual beings? He makes a reference to a "practical science" of psychology, and I am not sure if by that he is referring to something akin to Steiner's spiritual science. The latter endeavors to give each person tools of spiritual sight which allow us to perceive the inner logic through which all of our Thinking-Feeling-Willing experience is weaved (but not all at once, rather in gradual evolutionary stages of cognition). This inner logic is a reflection of higher order Thinking of spiritual beings. There are actual 'laws of soul-spirit' which can be discerned here, just as there are laws of natural science. Do you know what was Gurdjieff's understanding of the spiritual realms in that regard? I am assuming you have not personally perceived these things, so that's why I am asking about Gurdjieff.

You can download the PDF of "In Search of the Miraculous" here:
http://giurfa.com/fragmentsof.pdf
It's a massive work with a combination of practical exercises and a huge fully developed cosmology of the Universe. It's worth a look if you are interested.

Interestingly, Gurdjieff split from Ouspensky after the book was published. Gurdjieff was not interested in giving out such purely intellectual details on their own. In his way, they had to be combined by intense spiritual work to prepare the soul to receive them correctly, otherwise they would turn into intellectual mush.
A great example of this is the enneagram. If you Google "enneagram", you'll learn about personality tests, scores, types, supposed ancient traditions, and so on. It was originally a diagram Gurdjieff created to show how two primary laws of the universe, the law of three and the law of seven, interact. It's detailed in "In Search of the Miraculous". But it's been turned into hogwash.

Also, just for completion (I'm not pedalling Gurdjieff, lol), Gurdjieff eventually got to a point where he realised that his methods, being based on individual tuition, would not survive, and he felt compelled to write. His magnum opus is "Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson":
https://holybooks-lichtenbergpress.netd ... djieff.pdf
1130 pages of what appears at first glance to be indecipherable writings. In order to break the hypnosis of the illusion of the world, he attempted to move the reader from tunnel mode to funnel mode by inventing long, hard-to-pronounce words for experiential concepts, and writing really obscurely. He says up front you have to read the book at least three times. The second and third parts of his writings are written as clearly and simply as possible, so its style was deliberate.

I can only say, in my experience, that I have understood more from Beelzebub than from In Search of the Miraculous. Sometimes, many, many years later, I connect an experience with something I read in Beelzebub and thought I had completely forgotten. From this point of view, I regard it as a sacred book.

[Soul_of_Shu]

You can download the PDF of "In Search of the Miraculous" here:
http://giurfa.com/fragmentsof.pdf
It's a massive work with a combination of practical exercises and a huge fully developed cosmology of the Universe. It's worth a look if you are interested.

I seem to recall having tackled this tome at one time, but thanks to the link, I can see if any memory banks are jogged. I did long ago read Ouspensky's A New Model of the Universe (a mere 542 pages), and still have it on the shelf, finding it to be very reader-friendly and accessible. In any case, there is no doubt that this was a brilliant mind at work.

[Eugene I.]

From what I see, a lot of the so-called differences are nothing more than terminological issues. I too, respond badly to the word "thinking" or "Thinking", but that's because I see thinking as only intellectual and therefore only a part of my awareness. Others are using the word "Thinking" to fully to encompass much more.

Yes, we always run into these terminological issues here. "Thinking", in Steinerian understanding, is much more encompassing beyond just intellectual thinking, as Cleric pointed before. But the key point is how much it actually encompass (in somebody's understanding of it), in particular, whether it encompass the conscious self-experiencing (awareness) and the ability for Thinking to run in the "funnel" self-experiential mode. So, practically, it's not a matter of terminology, but a matter of expanding the experience of Thinking (or Consciousness, whichever term we prefer) knowing itself to include the so-called "existential aspects" of it (beingness-awareness and ability to directly experience them, in other words, the ability to experience the reality in the "funnel" mode). The issue is that Steiner and his followers see no value and never talk about the existential aspects of Thinking and the "funnel mode" way of Thinking as if they are unimportant or do not exist, and this is where the limitation and incompleteness of the Steinerian approach is. It would actually be easy for them to embrace it and include into their spiritual science practice, because there would be no logical/philosophical contradictions in that, but they are just being too attached to the orthodoxy of the Steiner's original philosophy and unwilling to go beyond that. But the real reason for that I think is a lack experiential knowledge of the existential aspects of Thinking and of its "funnel mode" of perception.

But to be fair, we can similarly criticize the practitioners of non-dual traditions for the lack of the appreciation of the depths of the Thinking activity in the dimension of meanings. They indeed tend to be negligent about the depths of the meaningful content of the "movie" and mostly focus on mastering the "funnel mode" of the "movie's" perception. So again, IMO for the wholistic approach a fusion of both is needed.

[TriloByte]

So again, IMO for the wholistic approach a fusion of both is needed.

I would agree. I think that was what Scott Roberts was doing, integrating BK idealism, non-dualism and Steinerian Science in one philosophy. I don’t know if he is still working in that regard. Sadly he doesn’t write in this forum as much as he did before.