Methods of Shifting our Habits of Mind

[AshvinP]

If we are to assert this sense to be an illusion we should really be able to extract that idea from the given. This is a typical example of the paradoxical situations we reach when we build upon abstract ideas. As long as we are dealing with abstract logic, for every statement we can form its inverse. For example, one statement could be "the self is an illusion because the fundamental no-self-awareness only imagines the self into existence". But we can just as easily build it's complementary: "the state of no-self is an illusion because it results only when the fundamental self-awareness imagines its own sense of self to be nonexistent" These things can never be dealt with through abstract reasoning. We are on firm soil only as long as we recognize what we find in the given. The facts of experience is that both self and no-self states are possible. The idea that one of them renders the other illusionary is added by us only quite artificially, it is not something that is contained within the given.

In regards to the above, I know Scott has developed essays which attempt to help us deal with the inevitable paradoxes of abstract reasoning and formal logic. I consider them largely successful because, every time I read them again, I feel like a fog has been lifted from my mind, and I know my goal is to reach the point where I can recite his arguments by memory as they become more natural to my habits of thought (Cleric's more detailed posts have the same effect). Perhaps I will even be able to restate them using slightly different formulations without losing any of their cognitive 'efficiency', but one step at at time...

My question right now is whether either of you have come up with other ways to convey such different habits of mind to others. Are there any go-to relatively simple thought experiments you find most engaging and useful? I imagine the best ones are those which relate to our inner experience of perceiving, feeling, thinking, etc. But I'm also interested in any 'tricks' you guys may have developed after trial and error. Perhaps when trying to communicate this in person rather than online. I am also interested in other 'modern' thinkers (let's say post-1800) who explore this line of discussion. So far, I have come across Owen Barfield (who is by far the most extensive and clear), Coleridge, Heidegger discusses it some, Jung as well. Who else and what particular books or essays?

Any guidance in this regard is much appreciated! Although my questions are not specifically aimed at igniting any formal philosophical discussion, maybe that could be a beneficial side effect. In any case, the 'formal philosophy' section is a bit sparse. But moderators feel free to shift the category if you prefer.

[David_Sundaram]

My question right now is whether either of you have come up with other ways to convey such different habits of mind to others. Are there any go-to relatively simple thought experiments you find most engaging and useful? I imagine the best ones are those which relate to our inner experience of perceiving, feeling, thinking, etc. But I'm also interested in any 'tricks' you guys may have developed after trial and error. Perhaps when trying to communicate this in person rather than online. I am also interested in other 'modern' thinkers (let's say post-1800) who explore this line of discussion. So far, I have come across Owen Barfield (who is by far the most extensive and clear), Coleridge, Heidegger discusses it some, Jung as well. Who else and what particular books or essays?

Any guidance in this regard is much appreciated! Although my questions are not specifically aimed at igniting any formal philosophical discussion, maybe that could be a beneficial side effect. In any case, the 'formal philosophy' section is a bit sparse. But moderators feel free to shift the category if you prefer.

Hi-Ho Ashvin -

"New Ways of Seeing: The Art of Therapeutic Reframing" by Mark Tyrell (coming from a therapeutic psychology background) may interest you.

Here's a blurb about it: "Meaning is at the heart of what it means to be human. The meaning we give something can terrify or elevate us, and in psychotherapy it's often the meaning our clients have given a life event that is as the root of their problems. Hence why the art of reframing - changing meaning - is central to effective therapy. In New Ways of Seeing, therapist of 20 years Mark Tyrrell gives transcripts of real cases where reframes have been used to release clients from restrictive perspectives. Clients with abusive childhoods who now feel they are damaged goods. Smokers who can't resist 'one more cigarette'. People with self esteem so low they believe they have failed at life. By reading the case studies and absorbing the theoretical framework around reframing, you can experience the shifts in meaning for yourself, enhancing your own ability to deliver carefully crafted reframes that will set your clients free."

Here's a link to a page on Mark's blog site where it says anyone can download a copy of the book for free if they subscribe to his newsletter:

https://www.unk.com/blog/about-mark-tyrrell/

[Cleric K]

Ashvin,

Scott already alluded to this. The most down-to-the-core consideration of the matter (to my knowledge) has been expressed in Rudolf Steiner's Philisophy of Freedom (PoF). Because of the sensitive nature of the word freedom, it has been translated with different titles like Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. In our age any mention of freedom immediately summons the picture of endless, fruitless quarrels, about whether freedom is real or predetermined illusion, but this is exactly what the work is not about.

Clearly, this work is not the most popular read but there are also quite understandable reasons for this.

One reason is that the philosophical habits through the centuries have become quite abstract. Many people can't really get anything out of PoF because they can't find what they expect to see in a typical work of philosophy. As a purely abstract discipline, most philosophical formulations begin with selection of the axioms/ontological primes/whatever (which may be motivated by the given but are used as completely abstract concepts) and then go on to show how by combining them in the most ingenious ways, one can build a tree of knowledge that can be mapped back to the given. If we approach PoF with such expectation, we'll be bitterly disappointed.

PoF is not about using the mind to postulate abstract primes and investigate their relations but about investigating the living activity that brings forth the primes in the first place. Everything that we read in PoF is not supposed to add some additional data within our mind but instead guides us in a way, that if we livingly experience what we read, we hear the words not as something that Dr. Steiner claims but as something that we ourselves produce through our own thinking on the given. In other words, we understand PoF not if we are able to recite its contents but if we are able at any point to produce its contents as a description of our own given experience. Probably some analogy can be made with mathematics, where it's not about duplicating someone's data within our mind but reaching a specific domain of cognitive experience. We can claim that we understand the Pythagorean theorem not if we are able to recite its contents but if we live through the mathematical thoughts that constitute its proof. These thoughts are objective experience quite unrelated to the fact who has been the first to discover a path to them. While we produce the proof from our own mathematical thinking, we are at the same time walking a path of a real cognitive experience. But this is only one part. PoF gives only some initial conditions, it can help us gain lucid perspective on the contents of the given. From there on we are on a path that no one has trodden before. As we'll see below, it's not about reaching and contemplating some static "truth" but it's a path, a process.

The second reason is that some people simply have antipathy for the direction where this path of experience leads. We must be quite clear about that. Even if something is true, this doesn't mean it's desirable. It's hardly necessary to give examples. We all know how we much prefer to turn a blind eye on a fault of character that we may posses, rather than confront it. Our cognizing activity is not immune to this either. Our thinking is being shaped by countless factors that have been accumulated through our life - most of them completely unconsciously. Just as an example, one such factor could be the assumption that there's a by definition unknowable objective realm that is responsible for the contents of our subjective experience. Please note, that the trouble with this idea is not that it says there are hidden causes behind our experiences but that it assumes that these causes can in principle never be known in their reality, as facts of direct experience. Such an idea is not something that is being forced upon us by the given. When I experience color, I'm justified to say that this color stands as a mystery in front of me, I don't know where it comes from and why I perceive it. But when I assert that the unknown reasons for the color's experience are in principle unknowable, then I add something to the given entirely out of myself.

For many thinkers, assumption as this, has made its way into their cognitive process quite unconsciously. It looks to them that such a thing is quite obvious, that everything points in that direction. But this unconscious assumption has great consequences for any further exploration of existence. It immediately leads us to the belief that we can consider as knowledge only the tree of knowledge that we build by linking concepts together and then showing how they map to the given perceptions.

Let's try to imagine the living experience of someone who has spent decades trying to map reality in such a way. One day, in a flash of insight, he realizes that all this pursuit of knowledge has been an exploration of a very specific branch of a much more diverse tree of cognitive experiences. This sudden widening of the horizon of possibilities might be experienced as joy and enthusiasm. But other experiences can also make their way. Such an insight might just as well evoke anger. This is not just a simple switch of understanding "Oh, OK, so it's been X and not Y". Such experience adds a whole new perspective on our life experience. Now when we look back, we can trace how within a whole life segment, our cognitive activity has been shaped through that invisible force of the assumption. The insight doesn't simply rearrange data on our screen but throws light on elements of reality that have been hitherto hidden. We were not aware of them previously but now, as Ashvin expresses it, a fog has been lifted and suddenly we perceive clearly the relation between the assumption and the shape of the thoughts. To put that into a metaphorical picture, we can say that previously our cognitive activity was flowing in certain patterns and rhythms and we were exploring the shapes thus formed. At that time we could say "that's just the patterns of neural activity" or "that's just the particular way awareness dreams its existence". But after the insight, our cognitive spiritual activity has found additional degrees of freedom. Previously, the explanation of our former thought shapes was sought into statements that point away towards reasons "in themselves" - laws of physics, dreaming awareness. Now through the transformation of our spiritual activity we realize that we have been (to continue with our poetic expression) enchanted into a love affair with an idea-being. We were so intrinsically merged with that idea-being that we were not aware of the way it was shaping our thoughts at every step. We don't imply here that the idea-being exists as some separate entity that forces our thinking out from distance. In our normal thinking, the perceptions of thoughts (words, mathematical symbols, etc.) are like condensations, projections of the ideas we experience as meaning. In this way, if the idea of the assumption is present, even if we cannot recognize it in its entirety, its essential nature is still being projected into every thought we form. The insight consists in the fact that we were able to encompass the vague idea as something concrete. Now we experience the idea as a part of the given and we can explore its relations to other ideas and perceptions. We are no longer confined to project thoughts that are unconsciously expressing the idea.

In this we have hinted at the essence of freedom as it is conceived in PoF. As we can see, it has nothing to do with empty speculations whether our activity is, from some external God-like perspective, free or pre-determined. What we can find in a completely practical way, is that it is possible to recognize elements that were previously shaping our soul life quite unconsciously but have now been lifted out of the fog. These elements have always been spread out within the given but we had to find our correct relation to them in order to see them. As long as we don't know the forces shaping our experiences, we postulate concepts like nature, God, dreaming awareness, etc. In the process of transformation of our vantage point, we gradually discover the shaping forces within the contents of experience.

Now the chilling question in front of us is: "So it means that even in this very moment my thoughts, feelings, actions are shaped by such idea-beings that I'm merged with? And I can only penetrate into the actual reasons of my current flow of experience if I attain to a vantage point where these idea-beings become differentiated, so I can capture them in thinking and choose freely to associate with them or not?" You see, this is not a direction that most people will take with enthusiasm. Our current science and philosophy puts us into a very comfortable seat that keeps reality at a "safe distance" from us. We are quite comfortable to speculate about the workings of the brain, to imagine God has created our immutable personalities, that there's no personality at all but only the dream of cosmic consciousness. The first will say "I'm interested in science and philosophy, my personal life is completely separate matter". The second says "Blasphemy! How dare you question what God has created?!". The third will say "What personality?"

To touch upon what Eugene said:

I entirely agree, since both states are possible, the experience of both states makes the idea of the existence of self inconclusive as well as the idea of its non-existence.

That's correct. We may never be able to perceive the self as "something in itself", as some fundamental element within the given. But we can surely have a practical idea of a self. To be more neutral with the words, instead of a self, we can speak of the specific environment within which our spiritual activity unfolds. And this environment does not contain only the perceptions of the sensory world but also all our knowledge - consciously or unconsciously attained, opinions, prejudices, sympathies and antipathies, hopes and fears. All this most surely forms the piping system through which our spiritual activity is forced the flow. We have no reason to claim that a self exists as some fundamental element of reality, but the labyrinth of the above mentioned factors most surely is part of the given and shapes our activity at every step. As long as we feel that our spiritual activity is able to reorganize this labyrinth, such that we attain to clearer and clearer perspective of it, we may label it a "personality". In this way we are not inventing anything but attaching a concept to perceptions of the given. Deviations occur only when we imagine that our thinking is somehow free from the labyrinth and we are in position to know reality independently of this environment. Actually we only know reality to the extent we are conscious of the constellation of ideas that restrict the forms which our spiritual activity can take. Everything else can be called dreaming about reality but avoiding to confront it.

The thinking process has a peculiar place within the given. When we have perceptions, we can ask "why I'm perceiving this color? Where this sound comes from?". The only thing that, so to speak, does not surprise us with its presence, is the perception of our own thoughts. Of all possible perceptions, of the whole spectrum of experiences within the given, only thought perceptions (as long as we are observing the thinking process) are present as something for which the cause is also experienced. We can often hear "Nature operates by such and such laws", "The Creative Nothing forms existence" but these are statements that stand only as abstract ideas. They express that causes for experiences exist but at the same time, when we formulate them in such an abstract manner, "Nature" and "Creative Nothing" remain as something completely foreign to us - we have the ideas but we can never find them within the given. We don't have direct experience how Nature or Creative Nothing create existence, we only experience the "output" of these processes, and any attempt to find something of this creative process within our own experience is considered a disillusioned act of an ego intoxicated in its thirst for self-importance.

Yet if we really want to ground our cognition in the given, we can only state the obvious fact - within active thinking, cause and effect are experienced as one. This is the only place we can experience a perception that contains its own cause. We can express this in many ways "The living Idea projects itself as a thought and beholds it", "The Universe observes its creative process within the thought-perceptions" and so on. But it is exactly here that we must be most vigilant because when we formulate such statements, we admire the thoughts as something that has already become external to this creative process. We may think that we are being humble and sober when we dissociate from the process where cause and effect are experienced together but from another perspective we can picture this as "The Creative Universe refusing to recognize its own creative activity and insisting that it's only a movie produced by the 'Creative Universe'".

There are many more things to be said here but this post is long enough already. The main takeaway is that, as we find things in the given, thinking stands out as the only thing where the cause is known. It is for this reason that the thinking process is the only logical place from which our quest for unveiling the hidden layers of the given can begin. After all, if we ignore the only thing where we can experience a cause as a fact of the given, and instead imagine our own causes, how can we expect that these abstract thoughts can ever be experienced as real causes? We are throwing away the only thing that gives us a point of contact with the creatively causative process and prefer to contemplate and admire the dead skin shed from the very same process.

The final reason for the unpopularity of PoF that we'll mention (which is related to the previous), is that many people dislike even more strongly the far reaching consequences of this spiritual path. To be able to lift the veils of our own personality and become progressively aware of all our weaknesses, faults, fears - not very appealing but bearable. But to describe that when this process is continued even further, one enters even greater environment of idea-beings, that shape not only our personality but the whole Cosmic landscape - this is what gets many people outraged. It is well known that Steiner didn't stop with PoF. He showed at great lengths how the process of lifting the fog can be continued even further and the contents of the experiences thus attained can be communicated. That's what became known as Anthroposophy. It is this second part of Steiner's work that puts many people off. The thinking is "If I'm gonna become such a mad esoterist, speaking of spiritual beings, I'd better stay away from PoF as it will probably simply brainwash me and prepare me for his sect."

But if what we are here talking about is at least partially understood, it should be more than clear that PoF is precisely the opposite of brainwashing - it is exactly the ability undress all accumulated and preconceived ideas, prejudices, opinions. Only in this way we can truly distinguish the given from the layers accumulated over it.

When I speak of PoF, I don't actually imagine the book itself. Please don't assume that I'm throwing around this as a fervent priest the Bible. Not at all. In fact, even as I've been writing this post I'm not sure if what I say here can be found in the book. PoF is a living experience. It is the experience of finding the truly certain within the riddle of existence and being able to calmly and objective perceive the contents of experience. It's not a destination, it's a process. We are free not if we take someone's ideas and choose to believe them or not but when we attain to a process that progressively reveals, layer after layer, how our spiritual experience has been formed thus far and how we can reveal what is yet to be uncovered.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Scott already alluded to this. The most down-to-the-core consideration of the matter (to my knowledge) has been expressed in Rudolf Steiner's Philisophy of Freedom (PoF). Because of the sensitive nature of the word freedom, it has been translated with different titles like Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path. In our age any mention of freedom immediately summons the picture of endless, fruitless quarrels, about whether freedom is real or predetermined illusion, but this is exactly what the work is not about.

Clearly, this work is not the most popular read but there are also quite understandable reasons for this.

It seems my question should have been, what else have you written that I can read? Or, if not much else yet, can you keep writing these penetrating and illuminating articles once a day, a week, or whatever is best for you? Seriously, you and Scott, in somewhat different ways, have an amazing ability to lift the fog with your essays.

I had started reading PoF when Scott recommended it, but slacked off and gave up with various rationalizations, like "I just don't like his style of writing". After reading your essay, though, I am thinking it was more about the fact that it was forcing me to confront these ideas in a way that I was not used to. I was making it harder for myself with my preset 'cognizing activity'. I remember feeling really frustrated, because his general ideas were exactly the kind of ideas I felt drawn to, just as with Barfield and Jung, but I couldn't motivate myself to engage with his writings like I could with them.

I am going to give it another go and just take what he's writing as it comes, starting from the givens of experience/thought as you say. For anyone else interested, you can access it for free at https://www.scribd.com/read/268537056/T ... f-Contents

The second reason is that some people simply have antipathy for the direction where this path of experience leads. We must be quite clear about that. Even if something is true, this doesn't mean it's desirable. It's hardly necessary to give examples. We all know how we much prefer to turn a blind eye on a fault of character that we may posses, rather than confront it. Our cognizing activity is not immune to this either. Our thinking is being shaped by countless factors that have been accumulated through our life - most of them completely unconsciously. Just as an example, one such factor could be the assumption that there's a by definition unknowable objective realm that is responsible for the contents of our subjective experience. Please note, that the trouble with this idea is not that it says there are hidden causes behind our experiences but that it assumes that these causes can in principle never be known in their reality, as facts of direct experience. Such an idea is not something that is being forced upon us by the given. When I experience color, I'm justified to say that this color stands as a mystery in front of me, I don't know where it comes from and why I perceive it. But when I assert that the unknown reasons for the color's experience are in principle unknowable, then I add something to the given entirely out of myself.

For many thinkers, assumption as this, has made its way into their cognitive process quite unconsciously. It looks to them that such a thing is quite obvious, that everything points in that direction. But this unconscious assumption has great consequences for any further exploration of existence. It immediately leads us to the belief that we can consider as knowledge only the tree of knowledge that we build by linking concepts together and then showing how they map to the given perceptions.

Have you gone into Jung's writings as well? As you may know, the above is at the core of his psychoanalytical method. He frequently critiqued Freud, Adler and others because they did not start with the given experiences, memories, dreams, etc. of each unique patient, and instead tried to fit everyone into broad preestablished categories of psychopathology. Although he started off doing much of that as well, it didn't take him long to figure out there was a much more fruitful way. I believe that was at the heart of his split with Freud, along with the spiritual implications that came along with this new approach.

The thinking process has a peculiar place within the given. When we have perceptions, we can ask "why I'm perceiving this color? Where this sound comes from?". The only thing that, so to speak, does not surprise us with its presence, is the perception of our own thoughts. Of all possible perceptions, of the whole spectrum of experiences within the given, only thought perceptions (as long as we are observing the thinking process) are present as something for which the cause is also experienced. We can often hear "Nature operates by such and such laws", "The Creative Nothing forms existence" but these are statements that stand only as abstract ideas. They express that causes for experiences exist but at the same time, when we formulate them in such an abstract manner, "Nature" and "Creative Nothing" remain as something completely foreign to us - we have the ideas but we can never find them within the given. We don't have direct experience how Nature or Creative Nothing create existence, we only experience the "output" of these processes, and any attempt to find something of this creative process within our own experience is considered a disillusioned act of an ego intoxicated in its thirst for self-importance.

Yet if we really want to ground our cognition in the given, we can only state the obvious fact - within active thinking, cause and effect are experienced as one. This is the only place we can experience a perception that contains its own cause. We can express this in many ways "The living Idea projects itself as a thought and beholds it", "The Universe observes its creative process within the thought-perceptions" and so on. But it is exactly here that we must be most vigilant because when we formulate such statements, we admire the thoughts as something that has already become external to this creative process. We may think that we are being humble and sober when we dissociate from the process where cause and effect are experienced together but from another perspective we can picture this as "The Creative Universe refusing to recognize its own creative activity and insisting that it's only a movie produced by the 'Creative Universe'".

Amazing. That is exactly the type of insight I am craving right now. It's so simple yet so profound. And just by engaging in a bit of 'experiment' with my own perceptions and thoughts I can realize for myself the ideas you are communicating above.

The final reason for the unpopularity of PoF that we'll mention (which is related to the previous), is that many people dislike even more strongly the far reaching consequences of this spiritual path. To be able to lift the veils of our own personality and become progressively aware of all our weaknesses, faults, fears - not very appealing but bearable. But to describe that when this process is continued even further, one enters even greater environment of idea-beings, that shape not only our personality but the whole Cosmic landscape - this is what gets many people outraged. It is well known that Steiner didn't stop with PoF. He showed at great lengths how the process of lifting the fog can be continued even further and the contents of the experiences thus attained can be communicated. That's what became known as Anthroposophy. It is this second part of Steiner's work that puts many people off. The thinking is "If I'm gonna become such a mad esoterist, speaking of spiritual beings, I'd better stay away from PoF as it will probably simply brainwash me and prepare me for his sect."

I hear you. The esoteric angle was certainly causing me a good deal of hesitation and consternation a few years ago. I think much of the same applies to Jung, who gets pretty 'jiggy with it' in his later writings such as Aion. But it's undeniable from the Red Book that he encountered idea-beings and they inspired him to much of his psychological/scientific insight. It's funny, because a belief in any form of orthodox theism is not much different in terms of the implications, yet we have managed to make it "safe" for ourselves through various unconscious cognitive programs rooted in rationalism and materialism/dualism.

[AshvinP]

After finishing the first chapter of PoF, I was really interested to see what if any explicit Steiner-Jung connection existed, since they lived at the same time and from the same area, traveled to the same places and no doubt both wrote in German. I came across a Jung related google group where this had been discussed back in 2014. It appears Steiner did some lectures about concepts in psychoanalysis between 1912-1921 (which is pretty early in Jung's career as well), for anyone interested.

Psychoanalysis in the Light of Anthroposophy

On-line since: 29th February, 2012
By Rudolf Steiner

Translated by May Laird-Brown
From Bn/GA numbers 143, 178 & 205

In these five lectures, later published under the title Psychoanalysis and Spiritual Psychology, Steiner lays the foundations for a truly spiritual psychology. The first two lectures constitute a critical examination of the principles of Freud and Jung. The last three lectures begin with a description of the threefold structure of human consciousness (reflective or mirror consciousness, supra-consciousness, and sub-consciousness) and go on to outline a psychology that takes into account both the soul's hidden powers and the complex connections between psychological and organic, bodily processes.

These lectures were given in different locations and at widely different times, but are grouped together under one topic. Three different Bn/GA numbers are represented in this First Edition of this grouping of lectures. This volume is presented here with the kind permission of the Rudolf Steiner Nachlassverwaltung, Dornach, Switzerland. From Bn 178, 153, and 205 and GA 178, 153, and 205.

[Cleric K]

It seems my question should have been, what else have you written that I can read? Or, if not much else yet, can you keep writing these penetrating and illuminating articles once a day, a week, or whatever is best for you?

No, I haven't written anything. Actually I don't have philosophical or any other academic background. We'll see about the articles. Things should flow out of inspiration. Otherwise "I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal."

I had started reading PoF when Scott recommended it, but slacked off and gave up with various rationalizations, like "I just don't like his style of writing"

Yes, that's another "reason" that I was thinking of adding but the post was getting way too long. For historical reasons PoF had to take the form it took. It was to be expressed in a language of the philosophers of its time. Ironically it was exactly these philosophers that absolutely didn't get the point. But it's only natural. Professional philosophers usually identify with the -ism that they express and especially if they have few books behind their back it's very unlikely they'll ever switch directions.

Steiner was also perfectly aware that very few were actually capable of taking the path in PoF, although it is the only way we can approach the Spirit not on grounds of faith but as a real experience. It simply requires determination to get to the root of things - something that is glaringly lacking today.

So I guess that as decades go by, even less and less people are going go be able to approach PoF in its form, considering the trends of our TL;DR age. But in one way or another it will find its way. And again, when I say "it" I don't imagine so much the book itself but the living experience, the attainment to a state of being from which we can see clearly our place as a spiritual being within our environment. That humanity should pass through this is as certain as passing through teething or puberty (if we live that long).

Have you gone into Jung's writings as well?

Not very much. Only so that I can gain a picture of the soul-spiritual configuration of being that he's expressing. I admire his work and think that's very important contribution to humanity. But personally I'm more interested into attaining to the reality of the archetype-beings rather than building pictures of them from the side of the intellect.

[AshvinP]

Yes, that's another "reason" that I was thinking of adding but the post was getting way too long. For historical reasons PoF had to take the form it took. It was to be expressed in a language of the philosophers of its time. Ironically it was exactly these philosophers that absolutely didn't get the point. But it's only natural. Professional philosophers usually identify with the -ism that they express and especially if they have few books behind their back it's very unlikely they'll ever switch directions.

Steiner was also perfectly aware that very few were actually capable of taking the path in PoF, although it is the only way we can approach the Spirit not on grounds of faith but as a real experience. It simply requires determination to get to the root of things - something that is glaringly lacking today.

So I guess that as decades go by, even less and less people are going go be able to approach PoF in its form, considering the trends of our TL;DR age. But in one way or another it will find its way. And again, when I say "it" I don't imagine so much the book itself but the living experience, the attainment to a state of being from which we can see clearly our place as a spiritual being within our environment. That humanity should pass through this is as certain as passing through teething or puberty (if we live that long).

Oddly enough, I found PoF to be written pretty clear and straightforward this time around. I'm sure your advice on how to approach it helped, without any preconceived notions of what it should be discussing. The philosophical 'jargon' has been pretty limited so far. It's also possible I was just thinking of another of Steiner's works. Anyway, I recommend others to dive right into PoF.

Have you gone into Jung's writings as well?

Not very much. Only so that I can gain a picture of the soul-spiritual configuration of being that he's expressing. I admire his work and think that's very important contribution to humanity. But personally I'm more interested into attaining to the reality of the archetype-beings rather than building pictures of them from the side of the intellect.

Gotcha. Jung was heavily inspired by Kant and therefore took that phenomenon/noumenon divide seriously, which we see in his conception of the 'collective unconscious'. Although there is certainly wisdom in that approach, I am starting to see it more as a stumbling block for serious idealists. I like the term 'subconscious' better now.

Jung created a pretty thick intellectual gloss over his esoteric experiences and insights, no doubt because he felt it was necessary to retain 'credibility' in his professional psychiatric circles. You may appreciate The Red Book: Liber Novus, though, especially if you can shell out for an illustrated copy.

I also really enjoyed his essays on Psychological Types, as they explored the history of Western thought in the vein of Nietzsche's insight:

“It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of which the entire plant has always grown."