Why Man Creates Art: Kanye West as an Archetypal Artist

[Federica]

Hey Frederica, I appreciate your feedback. I can see how you drew comparisons to both those songs, especially with the vocal melodies and the rhythm section of Wicked Game. I'm a bit worried that the song kind of "floods itself" (for lack of a better phrase) with all the slow tempo soaring vocal melodies. But I also see that as important for establishing the "distant qualities" that you point out. As if the song is surrounding you from every direction -- some textures pulling you and some textures pushing you.

I'm not a musician, however my impression is, it's balanced, there's no flood risk, and the conclusion is your embankment. If anything, it seems almost like there are two different songs in the song. The most original one is your starting point, then, when you move on to elaborating, that's when you take a 'radioheady' direction, first at about 1:48, with their typical slightly dragging progression with slightly rocky traits.

In the first section, I wanted to evoke the sensation of straddling the edge between life and death by use of the “heartbeat” pattern percussion, and the subtle vocal melodies. Then more percussive elements kind of replicating a heartbeat are gradually layered to each bar with increasing frequencies to evoke the sensation of slowly getting ready to awaken. Then the second section you refer to is where the song fully awakens. I just realized that I need to turn up the volume on the drums to emphasize this intended effect.

Ok, I wasn't able to read that meaning. As I was saying in a recent discussion with Lorenzo, words and sentences - or musical words and sentences - by themselves don't encapsulate or hold any meaning, they only point to it. The reader or listener has to take a concrete meaning forming action within. It seems that musical language leaves more degrees of freedom than spoken/written language to express ideas.

[AshvinP]

That’s an interesting point about how we develop illnesses within dysfunctional organs that are obstructing spiritual clarity in our phenomenal experiences in order to rejuvenate our spiritual outlook therefrom. If we understand our body as an apparatus woven out of our own will before we are born, then each organ is the physical manifestation of a specific function of our consciousness. If our spirit is tainted with sin, trauma, or anything that obstructs its own enlightenment, then it imposes that obscurity on the effectiveness of its physical formation. In fact, the physical form of and from our spirit solely represents the recognition of its own imperfections against the deepest levels of our soul. Our physical manifestation is simply our will to self destruct so these hidden layers of our soul can break free, and physical illnesses are just indications of deeper efforts to free the soul. I think this will is represented by our bodies' metabolic processes, which create disorder by energy conversion processes in order to maintain order and sustain the body. Ultimately, our will and metabolism alike are just the imposition of disorder to the body. A symptom of any physical illness is either a lack of, or too much metabolism in the damaged organ (And I would also consider it to be the cause of such).

As our spiritual self reaches the highest of ideals, it actually has more trouble weaving together a physical body that can sustain itself, because a physical body can no longer capture the essence of that spirit. But on the other hand, the spiritual self also becomes more capable of recognizing its own higher ideals, and so is more capable of weaving together a more energy efficient bodily system (one that does not need to metabolize as much in order to sustain itself). However, the ultimate goal of our repeated incarnations is to cultivate our spirit to a point where it cannot, and/or does not wish to further reincarnate. It wants to evolve towards pure love and pure energy that is one with the love and energy of the universe. That's my understanding anyways.

At any rate, yes it is no coincidence that I may periodically return to this forum. I have an impulse to cultivate my spirit and this forum provides spiritual teachings.

These are very intuitive insights, Grant, as usual! We should be wary of trying to generalize these things too broadly. One thing I have learned is that there are always exceptions to the 'rules' when it comes to higher spiritual realities, such as those connected with how our soul-spirit element impresses flaws or illnesses into the bodily element. They aren't arbitrary exceptions, but rather form the basis of even higher-order 'rules' in which the others are embedded. But a certain development in our own thinking needs to take place before we discern these higher-order structures in a living way. Nevertheless, you are clearly probing the contours of some deep esoteric truths with your thought-feelers.

Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. If this primary force were the only thing that were active — it is this very force that is to bring the soul back to the spiritual — man would need only a very short time on earth. But in that case the whole of earth evolution would have taken an entirely different course; it would also have failed to achieve its purpose. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.

All this makes me curious - what sort of feeling-experience do you have when these intuitive insights arise in your consciousness, weaving together various threads which were hanging apart beforehand? (I am not sure if you had thought of what you wrote in the last post before). Would you call these very powerful cognitive experiences which inspire some concrete feelings? For me, if I am intuitively exploring something unfamiliar, which is generally anything related to higher spiritual realities, and then I come across details which flesh out and strengthen that intuition, it's like many Christmases come early, and my intuitive sense for these things wasn't nearly as sharp as yours.

[GrantHenderson]

That’s an interesting point about how we develop illnesses within dysfunctional organs that are obstructing spiritual clarity in our phenomenal experiences in order to rejuvenate our spiritual outlook therefrom. If we understand our body as an apparatus woven out of our own will before we are born, then each organ is the physical manifestation of a specific function of our consciousness. If our spirit is tainted with sin, trauma, or anything that obstructs its own enlightenment, then it imposes that obscurity on the effectiveness of its physical formation. In fact, the physical form of and from our spirit solely represents the recognition of its own imperfections against the deepest levels of our soul. Our physical manifestation is simply our will to self destruct so these hidden layers of our soul can break free, and physical illnesses are just indications of deeper efforts to free the soul. I think this will is represented by our bodies' metabolic processes, which create disorder by energy conversion processes in order to maintain order and sustain the body. Ultimately, our will and metabolism alike are just the imposition of disorder to the body. A symptom of any physical illness is either a lack of, or too much metabolism in the damaged organ (And I would also consider it to be the cause of such).

As our spiritual self reaches the highest of ideals, it actually has more trouble weaving together a physical body that can sustain itself, because a physical body can no longer capture the essence of that spirit. But on the other hand, the spiritual self also becomes more capable of recognizing its own higher ideals, and so is more capable of weaving together a more energy efficient bodily system (one that does not need to metabolize as much in order to sustain itself). However, the ultimate goal of our repeated incarnations is to cultivate our spirit to a point where it cannot, and/or does not wish to further reincarnate. It wants to evolve towards pure love and pure energy that is one with the love and energy of the universe. That's my understanding anyways.

At any rate, yes it is no coincidence that I may periodically return to this forum. I have an impulse to cultivate my spirit and this forum provides spiritual teachings.

These are very intuitive insights, Grant, as usual! We should be wary of trying to generalize these things too broadly. One thing I have learned is that there are always exceptions to the 'rules' when it comes to higher spiritual realities, such as those connected with how our soul-spirit element impresses flaws or illnesses into the bodily element. They aren't arbitrary exceptions, but rather form the basis of even higher-order 'rules' in which the others are embedded. But a certain development in our own thinking needs to take place before we discern these higher-order structures in a living way. Nevertheless, you are clearly probing the contours of some deep esoteric truths with your thought-feelers.

Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. If this primary force were the only thing that were active — it is this very force that is to bring the soul back to the spiritual — man would need only a very short time on earth. But in that case the whole of earth evolution would have taken an entirely different course; it would also have failed to achieve its purpose. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.

All this makes me curious - what sort of feeling-experience do you have when these intuitive insights arise in your consciousness, weaving together various threads which were hanging apart beforehand? (I am not sure if you had thought of what you wrote in the last post before). Would you call these very powerful cognitive experiences which inspire some concrete feelings? For me, if I am intuitively exploring something unfamiliar, which is generally anything related to higher spiritual realities, and then I come across details which flesh out and strengthen that intuition, it's like many Christmases come early, and my intuitive sense for these things wasn't nearly as sharp as yours.

I think I see what you mean. The spiritual forces that guide phenomena flow from a Godhead which ultimately dictates their causal significance. God is the condition upon which spiritual forces fulfill. And where spiritual forces do not fulfill God, God is the agent that overrides them. In other words, God dictates where our spiritual forces that act upon the god in our spirit do not fulfill the god in us all.

Yes, much of the comprehension within most of my comments are revealed to me upon writing them. It takes me a few hours to conceive of and write some comments.
I suppose, similar to your experience, I trust there is truth in something when the thoughts clarify other aspects of my worldview, and the feelings bring me closer to God, with sensations of balance from both the inner conception and the language through which it is conveyed, as well as balance between the conception and the language. That last part is important, because sometimes I sense something is missing in my conception based on what feels unbalanced in the language through which the conception is conveyed. In that sense, language is like a ground to stand on when carving out an idea. But on the other hand, language is also like a ceiling for the extent to which the idea is communicated. The language cannot totally contain the idea, but you do your best.

[AshvinP]

That’s an interesting point about how we develop illnesses within dysfunctional organs that are obstructing spiritual clarity in our phenomenal experiences in order to rejuvenate our spiritual outlook therefrom. If we understand our body as an apparatus woven out of our own will before we are born, then each organ is the physical manifestation of a specific function of our consciousness. If our spirit is tainted with sin, trauma, or anything that obstructs its own enlightenment, then it imposes that obscurity on the effectiveness of its physical formation. In fact, the physical form of and from our spirit solely represents the recognition of its own imperfections against the deepest levels of our soul. Our physical manifestation is simply our will to self destruct so these hidden layers of our soul can break free, and physical illnesses are just indications of deeper efforts to free the soul. I think this will is represented by our bodies' metabolic processes, which create disorder by energy conversion processes in order to maintain order and sustain the body. Ultimately, our will and metabolism alike are just the imposition of disorder to the body. A symptom of any physical illness is either a lack of, or too much metabolism in the damaged organ (And I would also consider it to be the cause of such).

As our spiritual self reaches the highest of ideals, it actually has more trouble weaving together a physical body that can sustain itself, because a physical body can no longer capture the essence of that spirit. But on the other hand, the spiritual self also becomes more capable of recognizing its own higher ideals, and so is more capable of weaving together a more energy efficient bodily system (one that does not need to metabolize as much in order to sustain itself). However, the ultimate goal of our repeated incarnations is to cultivate our spirit to a point where it cannot, and/or does not wish to further reincarnate. It wants to evolve towards pure love and pure energy that is one with the love and energy of the universe. That's my understanding anyways.

At any rate, yes it is no coincidence that I may periodically return to this forum. I have an impulse to cultivate my spirit and this forum provides spiritual teachings.

These are very intuitive insights, Grant, as usual! We should be wary of trying to generalize these things too broadly. One thing I have learned is that there are always exceptions to the 'rules' when it comes to higher spiritual realities, such as those connected with how our soul-spirit element impresses flaws or illnesses into the bodily element. They aren't arbitrary exceptions, but rather form the basis of even higher-order 'rules' in which the others are embedded. But a certain development in our own thinking needs to take place before we discern these higher-order structures in a living way. Nevertheless, you are clearly probing the contours of some deep esoteric truths with your thought-feelers.

Any action of man that hurts another being or creature or the world in general, hinders the doer in his development. This is what the pilgrimage of life means for me, that the primary force of the soul, as it goes from incarnation to incarnation, is set for further development. And this development progresses in such a fashion that man as it were is always putting obstacles in his own path. If this primary force were the only thing that were active — it is this very force that is to bring the soul back to the spiritual — man would need only a very short time on earth. But in that case the whole of earth evolution would have taken an entirely different course; it would also have failed to achieve its purpose. You must not think that man would be better off if he put no obstacles in his own way. It is only by setting himself these handicaps that he grows strong and acquires experience, for it is the very eradicating and overcoming of these hindrances that will make him the strong being he must become by the end of earth evolution. It is thoroughly in keeping with earth evolution that he puts stones in his own path. If he did not have to muster the strength to remove these obstacles he would not acquire this strength at all. Then the world would be the poorer. We must altogether disregard the good and evil connected with these hindrances and look solely at the wisdom of the world that intended, right from the beginning, that man should have the possibility of setting himself hindrances in earthly evolution so that in removing them he could acquire strength for later. We could even say that the wise guidance of the world allowed man to become evil and gave him the possibility of doing harm, so that in repairing the harm and overcoming the evil he can become stronger in the course of karmic development than he would have become had he reached his goal without effort. This is how we should understand the significance and justification of obstacles and hindrances.

All this makes me curious - what sort of feeling-experience do you have when these intuitive insights arise in your consciousness, weaving together various threads which were hanging apart beforehand? (I am not sure if you had thought of what you wrote in the last post before). Would you call these very powerful cognitive experiences which inspire some concrete feelings? For me, if I am intuitively exploring something unfamiliar, which is generally anything related to higher spiritual realities, and then I come across details which flesh out and strengthen that intuition, it's like many Christmases come early, and my intuitive sense for these things wasn't nearly as sharp as yours.

I think I see what you mean. The spiritual forces that guide phenomena flow from a Godhead which ultimately dictates their causal significance. God is the condition upon which spiritual forces fulfill. And where spiritual forces do not fulfill God, God is the agent that overrides them. In other words, God dictates where our spiritual forces that act upon the god in our spirit do not fulfill the god in us all.

I wouldn't use the word 'dictate', because that makes it sound arbitrary and coercive, whereas the higher-order activity which embeds the perceptual-conceptual lawfulness we are familiar with is also lawful (at a more aesthetic and moral level, as well as scientific) and even less coercive than the former. The reason it is less coercive is because it relates more intimately to our own soul-life, or what we may call the Karmic threads which we ourselves have woven over many incarnations (also in the context our nested collectives - families, nations, etc.). It only seems arbitary and coercive to us as long it remains below the threshold of waking consciousness, as a sort of dark instinctual 'subconscious' which rules over us because we appear to have no creative responsibility for it. Yet during sleep and between death-rebirth we are intentionally participating in the spiritual forces which structure our normal waking experience, with all its obstacles and sufferings.

We have already described the remarkable way in which this period of life runs its course, and we know that at this stage of his existence man's life flows backwards. This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life — in reverse sequence. Assuming that a man dies in his fortieth year, he will pass through all the experiences he has gone through in life in the reverse order, beginning with his thirty-ninth year, then the thirty-eighth, the thirty-seventh, the thirty-sixth, and so on. He really does go through his whole life backwards, right to the moment of birth. This is what is behind the beautiful words of Christ, when He was speaking of man's entry into the spiritual world or the kingdom of Heaven: ‘Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ In other words, man lives backwards as far as his first moments and being absolved of everything, he can then enter Devachan or the kingdom of Heaven, and be in the spiritual world from then onwards. This is difficult to imagine, as we are so very accustomed to time being absolute, like it is on the physical plane. It requires considerable effort to get used to this, but it will come.

Now we must picture to ourselves what man actually does in Kamaloca. We could say a great deal about it, of course. Today, however, we shall concentrate solely on what concerns the question of the karmic cause of illnesses. So what I am about to say must not be taken as the only kind of experience in Kamaloca, but as one among many.
...
When, therefore, whilst living his life backwards in Kamaloca after death, a man encounters some harm he did to a fellow man in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as much as the joy and good he brought to others. Only now it is in his own astral body that he experiences the harm he did to someone else. Supposing he hit someone when he was twenty, so that it really hurt. In his reverse journey through life he feels it in his own astral body in exactly the same way the other person did when it happened. You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realise you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Yes, much of the comprehension within most of my comments are revealed to me upon writing them. It takes me a few hours to conceive of and write some comments.
I suppose, similar to your experience, I trust there is truth in something when the thoughts clarify other aspects of my worldview, and the feelings bring me closer to God, with sensations of balance from both the inner conception and the language through which it is conveyed, as well as balance between the conception and the language. That last part is important, because sometimes I sense something is missing in my conception based on what feels unbalanced in the language through which the conception is conveyed. In that sense, language is like a ground to stand on when carving out an idea. But on the other hand, language is also like a ceiling for the extent to which the idea is communicated. The language cannot totally contain the idea, but you do your best.

Right, so with respect to language as a ground to stand on, it is like perceiving our inner word-concepts in a similar manner to how we perceive outer sense-perceptions, so that they stand in more and more harmonious relation with one another in the context of our overarching intuited ideas-ideals. When there is some sense of disharmony, this impels us (ideally) to seek out additional concepts to further fill in the gaps within that intuitive context, reaching a more stable equilibrium of harmony for the time being.

But then we can take a passage like the one I quoted above. Generally it is my experience, and my reason for using such quotes, that it reflects my intuitive understanding in a way which I cannot normally articulate with concepts, or even imagine how to begin articulating in any useful way (besides simply repeating what was written in slightly different words). I find there is something profoundly important and inspiring/motivating in the fact that this unsuspected, unimagined articulation actually has been attained by others, in a way that elucidates my own intuition. What are your thoughts-feelings on that?

[GrantHenderson]

These are very intuitive insights, Grant, as usual! We should be wary of trying to generalize these things too broadly. One thing I have learned is that there are always exceptions to the 'rules' when it comes to higher spiritual realities, such as those connected with how our soul-spirit element impresses flaws or illnesses into the bodily element. They aren't arbitrary exceptions, but rather form the basis of even higher-order 'rules' in which the others are embedded. But a certain development in our own thinking needs to take place before we discern these higher-order structures in a living way. Nevertheless, you are clearly probing the contours of some deep esoteric truths with your thought-feelers.





All this makes me curious - what sort of feeling-experience do you have when these intuitive insights arise in your consciousness, weaving together various threads which were hanging apart beforehand? (I am not sure if you had thought of what you wrote in the last post before). Would you call these very powerful cognitive experiences which inspire some concrete feelings? For me, if I am intuitively exploring something unfamiliar, which is generally anything related to higher spiritual realities, and then I come across details which flesh out and strengthen that intuition, it's like many Christmases come early, and my intuitive sense for these things wasn't nearly as sharp as yours.

I think I see what you mean. The spiritual forces that guide phenomena flow from a Godhead which ultimately dictates their causal significance. God is the condition upon which spiritual forces fulfill. And where spiritual forces do not fulfill God, God is the agent that overrides them. In other words, God dictates where our spiritual forces that act upon the god in our spirit do not fulfill the god in us all.

I wouldn't use the word 'dictate', because that makes it sound arbitrary and coercive, whereas the higher-order activity which embeds the perceptual-conceptual lawfulness we are familiar with is also lawful (at a more aesthetic and moral level, as well as scientific) and even less coercive than the former. The reason it is less coercive is because it relates more intimately to our own soul-life, or what we may call the Karmic threads which we ourselves have woven over many incarnations (also in the context our nested collectives - families, nations, etc.). It only seems arbitary and coercive to us as long it remains below the threshold of waking consciousness, as a sort of dark instinctual 'subconscious' which rules over us because we appear to have no creative responsibility for it. Yet during sleep and between death-rebirth we are intentionally participating in the spiritual forces which structure our normal waking experience, with all its obstacles and sufferings.

We have already described the remarkable way in which this period of life runs its course, and we know that at this stage of his existence man's life flows backwards. This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life — in reverse sequence. Assuming that a man dies in his fortieth year, he will pass through all the experiences he has gone through in life in the reverse order, beginning with his thirty-ninth year, then the thirty-eighth, the thirty-seventh, the thirty-sixth, and so on. He really does go through his whole life backwards, right to the moment of birth. This is what is behind the beautiful words of Christ, when He was speaking of man's entry into the spiritual world or the kingdom of Heaven: ‘Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ In other words, man lives backwards as far as his first moments and being absolved of everything, he can then enter Devachan or the kingdom of Heaven, and be in the spiritual world from then onwards. This is difficult to imagine, as we are so very accustomed to time being absolute, like it is on the physical plane. It requires considerable effort to get used to this, but it will come.

Now we must picture to ourselves what man actually does in Kamaloca. We could say a great deal about it, of course. Today, however, we shall concentrate solely on what concerns the question of the karmic cause of illnesses. So what I am about to say must not be taken as the only kind of experience in Kamaloca, but as one among many.
...
When, therefore, whilst living his life backwards in Kamaloca after death, a man encounters some harm he did to a fellow man in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as much as the joy and good he brought to others. Only now it is in his own astral body that he experiences the harm he did to someone else. Supposing he hit someone when he was twenty, so that it really hurt. In his reverse journey through life he feels it in his own astral body in exactly the same way the other person did when it happened. You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realise you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Yes, much of the comprehension within most of my comments are revealed to me upon writing them. It takes me a few hours to conceive of and write some comments.
I suppose, similar to your experience, I trust there is truth in something when the thoughts clarify other aspects of my worldview, and the feelings bring me closer to God, with sensations of balance from both the inner conception and the language through which it is conveyed, as well as balance between the conception and the language. That last part is important, because sometimes I sense something is missing in my conception based on what feels unbalanced in the language through which the conception is conveyed. In that sense, language is like a ground to stand on when carving out an idea. But on the other hand, language is also like a ceiling for the extent to which the idea is communicated. The language cannot totally contain the idea, but you do your best.

Right, so with respect to language as a ground to stand on, it is like perceiving our inner word-concepts in a similar manner to how we perceive outer sense-perceptions, so that they stand in more and more harmonious relation with one another in the context of our overarching intuited ideas-ideals. When there is some sense of disharmony, this impels us (ideally) to seek out additional concepts to further fill in the gaps within that intuitive context, reaching a more stable equilibrium of harmony for the time being.

But then we can take a passage like the one I quoted above. Generally it is my experience, and my reason for using such quotes, that it reflects my intuitive understanding in a way which I cannot normally articulate with concepts, or even imagine how to begin articulating in any useful way (besides simply repeating what was written in slightly different words). I find there is something profoundly important and inspiring/motivating in the fact that this unsuspected, unimagined articulation actually has been attained by others, in a way that elucidates my own intuition. What are your thoughts-feelings on that?

This makes me wonder about what makes something meaningful. Anything. For something to be meaningful requires two essential elements -- it has to refer to a thing, and an action/process. If we only consider this algorithm in one direction of time, i.e, this ball (thing) moves forward (action/process), then it fails to be meaningful, because the ball references the action of moving forward, but the action of moving forward does not reference the ball. In such a scenario, the ball and the action of moving forward are two separate elements that do not refer to one another in a meaningful way, and thus do not form a meaningful relation. In order for the “thing” to be conceivable, we must also understand the action/process it undertakes to be that "thing", and vice versa. So, when the relationship is considered both causally, and retro-causally, The ball is also the action of moving forward (one combined element), and so are equally the ball and the action of moving forward two distinct elements.

Likewise, the dynamic relationship between heaven and earth is a manifestation of meaning/idea. The quote you shared mentions how after death “You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations”. This is a striking idea. You become not only the ball, but also the action of moving forward, so to speak - the effect it produces. What we perceive as external experiences when we are alive becomes our inner experience after we die. Our wrong doings to others become wrong doings upon ourselves, which we can then work within to mend for future incarnations.

I feel similarly about being inspired by others who have tapped into a deep intuition. It is as if we are all tapping into the same basic facts held within different time frames. Each idea invigorates the others, as they are all reinterpretations of the same basic facts about life. I am still ignorant about the intricacies of the dynamic relationship between heaven and earth. Rudolf Steiner seems like a great resource. I haven't read much of his material but sometimes I listen to his audiobooks as I am falling asleep, though I retain very little from this. One day I am sure I will dive deeper.

On a side note, I like to know who I'm talking to. If you don’t mind me asking, who are you? Where did you grow up? What do you do for a living? What other things do you like to do for fun? What are your goals? No pressure to respond if that feels too invasive. I just get fulfillment in knowing about the people I'm conversing with.

Hopefully I'll respond in less than a month this time.

[AshvinP]

I think I see what you mean. The spiritual forces that guide phenomena flow from a Godhead which ultimately dictates their causal significance. God is the condition upon which spiritual forces fulfill. And where spiritual forces do not fulfill God, God is the agent that overrides them. In other words, God dictates where our spiritual forces that act upon the god in our spirit do not fulfill the god in us all.

I wouldn't use the word 'dictate', because that makes it sound arbitrary and coercive, whereas the higher-order activity which embeds the perceptual-conceptual lawfulness we are familiar with is also lawful (at a more aesthetic and moral level, as well as scientific) and even less coercive than the former. The reason it is less coercive is because it relates more intimately to our own soul-life, or what we may call the Karmic threads which we ourselves have woven over many incarnations (also in the context our nested collectives - families, nations, etc.). It only seems arbitary and coercive to us as long it remains below the threshold of waking consciousness, as a sort of dark instinctual 'subconscious' which rules over us because we appear to have no creative responsibility for it. Yet during sleep and between death-rebirth we are intentionally participating in the spiritual forces which structure our normal waking experience, with all its obstacles and sufferings.

We have already described the remarkable way in which this period of life runs its course, and we know that at this stage of his existence man's life flows backwards. This is something that is difficult for newcomers to anthroposophy to understand at first. Man passes through the Kamaloca period which lasts roughly a third of the length of his earthly life — in reverse sequence. Assuming that a man dies in his fortieth year, he will pass through all the experiences he has gone through in life in the reverse order, beginning with his thirty-ninth year, then the thirty-eighth, the thirty-seventh, the thirty-sixth, and so on. He really does go through his whole life backwards, right to the moment of birth. This is what is behind the beautiful words of Christ, when He was speaking of man's entry into the spiritual world or the kingdom of Heaven: ‘Except ye ... become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of Heaven!’ In other words, man lives backwards as far as his first moments and being absolved of everything, he can then enter Devachan or the kingdom of Heaven, and be in the spiritual world from then onwards. This is difficult to imagine, as we are so very accustomed to time being absolute, like it is on the physical plane. It requires considerable effort to get used to this, but it will come.

Now we must picture to ourselves what man actually does in Kamaloca. We could say a great deal about it, of course. Today, however, we shall concentrate solely on what concerns the question of the karmic cause of illnesses. So what I am about to say must not be taken as the only kind of experience in Kamaloca, but as one among many.
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When, therefore, whilst living his life backwards in Kamaloca after death, a man encounters some harm he did to a fellow man in his twentieth year, he experiences this harm just as much as the joy and good he brought to others. Only now it is in his own astral body that he experiences the harm he did to someone else. Supposing he hit someone when he was twenty, so that it really hurt. In his reverse journey through life he feels it in his own astral body in exactly the same way the other person did when it happened. You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations. Your own astral body tells you what it felt like, and you realise you have laid an obstacle in the way of your further development. This has to be cleared away, otherwise you cannot get beyond it. This is the moment you form the intention of getting rid of the obstacle. So when you have lived through the Kamaloca period, you arrive back in your childhood filled with the intention of getting rid of all the hindrances you created in life. You are full of intentions, and it is the force of these intentions that brings about the special character of your future lives on earth.

Yes, much of the comprehension within most of my comments are revealed to me upon writing them. It takes me a few hours to conceive of and write some comments.
I suppose, similar to your experience, I trust there is truth in something when the thoughts clarify other aspects of my worldview, and the feelings bring me closer to God, with sensations of balance from both the inner conception and the language through which it is conveyed, as well as balance between the conception and the language. That last part is important, because sometimes I sense something is missing in my conception based on what feels unbalanced in the language through which the conception is conveyed. In that sense, language is like a ground to stand on when carving out an idea. But on the other hand, language is also like a ceiling for the extent to which the idea is communicated. The language cannot totally contain the idea, but you do your best.

Right, so with respect to language as a ground to stand on, it is like perceiving our inner word-concepts in a similar manner to how we perceive outer sense-perceptions, so that they stand in more and more harmonious relation with one another in the context of our overarching intuited ideas-ideals. When there is some sense of disharmony, this impels us (ideally) to seek out additional concepts to further fill in the gaps within that intuitive context, reaching a more stable equilibrium of harmony for the time being.

But then we can take a passage like the one I quoted above. Generally it is my experience, and my reason for using such quotes, that it reflects my intuitive understanding in a way which I cannot normally articulate with concepts, or even imagine how to begin articulating in any useful way (besides simply repeating what was written in slightly different words). I find there is something profoundly important and inspiring/motivating in the fact that this unsuspected, unimagined articulation actually has been attained by others, in a way that elucidates my own intuition. What are your thoughts-feelings on that?

This makes me wonder about what makes something meaningful. Anything. For something to be meaningful requires two essential elements -- it has to refer to a thing, and an action/process. If we only consider this algorithm in one direction of time, i.e, this ball (thing) moves forward (action/process), then it fails to be meaningful, because the ball references the action of moving forward, but the action of moving forward does not reference the ball. In such a scenario, the ball and the action of moving forward are two separate elements that do not refer to one another in a meaningful way, and thus do not form a meaningful relation. In order for the “thing” to be conceivable, we must also understand the action/process it undertakes to be that "thing", and vice versa. So, when the relationship is considered both causally, and retro-causally, The ball is also the action of moving forward (one combined element), and so are equally the ball and the action of moving forward two distinct elements.

Likewise, the dynamic relationship between heaven and earth is a manifestation of meaning/idea. The quote you shared mentions how after death “You experience objectively in the spiritual world everything you yourself did in the external world, and in the process you acquire the strength and the inclination to compensate for the pain in one of your future incarnations”. This is a striking idea. You become not only the ball, but also the action of moving forward, so to speak - the effect it produces. What we perceive as external experiences when we are alive becomes our inner experience after we die. Our wrong doings to others become wrong doings upon ourselves, which we can then work within to mend for future incarnations.

I feel similarly about being inspired by others who have tapped into a deep intuition. It is as if we are all tapping into the same basic facts held within different time frames. Each idea invigorates the others, as they are all reinterpretations of the same basic facts about life. I am still ignorant about the intricacies of the dynamic relationship between heaven and earth. Rudolf Steiner seems like a great resource. I haven't read much of his material but sometimes I listen to his audiobooks as I am falling asleep, though I retain very little from this. One day I am sure I will dive deeper.

Hi Grant,

Nice to hear from you again. 

I like that example. It shows that our normal perceptual-conceptual experience, such as objects we perceive or words we use, are like tokens of remembrance for soul-spirit processes which we experience more directly (without the filter of normal thinking) pre-birth or during sleep. Our normal thinking consciousness needs these spatialized tokens as a mediating link between the poles of waking and sleeping experience, between life and pre- or post-life experience (or Earth and Heaven). Even when we are awake, we are mostly asleep to our life of archetypal feeling and will impulses. We are only fully awake in our creative thinking, where we intuitively know the 'laws' by which our mental pictures and concepts transform. I think it is valid as a general principle that all meaning we perceive in our thinking is referential or relational - there can be no isolated pockets of meaning which don't immediately implicate other pockets of meaning. I would also add that the referents of our meaningful activity can become more spiritualized through the development of cognition. 

If we try to imagine 'moving forward' by itself without reference to an object moving forward, we will have great difficulty. But now the spatial tokens have clearly become a crutch for most people, because we got too comfortable on the bridge between perception and idea and forgot we were only using it to cross over the valley of reflective thought to the other side of the mountain - spiritually creative thinking. It is possible to meaningfully imagine the process of movement without reference to a spatial object, but this requires inner strengthening and enlivening of our cognition. We could say the spatial object becomes increasingly perceived in its living temporal relations which are always in movement - integrated into the ideal act of movement itself. Our formless "I" increasingly becomes the new referent to which all activity is related, as the former continually awakens to itself at higher stages. We begin to experience all phenomenal processes as thinking-gestures, which is not to say they are localized to only our current aperture of thinking. Yet that aperture gradually begins to expand and we intuitively understand the subtle ways in which our thinking-gestures shape our environmental context. 

Cleric also discussed this in one of his essays:

viewtopic.php?t=726

How do we originally learn what 'falling' is? When we observe sensory perceptions of a falling apple, for example. We have succession of images, similarly to the fly, and the image of the apple entrains our attention (movement of attention is also an elementary act of our spiritual activity). This movement forces us to experience certain thinking gesture. Imagine that we're dancing and we let our partner lead. She initiates the movements while we simply follow in suit and as a result we experience sensory movement. If we pay attention we can later replicate the same movements with our own will. Something similar happens in thinking. If after we've seen the apple we close our eyes and replicate the process, now we don't have attention dragged by perception but thinking gesture moving an imaginary perception. This gesture has its recognizable feel to it. Just like moving our hand horizontally vs. vertically feels differently, so moving an imagined object from top to bottom in accelerating pace, feels as something recognizable. We can distinguish it from moving our focus horizontally, for example. Any such inner gesture has its unique meaningful fingerprint, so to speak. Each thinking gesture expresses a 'shape' of meaning. Thinking lives in meaningful time-patterns. The patterns are not something that we perceive externally and then interpret with thinking. They are the geometry of meaning itself. This is not something that we can understand intellectually. We can only grasp it in intuition when the hysteresis process has been brought to unity, when we experience how willed temporal meaning shapes the flow of thought-perception.

The meaningful fingerprint of a single thinking gesture can never be experienced in complete isolation. There's always implicit context which supports the concrete meaning of a thinking gesture. We'll return to that context later.

We can recognize that we perform quite similar thinking gesture even if we imagine not apples but falling stones or tomatoes, just as we can move our hand in the same way with different objects in it. This common gesture is what is labeled 'falling'. So the word 'falling' is a token, something like a reminder. Sometimes when I don't want to forget to do something before leaving home, I place some object at the door step. In this way on my way out I see it and it reminds me why it is there. The object may have nothing to do with what I had to remember, it only serves as a link. Similarly, the sound of the word 'falling' has nothing to do with the thinking gesture of falling (the movement of attention from top to bottom), yet it reminds us of it (the word has no similarity to the gesture in most of our modern languages but it can be argued that it wasn't so in the proto languages).

The important thing is that when initially perceiving the falling apple, it is no different from the fly. We don't know from the start that apples fall. But when we think about the falling apple, when we summon a memory image of it and move it through our own thinking, we experience it as (T) and we know the 'law' through which the imaginary apple (not the perceived) is falling because it is really the meaning that we think and which temporally glues together the apple 'frames'.

These principles really shine a light on how it is that the sensory world acts as a realm of analogies to invisible soul-spirit processes - "as above, so below, and as below, so above." We could say a working definition of 'creative thinking' is when we have an increasingly lucid intuitive sense for the 'law' through which perceptions come into being and into movement from meaningful activity. An artist will instinctively use this sense to create his art, but the latter gains enormous strength and richness of meaning if we also make it more conscious in our striving towards high ideals - we can explore the reasons why such inner senses exist for our benefit, and that of the Earth organism as a whole, and how precisely they work. Steiner provides a seemingly unending depth of such 'why' explanations to kindle our imagination, inspiration, and intuition and thereby help optimize our stream of becoming into greater spiritual consciousness. 

Have you come across rudolfsteineraudio.com? It contains audio recordings of many different lectures and is very well narrated. Lately I have been listening to the following lecture series and I think you would find it interesting and useful as well - http://rudolfsteineraudio.com/transform ... 1cw58.html

On a side note, I like to know who I'm talking to. If you don’t mind me asking, who are you? Where did you grow up? What do you do for a living? What other things do you like to do for fun? What are your goals? No pressure to respond if that feels too invasive. I just get fulfillment in knowing about the people I'm conversing with.

Hopefully I'll respond in less than a month this time.

I don't mind you asking, but there isn't much interesting to share

I grew up in Virginia, US (and still live there, although I moved from south to north). I am a bankruptcy attorney. What I do 'for fun' has changed enormously in the last few years. Besides work and explicit spiritual practice, I try to play basketball and piano. Everything I do now is in relation to spiritual development - I always have an eye towards how to approach activities so they can perfect my inner qualities and capacities, which in turn helps me contribute to the continual work of manifesting the Kingdom on Earth as in Heaven. That is my high ideal, in the abstract.

How about you?