Steiners thinking

[Güney27]

I've been dealing with steiner for months now, sometimes more sometimes less.
However, there are some points that cannot be understood mentally.
For example: Our thinking does not name things that exist outside and without us (as a normal person thinks)
According to what I sometimes understand from Steiner, our thinking is an organ of perception like the ear.
It perceives concepts and ideas and does not invent them.
Steiner cannot tell us what concepts are.
I would say that terms are thought packages that describe the essential, the way something is.
In truth, these concepts are spiritual beings, which we perceive in a rigid form.
Our spirit connects through Thinking with the spiritual essence of the objects.
So in thinking we are in the spiritual world or connected to it and perceive it as such.
However, for every person who is not clairvoyant (like for me), a term is not a spiritual being, but a word that describes similarities and contains essential characteristics of a thing.
For the common man, a thought is a word that describes something of our perception that man produces.
Steiner says a flower connects to the concept in the human soul, but normal perception makes it appear that after seeing a flower we generate that concept.

Somehow Steiner becomes very incomprehensible to me at this point.
However, I continue to study his writings as I have the intuition to be on to something important.
But I can't grasp certain statements.

[Cleric K]

I've been dealing with steiner for months now, sometimes more sometimes less.
However, there are some points that cannot be understood mentally.
For example: Our thinking does not name things that exist outside and without us (as a normal person thinks)
According to what I sometimes understand from Steiner, our thinking is an organ of perception like the ear.
It perceives concepts and ideas and does not invent them.
Steiner cannot tell us what concepts are.
I would say that terms are thought packages that describe the essential, the way something is.
In truth, these concepts are spiritual beings, which we perceive in a rigid form.
Our spirit connects through Thinking with the spiritual essence of the objects.
So in thinking we are in the spiritual world or connected to it and perceive it as such.
However, for every person who is not clairvoyant (like for me), a term is not a spiritual being, but a word that describes similarities and contains essential characteristics of a thing.
For the common man, a thought is a word that describes something of our perception that man produces.
Steiner says a flower connects to the concept in the human soul, but normal perception makes it appear that after seeing a flower we generate that concept.

Somehow Steiner becomes very incomprehensible to me at this point.
However, I continue to study his writings as I have the intuition to be on to something important.
But I can't grasp certain statements.

Hi Guney,

Yes, it’s quite normal that any contemporary person would have trouble when hearing something like ‘thoughts are living spiritual beings’. It surely was the case for me. And unfortunately, no amount of theorizing about the mechanics of thinking will make this any clearer. The only thing that makes it clearer is to first become better acquainted with our own thinking process in an experiential way.


It is true that for contemporary man thoughts are felt to be nothing more than tokens of meaning. Let’s take the experience of walking. This is not only the perception of our feet moving but also the experience of our will and also the layers of intuitive meaning which give direction of our walk. All these things are part of our rich spiritual experience as human beings. From this whole panorama of phenomena we can extract a symbol, a gesture like:



This gesture is like an extract, like a fractal copy of the phenomenal reality we try to express. Words are other kinds of gestures. Instead of using our hands, we move our vocal tract. When we think verbally it’s practically the same thing, except that our spiritual activity weaves in imaginative thought-formation without descending into the will.

So just as you say, in general thoughts are symbols for aspects of our spiritual experience. The important thing is to deepen our experience of how thoughts are formed. For example, with walking it is relatively easy to see how we live in the will, we feel our whole body moving, we have some idea of where we’re going. All this is condensed into a symbol.

The next step is to be vividly aware that a thought on its own, extricated from its living context is of little use (except for abstract metaphysics). We need to get in the habit of seeing all thoughts as lawful precipitations of our spiritual be-ing. Since our flow of be-ing is quite complicated and even inexplicable, thoughts serve as kind of anchor points, as holds on a climbing wall.



So through thinking in symbols (words) we get a kind of grip on the flow of be-ing. It is important to try and feel that these holds are lawfully nested within the greater flow. Only through this we can understand why it is said that thinking is a kind of decohered perception of this spiritual flow (world). Higher development leads to a more holistic cognition of the flow itself. As long as we live in a fully separate intellectual world made of only climbing holds and their relations, which is completely opaque to the ‘real’ world it symbolizes, things will never be clear.

Now what happens when we hear ‘walking’ in relation to someone else? Now we have only a sensory perception, we see them walking. We don’t feel their will and maybe we don’t know why and where they are going. Yet since we’re both humans we can largely understand that this perception of a walking person is driven by spiritual be-ing, that intends and wills the movement. If we make an effort we can very well understand the idea that the person employs in their walking.

To some extent we can resonate even with feelings of the higher animals. Fear, joy, distress, etc. – we can very well identify with such feelings. Things however become quite murky when we continue down in the lower animals, plants and the mineral world. Then there’s really nothing we can imagine that could be reasonably similar to our human experience. And herein lies the great threshold of today’s human consciousness.

Let’s get a very clear view of this. We should feel how great of a difference there is when we speak of walking and, for example, of a ball rolling or plant growing. At our human level it is easy to see a concept like ‘walking’ as condensate of spiritual experience, but when we speak of a ‘plant growing’ we have only perceptions, we can hardly imagine spiritual be-ing with inner experience behind such phenomena.

Interestingly, such inner experience is only to be expected in a framework like BK’s idealism. The big problem is that (unless we turn everything into anthopomorphic caricatures) we don’t feel there could be anything human-like behind these phenomena (at least in the form we’re familiar with from our everyday life). This is the main reason why MAL is declared instinctive. The other alternative would be to realize that there could be quite conscious spiritual activity at large but we must go through certain evolutionary development in order to grow our being into the depths and gain first-person knowledge of this activity, as we have first-person knowledge of our own thinking, feeling, willing.

And this is where we come to ‘Steiner thinking’. As we can see, there’s nothing exotic, nothing crazy about this. In fact this is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we ponder on the idea of MAL. One can’t help but ask – what is it like to be conscious at a level that grows beyond the so-called dissociative bubble. But then one quickly realizes that there are too many disturbing prospects in such an endeavor – the least of which is to realize that our thoughts and feelings are not fully private. At the face of such realizations one turns back and begins to seek ways to justify the dissociative experience and to theorize how beyond our personal bubble there’s only unconscious instinct.

So Steiner (or any other genuine evolutionary path) does nothing more than continue where others simply stop and turn back. There are two ways in which one can turn back: one is to simply declare the Cosmos (MAL) to be unconsciously instinctive, the other is to admit the possibility that there could be Cosmic consciousness, yet it is unknowable (on the ‘other side’) for the human being while on Earth.

Before one trying to understand anything of ‘Steiner thinking’, one should honestly investigate the question of Cosmic consciousness and how our human ego relates to it. If one prefers to justify the absoluteness of the dissociative bubble, then there’s simply no way to approach ‘Steiner thinking’. One can approach that thinking (which is also Goethe’s) if when seeing a plant one can say “There’s a living spiritual be-ing which is active in the archetypal nature of this plant. This be-ing is knowable if I can transform my consciousness to reach the levels where this plant be-ing is active. Then I’ll know something of the inner life of the plant world in the way I know something about the inner human life when I see someone walking.”

Imagine we have experience of walking but we have never made it consciously directed, that is, there’s no idea in it. Then walking for us is just an aimless act of will. Then if we see someone else walking we would implicitly assume it is the same for them. It is only when we reach ideation of our own walking that we can also recognize ideation living in others too. It’s similar with the plant and mineral kingdoms. We can’t readily imagine the kind of inner spiritual activity which might be active in plants. But through the proper inner development we can reach that level of consciousness. And here’s the key part – when we do that, we also see the concept of ‘plant growth’ as a symbol precipitating from inner Cosmic spiritual life, just like it is for walking.

This is really the whole reason to speak of thoughts as expressions of spiritual beings. Even though we might not be clairvoyant yet, we should be open for the possibility that concepts like ‘plant blooming’, ‘crystal forming’ can be discovered as immediate symbolizing of the inner life of the Cosmos.

Even BK would say “There’s something like being a crystal.” Here everyone should determine their own standings: “Do I want to evolve my being such that I know what it is like to be a crystal or I prefer the more convenient approach to simply declare anything out of mind to be instinctive unconsciousness.”

So all this summarizes to the following. We can only grasp ‘Steiner thinking’, not if we imagine it as some sophisticated intellectual framework (like Hegelian, Kantian, etc.) but if we see thinking as spiritual activity precipitating symbols of inner spiritual being. What Steiner and every proper evolutionary path do, is to seek how our personal consciousness is embedded in the Cosmic. Every concept like ‘plant’, ‘rock’, ‘cloud’, etc. should become for us a pointer that invites us to seek the inner world whose shadow we perceive as fragments of color, sound and so on.
There’s a simple self-test anyone can perform. Those who feel great antipathy towards Steiner will almost certainly find out that they have zero interest in any inner being of the Cosmos and how it relates to our human ego (or how the ego is nested into the Cosmic inner being). It is exceedingly rare that someone may have interest in a living expanding of first-person consciousness into the hierarchically nested Cosmic layers which reveal the inner being of the World, yet don’t recognize that spiritual science speaks of exactly that. If such a person was to honestly pursue this direction he would be forced to reproduce the thought-symbols of spiritual science anyway. So in a nutshell, to grasp ‘Steiner thinking’ one has to go further than where BK stops. One has to not only theorize about some Cosmic consciousness but energetically seek the reality of how our ego-consciousness is embedded within the Cosmic. Only in this way do we have a chance to understand thoughts as symbols of Cosmic spiritual activity and why through thinking-holds we actually grip and perceive fragments of this spiritual flow.

[Federica]

Cleric,

The following reflection has been occurring to me for some time now. A while ago, I touched on it here, in the “This forum” thread. Now, as I am reading this new thread, the idea is once again making its clear impression. I will try to express it, hoping I’ll find the right words to say it right. I apologize for any inadequacies of my understanding that could make the following off-point and inappropriate. I know there’s a risk this can happen, still I am taking it with full knowledge, so with it, I am of course also taking unnuanced responsibility for it. It’s about meaning breadth versus its direction. I think the meaning illustrated in this post is useful and illuminating for some. Perhaps the primary intention of your post was just that, to provide a new illustration of the inner shift that needs to happen if one wants to open to an integral understanding of self, world, and the spiritual in them. To the one who is moved by such a query, even at the price of baring the self of all intellectual flesh and leaving it at the path's entrance, this post is helpful. For my part, I can only be thankful for yet another profound and graceful painting of that-which-can-be-called-by-many-names.


But when it comes to answering Güney’s question - if this post wants to be specifically helpful to the very real person who is asking here - well, I doubt the post does that. It seems to me this writing is exceedingly complex and conceptually expansive for that. It also calls for pre-requisites, and is weaved with references. Now, I don't know Güney. I apologize for calling you forth, Güney, I realize it may look like I'm making unfounded hypotheses about you. Maybe Güney will soon confirm it all makes sense, and it all helps tackle the hurdle of the incomprehensible. I really hope this is about to happen, and that I am only projecting biased impressions. But as said, I am a risk taker, for reasons I consider worth it, to the best of my understanding, and here again my sense is, Cleric, that either you have reached a level where you have forgotten how standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff, and you expect too much from our understanding, or you remember exactly how it feels to read the specific PoF page Güney has been reading, but you are seizing the opportunity of the question to do something different in response. I admit I’m undecided between these two possibilities. But I do see a gap and two possible causes, and my strong feeling is, if it’s the former, you should perhaps simplify, and narrow your illustration, sacrificing breadth to tackle the exact pain-point, and if it's the latter, wouldn't it be relevant to be more explicit about it?

[AshvinP]

Cleric,

The following reflection has been occurring to me for some time now. A while ago, I touched on it here, in the “This forum” thread. Now, as I am reading this new thread, the idea is once again making its clear impression. I will try to express it, hoping I’ll find the right words to say it right. I apologize for any inadequacies of my understanding that could make the following off-point and inappropriate. I know there’s a risk this can happen, still I am taking it with full knowledge, so with it, I am of course also taking unnuanced responsibility for it. It’s about meaning breadth versus its direction. I think the meaning illustrated in this post is useful and illuminating for some. Perhaps the primary intention of your post was just that, to provide a new illustration of the inner shift that needs to happen if one wants to open to an integral understanding of self, world, and the spiritual in them. To the one who is moved by such a query, even at the price of baring the self of all intellectual flesh and leaving it at the path's entrance, this post is helpful. For my part, I can only be thankful for yet another profound and graceful painting of that-which-can-be-called-by-many-names.


But when it comes to answering Güney’s question - if this post wants to be specifically helpful to the very real person who is asking here - well, I doubt the post does that. It seems to me this writing is exceedingly complex and conceptually expansive for that. It also calls for pre-requisites, and is weaved with references. Now, I don't know Güney. I apologize for calling you forth, Güney, I realize it may look like I'm making unfounded hypotheses about you. Maybe Güney will soon confirm it all makes sense, and it all helps tackle the hurdle of the incomprehensible. I really hope this is about to happen, and that I am only projecting biased impressions. But as said, I am a risk taker, for reasons I consider worth it, to the best of my understanding, and here again my sense is, Cleric, that either you have reached a level where you have forgotten how standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff, and you expect too much from our understanding, or you remember exactly how it feels to read the specific PoF page Güney has been reading, but you are seizing the opportunity of the question to do something different in response. I admit I’m undecided between these two possibilities. But I do see a gap and two possible causes, and my strong feeling is, if it’s the former, you should perhaps simplify, and narrow your illustration, sacrificing breadth to tackle the exact pain-point, and if it's the latter, wouldn't it be relevant to be more explicit about it?

Let me just offer a different perspective here - it's interesting that I read Guney's post, starting thinking about a response, which would have entailed more of a technical philosophical breakdown of Steiner's discussion on "concepts" and how our thoughts relate to spiritual activity of higher beings, then I thought, "actually this will be more of the same stuff I have already written in response to Guney and others, which clearly didn't make much of an impression, so I am going to wait and see if Cleric writes something different and more directly to the issues which need to be grasped." And he did.

I thought the reference to BK's idealism, MAL, and how Steiner (and other spiritual evolutionary streams) is simply picking up and continuing the logical thread where others refuse to venture further, was very helpful. We should always pay attention to the underlying trends of thinking here and the living feedback we get from the posts. The core issue of the need to understand our thinking-thoughts as embedded within the gradient flow of spiritual activity which shapes the Cosmic, Natural, and Individual landscapes, simply has not been elucidated for most people here, after many attempts at 'PoF 101' approach. If we take this spiritual evolutionary view as a living idea, then it's easier to discern that this perennial confusion has a lot to do with underlying prejudices, antipathies, fears, anxieties, etc. re: that core issue.

It's all too easy for us to encounter a series of analytic models which purport to explain 'thinking as spiritual activity' and confuse those for a genuine understanding, which then means we haven't understood and will be back in the same boat of confusion a few weeks or days later. We are then still living in the completely separate intellectual world of only conceptual holds and their relations on the climbing rock, beholden to our thinking rather than mastering it. "How standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff" is precisely the obstacle which needs to be overcome. What we really need is to seek the experience of our own thinking as embedded within that greater flow, which was after all Steiner's aim in PoF as well, and that simply can't happen if certain soul dispositions are actively resisting any such experience. Standard cognition needs to be brought to the point where it discerns the interminable cracks in its own habits and then takes a leap of reasoned faith to a new, deeper level of its own reality.

[Federica]

Let me just offer a different perspective here - it's interesting that I read Guney's post, starting thinking about a response, which would have entailed more of a technical philosophical breakdown of Steiner's discussion on "concepts" and how our thoughts relate to spiritual activity of higher beings, then I thought, "actually this will be more of the same stuff I have already written in response to Guney and others, which clearly didn't make much of an impression, so I am going to wait and see if Cleric writes something different and more directly to the issues which need to be grasped." And he did.

I thought the reference to BK's idealism, MAL, and how Steiner (and other spiritual evolutionary streams) is simply picking up and continuing the logical thread where others refuse to venture further, was very helpful. We should always pay attention to the underlying trends of thinking here and the living feedback we get from the posts. The core issue of the need to understand our thinking-thoughts as embedded within the gradient flow of spiritual activity which shapes the Cosmic, Natural, and Individual landscapes, simply has not been elucidated for most people here, after many attempts at 'PoF 101' approach. If we take this spiritual evolutionary view as a living idea, then it's easier to discern that this perennial confusion has a lot to do with underlying prejudices, antipathies, fears, anxieties, etc. re: that core issue.

It's all too easy for us to encounter a series of analytic models which purport to explain 'thinking as spiritual activity' and confuse those for a genuine understanding, which then means we haven't understood and will be back in the same boat of confusion a few weeks or days later. We are then still living in the completely separate intellectual world of only conceptual holds and their relations on the climbing rock, beholden to our thinking rather than mastering it. "How standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff" is precisely the obstacle which needs to be overcome. What we really need is to seek the experience of our own thinking as embedded within that greater flow, which was after all Steiner's aim in PoF as well, and that simply can't happen if certain soul dispositions are actively resisting any such experience. Standard cognition needs to be brought to the point where it discerns the interminable cracks in its own habits and then takes a leap of reasoned faith to a new, deeper level of its own reality.

Ashvin,

I understand / agree with everything you say here.

I thought the reference to BK's idealism, MAL, and how Steiner (and other spiritual evolutionary streams) is simply picking up and continuing the logical thread where others refuse to venture further, was very helpful.

Yes, I thought that too.

We should always pay attention to the underlying trends of thinking here and the living feedback we get from the posts.

Yes!

Natural, and Individual landscapes, simply has not been elucidated for most people here, after many attempts at 'PoF 101' approach.

This I don't have a full view on, of course, but it completely aligns with what I have seen and I am sure you're right.
I would note you say: "for most people".

If we take this spiritual evolutionary view as a living idea, then it's easier to discern that this perennial confusion has a lot to do with underlying prejudices, antipathies, fears, anxieties, etc. re: that core issue.

Yes - I would ask: easier for whom?

It's all too easy for us to encounter a series of analytic models which purport to explain 'thinking as spiritual activity' and confuse those for a genuine understanding, which then means we haven't understood and will be back in the same boat of confusion a few weeks or days later. We are then still living in the completely separate intellectual world of only conceptual holds and their relations on the climbing rock, beholden to our thinking rather than mastering it.

Absolutely, I understand that. We have discussed that many times.

"How standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff" is precisely the obstacle which needs to be overcome. What we really need is to seek the experience of our own thinking as embedded within that greater flow.

Precisely! What makes you think that I suggest otherwise? Everything you have expressed here makes sense to me.
But I don't see how it addresses the message of my post. All this has very little to do with what I have written. You seem to imply that I would like Cleric to provide intellectual explanations? And that I advocate for "analytic models which purport to explain 'thinking as spiritual activity'"?

[Güney27]

I've been dealing with steiner for months now, sometimes more sometimes less.
However, there are some points that cannot be understood mentally.
For example: Our thinking does not name things that exist outside and without us (as a normal person thinks)
According to what I sometimes understand from Steiner, our thinking is an organ of perception like the ear.
It perceives concepts and ideas and does not invent them.
Steiner cannot tell us what concepts are.
I would say that terms are thought packages that describe the essential, the way something is.
In truth, these concepts are spiritual beings, which we perceive in a rigid form.
Our spirit connects through Thinking with the spiritual essence of the objects.
So in thinking we are in the spiritual world or connected to it and perceive it as such.
However, for every person who is not clairvoyant (like for me), a term is not a spiritual being, but a word that describes similarities and contains essential characteristics of a thing.
For the common man, a thought is a word that describes something of our perception that man produces.
Steiner says a flower connects to the concept in the human soul, but normal perception makes it appear that after seeing a flower we generate that concept.

Somehow Steiner becomes very incomprehensible to me at this point.
However, I continue to study his writings as I have the intuition to be on to something important.
But I can't grasp certain statements.

Hi Guney,

Yes, it’s quite normal that any contemporary person would have trouble when hearing something like ‘thoughts are living spiritual beings’. It surely was the case for me. And unfortunately, no amount of theorizing about the mechanics of thinking will make this any clearer. The only thing that makes it clearer is to first become better acquainted with our own thinking process in an experiential way.


It is true that for contemporary man thoughts are felt to be nothing more than tokens of meaning. Let’s take the experience of walking. This is not only the perception of our feet moving but also the experience of our will and also the layers of intuitive meaning which give direction of our walk. All these things are part of our rich spiritual experience as human beings. From this whole panorama of phenomena we can extract a symbol, a gesture like:



This gesture is like an extract, like a fractal copy of the phenomenal reality we try to express. Words are other kinds of gestures. Instead of using our hands, we move our vocal tract. When we think verbally it’s practically the same thing, except that our spiritual activity weaves in imaginative thought-formation without descending into the will.

So just as you say, in general thoughts are symbols for aspects of our spiritual experience. The important thing is to deepen our experience of how thoughts are formed. For example, with walking it is relatively easy to see how we live in the will, we feel our whole body moving, we have some idea of where we’re going. All this is condensed into a symbol.

The next step is to be vividly aware that a thought on its own, extricated from its living context is of little use (except for abstract metaphysics). We need to get in the habit of seeing all thoughts as lawful precipitations of our spiritual be-ing. Since our flow of be-ing is quite complicated and even inexplicable, thoughts serve as kind of anchor points, as holds on a climbing wall.



So through thinking in symbols (words) we get a kind of grip on the flow of be-ing. It is important to try and feel that these holds are lawfully nested within the greater flow. Only through this we can understand why it is said that thinking is a kind of decohered perception of this spiritual flow (world). Higher development leads to a more holistic cognition of the flow itself. As long as we live in a fully separate intellectual world made of only climbing holds and their relations, which is completely opaque to the ‘real’ world it symbolizes, things will never be clear.

Now what happens when we hear ‘walking’ in relation to someone else? Now we have only a sensory perception, we see them walking. We don’t feel their will and maybe we don’t know why and where they are going. Yet since we’re both humans we can largely understand that this perception of a walking person is driven by spiritual be-ing, that intends and wills the movement. If we make an effort we can very well understand the idea that the person employs in their walking.

To some extent we can resonate even with feelings of the higher animals. Fear, joy, distress, etc. – we can very well identify with such feelings. Things however become quite murky when we continue down in the lower animals, plants and the mineral world. Then there’s really nothing we can imagine that could be reasonably similar to our human experience. And herein lies the great threshold of today’s human consciousness.

Let’s get a very clear view of this. We should feel how great of a difference there is when we speak of walking and, for example, of a ball rolling or plant growing. At our human level it is easy to see a concept like ‘walking’ as condensate of spiritual experience, but when we speak of a ‘plant growing’ we have only perceptions, we can hardly imagine spiritual be-ing with inner experience behind such phenomena.

Interestingly, such inner experience is only to be expected in a framework like BK’s idealism. The big problem is that (unless we turn everything into anthopomorphic caricatures) we don’t feel there could be anything human-like behind these phenomena (at least in the form we’re familiar with from our everyday life). This is the main reason why MAL is declared instinctive. The other alternative would be to realize that there could be quite conscious spiritual activity at large but we must go through certain evolutionary development in order to grow our being into the depths and gain first-person knowledge of this activity, as we have first-person knowledge of our own thinking, feeling, willing.

And this is where we come to ‘Steiner thinking’. As we can see, there’s nothing exotic, nothing crazy about this. In fact this is usually the first thing that comes to mind when we ponder on the idea of MAL. One can’t help but ask – what is it like to be conscious at a level that grows beyond the so-called dissociative bubble. But then one quickly realizes that there are too many disturbing prospects in such an endeavor – the least of which is to realize that our thoughts and feelings are not fully private. At the face of such realizations one turns back and begins to seek ways to justify the dissociative experience and to theorize how beyond our personal bubble there’s only unconscious instinct.

So Steiner (or any other genuine evolutionary path) does nothing more than continue where others simply stop and turn back. There are two ways in which one can turn back: one is to simply declare the Cosmos (MAL) to be unconsciously instinctive, the other is to admit the possibility that there could be Cosmic consciousness, yet it is unknowable (on the ‘other side’) for the human being while on Earth.

Before one trying to understand anything of ‘Steiner thinking’, one should honestly investigate the question of Cosmic consciousness and how our human ego relates to it. If one prefers to justify the absoluteness of the dissociative bubble, then there’s simply no way to approach ‘Steiner thinking’. One can approach that thinking (which is also Goethe’s) if when seeing a plant one can say “There’s a living spiritual be-ing which is active in the archetypal nature of this plant. This be-ing is knowable if I can transform my consciousness to reach the levels where this plant be-ing is active. Then I’ll know something of the inner life of the plant world in the way I know something about the inner human life when I see someone walking.”

Imagine we have experience of walking but we have never made it consciously directed, that is, there’s no idea in it. Then walking for us is just an aimless act of will. Then if we see someone else walking we would implicitly assume it is the same for them. It is only when we reach ideation of our own walking that we can also recognize ideation living in others too. It’s similar with the plant and mineral kingdoms. We can’t readily imagine the kind of inner spiritual activity which might be active in plants. But through the proper inner development we can reach that level of consciousness. And here’s the key part – when we do that, we also see the concept of ‘plant growth’ as a symbol precipitating from inner Cosmic spiritual life, just like it is for walking.

This is really the whole reason to speak of thoughts as expressions of spiritual beings. Even though we might not be clairvoyant yet, we should be open for the possibility that concepts like ‘plant blooming’, ‘crystal forming’ can be discovered as immediate symbolizing of the inner life of the Cosmos.

Even BK would say “There’s something like being a crystal.” Here everyone should determine their own standings: “Do I want to evolve my being such that I know what it is like to be a crystal or I prefer the more convenient approach to simply declare anything out of mind to be instinctive unconsciousness.”

So all this summarizes to the following. We can only grasp ‘Steiner thinking’, not if we imagine it as some sophisticated intellectual framework (like Hegelian, Kantian, etc.) but if we see thinking as spiritual activity precipitating symbols of inner spiritual being. What Steiner and every proper evolutionary path do, is to seek how our personal consciousness is embedded in the Cosmic. Every concept like ‘plant’, ‘rock’, ‘cloud’, etc. should become for us a pointer that invites us to seek the inner world whose shadow we perceive as fragments of color, sound and so on.
There’s a simple self-test anyone can perform. Those who feel great antipathy towards Steiner will almost certainly find out that they have zero interest in any inner being of the Cosmos and how it relates to our human ego (or how the ego is nested into the Cosmic inner being). It is exceedingly rare that someone may have interest in a living expanding of first-person consciousness into the hierarchically nested Cosmic layers which reveal the inner being of the World, yet don’t recognize that spiritual science speaks of exactly that. If such a person was to honestly pursue this direction he would be forced to reproduce the thought-symbols of spiritual science anyway. So in a nutshell, to grasp ‘Steiner thinking’ one has to go further than where BK stops. One has to not only theorize about some Cosmic consciousness but energetically seek the reality of how our ego-consciousness is embedded within the Cosmic. Only in this way do we have a chance to understand thoughts as symbols of Cosmic spiritual activity and why through thinking-holds we actually grip and perceive fragments of this spiritual flow.

Hello Cleric,
I want to thank you for taking the time and energy to explain these things over and over again.

Thoughts are extracts or words produced by our mind. They are symbols for multi-faceted processes. For example, a pantomime expresses certain things through gestures. He extracts essentials of a thing and wraps them in movements (gestures or symbols) to communicate them intelligibly. This movement (gestures, symbols, thoughts) are always intentional, i.e. about something. They indicate something.
So these "extracts" which represent the essence of a thing are then concepts?
What then is the difference between concepts and words?


,,And here's the key part – when we do that, we also see the concept of 'plant growth' as ​​a symbol precipitating from inner Cosmic spiritual life, just like it is for walking. ,,

So this concept did not come about through my mental activity like that of walking but from the spiritual cosmos?


So we create symbols of spiritual cosmos through thinking?
However, through our thinking we only extract our perception to make it understandable.


I still don't understand why our thinking is called an organ of perception. When we condense our perception into gestures, thinking (concepts) is something we add to the world.

It seems wrong to my current state of consciousness to say that plants and minerals are manifestations of mental activity. My experience doesn't confirm this at the moment. Bk speculates about it. After all, he postulates a blind, non-meta-cognitive spirit behind the phenomena of the world, not consciously spiritual beings.

Kind regards.

[Güney27]

Cleric,

The following reflection has been occurring to me for some time now. A while ago, I touched on it here, in the “This forum” thread. Now, as I am reading this new thread, the idea is once again making its clear impression. I will try to express it, hoping I’ll find the right words to say it right. I apologize for any inadequacies of my understanding that could make the following off-point and inappropriate. I know there’s a risk this can happen, still I am taking it with full knowledge, so with it, I am of course also taking unnuanced responsibility for it. It’s about meaning breadth versus its direction. I think the meaning illustrated in this post is useful and illuminating for some. Perhaps the primary intention of your post was just that, to provide a new illustration of the inner shift that needs to happen if one wants to open to an integral understanding of self, world, and the spiritual in them. To the one who is moved by such a query, even at the price of baring the self of all intellectual flesh and leaving it at the path's entrance, this post is helpful. For my part, I can only be thankful for yet another profound and graceful painting of that-which-can-be-called-by-many-names.


But when it comes to answering Güney’s question - if this post wants to be specifically helpful to the very real person who is asking here - well, I doubt the post does that. It seems to me this writing is exceedingly complex and conceptually expansive for that. It also calls for pre-requisites, and is weaved with references. Now, I don't know Güney. I apologize for calling you forth, Güney, I realize it may look like I'm making unfounded hypotheses about you. Maybe Güney will soon confirm it all makes sense, and it all helps tackle the hurdle of the incomprehensible. I really hope this is about to happen, and that I am only projecting biased impressions. But as said, I am a risk taker, for reasons I consider worth it, to the best of my understanding, and here again my sense is, Cleric, that either you have reached a level where you have forgotten how standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff, and you expect too much from our understanding, or you remember exactly how it feels to read the specific PoF page Güney has been reading, but you are seizing the opportunity of the question to do something different in response. I admit I’m undecided between these two possibilities. But I do see a gap and two possible causes, and my strong feeling is, if it’s the former, you should perhaps simplify, and narrow your illustration, sacrificing breadth to tackle the exact pain-point, and if it's the latter, wouldn't it be relevant to be more explicit about it?

Hi Frederica

,,But when it comes to answering Güney's question - whether this post specifically intends to be helpful to the very real person asking here - well I doubt the post does that,,


My question hasn't been answered for me, I still don't understand the core of pof and Steiner's thinking.
However, I am grateful for Cleric's time and effort.
It's probably too complicated and weird for my current thinking.
Steiner's writing still is also somewhat unusual.

Kind regards

[AshvinP]

If we take this spiritual evolutionary view as a living idea, then it's easier to discern that this perennial confusion has a lot to do with underlying prejudices, antipathies, fears, anxieties, etc. re: that core issue.

Yes - I would ask: easier for whom?

Easier for anyone who takes it as a living idea, which I know that you do. But the main point being, often people will wonder, "why are we talking about prejudices and antipathies and what not... I just asked about the word 'concept' and what it means according to Steiner?" This indicates we are still viewing it as an analytic model, like we get from Hegel or Kant, etc, and we are expecting a likewise straightforward analytical answer to the question. But it generally doesn't occur that no such answers, which would be useful for understanding, exist. The spiritual evolutionary approach is all about digging beneath the complexified layers of our current conscious activity to find the deeper reasons why we desire, feel and think the way we do, which will then naturally illuminate the meaning of unfamiliar spiritual concepts and relations between those concepts, because we are tracing back into the living thinking flow from which those concepts were formed.

"How standard cognition goes about trying to grasp stuff" is precisely the obstacle which needs to be overcome. What we really need is to seek the experience of our own thinking as embedded within that greater flow.

Precisely! What makes you think that I suggest otherwise? Everything you have expressed here makes sense to me.
But I don't see how it addresses the message of my post. All this has very little to do with what I have written. You seem to imply that I would like Cleric to provide intellectual explanations? And that I advocate for "analytic models which purport to explain 'thinking as spiritual activity'"?

It sounded to me like you felt Cleric's journey from the inner perspective tied to the 'walking' concept to that of spiritual beings behind the phenomena of the plant kingdom was too complex and not so relevant to the question. Is that accurate?

Ultimately, it's about recognizing the gradient between our own personal experience of thinking in the physical world of forms, to that of archetypal spiritual Ideas which structure that experience and, therefore, the world of forms as well. And when we find this very difficult to fathom, it's usually not because the core idea is very complex - as Cleric mentioned, it's one of the first things the analytic idealist might wonder when learning his consciousness is integral part of MAL - but because the idea is asking to us to open our thinking, in a very real way, to the Cosmos at large. It asks us to begin dissolving our current identity of "me" into the Thought-activity of higher be-ings. Whenever I am tempted to underestimate how big of a soul-adjustment this is from normal life, I remind myself of the ancient initiations and the grueling methods through which they sought experience of the higher worlds.

So I really can't imagine a more simple way to address that issue than he did, without resorting to analytical models, which is what our standard cognition normally uses to grasp philosophical and spiritual ideas, and which we both agree would be counter-productive.

[Anthony66]

Ultimately, it's about recognizing the gradient between our own personal experience of thinking in the physical world of forms, to that of archetypal spiritual Ideas which structure that experience and, therefore, the world of forms as well.

One of the premises of the ontological argument for the existence of God declares that it is greater for something to exist in reality than as an idea in the mind. Of course there are many issues with this, but I wonder how one thinks about this from a SS perspective. As I understand things, the difference between a tree in my sense perspective and one formed purely in my mind is that the former is in the mind of higher beings which is subsequently constructed/rendered/reconstituted/completed through my thinking. The latter could in principle form part of a fractal world of my making of which other beings could inhabit (if I could hold my attention long enough and develop my imaginative faculties to a degree beyond where they sit at the moment). So the difference between the reality we experience and one created in my mind is one of fractal degree rather than one of substance. Or is there some fundamental difference between the capabilities of world-making-beings and the human mind apart from hierarchical locus?

[Cleric K]

What then is the difference between concepts and words?

A word in this case is the sound perception. Think about hearing a word in a foreign language. Then you have a sound perception but no concept, no intuition of what it means. Think about a word in different languages, for example ‘a lion’. We can imagine the written words or a drawing, or even the perception of a real lion. Try to introspect what is common in all these cases. Clearly it is not the perception – that is different in all cases. What is common is the invisible meaning which lives in us as an implicit intuition that we know what these perceptions are about.

This is probably the hardest part to grasp about PoF. Through the inertia of our abstract intellectual habits, one tries to see the concept, the idea as something in front of them, as some content of consciousness. But the meaningful essence of our being is really like the invisible intuitive background of consciousness. Words, images and so on reflect (symbolize) that meaning.

Imagine that you are to describe your home to a friend. You have a spatial image of your home and you describe it as you would describe the contents of a painting. This is relatively easy because you can hold the spatial image of your home as something holistic, which you break down in parts (rooms, furniture, etc.) and describe them. But imagine you’re recounting a movie or a book to a friend. Obviously the story is too vast to fit in a single thought or image. This story doesn’t exist as some spatial picture that we can encompass in the same way we can do our home. Yet it still exists as a kind of landscape of meaning. We can break it down into chapters, scenes. Depending on the book/movie these may not be simply sensory happenings, there might be soul life, philosophy and so on.

The key thing is to introspect what the book/movie is for our conscious life. Or it may not be a book, it may be some knowledge, for example using a computer to get on the Internet and write on a forum. All these things are in a certain sense ‘larger’ than anything we experience at any point of our momentary conscious life. Yet we feel certain orientation within them. At home we have spatial awareness. If the ‘pixels’ of my consciousness present me with the view of my living room, I know how to employ my will ‘buttons’ in order to transform the view to that of the bathroom. I feel myself to be spatially oriented in my home. It is similar when we recount a movie or when we describe some knowledge. We feel certain intuitive orientation within the landscape of meaning.

Seen in this way, a concept is like a well defined landmark of the invisible landscape of intuition. When we’re hiking we use such landmarks – the strange shape of that rock or a tree – to give us points of support within the landscape. In the previous post I likened these to climbing holds.

The most difficult thing is to overcome the tendency to reduce the real and invisible intuitive landscape to symbols and then imagine that we can have satisfactory understanding of reality by simply manipulating the symbols.

,,And here's the key part – when we do that, we also see the concept of 'plant growth' as ​​a symbol precipitating from inner Cosmic spiritual life, just like it is for walking. ,,

So this concept did not come about through my mental activity like that of walking but from the spiritual cosmos?

No, it came from your own observation but in this sense it exists as a Maya picture. You see some green stuff increasing in size, unfolding leaves. You’ll have similar perceptions even if you see a computer generated animation. Yet these images have spiritual background. In the latter case the artist worked with the software, in the former we’re invited to seek the Cosmic spiritual processes that live behind the growth processes. Initially we develop the concept of ‘plant growth’ as something abstract, as a label for sensory phenomena. But this concept is at the same time a point of contact with the true spiritual forces behind plant growth. Our naive purely sensory concept won’t be thrown away and replaced with something completely different but will instead become a receptacle within which higher forces will flow and expand it. Then when we look at sensory plant growth we’ll still have our sensory concept but it will be deepened into Cosmic happenings which complement it and make it comprehensible in a much wider context.

I still don't understand why our thinking is called an organ of perception. When we condense our perception into gestures, thinking (concepts) is something we add to the world.

Actually, as I have often mentioned, materialists are in a much better position to understand this. People with superficial spiritual understanding are much more likely to take their inner being as some apex pure consciousness that demands no deeper investigation. On the other hand materialists see consciousness only as the ‘pixels’, the final output of deeper physical processing. Of course, it has been long known that there are no ‘pixel neurons’ which some ghost homunculus contemplates but still it is imagined that this processing somehow equates spiritual experience.

The key here is that if we observe clearly, we have no choice but say “In certain sense what I experience in my thinking is a perception (or a reflection) of the actual processes of reality, just like the pixels of a computer are part of physical reality. In some way, every my thought corresponds to real processes within the brain. Seen thus, my conscious experience is a view of the true physical processes.” No self-respecting materialist would say that there’s some leeway between conscious phenomena and the actual physical state of the brain. This means that even hallucinations, confused thoughts and so on are in fact the fully objective experiences of the brain processes. They may be false in their logical relation to other processes but in themselves are objective reality. Similarly, a poorly written algorithm may give wrong answers to a problem but in the electron flow in the CPU there’s no violation of the laws of physics. It is in this sense that we say – no matter what the thoughts are about, the experience of the thoughts themselves presents a view of the actual processing.

So when we see things in this sense, we should be aware that when we think, we experience an actual process of reality. We perceive a view of the workings of reality in our thinking flow – I repeat – not in what we think about but in the experience of thoughts themselves as spiritual phenomena. And here comes the greatest stumbling block. Both materialists and spiritualist, without really being aware of it, think about these things as if they are placed outside of them. The materialist thinks about the theoretical brain and imagines how it produces the experienced thinking but doesn’t try to observe this process in vivo, in the very act of thinking about the theoretical brain.

We should get a very clear feel of this. If we understand what is here being talked about, we should feel like a dog chasing its tail, as the Ouroborus. Thinking spirals into its own perception.

But what determines this thinking? Once again, the materialist is much more clear-headed here than most spiritualists. He recognizes there’s certain structure that has developed over the course of time, acting as certain channels, circuits for the thinking process. So if a materialist thinks in this way he should say “The thoughts that I think in this very moment are dependent on the ducts and channels of my nervous system, yet as I perceive this thinking process, it feeds back on itself and it modifies itself”. If we avoid the prejudice that the physical structure is the sole determinant for conscious experience, we’ll reach the conclusion that when we think, we’re really perceiving reflected symbols of the invisible landscape of reality, we’re probing its structure.

If we can’t see why this kind of self-observing thinking is also a perception of the structure of reality, it is only because we subconsciously place ourselves outside that structure and we imagine that we think as a being independent of reality, from some point at the Cosmic periphery. We only overcome this when we realize that our thinking about reality is not in the least independent of reality – it is formatted by the workings of reality. It is for this reason that when the thinking process turns towards itself it perceives something of the process of reality, the tip of the iceberg at least.

To understand how thinking can act as means of perception we should first recognize that it has two aspects. The first is easier to discern – it is that we experience the thought content in consciousness – words, images and so on. We approach the other aspect when we’re not satisfied only with the thought content but we ask ourselves “What determines the way my thoughts unfold? How can I know more about the channels and ducts of reality within which my thinking flows?” This second aspect doesn’t reveal itself as some readymade picture but is much more like blindfolded touching inside a labyrinth. Every thought in our thinking flow implicitly tells us something about the invisible labyrinth which constraints it. Gradually we learn not to be preoccupied with the form of the thought but to recognize the invisible constraints within which the thought flows. We might say that the perceptible thought forms are the positive, while the invisible constraints are the negative. The positive thought perceptions are the cast iron, the negative constraints are the casting mold.
We can grasp the nature of these constraints when we remember the example of recounting the book. We don’t see the story of the book as something in front of us but we move through its intuitive structure, which acts as constraints that determine the words we use to describe it. When we use the words we can feel if they fit the meaningful constraints of the story or they are dissonant to it. In a similar way our field of investigation can be expanded and we can see how our thoughts are formed within the invisible constraints of our character, ideas, beliefs, prejudices, fears, hopes, sympathies, antipathies. These are the invisible labyrinths within which we form our thoughts. Just as with the book, the thoughts may fit the invisible intuitive context of they may be dissonant to it. This is a key skill to develop – to feel clearly whether our thought forms embed musically in our intuitive context. In this sense, thinking becomes the means of perception of these contextual labyrinths (the negative, the casting molds). We become more and more oriented within them, we learn to avoid bouncing in the walls and even to transform them. The book exists as intuitive meaning that we must express in words. In the same sense the inner world is grasped in intuition. The more oriented we are within it, the more we’ll see in the totality of our conscious experience a lawful image of the intuitive landscape and the better we’ll be able to describe its lawful dynamics in words and symbols.