Steiners thinking

[lorenzop]

As Federica is also suggesting, there is something which is thinking the turtle concept, is there not, which is not strictly identical to the concept in your experience?

No there is not.- and I don't see any advantage to adding this additional layer, even as a model or explanation.

[AshvinP]

As Federica is also suggesting, there is something which is thinking the turtle concept, is there not, which is not strictly identical to the concept in your experience?

No there is not.- and I don't see any advantage to adding this additional layer, even as a model or explanation.

We know this is your intellectual position, Lorenzo. This is why it is suggested you actually do the experiment, as it was outlined and in good faith. Only in pure abstract thinking can one deny the difference. Cleric, Federica, and I are seeing if you are interested at all in exploring the thinking perspective-activity which is doing the denying. Through such exploration, one may find the intellect inverts, ignores, and denies many experiential realities across all domains of life. Again, it's not about gaining personal advantages or comforts or conveniences - which is what the modern intellect is concerned with - it's only about Truth. Without a burning desire for Truth over advantages and conveniences, there is simply nowhere left to go, no motivation left to genuinely seek any answers to existential questions.

[lorenzop]

You are saying that if only I would do the experiment in good faith - I would see it your way - and no - I'm not going to let you bully or gaslight me.

[AshvinP]

You are saying that if only I would do the experiment in good faith - I would see it your way - and no - I'm not going to let you bully or gaslight me.

Ok, and I think this was clear before you had no intention/interest to actually try the experiment and observe the results, but now we know for sure. All we ever do here is suggest that, if someone is interested in opening up to new inward experiences, then there are ways to go about it and here are the precise reasons why it could be helpful. We never pretend this is a matter of opinion or intellectual debate - it's not. If I were to practice the piano and gradually learn to play songs with ever-greater precision and harmony, no amount of abstract debate would convince me it was all an illusion and actually I had gotten worse at the piano. It would be counter-productive for me to go on a piano forum and pretend what I had learned to do was all a matter of abstract modeling which could be 'right' or 'wrong', just to satisfy my personal desires. Spiritual thinking is a skill that we must work at through inner effort, and when we do so, there can be absolutely no doubt of its deeper living reality within us.

[Federica]

The phrase 'seeing a turtle' is not the same as 'I am a turtle' so I'm not sure where you are going with this.
When you see or think of a turtle are you also aware of a thinking or seeing self, or is the thinking and seeing self a something that occurs in retrospect?
For example, look at any object around you, there is the seeing of the object, is there also a line of seperation, and a second thing, a seperate thinking seeing 'I' as well.
OR, is the seperate thinking and seeing 'I' something one locates after, where the 'I' is just another thought.
I am proposing that the thinking "I" is just another thought.

That "seeing self that occurs in retrospect" exists, you are correct I think: after you have seen the object, you can think of the fact that you have seen it. And this is just another thought, as you say.

But what if, in addition, some thinking also happens before, in the exact moment I look at an object around me? At that moment there's a seeing that also incorporates a thinking action. But it's not easy to notice, because the thinking action is mixed up with the perception of the object, so what stands out is the perception.
In other words, at that exact moment of seeing, thinking is busy with the perception, so it cannot at the same time realize what it's doing. Like, it cannot do 2 things at the exact same moment. But nonetheless it is active in the perception.

Could it not be that the perception is in fact a seamless mix, a very good mix of 2 things: the object to be perceived and our thinking agency? Can you exclude such a possibility with certainty?

[lorenzop]

No I can not exclude such a possibility (of a Big Thinking, or pre-thinking wrapping around perception\thinking) . . . what am saying is that I conducted Cleric's experiment (in good faith) and I did not detect any Big Thinking.
Since I have no personal experiential evidence of this Big Thinking, I can only assume it exists if adding Big Thinking has explanitory power, or it's if reasonable to assume it exists. I don't see what mysteries, riddles or questions the addition of Big secondary thinking solves or answers.

[AshvinP]

No I can not exclude such a possibility (of a Big Thinking, or pre-thinking wrapping around perception\thinking) . . . what am saying is that I conducted Cleric's experiment (in good faith) and I did not detect any Big Thinking.
Since I have no personal experiential evidence of this Big Thinking, I can only assume it exists if adding Big Thinking has explanitory power, or it's if reasonable to assume it exists. I don't see what mysteries, riddles or questions the addition of Big secondary thinking solves or answers.

First you said you closed your eyes and lost all senses including spatial extension.

Then you said you were picturing a turtle and reported your thoughts about the turtle-picture.

We are telling you this indicates you didn't do the experiment Cleric gave, but did your own experiment, which he anticipated and explicitly suggested you avoid doing. Can you see this?

[lorenzop]

I reread Cleric's experiment instructions, and Yes, I did it incorrectly.
I'll have to get back to this thread on this, might take a few days/weeks/months to do the experiment properly.

[Federica]

No I can not exclude such a possibility (of a Big Thinking, or pre-thinking wrapping around perception\thinking) . . . what am saying is that I conducted Cleric's experiment (in good faith) and I did not detect any Big Thinking.
Since I have no personal experiential evidence of this Big Thinking, I can only assume it exists if adding Big Thinking has explanitory power, or it's if reasonable to assume it exists. I don't see what mysteries, riddles or questions the addition of Big secondary thinking solves or answers.

I conducted Cleric's experiment (in good faith) and I did not detect any Big Thinking.

Yeah, it's difficult to detect at first look. Because we only have one thinking agency, and while it's busy dealing with the perception, it cannot at the exact same time 'think' that it's thinking the perception... (but why are you calling it Big Thinking?)

I can only assume it exists if adding Big Thinking has explanitory power, or it's if reasonable to assume it exists.

Yes, in a way this sounds 'the best one can reasonably do'. But we can also ask: Why should we settle for less? We know that explanatory power is a tricky concept, and accepting a viewpoint only because it 'sounds reasonable' is not very satisfying, is it? We know that we are only making suppositions. They could be wrong, and we would never be sure!
Is this good enough philosophy? Can we affort such guesswork when our understanding of reality depends on it...?


That's why Ashvin, I think, was speaking of finding the Truth. There's actually a way to be so careful with doing the experiments, and so careful with observing the results (with effort) that we can come to a sure conclusion, not just to reasonable suppositions. We don't need to renounce searching for the Truth!
Truth means that, once you have seen it, you will not feel any necessity to estimate how reasonable the thing is from 1 to 10, or how much it explains of this and not that. You will know, beyond any doubt, and from your own experience, that it's true.
Isn't it great news? Or do you see any issue with that?

[AshvinP]

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.

Guney,

You may appreciate this excerpt from the book I quoted on another thread, as it deals directly with the 'concept' and ties in with what Cleric has been responding as well.

The Formative Power of the Concept

What spiritual practitioners really tend to experience, by means of disciplines, is the force by means of which the concept forms in consciousness. No concept manifests without such a formative power, but this normally remains ignored, since the ordinary rationalist is interested only in the dialectical use of the conceptual form. Instead, as spiritual practitioners, we take on the concept as a vehicle of the power of thinking. We go back to the formative power of the concept, independent of its specific meaning. Each concept presupposes such a power, insofar as it is the synthesis of a multiplicity that corresponds to a real entity as an original extra-sensory “type.”

As present-day dialecticians, we normally ignore the moment of synthesis. While we assume its power to be real, we effectively do not even believe in its existence. We fail to notice that, with the concept of “horse,” we refer to a single entity that lives in all horses and indicate it as something concrete. We do not know what we even do. We believe a “universal” to be real, whose existence we dialectically negate or ignore. Without knowing it, we tap the concept's formative power, or power of life. By means of concentration, we, as disciples, experience precisely the life element of which thought is normally deprived.
...
The concentration exercise restores realism to concepts. In effect, when we evoke a concept, we solicit a force that enables it to surface, but it immediately withdraws into the unknown of consciousness. It is the force of memory, which manifests in the thinking movement and immediately yields to the abstract-dialectical form at which level it becomes conscious. A concept remembered is an act of creation forever new, but the living moment of the mnemonic act continually escapes dialectical consciousness...

The force that enables the concept to surface in the mind when evoked is the same force at work in the original formation of the concept. In both cases, this force springs as a power, within an inner zone that escapes consciousness. In concentration, consciousness tends to make this power its own, which its movement continually presupposes.

We can therefore evoke a concept, because essentially we already possess it. We possess an indefinite series of concepts of things and entities, but, if we observe, never have we effectively operated with deliberate forces of consciousness in their formation. A higher force, in the form of a greater spontaneity, has acted in the thinking relationship with the object.

We consciously only have mental pictures of an entity. We end up having a concept of it, which, in itself, is a power of synthesis, but we have not directly worked upon such a synthesis through an act of determined consciousness. Nevertheless, we normally use the concept as if we possessed such a synthesis. It is as if by saying “horse” we have the perception of the entity that lives in each single horse, as its archetype. Concentration consists in consciously acquiring the dynamics of the archetypal process, which surfaces in the conscious mental sphere from the depths of the soul.

If we can experience the concept's power of synthesis, we enter a sphere of reality that is normally imperceptible, because it is vast and powerful for the conscious mental sphere. We enter a sphere of suprasensory powers, which we perceive as the absolute foundation of the sensory sphere. As free beings, we today have the power of proving to ourselves the reality of the suprasensory world.
...
Concentration on an object that we evoke essentially moves from its concept, that is, from its element that inside consciousness is a working power of synthesis, un-possessed. This power becomes objectified. The “I” lives with its own current of force within the soul, thanks to the fact that, through a series of mental pictures, the object is reconstituted as a concept, namely, as an original synthetic power.

So that it can allow itself to be perceived, this power, substantially woven of will, demands the insistence of the will in thinking. It becomes willed to such an extent that thought's determination and its willful content end up coinciding. The will is willed so intensely that it ceases to demand effort. It becomes a current of life that reconnects consciousness to the source of its force.

Scalifero, Massimo. A Practical Manual of Meditation . Lindisfarne. Kindle Edition.