Steiners thinking

[Güney27]

Hi Clerik,
I am re-reading your essays (the four parts of Central topic) to get a better sense of what is being said here. I have read part 1 and 2. At the end of part two you wrote about a concept called true time (t). I honestly find the illustration inaccessible and wanted to ask if you could explain what it meant?
Kind regards.

[Güney27]

Since re-reading Part 1, my feelings about thinking have changed. I was able to see how anger and resentment affected my thoughts a few times.

In addition, when I think, I often become aware that I am doing something myself when I am thinking.
I felt the same when reading Steiner's works.
It brought about strange changes in my perception.

[lorenzop]

...Then we can sense something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving. What is this something, as you actually experience it, in your view?

I don't sense or experience anything like you describe above - "something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving". For example, if I think of a turtle, there is no something additional that is like or about a turtle.

[Cleric K]

Hi Clerik,
I am re-reading your essays (the four parts of Central topic) to get a better sense of what is being said here. I have read part 1 and 2. At the end of part two you wrote about a concept called true time (t). I honestly find the illustration inaccessible and wanted to ask if you could explain what it meant?
Kind regards.

Hi Guney. True Time maybe sounds a little more scary than necessary. Actually it is all a matter of a simple observation.

Think about the fly example again. Imagine that you are seeing a fly. You experience a sequence of ‘frames’ of existence. Each frame has the fly at a different position. You may be able to anticipate to some extent the fly’s movement but as a whole, in your consciousness you don’t have any knowledge of how your perceptions of the fly are going to move. The fly's movements keep surprising you.

Science seeks mathematical laws of physics which can be used to calculate how frames should evolve in time. But still, this gives us only a prediction. We have learned to mimic Nature’s appearances through mathematical art within our minds but the true essence of Nature still remains on the ‘other side’ of our consciousness.

Now take an imaginary fly and move it around in your imagination. Or even simpler, in the way I suggested to Lorenzo in the previous post – don’t try to imagine a fly but simply move the focus of your attention around. Try to compare how it feels in relation to a real fly. Can the motions of your ray of attention ‘surprise’ you in the way a real fly can? Can you 'miss' your ray of attention?

It is really a very simple thing to observe yet today’s science and philosophy don’t pay attention to such things because it is considered ‘subjective’ and it is dismissed that it may have something to do with reality as a whole.

So basically science searches for the laws of time mirrored in our intellectual formulas. What is suggested with True Time is that the actual laws that govern the transformation of the flow of experience are of thought-nature. So very crudely speaking, if you expand your consciousness to merge with the forces that work in the fly, its movements will no longer ‘surprise’ you but will be felt as if you are one with the spiritual activity that thinks its movement.

To be a little more precise, we can say that when you move your own ray of attention, this always happens within an aura of intuition, of implicit knowing, that ‘glues’ the frames of your existence in a meaningful flow. You simply know how your ray moves, how it turns and so on. When you consciously move your attention to the right you don’t have to perceive this and then think to yourself “Aha! So my attention moved right”. No, instead you feel that your intuitive knowing of the way your attention moves right is at the same time the cause of the movement.

It is in this sense that you can imagine merging with the intuitive activity which drives the real fly (again, this is only as a simplified example. The fly’s behavior is much more complex than some being imagining externally the movement of a point). Then you live in intuition which explains the temporal change of your perceptions of the fly and it is in fact the true cause of its movement. That’s why I called it True Time. Only change which is fused with its intuitive content (such as in the case of your movement of attention) requires no further explanation because the perception is no longer a mystery but is simply the immediate reflection of the intuitive intent.

[Federica]

...Then we can sense something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving. What is this something, as you actually experience it, in your view?

I don't sense or experience anything like you describe above - "something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving". For example, if I think of a turtle, there is no something additional that is like or about a turtle.

Are you a turtle? No you aren't. So when you think of the turtle, and you are not the turtle, what's the difference?

[lorenzop]

...Then we can sense something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving. What is this something, as you actually experience it, in your view?

I don't sense or experience anything like you describe above - "something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving". For example, if I think of a turtle, there is no something additional that is like or about a turtle.

Are you a turtle? No you aren't. So when you think of the turtle, and you are not the turtle, what's the difference?

Not sure what you're getting at here, or how it relates to what i wrote.
But you are 100% correct I am not a turtle, so we have something to build on!!!
Tecnically we use the expression "I think of a turtle" as a model, or for the sake of a conversation; but there really is not 2 things here, there is not an I, and a line of demarcation, and a turtle - - - there is only "thinking of a turtle". We also may say "I saw the sunset last night" . . . but there is only thinking and seeing, there isn't a subject and object in our experience.
All I was suggesting in my prior post is that when thinking of a turtle, (for me) there is not an additional something that is like or about a turtle. When you think of a turtle, do you percieve\appreciate a Turtle Wrapper, or Turtle Idea or some such additional something as Ashwin suggests?

[Federica]

Following Güney's trend, I have searched for Cleric's first thread in the forum to start reading or re-reading. It's Man know thyself, which immediately refers to this other thread as its point of origin, so I went to that one, first time I read it. Cleric, Ashvin, you both read SO differently in those 1,5 year old posts! You are so different, or at least it's my impression, but I doubt it's only that. Interesting perspective in literal sense. Lots of food for thoughts...

[Federica]

I don't sense or experience anything like you describe above - "something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving". For example, if I think of a turtle, there is no something additional that is like or about a turtle.

Are you a turtle? No you aren't. So when you think of the turtle, and you are not the turtle, what's the difference?

Not sure what you're getting at here, or how it relates to what i wrote.
But you are 100% correct I am not a turtle, so we have something to build on!!!
Tecnically we use the expression "I think of a turtle" as a model, or for the sake of a conversation; but there really is not 2 things here, there is not an I, and a line of demarcation, and a turtle - - - there is only "thinking of a turtle". We also may say "I saw the sunset last night" . . . but there is only thinking and seeing, there isn't a subject and object in our experience.
All I was suggesting in my prior post is that when thinking of a turtle, (for me) there is not an additional something that is like or about a turtle. When you think of a turtle, do you percieve\appreciate a Turtle Wrapper, or Turtle Idea or some such additional something as Ashwin suggests?

Ok, it's a tower game and it's my turn to put the next piece on top!!!
So you say: "I am 100% not a turtle". Then you spend the following 3 lines to explain that you actually are... a turtle. If you just read again your lines 3 to 5, you'll see what I mean.
My ask would be, would yo please try to get closer to your first exclamation "I am 100% not a turtle!" and notice that it sounds and feels much more true than the following 3 lines of theories... like there's no you, and there's no whatever else. You are not a turtle, that's all! Exactly as you exclaimed it. You stand distinct from the turtle, and there's no meditational blabla or afterthought that can muddle that. And from where you stand, as a different viewpoint from the turtle, you do the thinking.
Or? Is the tower still standing?

[AshvinP]

...Then we can sense something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving. What is this something, as you actually experience it, in your view?

I don't sense or experience anything like you describe above - "something there which lives independently of our perceptions or thoughts about what we are perceiving". For example, if I think of a turtle, there is no something additional that is like or about a turtle.

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? The whole point is to differentiate the content of the thoughts-concepts-perceptions from the willing-thinking activity you are engaged in. But not to only differentiate these things in abstraction reflection, but to experience the differentiation in real-time, in vivo through the experiment. And, due to the nature of normal cognition, that can't be done if we want to only focus on our mental pictures. So don't think about any specific content, just experience the shifts in attention.

In the abstract reflective case, these things simply remain dead thoughts which can be rationalized away, precisely because we don't feel they have any living significance. But such a thing simply cannot be done when there is living experience of the differentiated activity from content which was previously in the blind spot, and therefore was never seriously considered. Then we have to either confront that differentiation and probe deeper into why it exists and what its existence means for the structure of our reality, or admit to ourselves we are totally uninterested in why these fundamental inward characteristics exist and their implications.

[lorenzop]

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.