Yes, exactly the bolded part. Remember what Steiner explains, for example, about the rose cross meditation. If you just show a picture of it to someone and say: "Here, concentrate on this", it's unlikely that any results will be achieved. RS says that the symbol only has power if we have gone through the process of building it ourselves. Not only its visual aspect but also the feeling. The power of the rose cross is that our living and purified spiritual nature (symbolized by the rose) is grafted upon the the dark cross of our lower self. When we livingly imagine these things, certain currents are set in motion in our soul, even if we perceive nothing. Yet, after the symbol is built we need to hold it quietly in concentration. We no longer move it, morph it and so on but we live in spiritual activity that sustains it through time. Then after we begin to gain consciousness of this temporal flow, we can once again discover the forces that we have stirred while building the image but now from their subtler side, as deeper forces that curve our soul life.AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Dec 27, 2022 4:37 pm In the context of Federica's post, I was imagining an exercise in which we start drawing a triangle starting from the apex or the base, but we slow down the tip of our spiritual activity until we stop maybe halfway through one of the sides. So now we are maintaining the image of the half-line or perhaps just the point where we stopped. Either way, my follow up question is, do you think there is any additional value gained from concentrating-maintaing the full static triangle image? Or, in the case of 'I think the words', the image of the sentence which we have drawn out into the static thought-sound? My reasoning was that this engenders more strength of subtle spiritual activity which is maintaining the image, in comparison to if we were to simply begin by concentrating on a static point. We have a 'deeper' standing wave, waterfall, etc. which is reflecting our temporally dynamic imaginative flow that sustains it. Perhaps it doesn't really make a difference. What do you think?
If we simply begin to concentrate on a point, one God knows in what configuration our soul forces are. Remember that in our age, intellectual forces are relatively independent of deeper soul and moral life. One can be a quite clever hacker even if they breed pure hatred to humanity. Such a person won't have any problem to concentrate on a point but even if they manage to grasp the temporal flow of spiritual activity, they would have to awaken to their grotesque soul forms.
There are so many things to be mentioned here. Our mobile ordinary imagination should be developed, for example by doing the growing plant exercise. Here we have a completely sensory imagination, we imagine a plant, as we would see it with our eyes. There's (seemingly) nothing occult in this. Yet by consciously imagining the plant unfolding leaf by leaf, we engage our spiritual activity in certain ways. We should be clear why we do this.
The actual spiritual forces that act as the life forces of the growing plant, are not being thought by spiritual beings in the way we imagine the developing plant. A spiritual being doesn't stand to the side and use its imagination like some form of telekinesis, in order to instill life force in the plant form 'over there'. The activity of these beings is in itself the archetypal time-curvature of growth and reproduction. Yet things are such that when we imagine the growing plant, unless we imagine it in a purely mechanical way (this has something in common with the quote about the danger of the cinematograph), we set in motion certain forces. It's not so much the geometrical form of imagination but that we unknowingly take part in such an expansion from a seed, flowering, forming fruit and finally reaching a seed again. There's something archetypal in this progression. The imagined plant is only a scaffold, helping wheels, through which we set in motion these deeper archetypal movements. When later in meditation we attain to these subtler movements of the spirit, it becomes possible that grasp our ordinary imagination of the plant as something that exists in musical relations with the finer forces. The two are in different octaves, so to speak, but yet they are musically related. And the important thing is that if we have never engaged with these ordinary exercises of our purely sensory imagination, there would be no gesture to remember even if pass right through the archetypal force. Seen in this way, our ordinary imagination creates a vocabulary of gestures which are used to translate the subtler worlds to our ordinary cognition. This is important to note. In our Earthly eon, our thinking "I" is our natural cognitive habitat. We only grasp the higher worlds as far as they can be translated to the language of our "I", that is, we need to be able to think with our normal cognition about the higher worlds.
This is important to understand. It is true that our present consciousness already spans the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. Yet, as we have discussed many times, our Earthly state is like an aliased, mineralized version of the full spectrum. The thinking gesture of imagining a plant growing and unfolding leaf by leaf is unique to our Earthly state. An Angel can't see a plant in this way. The form of the plant that we perceive is only possible as a result of the highly convoluted interaction of the plant life forces, the forces of light, the forces of our sensory organs and brain organization. This is a unique experience in itself. Yet by following the sensory unfolding of that plant we already lead ourselves into resonance with the more subtle forces. It is important to keep in mind that these subtler forces don't 'look like' a growing plant as we can see it from the side. But we can recognize these forces to be active in the plant.
I'm stressing on this in order to avoid the expectation that in the world of Inspiration we find the spiritual gestures of higher beings as thinking in concepts and imagining plants from the side. Such human gestures indeed belong to that world but they are like Moiré patterns over the subtler world of spiritual activity. As said, our thinking gestures and imagination, even as lofty as a growing plant, are still very crude and chubby in comparison to the subtler flow. They are like grunts of cavemen in comparison to the creative flow of higher beings.
For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration. Our grunting intellectual being is left meditating, while our subtler spiritual being begins to find its existence. We can indeed feel our physical being and our intellectual self as a kind of environment around us. In certain sense we feel as distinct beings. It's like the intellectual self says "OK, I'll hold perfectly still, so that you can climb on my back and see further." It is actually quite important that we always keep that physical phantom in sight. It must keep its concentration. Then at certain points we can actually perceive how the thinking of this being receives as inspiration certain thinking gestures, which are already at the grunting level. In this act our split-selves unite, the subtler gestures have been translated to the level of our normal cognition. Without this, in our normal state we simply can't remember the experiences in the subtler spectrum. They key however, is that there's this rhythmic process, where we concentrate the intellectual self, make it into a meditating statue in order for our finer cognitive forces to awaken, which are able to behold how our ordinary self continues to concentrate. This is difficult to describe but it's almost like a finer level of intuition awakens which is fully aware and can be subtly active yet without disrupting the concentration of our ordinary physical self. Then this subtler self flows itself into the intellectual and becomes an imaginative gesture. Of course, here I describe this as two independent processes while most of the time it happens as a more or less continuous stream, but the fact remains that our intellectual self must sacrifice itself in concentration (the black cross) in order to give firm support for subtler spiritual activity (which is as if grafted from the higher worlds onto the rootstock of our physical being).