Basic exercise

[Federica]

In that case, I want to share another exercise which I typed out for someone else, anyway. I don't think it is in TSH.

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Inner Exercise: Breathing Images

This exercise is adapted from the seminal indications by Steiner known as "The Ancient Yoga Culture and the New Yoga Will." IN this work, Steiner lays the roadbed for the establishment of a western esoteric yoga practice. Instead of breathing in the prana from the air as eastern yogis do, Steiner indicates that a more effective path for the western soul would be to breathe prana in with the light which comes into the eyes or other senses. For the prana, or ether force, needed by western adepts is, according to Steiner, found in light rather than air. A conscious breathing of light into the eyes in the form of images can be experienced as a delicate process in which light meets and mingles with a current of will forces from within the human being. To experience the mingling of currents puts the human being at the door to higher worlds. To accomplish this, the following exercise is useful.

Observe a candle flame for a minute. Close your eyes and observe the after-image. Watch it pulse and ebb and change colors until no image is perceptible. Pay attention to the inner state after the image fades away. Once this becomes familiar, visualize a current of energy rising up the spine from the kidney area into the back of the brain, through the optic nerve, and toward the front of the head. Once this is an experience, combine the first exercise with the second. Begin by establishing the current from the kidney to the eyes, then open the eyes and observe a candle flame. Close your eyes and pay attention to the place in the head where the after-image meets the kidney current, where the human will meets the sense impression.
...

In this exercise an attempt is made to experience the difference between the activity of the life forces and the activity of the awareness in the act of perception. The first part of the exercise in which we observe the ebbing of an after-image comes out of Goethe's color theory. The after-image pulsates, coming into focus and then dissolving at regular intervals. This observation, if repeated, can lead to an inner experience of the role of the life forces in our perception. The second half of the exercise, in which we experience a current moving from the kidneys to the head and out of the eyes, puts us in contact with the current which floods our sympathetic nervous system and lies at the root of our soul's awareness in the astral body. In the forming of mental images these two currents are in constant interplay, creating harmonics or disequilibrium in the soul. When gently repeated, this exercise can yield a direct experience of the way in which every sense impression and every thought is accompanied by a subtle mental image which quickly fades and fluctuates into another image - and that the ability to control this is the basis for cognition and the capacity for higher development. This experience serves as the basis for a new yoga of the senses.

Thank you, Ashvin!

This exercise description is impressive. I am not familiar with it, although a few months ago you offered a description of the first part, and your experience with it:

(...)
Let's say I light a candle and focus on the flame a bit. Through this path of developing imaginative thinking, I can then close my eyes and see the after-image of the flame in very vivid outlines and colors. This image floats around awhile and then sinks down the field of inner vision until it disappears. For many minutes afterwards (I haven't tested exactly how long), I can recall the same image as vividly as before and watch the same process inwardly. Even if my eyes are open in a somewhat dark area, I can project this image onto the wall of my room in a very definite form. So I can actually see the process of an impression sinking down into my subconscious to become an accessible memory DoF.
(...)

I didn't try it then, nor I fully understood your comments, but now I get them better, also in combination with Klocek's description, and I surely want to attempt the complete exercise.

Federica,

Nice catch - I had forgotten about making that comment here. At that time, I hadn't come across Klocek or the exercises. I wasn't really doing it as an exercise, but just observing the process and wondering what it was all about. Now, after reading him and studying more spiritual science in general, and prayerful meditation, I have a much better sense of what's occurring. It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were. These impressions are always forming part of the riverbed through which our spiritual activity flows. Once we can bring them more into the light of our waking consciousness through spiritual training, we can then understand them more as an objective force of our soul life (in the sense of Cleric's post on the other thread). In the case of sensory impressions, this can be a quite vivid perception. It's similar for the songs I mentioned which get stuck in the head - even if I wasn't made aware of them, they would still be 'stuck in my head' and influencing the course of my spiritual activity. Of course this is still only the very surface of the normally subconscious soul life, yet it still provides valuable living feed back for how to find new DoF and steer the spiritual activity in novel ways. At the very least, it drives home that everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds.

Yeah, for better or worse - and probably worse - I tend to have a good episodic memory.
But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Ashvin!

This exercise description is impressive. I am not familiar with it, although a few months ago you offered a description of the first part, and your experience with it:




I didn't try it then, nor I fully understood your comments, but now I get them better, also in combination with Klocek's description, and I surely want to attempt the complete exercise.

Federica,

Nice catch - I had forgotten about making that comment here. At that time, I hadn't come across Klocek or the exercises. I wasn't really doing it as an exercise, but just observing the process and wondering what it was all about. Now, after reading him and studying more spiritual science in general, and prayerful meditation, I have a much better sense of what's occurring. It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were. These impressions are always forming part of the riverbed through which our spiritual activity flows. Once we can bring them more into the light of our waking consciousness through spiritual training, we can then understand them more as an objective force of our soul life (in the sense of Cleric's post on the other thread). In the case of sensory impressions, this can be a quite vivid perception. It's similar for the songs I mentioned which get stuck in the head - even if I wasn't made aware of them, they would still be 'stuck in my head' and influencing the course of my spiritual activity. Of course this is still only the very surface of the normally subconscious soul life, yet it still provides valuable living feed back for how to find new DoF and steer the spiritual activity in novel ways. At the very least, it drives home that everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds.

Yeah, for better or worse - and probably worse - I tend to have a good episodic memory.
But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

I'm sure that's for better. Although, as we spoke before, there could be a transition phase where some aspects of the memory appear to get worse for a while. I'm not sure if that happens for everyone. I understand it as part of the deconditioning process from normal sensory-conceptual life, so that we find our conscious bearings in life more within the free flow of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions which build up our organism in relation with the environment. It reminds me of my cat who always needs to sniff out an area before she lays down to rest there, even if she has been in that same area many times. She hasn't developed the thinking capacity to rely on memory for such decisions, which is certainly an advance in spiritual evolution for humans. Yet, in order to develop and perfect that capacity, we also dampened the living impulses which impart a much more Wise orientation towards the surrounding world. Now we need to recover that Wisdom through our spiritually awakened consciousness. We are no longer compelled to 'sniff out' the environment for our strictly necessary actions, yet we can freely choose to do so in full consciousness. Or in the terms of PoF:

A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences. He recalls, before coming to a decision, what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a comparable case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit, these prior conditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes a completely first-hand decision. What others have done in such a case worries him as little as what they have decreed. He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.

 


That is mostly an introduction for the rest of my response below.

But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

Right, this oscillation into the blind spot will continue to happen, but the more we anticipate it, the more we neutralize its effect. What you say about the frightening aspect is exactly what happens with these living dynamics when they remain unconscious or only in the form of abstract theory. Even with the latter, we are permeating the unknown with our concepts, making the underlying forces more transparent to our consciousness, and mitigating the apparent threat. The quickest way to deal with anxiety about some phenomena is to analyze it and make it more coherently sensible. We disentangle the content from personal inclinations and emotions and purify it with logical reasoning. Thinking doesn't care about how we feel at any given time - whether we are happy, sad, or afraid, whether we have a headache, a stomach ache, a flu, etc. It's either logically coherent or not - if it's not, then we are impelled to move forward to find the missing pieces of a more holistic image. Yet we are now at the cognitive evolutionary stage where the logical forces we discern only in abstract theory are still felt to be something which happens to us, rather than something we are intimately participating in. 

Now we need to acquire a living remembrance of all the ways in which we bring about our own circumstances, how we bring about all that which only appears to impress upon us without our involvement. We can begin working on this even with ordinary cognition. First we should try to notice how our thought-life and soul-life directs us to certain parts of the World Content and not others. We end up at certain places at certain times, and pay attention to certain portions of the spectrum and not others, based on our interests, emotions, character, beliefs, theories, etc. The very act of paying more attention to these details, even if we aren't very clear on the connections at first, works to loosen our habitual patterns of thinking and feeling, creating new leeway in the soul-organism for our spiritual activity to explore. Eventually this will lead us into the stream of Karma associated with our previous incarnation, where the seed was formed, through our moral-spiritual activity, which has now grown into the body and soul characteristics of our current incarnation. Our temperament, for ex., goes a long way towards influencing what career we chose in life. Of course our physical constitution influences all sorts of life decisions as well. 

When somebody goes through life with great attentiveness to everything, he must, in the nature of things, move about a great deal. Human beings who lead an entirely sedentary life are very difficult to study to-day from the point of view of karma, because there was no such mode of life in earlier times. It remains to be seen what men with an exclusively sedentary mode of life will be like in the next earthly life, for sedentary existences have become customary only in this age. But when, in earlier times, a man was attentive to the things in his environment, he always had to go to them; he had to make his limbs mobile, to bring his limbs into activity. The whole body was active, not only the senses which belong to the head-system. Everything in which the whole body takes part, when the human being is attentive and observant, passes over into the structure of the head of the next earthly life, and has a definite effect.

So, in general, we need to resist compartmentalizing or 'detaching' what we are involved in on a daily basis with our spiritual activity from the process of spiritual evolution itself. We make our spiritual activity more focused and steer it with greater precision during meditation, yet we are more generally trying to broaden and deepen our attentiveness to the World Content. As discussed previously, our attention usually gets interrupted by personal soul-entanglements which reflect the 'rejection' of our spiritual offerings by Cosmic Intuition. We gives ourselves the opportunity to notice this more during meditation, but it's happening all the time. We can pay attention and let Cosmic impulses inflow our consciousness on a clear starry night as well, or even during the day. When our overarching intents become less personal and more Cosmic in orientation, we begin to resonate with intents which we normally don't think of as 'our own' and therefore our aperture for meaningful attention to the WC grows. It's interesting because sometimes I find it easier to concentrate when trying to meditate outside in Nature, even with natural and cultural noises around. It's almost as if there is less 'pressure' to make something happen, and I feel the verse - "for my yoke is easy and my burden is light". This leads me into your post from the other thread, which I have moved here for convenience, since it's related to exercises and we also had the VR discussion going on there. 

That “the 'I' who recognizes the threshold is not the 'I' who was recognized to be the conventional self” is a completely unexpected statement, for me I am at the stage of searching for a sense of it and hoping to find some idea of distinction in that sense. Certainly not that I had found anything! Also, I don’t clearly recognize any thresholds. I only have a desire to extricate myself. And from there, I fumble. Maybe I would try to visualize my body as vividly as possible from an external viewpoint, following what it was doing earlier in the day. Crossing the street, it was raining, it looked sideways to check for coming bikes. Some thoughts were hovering over these frames - the ‘film’ gets captions.
This looking back is not the usual one of recalling a memory, which we form, bring to us, and attach to ourselves, as an increment to complement the unity of our identity. Here it’s about forming a clear enough visualization to detach from, and look at as part of a flow. It could be incorporated in the series of snapshots in Cleric’s quoted post, and could weld with the other constraints. But for me all this is only at the wish-stage. I guess I am demonstrating the lack of consciousness of the act you speak of.


Coming to the film trailer, I paused reading immediately, and watched first. I couldn’t guess the intuition you gathered, much less the purpose of the example. But I understand. Wishing to separate from the physical body means searching for a shared spiritual landscape, and feelings can also be traced back to their original common source. Paying attention to the gestures that operate that deepening is what you did with those feelings, and what I haven’t done with my exercise.


The description of deepening in Cleric’s post is very helpful! I understand everything you say. I don’t feel the plunge, because I don’t have enough momentum. It has happened with other posts, rarely, but never at first or second reading. More on returning after a while, after having lost the detailed memory of previous reading. When rediscovering the idea at that point, with only a general understanding of the direction but no details, the conscious attention can feel new and light, and roll on the landscape, until it plunges. In fact, this only happens because of the invisible support of the preparation work.

You must sense something to extricate yourself from if you have the desire to extricate, right? We all have a difficult time objectively assessing our own situation, since we are merged into it. Very few people would make this comment - "I will be reading this post again going forward, and hopefully the degrees of freedom will have evolved by then." This by itself shows an intuitive grasp for what is being spoken of which most people lack - usually it never occurs that revisiting the same content will increase its depth of meaning for us as our cognition evolves. Or, with the move trailer, I gave you very little go on, but you still permeated that content with your understanding. (the film example was likewise pointing to the discussion about our 'inner disposition' towards phenomena, which may normally repel or disgust us to some extent, allowing for more inward archetypal understanding).

The main issue I think is one of expectation, which is also an issue for me and practically everyone who has started on the path. Our normal self we identify with always expects something to happen to it and bring about its elevation, transformation, higher realization, etc.. In that process, it views what's actually happening to it, in terms of gradual understanding and lucidity of spiritual principles as you are gaining here - pulling together seemingly disparate avenues of thought - as a temporary means to that higher end. Yet the means and the end should become increasingly united in our consciousness, like the thinking and the will (perception). I'm not speaking of the conceptualization here - we may very well verbalize to ourselves, 'I know it's not fruitful to expect any reward for my efforts and that the path of greater concentration and understanding is itself the path to spiritual consciousness', but the question is whether our inner being is also allowing those thoughts to penetrate more deeply into our spheres of feeling and will. What Cleric mentioned on the other thread in regards to 'detachment' or 'separation' during concentration-meditation is very important in that regard. It can also be applied to our non-meditative life.

With regards to outer experiments one does while going about the day (of course not while driving or anything similar), I think your differentiation exercise can be useful. It can be a way of internalizing the TC spectrum which Cleric has highlighted for us in various ways. For ex. in a recent post:

To gain even deeper intuition of the telos of our flow of metamorphosis, we have to seek sensitivity for our inner life of sympathies, antipathies, desires. For example, the desire to have a glass of wine is part of that telos, isn’t it? It curves the way our states of being metamorphose towards a certain direction.

...Our inner life is weaved of such forces that externally steer the streamline of our becoming (depicted as ‘lateral’ forces in the image). Through concentration of our spiritual activity we can resist these forces and as a result we become conscious of them and corresponding new degrees of freedom. This is at the basis of one of the exercises in HTKHW, where we have to deny to ourselves some small desire. For example, next time I feel like having a glass of wine and see myself reaching for the bottle, I can say “I’ll skip this time.” The goal here is not to deprive ourselves and be miserable but to find the experience of us differentiating from the desire. In this way it becomes an objective force in our soul life, that we are ordinarily completely merged with and flow along. By differentiating we come to know another ‘me’ which has the inner strength to steer the streamline in novel ways.

So as we go about our day, we can make an exercise out of concentrating on the overarching intents we are engaged in - to begin with, the ones we know as 'our own' intents - and differentiating from the flow of desires, feelings, thoughts, and perceptual states which is structured by those intents in a fluid stream of becoming. These are the states of being which we must endure for our intent to be realized - instead of intending the Idea, 'go to the store', and immediately realizing that intention with our higher strata of intuitive consciousness, there is an arrested state of the Idea's evolution where our inspired, imaginative, and physical consciousness must work through the inner-outer 'bureaucracy' before it is fulfilled. We must negotiate a whole range of impulses, desires, feelings (sympathies-antipathies), thoughts, and perceptual structures to consciously fulfill the Idea. By becoming more conscious of this process itself, we resonate with the archetypal activity which is responsible for maintaining the bureaucracy and therefore navigate it with increasing ease (while also adopting that responsibility for ourselves).

In the first kind of vision the soul's inner working on the organism is revealed. In the second the soul penetrates to the will. But an inner activity must precede the outward manifestation of the will. Before the arm can be raised, the creative current must flow into it so that in its metabolic processes, which run on quietly, processes are inserted that are clearly the result of feeling. Feeling is a willing that remains enclosed within the human being, a willing that is arrested at its inception.

The processes inserted into the body for feeling and willing reveal themselves for the second stage of vision as processes that are in opposition to those that support life. They are destructive processes. In the constructive processes life prospers; but the soul withers in them. The life of the body, which itself is built up by the soul, must be broken down so that the nature and activity of the soul can unfold out of the body.

To spiritual vision the working of the soul on the body is like a memory of something that the soul had first to accomplish before it could exist in its own activity.

Thereby, however, the soul experiences itself as a purely spiritual being that has let the forming of the body take precedence to the soul's own activity in order to have the body become the basis for the soul's inherent, purely spiritual development. The soul first devotes its creative effort to the body so that, after this has been done sufficiently, the soul can manifest itself in free spirituality.

And this development of the soul begins already with thinking that results from the perception of the senses. When one perceives an object, the soul commences its activity. It shapes the corresponding part of the body in such a way that it becomes adapted for developing, in the form of thought, a mirror image of the object. In experiencing this mirror image, the soul beholds the result of its own activity.

Note that such an exercise only makes sense if we remain connected with the first-person meaningful experience of those desires, feelings, thought-perceptions we are working through within the overarching Idea. Otherwise we simply envision them as abstract entities apart from our core being, which we try to fit into some model of that being. It is much easier said than done when we are immersed in the sensory spectrum, which is why these things only work if we are simultaneously deepening our cognition through the spheres of feeling and willing with the archetypal exercises and meditations. 

[AshvinP]

There are two mantras I would like to share which I have been working with recently. I generally do these early in the morning as the Sun is rising, and repeat each mantra 3x. By making such things into a regular routine, we can gradually clear out the deadwood of old compulsive materialistic habits and voluntarily replace them with new spiritual habits, strengthening the will force of our "I". That is quite independent of whether we sense any concrete 'results' at first.

"Towards the world I turn my senses,
I turn my ray senses towards the things of this world.
Sense existence, you deceive me!
What flees from existence as nothing,
for you, is existence and reality. 
Let what must seem like nothing to you,
disclose itself to my inner life." 

In light of Cleric's recent posts, I have recently begun trying to sense the convolutions of depth my spiritual activity incarnates and ascends through when engaging such verses. Especially in this mantra, we can sense how the content of the verses closely aligns with what we are actually doing with our spiritual activity as we work through it. First we have the overarching intuition of the mantra, the intent that we are engaging in the mantra for our high ideals. We can then accompany the verses with imagery as we move through them. For ex., before I say 'what flees from existence as nothing', I make an imagistic thinking-gesture of soda bubbles. It is a great exercise to consciously will the images before the words, since normally our habitual, passive activity only becomes conscious of the words we verbalize-perceive before the imagery (if there is any accompanying imagery at all). 

But no impression is made if one confronts the sense world with super-sensible experience. Spiritual organs are too soft and flexible, as it were. That's why all physical things seem like empty spaces. A comparison can give one a perception of this. The water in a glass is invisible. The gas pearls in soda water are visible even though the bubbles are much more rarefied than water; they're nothing in comparison with the denser fluid. So the nothing is visible and the something is invisible. For a spiritual gaze that's the way things really are with the physical world. Like these pearls in water, all atoms are holes or empty bubbles in the spiritual world. All physical things are composed of countless numbers of such holes. When we touch things we bump into these holes, this nothing. That's the way things are with man's body also. Seen spiritually, for instance, the brain is a spiritual form. There are countless empty pearls or holes in it, and they make up what a scientist investigates with his instruments.

So we have convoluted the intuitive meaning into fluid images, and then we further convolute the imagery into the linearized sequences of our inner verbalization. We can try sense the fine texture of how the imagery precipitates into words. As we did with the 'I think the words' exercise, we can slow down the process so that we sense a tighter fit between our spiritual activity and its reflections in the images and words (we don't need to slow down to the point of stopping though, since we are trying to sense the depth of activity through the verses). Although we can investigate the spiritual meaning of these images and words before or after the exercise, as we did above, we need to resist that during the exercise itself. A focus on the meaning will inevitably obscure the focus on the convoluting process itself and maintain the polarization of our thinking and its reflections. 

"More radiant than the Sun;
Purer than the snow;
Finer than the ether;
Is the Self.
The Spirit in my heart;
I am this Self; 
this Self, am I."

After we finish the first mantra, we could also do the one above with a sense of releasing the content back into the spirit worlds within us, back through the increasingly rarefied strata of our spiritual activity from words to images to pure intuitive intent. When we reach the last two lines, we can hardly form any images for them. Here we have the feeling that we have just borrowed the imaginative content for the exercise, for the task of transmutation in our inner alchemical laboratory, and are now entrusting the fruits of the exercise to their rightful owner for further development of its forces within us. We can gradually acquire the feeling that we are truly participating in Cosmic aims and that our spiritual deeds are forming the building stones for a new Heaven and new Earth.

Again, I have to tell you something which will seem fantastic to the uninitiated, on account, I may say, of the comprehensive, all-embracing range of the idea. What man prints as a form deriving from his soul on the matter of this earth Round is eternal, it will not pass away. Even though the matter thus given form outwardly decays, what the Royal Art has given form to, in pyramids, temples and churches, is imperishable. What the human spirit has given shape to, in matter, will remain present in the world as a continuing force. That is completely clear to those who are initiated in such matters. Cologne's Gothic cathedral will, for example, pass away; but it is of far reaching significance that the atoms were once in this form. This form itself is the imperishable thing that will henceforth participate in the ongoing evolutionary process of humanity, just as the living force that is in the plant participates in the evolution of Nature! The painter, who paints a picture today, who prints dead matter with his soul's blood, is also creating something which will sooner or later be disposed in thousands of atoms. What has imperishable and continuing value, what is eternal, is that he has created, that something from his soul has flowed into matter.

States and all other human communities come and go before our eyes. But what men have formed out of their souls, as such communities, constitute humanly-conceived ideas of eternal value, with an eternally enduring significance. And when this human race once again appears on the earth in a new form, then it will see the fruits of these elements of eternal value.

We are in our tiny corner of the house, doing these short exercises here and there, traversing the inner landscape step by step with our spiritual activity, slowly but surely, and the world says we are being silly and superstitious to think this makes a difference in the affairs of the world. Yet spiritual cognition which penetrates beyond the veil of Maya knows that this is in fact the most world-transforming activity which we can engage in. All metamorphoses of nature and culture over the ages have come through exactly this activity, performed in mystery schools and esoteric circles (which have now been universalized through the MoG), even including the technology developed during the modern materialistic age. Before electricity was an outer physical force, it was an occult (inner) force. We can remember that there are many of us doing our humble inner exercises all across the globe, contributing the flame of our spiritual activity to an inner vigil which will gradually illuminate the darkness of the world, pressing out from the inner dimensions to that of the outer physiognomy.  

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Thank you so much for all the ideas in this post!
I am far from completing the reflection they invite to, but I feel this work in itself is beneficial. The effort of encompassing these insight cohesively is a valuable exercise in itself, not only as a guide to future exercises.

Yeah, for better or worse - and probably worse - I tend to have a good episodic memory.
But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

I'm sure that's for better. Although, as we spoke before, there could be a transition phase where some aspects of the memory appear to get worse for a while. I'm not sure if that happens for everyone. I understand it as part of the deconditioning process from normal sensory-conceptual life, so that we find our conscious bearings in life more within the free flow of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions which build up our organism in relation with the environment. It reminds me of my cat who always needs to sniff out an area before she lays down to rest there, even if she has been in that same area many times. She hasn't developed the thinking capacity to rely on memory for such decisions, which is certainly an advance in spiritual evolution for humans. Yet, in order to develop and perfect that capacity, we also dampened the living impulses which impart a much more Wise orientation towards the surrounding world. Now we need to recover that Wisdom through our spiritually awakened consciousness. We are no longer compelled to 'sniff out' the environment for our strictly necessary actions, yet we can freely choose to do so in full consciousness. Or in the terms of PoF:

A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences. He recalls, before coming to a decision, what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a comparable case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit, these prior conditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes a completely first-hand decision. What others have done in such a case worries him as little as what they have decreed. He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.

 

That is mostly an introduction for the rest of my response below.

As I understand it, in your words and in Steiner's, this is an introduction that closes the circle at the same time. The path to knowledge of the ideal landscape doesn’t remain a purely spiritual pursuit, but feeds back into the will. An asymmetry seems to appear, when the unfree spirit is fully dependent on percepts/concepts to guide action (I suppose this is the meaning in the quoted passage, even if it’s said that the unfree spirit relies on percepts only) while the free spirit has an 'asymmetrical' spiritual activity, some of which is not merged with perception/not engaged in the subject-object loop. The asymmetry is balanced out when that extended connection to the spiritual landscape is translated into actions in the perceptual world.
In this sense, thinking of the Levin’s model and its mutually impinging levels of causality, that we progressively infuse with awareness, it could maybe be said that a synonym for infusing reality with awareness/becoming more conscious of it, is to identifying the telos in the higher orders. When that principal direction is found in the spiritual world, the system can become unitary, the fast vibrating membrane can be understood as unitary, and that “Wise orientation towards the surrounding world” can be consequently found. So it’s about extricating oneself from the sensory spectrum first, to become able to plunge in it again, in action, from the perspective of the future, instead of remaining trapped in the constrained realm of ”the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences”.

Incidentally, thinking of the dog’s trust fall on the other thread, I would imagine that trust requires, among other things, an ability to rely on memory? I’ve never had a cat, but maybe your cat is not unaware of regularly choosing that same spot, and sniffs it every time in search for new evidence.

But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

Right, this oscillation into the blind spot will continue to happen, but the more we anticipate it, the more we neutralize its effect. What you say about the frightening aspect is exactly what happens with these living dynamics when they remain unconscious or only in the form of abstract theory. Even with the latter, we are permeating the unknown with our concepts, making the underlying forces more transparent to our consciousness, and mitigating the apparent threat. The quickest way to deal with anxiety about some phenomena is to analyze it and make it more coherently sensible. We disentangle the content from personal inclinations and emotions and purify it with logical reasoning. Thinking doesn't care about how we feel at any given time - whether we are happy, sad, or afraid, whether we have a headache, a stomach ache, a flu, etc. It's either logically coherent or not - if it's not, then we are impelled to move forward to find the missing pieces of a more holistic image. Yet we are now at the cognitive evolutionary stage where the logical forces we discern only in abstract theory are still felt to be something which happens to us, rather than something we are intimately participating in. 

Yes. Your last sentence made me think of your recent reference (to Anthony) about self-fulfilling prophecies. When does a probabilistic assessment become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Now we need to acquire a living remembrance of all the ways in which we bring about our own circumstances, how we bring about all that which only appears to impress upon us without our involvement. We can begin working on this even with ordinary cognition. First we should try to notice how our thought-life and soul-life directs us to certain parts of the World Content and not others. We end up at certain places at certain times, and pay attention to certain portions of the spectrum and not others, based on our interests, emotions, character, beliefs, theories, etc. The very act of paying more attention to these details, even if we aren't very clear on the connections at first, works to loosen our habitual patterns of thinking and feeling, creating new leeway in the soul-organism for our spiritual activity to explore. Eventually this will lead us into the stream of Karma associated with our previous incarnation, where the seed was formed, through our moral-spiritual activity, which has now grown into the body and soul characteristics of our current incarnation. Our temperament, for ex., goes a long way towards influencing what career we chose in life. Of course our physical constitution influences all sorts of life decisions as well. 

When somebody goes through life with great attentiveness to everything, he must, in the nature of things, move about a great deal. Human beings who lead an entirely sedentary life are very difficult to study to-day from the point of view of karma, because there was no such mode of life in earlier times. It remains to be seen what men with an exclusively sedentary mode of life will be like in the next earthly life, for sedentary existences have become customary only in this age. But when, in earlier times, a man was attentive to the things in his environment, he always had to go to them; he had to make his limbs mobile, to bring his limbs into activity. The whole body was active, not only the senses which belong to the head-system. Everything in which the whole body takes part, when the human being is attentive and observant, passes over into the structure of the head of the next earthly life, and has a definite effect.

So, in general, we need to resist compartmentalizing or 'detaching' what we are involved in on a daily basis with our spiritual activity from the process of spiritual evolution itself. We make our spiritual activity more focused and steer it with greater precision during meditation, yet we are more generally trying to broaden and deepen our attentiveness to the World Content. As discussed previously, our attention usually gets interrupted by personal soul-entanglements which reflect the 'rejection' of our spiritual offerings by Cosmic Intuition. We gives ourselves the opportunity to notice this more during meditation, but it's happening all the time. We can pay attention and let Cosmic impulses inflow our consciousness on a clear starry night as well, or even during the day. When our overarching intents become less personal and more Cosmic in orientation, we begin to resonate with intents which we normally don't think of as 'our own' and therefore our aperture for meaningful attention to the WC grows. It's interesting because sometimes I find it easier to concentrate when trying to meditate outside in Nature, even with natural and cultural noises around. It's almost as if there is less 'pressure' to make something happen, and I feel the verse - "for my yoke is easy and my burden is light". This leads me into your post from the other thread, which I have moved here for convenience, since it's related to exercises and we also had the VR discussion going on there. 

The quote about the meaning of human physical constitution remains unclear. I’ve read the whole lecture, but I can’t say I grasp the connections between karma and physical constitution. It could be one of those lectures that require some more background, or living thinking. Still it was thought-provoking to read. Otherwise I understand well the line of your thoughts. I’m reminded of the following:

In our sensory spectrum the effects of our activity are so stretched in a hysteresis-like process that by the time we perceive the effect we can no longer recognize the causes. We carelessly throw garbage on the ground. In our waking consciousness we don’t even register this. Yet in the spiritual world this spiritual gesture is a part of our being. It remains there as something that breaks the harmony, just like a thorn in our foot breaks our well-being. Not so much the isolated event itself but the whole configuration of our being that allows for the event. These effects reverberate in a very complicated way and it is practically impossible to recognize that certain things that happen to us in life are reverberations of these holistic processes.

-

You must sense something to extricate yourself from if you have the desire to extricate, right? We all have a difficult time objectively assessing our own situation, since we are merged into it. Very few people would make this comment - "I will be reading this post again going forward, and hopefully the degrees of freedom will have evolved by then." This by itself shows an intuitive grasp for what is being spoken of which most people lack - usually it never occurs that revisiting the same content will increase its depth of meaning for us as our cognition evolves. Or, with the move trailer, I gave you very little go on, but you still permeated that content with your understanding. (the film example was likewise pointing to the discussion about our 'inner disposition' towards phenomena, which may normally repel or disgust us to some extent, allowing for more inward archetypal understanding).

The main issue I think is one of expectation, which is also an issue for me and practically everyone who has started on the path. Our normal self we identify with always expects something to happen to it and bring about its elevation, transformation, higher realization, etc.. In that process, it views what's actually happening to it, in terms of gradual understanding and lucidity of spiritual principles as you are gaining here - pulling together seemingly disparate avenues of thought - as a temporary means to that higher end. Yet the means and the end should become increasingly united in our consciousness, like the thinking and the will (perception). I'm not speaking of the conceptualization here - we may very well verbalize to ourselves, 'I know it's not fruitful to expect any reward for my efforts and that the path of greater concentration and understanding is itself the path to spiritual consciousness', but the question is whether our inner being is also allowing those thoughts to penetrate more deeply into our spheres of feeling and will. What Cleric mentioned on the other thread in regards to 'detachment' or 'separation' during concentration-meditation is very important in that regard. It can also be applied to our non-meditative life.

With regards to outer experiments one does while going about the day (of course not while driving or anything similar), I think your differentiation exercise can be useful. It can be a way of internalizing the TC spectrum which Cleric has highlighted for us in various ways. For ex. in a recent post:

To gain even deeper intuition of the telos of our flow of metamorphosis, we have to seek sensitivity for our inner life of sympathies, antipathies, desires. For example, the desire to have a glass of wine is part of that telos, isn’t it? It curves the way our states of being metamorphose towards a certain direction.

...Our inner life is weaved of such forces that externally steer the streamline of our becoming (depicted as ‘lateral’ forces in the image). Through concentration of our spiritual activity we can resist these forces and as a result we become conscious of them and corresponding new degrees of freedom. This is at the basis of one of the exercises in HTKHW, where we have to deny to ourselves some small desire. For example, next time I feel like having a glass of wine and see myself reaching for the bottle, I can say “I’ll skip this time.” The goal here is not to deprive ourselves and be miserable but to find the experience of us differentiating from the desire. In this way it becomes an objective force in our soul life, that we are ordinarily completely merged with and flow along. By differentiating we come to know another ‘me’ which has the inner strength to steer the streamline in novel ways.

This time I'm not sure I deserve the credit. The underlined above seems to me a rather common attitude. It's usually referred to as "growth mindset". And for the trailer, I didn't do much more than bringing together and summarize what you had already laid out. Anyway, yes, I want to extricate myself from the obfuscating entanglement with perceptions that stands in the way of the first-person perspective. I have an intuition of the constraints it operates, and I have a desire to overcome them. I know it can be done through concentration and meditation. Nevertheless I seem to have this wish to push my reasoning cognition further ahead, as driver of that attunement. Sometimes I think “How worthwhile can it be that I take on meditation now, while my usual cognition is not plastic enough, it struggles at processing percepts the appropriate way, and is dragged from all sides by lateral forces”. This is a conscious sense, not an abstraction. From this sense, I derive a desire to reason myself out of these constraints from within them, or at least to loosen them somewhat more. I feel there’s a continuum of modes of thinking activity, and that meditation could be a state to approach gradually, or in the flow of the daily activity (when alone), and not necessarily as a formalized exercise. I have this wish to find a continuum of modes of cognition, rather than saying to myself “Every day at 7:00 you will sit quietly and make the meditation happen”. It’s not that I attempt to avoid discipline. It’s rather a desire to bring the totality of one’s life into a more awakened and coherent state, and to avoid compartmentalizing our activity in T-F-W, in an abstract way.

Maybe this only demonstrates that I am not yet capable of unconditional trust, and that I simply try to avoid taking the plunge. But as far as I can tell, it seems possible to make it a gradual deepening, that encompasses all aspects of our existence, and all our T-F-W spectrum of activities at once, including when practicing exercises. Maybe it simply echoes what you said, that “the means and the end should become increasingly united in our consciousness”.
I recognize the issue of expectation you speak of. I do fall in that mode sometimes, but when I wish I could extricate myself, and really try to live up to that sense, I am called to a unitary mobilization of the self, ideally beyond the necessity of doing exercises that feel too separate from the flow of activity, exercises that bring us in a different world, and make us expect to reach special states of spiritual activity, as you say. I guess this is why the most meditation-like states I experience are reflective states that precede falling asleep, or that originate from reading without much pre-planning, or from “practical” exercises as in Klocek or Knowledge of the higher worlds. Also this is the underlying reason why I don't prefer the word spiritualization/spiritualizing which to me sounds like an “injection of spirit” (not saying that you mean it that way of course).

So as we go about our day, we can make an exercise out of concentrating on the overarching intents we are engaged in - to begin with, the ones we know as 'our own' intents - and differentiating from the flow of desires, feelings, thoughts, and perceptual states which is structured by those intents in a fluid stream of becoming. These are the states of being which we must endure for our intent to be realized - instead of intending the Idea, 'go to the store', and immediately realizing that intention with our higher strata of intuitive consciousness, there is an arrested state of the Idea's evolution where our inspired, imaginative, and physical consciousness must work through the inner-outer 'bureaucracy' before it is fulfilled. We must negotiate a whole range of impulses, desires, feelings (sympathies-antipathies), thoughts, and perceptual structures to consciously fulfill the Idea. By becoming more conscious of this process itself, we resonate with the archetypal activity which is responsible for maintaining the bureaucracy and therefore navigate it with increasing ease (while also adopting that responsibility for ourselves).

In the first kind of vision the soul's inner working on the organism is revealed. In the second the soul penetrates to the will. But an inner activity must precede the outward manifestation of the will. Before the arm can be raised, the creative current must flow into it so that in its metabolic processes, which run on quietly, processes are inserted that are clearly the result of feeling. Feeling is a willing that remains enclosed within the human being, a willing that is arrested at its inception.

The processes inserted into the body for feeling and willing reveal themselves for the second stage of vision as processes that are in opposition to those that support life. They are destructive processes. In the constructive processes life prospers; but the soul withers in them. The life of the body, which itself is built up by the soul, must be broken down so that the nature and activity of the soul can unfold out of the body.

To spiritual vision the working of the soul on the body is like a memory of something that the soul had first to accomplish before it could exist in its own activity.

Thereby, however, the soul experiences itself as a purely spiritual being that has let the forming of the body take precedence to the soul's own activity in order to have the body become the basis for the soul's inherent, purely spiritual development. The soul first devotes its creative effort to the body so that, after this has been done sufficiently, the soul can manifest itself in free spirituality.

And this development of the soul begins already with thinking that results from the perception of the senses. When one perceives an object, the soul commences its activity. It shapes the corresponding part of the body in such a way that it becomes adapted for developing, in the form of thought, a mirror image of the object. In experiencing this mirror image, the soul beholds the result of its own activity.

Note that such an exercise only makes sense if we remain connected with the first-person meaningful experience of those desires, feelings, thought-perceptions we are working through within the overarching Idea. Otherwise we simply envision them as abstract entities apart from our core being, which we try to fit into some model of that being. It is much easier said than done when we are immersed in the sensory spectrum, which is why these things only work if we are simultaneously deepening our cognition through the spheres of feeling and willing with the archetypal exercises and meditations. 

Yes, this is a type of exercise I feel very positively about. I have tried something similar (as you suggested elsewhere) with work, focusing on the stream of percepts/concepts brought about by the execution of an idea. I find it very challenging to maintain the self reflective mode, remaining conscious of how we negotiate the stream of imagery, while interacting with others. In short, I can't do it I start with the intention, and then very soon my whole conscious attention is sucked by the dynamics of the interaction and how to steer it towards the overarching intent, how to make the bureaucracy work, instead of paying self-reflecting attention to what I’m doing, feeling and thinking throughout that process.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Thank you so much for all the ideas in this post!
I am far from completing the reflection they invite to, but I feel this work in itself is beneficial. The effort of encompassing these insight cohesively is a valuable exercise in itself, not only as a guide to future exercises.

Yeah, for better or worse - and probably worse - I tend to have a good episodic memory.
But listen to this one, I think you'll like it. Reading this:

"It's remarkable how everything which has ever impressed upon us is inscribed into our etheric organism, as it were."

I thought "Oh... I can't decide if it's more reassuring or more frightening that absolutely everything gets inexorably impressed". Then, coming to this:

"everything we think, perceive and do matters - it all plays into the context through which our temporal becoming unfolds"

where you simply describe a differently time-characterized viewpoint on the same stream of imagery as in the previous sentence, I realized I was dwelling, having coffee, or whatever I was doing, in the blind spot, when considering the first sentence. Just because the phrasing is more implicit, I unconsciously let myself slip into "Oh look at what happens to us"...

I'm sure that's for better. Although, as we spoke before, there could be a transition phase where some aspects of the memory appear to get worse for a while. I'm not sure if that happens for everyone. I understand it as part of the deconditioning process from normal sensory-conceptual life, so that we find our conscious bearings in life more within the free flow of imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions which build up our organism in relation with the environment. It reminds me of my cat who always needs to sniff out an area before she lays down to rest there, even if she has been in that same area many times. She hasn't developed the thinking capacity to rely on memory for such decisions, which is certainly an advance in spiritual evolution for humans. Yet, in order to develop and perfect that capacity, we also dampened the living impulses which impart a much more Wise orientation towards the surrounding world. Now we need to recover that Wisdom through our spiritually awakened consciousness. We are no longer compelled to 'sniff out' the environment for our strictly necessary actions, yet we can freely choose to do so in full consciousness. Or in the terms of PoF:

A free spirit acts according to his impulses, that is, according to intuitions selected from the totality of his world of ideas by thinking. For an unfree spirit, the reason why he singles out a particular intuition from his world of ideas in order to make it the basis of an action, lies in the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences. He recalls, before coming to a decision, what someone else has done or recommended as suitable in a comparable case, or what God has commanded to be done in such a case, and so on, and he acts accordingly. For a free spirit, these prior conditions are not the only impulses to action. He makes a completely first-hand decision. What others have done in such a case worries him as little as what they have decreed. He has purely ideal reasons which lead him to select from the sum of his concepts just one in particular, and then to translate it into action.

 

That is mostly an introduction for the rest of my response below.

As I understand it, in your words and in Steiner's, this is an introduction that closes the circle at the same time. The path to knowledge of the ideal landscape doesn’t remain a purely spiritual pursuit, but feeds back into the will. An asymmetry seems to appear, when the unfree spirit is fully dependent on percepts/concepts to guide action (I suppose this is the meaning in the quoted passage, even if it’s said that the unfree spirit relies on percepts only) while the free spirit has an 'asymmetrical' spiritual activity, some of which is not merged with perception/not engaged in the subject-object loop. The asymmetry is balanced out when that extended connection to the spiritual landscape is translated into actions in the perceptual world.
In this sense, thinking of the Levin’s model and its mutually impinging levels of causality, that we progressively infuse with awareness, it could maybe be said that a synonym for infusing reality with awareness/becoming more conscious of it, is to identifying the telos in the higher orders. When that principal direction is found in the spiritual world, the system can become unitary, the fast vibrating membrane can be understood as unitary, and that “Wise orientation towards the surrounding world” can be consequently found. So it’s about extricating oneself from the sensory spectrum first, to become able to plunge in it again, in action, from the perspective of the future, instead of remaining trapped in the constrained realm of ”the world of percepts given to him, that is, in his past experiences”.

Federica, well said. Discerning the telos in the higher order spaces is indeed the key.

Incidentally, thinking of the dog’s trust fall on the other thread, I would imagine that trust requires, among other things, an ability to rely on memory? I’ve never had a cat, but maybe your cat is not unaware of regularly choosing that same spot, and sniffs it every time in search for new evidence.

Memory is really a function of reflective thinking, which generally animals have not evolved yet. It is a great trap for modern behavioral psychologists and cognitive scientists, since they seek to derive the inner conscious states from only the outer appearances, rather than the other way around, given that they simply assume the latter is impossible. There are many circumstances in which particular animals appear outwardly to have the faculty of human-like memory, but it is unjustified to then project our own individuated ego-conscious experience onto those appearances. This move broadly reflects the materialistic trend towards the animalization of the human, or the equating of the human with only its animalistic body and soul-tendencies (and eventually only the body), to the exclusion of the Ego-"I" which is uniquely embodied in the human individual. A more logically sound investigation, which doesn't foreclose the possibility of investigating the inner archetypal structure of the outer physiognomy, would lead to the spiritual reality of animal group-souls which live 'above' the physical-sensory plane and are the source of the memory-like qualities in the particular animals.

In order to answer this question we will first consider a force possessed only by the human being, not by animals: the inner soul force of memory. Animal memory is a pure figment of the scientists' imagination. Animals have no memory; they merely manifest symptoms to be explained by the same principle as those of human memory. In order to produce human memory, the main position of animals would have to be raised to the vertical, so that the ego could stream in. Since their principal position is horizontal, they can have no ego. But in certain animals the forward part of the body is in the same position as that of the human being, hence it can act intelligently, although this intelligence is not permeated by an ego.

This is the beginning of a vast region of misconceptions. When an animal manifests a capacity similar to that of memory and acts intelligently, nothing more is proved by these facts than that a being can be guided by an intelligence without being intelligent itself. Phenomena resembling memory can appear in the animal world, but not memory itself.

In memory we see something special, something quite different from what we find in mere intelligent thinking, for example, or in visualization. The essence of memory lies in the retention of a visualization we have had; it is still present after the act of perception has passed. The repetition of an action previously performed is not memory. A clock would in that case be endowed with memory, for it does today exactly what it did yesterday. If memory is to come about, the ego must seize a conception and retain it.

Right, this oscillation into the blind spot will continue to happen, but the more we anticipate it, the more we neutralize its effect. What you say about the frightening aspect is exactly what happens with these living dynamics when they remain unconscious or only in the form of abstract theory. Even with the latter, we are permeating the unknown with our concepts, making the underlying forces more transparent to our consciousness, and mitigating the apparent threat. The quickest way to deal with anxiety about some phenomena is to analyze it and make it more coherently sensible. We disentangle the content from personal inclinations and emotions and purify it with logical reasoning. Thinking doesn't care about how we feel at any given time - whether we are happy, sad, or afraid, whether we have a headache, a stomach ache, a flu, etc. It's either logically coherent or not - if it's not, then we are impelled to move forward to find the missing pieces of a more holistic image. Yet we are now at the cognitive evolutionary stage where the logical forces we discern only in abstract theory are still felt to be something which happens to us, rather than something we are intimately participating in. 

Yes. Your last sentence made me think of your recent reference (to Anthony) about self-fulfilling prophecies. When does a probabilistic assessment become a self-fulfilling prophecy?

We should be clear that the true causes of phenomenal occurrences are always to be sought on the spiritual planes, which are always being accessed from the physical plane through our rhythmic incarnational activity (of course these aren't actually separate areas of activity, but superimposed ones which we simply speak of as 'planes' to more conveniently differentiate them). The self-fulfilling prophecy comes in because our journey through the spirit worlds during sleep (to some extent) and after death is increasingly more dependent on what we ourselves do with our waking ego-consciousness during life. So this is mostly a matter of our inner disposition and how we direct our thinking, at the individual scale. We can trace precisely how a person's helpless attitude during life, for ex., will translate into an inability to develop their spiritual forces between incarnations, and therefore they will have to repeat the same lessons to extract those forces in a next incarnation, like in Groundhog's Day. The more they fail to perfect their WFT organism through the physical experiences presented to them, the more they risk lagging behind and eventually only finding suitable instruments for their Ego in lower life waves.

At the more collective scale, it becomes clear from the archetypal structure of reality that there are events which must come to pass and these can be discerned, in archetypal outlines (although these can become quite precise, especially in the near-term), through spiritual investigation. The ideational forces which 'bend' the curvature of the collective thinking, soul, life, and physical configuration spaces, i.e. what we know as the 'potential future', can be anticipated through supra-sensory cognition. Actually this was the basis of all ancient religious prophecy. Here is an interesting passage on that.

Let us seek to conceive what it means to have foresight on higher planes. Let us suppose you have water in a pond. You can foresee that the pond will become frozen if the temperature falls, so that skating and so on will be possible. In a similar way do we have [foresight] with the relationship of the so-called astral plane to the physical plane, that is to the world in which we are involved. If therefore one follows events on the astral plane one could then in fact see what will be, in a later period, with the help of astral happenings, as if it were a thickening of them. And so one can watch those astral events which subsequently step forth, solidified, on the physical plane. Physical events are nothing else than such thickened occurrences which have already taken place in the higher worlds... Now imagine it densified, translated down into the physical plane, so that something [physical] has happened, through this event, which had previously only happened astrally; analogous to, for example, your having a piece of ice where you had water before. Many such astral events must combine, must flow together, for the physical thickening eventually to become possible.

The quote about the meaning of human physical constitution remains unclear. I’ve read the whole lecture, but I can’t say I grasp the connections between karma and physical constitution. It could be one of those lectures that require some more background, or living thinking. Still it was thought-provoking to read. Otherwise I understand well the line of your thoughts. I’m reminded of the following:

In our sensory spectrum the effects of our activity are so stretched in a hysteresis-like process that by the time we perceive the effect we can no longer recognize the causes. We carelessly throw garbage on the ground. In our waking consciousness we don’t even register this. Yet in the spiritual world this spiritual gesture is a part of our being. It remains there as something that breaks the harmony, just like a thorn in our foot breaks our well-being. Not so much the isolated event itself but the whole configuration of our being that allows for the event. These effects reverberate in a very complicated way and it is practically impossible to recognize that certain things that happen to us in life are reverberations of these holistic processes.

It's very similar to what you wrote before - thinking leads over into the will and the will leads over into thinking, except we are speaking across incarnations now. What we do with our limbs, our arms, legs, hands, and feet, is the expression of our ego-conscious will. These deeds form the seed which is metamorphosed and grows as spiritual forces which can be worked with between incarnations. These forces then bend the configuration spaces which structure our head-organism for the next incarnation, which we can use as the instrument for Earthly thinking. At the same time, what we accomplish in the perfection of our Earthly thinking translates through a similar process into our limb organization for the next incarnation, to be used as the instrument of our ego-conscious will. Of course there are a lot more details that spiritual science unveils about these complex Karmic connections. Now we have reached a stage where we can also advance this process of consciously spiraling the will into thinking and perfecting our WFT organism during our current incarnation, which we would otherwise only be able to do across the threshold of physical death. As our living thinking grows and we study spiritual science (one feeds back into the other), we will notice how everything presented more philosophically in PoF, as the polar relationship of thinking and will-perception, has very deep implications for the entire structure of our spiritual evolution within the Cosmic organism. All of these archetypal principles will gain a new life within us as they are fleshed out through the science of the spirit. That is a key way in which our thinking can become more 'living'.

This time I'm not sure I deserve the credit. The underlined above seems to me a rather common attitude. It's usually referred to as "growth mindset". And for the trailer, I didn't do much more than bringing together and summarize what you had already laid out. Anyway, yes, I want to extricate myself from the obfuscating entanglement with perceptions that stands in the way of the first-person perspective. I have an intuition of the constraints it operates, and I have a desire to overcome them. I know it can be done through concentration and meditation. Nevertheless I seem to have this wish to push my reasoning cognition further ahead, as driver of that attunement. Sometimes I think “How worthwhile can it be that I take on meditation now, while my usual cognition is not plastic enough, it struggles at processing percepts the appropriate way, and is dragged from all sides by lateral forces”. This is a conscious sense, not an abstraction. From this sense, I derive a desire to reason myself out of these constraints from within them, or at least to loosen them somewhat more. I feel there’s a continuum of modes of thinking activity, and that meditation could be a state to approach gradually, or in the flow of the daily activity (when alone), and not necessarily as a formalized exercise. I have this wish to find a continuum of modes of cognition, rather than saying to myself “Every day at 7:00 you will sit quietly and make the meditation happen”. It’s not that I attempt to avoid discipline. It’s rather a desire to bring the totality of one’s life into a more awakened and coherent state, and to avoid compartmentalizing our activity in T-F-W, in an abstract way.

Maybe this only demonstrates that I am not yet capable of unconditional trust, and that I simply try to avoid taking the plunge. But as far as I can tell, it seems possible to make it a gradual deepening, that encompasses all aspects of our existence, and all our T-F-W spectrum of activities at once, including when practicing exercises. Maybe it simply echoes what you said, that “the means and the end should become increasingly united in our consciousness”.

I recognize the issue of expectation you speak of. I do fall in that mode sometimes, but when I wish I could extricate myself, and really try to live up to that sense, I am called to a unitary mobilization of the self, ideally beyond the necessity of doing exercises that feel too separate from the flow of activity, exercises that bring us in a different world, and make us expect to reach special states of spiritual activity, as you say. I guess this is why the most meditation-like states I experience are reflective states that precede falling asleep, or that originate from reading without much pre-planning, or from “practical” exercises as in Klocek or Knowledge of the higher worlds. Also this is the underlying reason why I don't prefer the word spiritualization/spiritualizing which to me sounds like an “injection of spirit” (not saying that you mean it that way of course).

I generally understand what you mean, and maybe Cleric will weigh in with some more helpful ways to think of this dynamic. Keep in mind, it is your reasoning cognition which leads you to the necessity of concentration and meditation for the 'inverted spiritual activity' which brings the Cosmic will into that cognition and thereby vitalizes it, extricating it from the perceptual entanglement and bringing it into a higher imaginative life. At the same time, you continue using that reasoning cognition to purify the will of personal entanglements with the normal Earthly spectrum, discerning the archetypal principles which structure reality and your participating thinking-role. It is always a rhythmic alternation we are engaged in, the hysteresis, whether we take hold of it or not. During sleep at night our cognitive life is always flowing out into the Cosmic realms to be revitalized with spiritual impulses so that we may continue functioning intellectually during the day. Even during the day, we are sleeping in our life of feeling and will, which thereby retain a somewhat vital character. Modern meditation is, at its core, bringing a more waking consciousness into the sleep states we are always cycling through, which simultaneously vitalizes our waking consciousness. We take hold of the process and become more creatively responsible for it, advancing our normal evolution and guarding against the vast, unavoidable snares presented by the surrounding materialistic thinking culture of modern times, which can only ensnare us if we don't remain actively vigilant in our spiritual activity. It does require a sacrificial plunge from our normal passive WFT habits, as you say, which will seem like a discontinuity from the perspective required to make the sacrifice, just as death seems like a discontinuity from the normal living perspective. Yet it is again our reasoning cognition which allows us to discern this is only the outer appearance of things, and actually death is always life continued on at a higher stage of integration, from which the discontinuities are bridged and life actually begins to make holistic sense. The sacrificial plunge(s) itself is what perfects our ego-conscious willing organism, making it a fit vehicle for the Cosmic Spirit. This is why spiritual devotion and courage were instilled as such critical virtues through the MoG.

“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

[Federica]

There are two mantras I would like to share which I have been working with recently. I generally do these early in the morning as the Sun is rising, and repeat each mantra 3x. By making such things into a regular routine, we can gradually clear out the deadwood of old compulsive materialistic habits and voluntarily replace them with new spiritual habits, strengthening the will force of our "I". That is quite independent of whether we sense any concrete 'results' at first.

"Towards the world I turn my senses,
I turn my ray senses towards the things of this world.
Sense existence, you deceive me!
What flees from existence as nothing,
for you, is existence and reality. 
Let what must seem like nothing to you,
disclose itself to my inner life." 

In light of Cleric's recent posts, I have recently begun trying to sense the convolutions of depth my spiritual activity incarnates and ascends through when engaging such verses. Especially in this mantra, we can sense how the content of the verses closely aligns with what we are actually doing with our spiritual activity as we work through it. First we have the overarching intuition of the mantra, the intent that we are engaging in the mantra for our high ideals. We can then accompany the verses with imagery as we move through them. For ex., before I say 'what flees from existence as nothing', I make an imagistic thinking-gesture of soda bubbles. It is a great exercise to consciously will the images before the words, since normally our habitual, passive activity only becomes conscious of the words we verbalize-perceive before the imagery (if there is any accompanying imagery at all). 

But no impression is made if one confronts the sense world with super-sensible experience. Spiritual organs are too soft and flexible, as it were. That's why all physical things seem like empty spaces. A comparison can give one a perception of this. The water in a glass is invisible. The gas pearls in soda water are visible even though the bubbles are much more rarefied than water; they're nothing in comparison with the denser fluid. So the nothing is visible and the something is invisible. For a spiritual gaze that's the way things really are with the physical world. Like these pearls in water, all atoms are holes or empty bubbles in the spiritual world. All physical things are composed of countless numbers of such holes. When we touch things we bump into these holes, this nothing. That's the way things are with man's body also. Seen spiritually, for instance, the brain is a spiritual form. There are countless empty pearls or holes in it, and they make up what a scientist investigates with his instruments.

So we have convoluted the intuitive meaning into fluid images, and then we further convolute the imagery into the linearized sequences of our inner verbalization. We can try sense the fine texture of how the imagery precipitates into words. As we did with the 'I think the words' exercise, we can slow down the process so that we sense a tighter fit between our spiritual activity and its reflections in the images and words (we don't need to slow down to the point of stopping though, since we are trying to sense the depth of activity through the verses). Although we can investigate the spiritual meaning of these images and words before or after the exercise, as we did above, we need to resist that during the exercise itself. A focus on the meaning will inevitably obscure the focus on the convoluting process itself and maintain the polarization of our thinking and its reflections. 

"More radiant than the Sun;
Purer than the snow;
Finer than the ether;
Is the Self.
The Spirit in my heart;
I am this Self; 
this Self, am I."

After we finish the first mantra, we could also do the one above with a sense of releasing the content back into the spirit worlds within us, back through the increasingly rarefied strata of our spiritual activity from words to images to pure intuitive intent. When we reach the last two lines, we can hardly form any images for them. Here we have the feeling that we have just borrowed the imaginative content for the exercise, for the task of transmutation in our inner alchemical laboratory, and are now entrusting the fruits of the exercise to their rightful owner for further development of its forces within us. We can gradually acquire the feeling that we are truly participating in Cosmic aims and that our spiritual deeds are forming the building stones for a new Heaven and new Earth.

Again, I have to tell you something which will seem fantastic to the uninitiated, on account, I may say, of the comprehensive, all-embracing range of the idea. What man prints as a form deriving from his soul on the matter of this earth Round is eternal, it will not pass away. Even though the matter thus given form outwardly decays, what the Royal Art has given form to, in pyramids, temples and churches, is imperishable. What the human spirit has given shape to, in matter, will remain present in the world as a continuing force. That is completely clear to those who are initiated in such matters. Cologne's Gothic cathedral will, for example, pass away; but it is of far reaching significance that the atoms were once in this form. This form itself is the imperishable thing that will henceforth participate in the ongoing evolutionary process of humanity, just as the living force that is in the plant participates in the evolution of Nature! The painter, who paints a picture today, who prints dead matter with his soul's blood, is also creating something which will sooner or later be disposed in thousands of atoms. What has imperishable and continuing value, what is eternal, is that he has created, that something from his soul has flowed into matter.

States and all other human communities come and go before our eyes. But what men have formed out of their souls, as such communities, constitute humanly-conceived ideas of eternal value, with an eternally enduring significance. And when this human race once again appears on the earth in a new form, then it will see the fruits of these elements of eternal value.

We are in our tiny corner of the house, doing these short exercises here and there, traversing the inner landscape step by step with our spiritual activity, slowly but surely, and the world says we are being silly and superstitious to think this makes a difference in the affairs of the world. Yet spiritual cognition which penetrates beyond the veil of Maya knows that this is in fact the most world-transforming activity which we can engage in. All metamorphoses of nature and culture over the ages have come through exactly this activity, performed in mystery schools and esoteric circles (which have now been universalized through the MoG), even including the technology developed during the modern materialistic age. Before electricity was an outer physical force, it was an occult (inner) force. We can remember that there are many of us doing our humble inner exercises all across the globe, contributing the flame of our spiritual activity to an inner vigil which will gradually illuminate the darkness of the world, pressing out from the inner dimensions to that of the outer physiognomy.  

Thanks for sharing and commenting on these exercices, Ashvin.
In relation to these comments:

"Especially in this mantra [the first one] we can sense how the content of the verses closely aligns with what we are actually doing with our spiritual activity as we work through it"

"Although we can investigate the spiritual meaning of these images and words before or after the exercise, as we did above, we need to resist that during the exercise itself. A focus on the meaning will inevitably obscure the focus on the convoluting process itself and maintain the polarization of our thinking and its reflections."

I am not sure whether you were suggesting the exercise should be made in a similar way to a concentration, rather than as a wish of grasping the nature of physical reality (then we should sense the content/meaning rather than resisting it)? Do you read it, or know it by heart?

[AshvinP]

There are two mantras I would like to share which I have been working with recently. I generally do these early in the morning as the Sun is rising, and repeat each mantra 3x. By making such things into a regular routine, we can gradually clear out the deadwood of old compulsive materialistic habits and voluntarily replace them with new spiritual habits, strengthening the will force of our "I". That is quite independent of whether we sense any concrete 'results' at first.

"Towards the world I turn my senses,
I turn my ray senses towards the things of this world.
Sense existence, you deceive me!
What flees from existence as nothing,
for you, is existence and reality. 
Let what must seem like nothing to you,
disclose itself to my inner life." 

In light of Cleric's recent posts, I have recently begun trying to sense the convolutions of depth my spiritual activity incarnates and ascends through when engaging such verses. Especially in this mantra, we can sense how the content of the verses closely aligns with what we are actually doing with our spiritual activity as we work through it. First we have the overarching intuition of the mantra, the intent that we are engaging in the mantra for our high ideals. We can then accompany the verses with imagery as we move through them. For ex., before I say 'what flees from existence as nothing', I make an imagistic thinking-gesture of soda bubbles. It is a great exercise to consciously will the images before the words, since normally our habitual, passive activity only becomes conscious of the words we verbalize-perceive before the imagery (if there is any accompanying imagery at all). 

But no impression is made if one confronts the sense world with super-sensible experience. Spiritual organs are too soft and flexible, as it were. That's why all physical things seem like empty spaces. A comparison can give one a perception of this. The water in a glass is invisible. The gas pearls in soda water are visible even though the bubbles are much more rarefied than water; they're nothing in comparison with the denser fluid. So the nothing is visible and the something is invisible. For a spiritual gaze that's the way things really are with the physical world. Like these pearls in water, all atoms are holes or empty bubbles in the spiritual world. All physical things are composed of countless numbers of such holes. When we touch things we bump into these holes, this nothing. That's the way things are with man's body also. Seen spiritually, for instance, the brain is a spiritual form. There are countless empty pearls or holes in it, and they make up what a scientist investigates with his instruments.

So we have convoluted the intuitive meaning into fluid images, and then we further convolute the imagery into the linearized sequences of our inner verbalization. We can try sense the fine texture of how the imagery precipitates into words. As we did with the 'I think the words' exercise, we can slow down the process so that we sense a tighter fit between our spiritual activity and its reflections in the images and words (we don't need to slow down to the point of stopping though, since we are trying to sense the depth of activity through the verses). Although we can investigate the spiritual meaning of these images and words before or after the exercise, as we did above, we need to resist that during the exercise itself. A focus on the meaning will inevitably obscure the focus on the convoluting process itself and maintain the polarization of our thinking and its reflections. 

"More radiant than the Sun;
Purer than the snow;
Finer than the ether;
Is the Self.
The Spirit in my heart;
I am this Self; 
this Self, am I."

After we finish the first mantra, we could also do the one above with a sense of releasing the content back into the spirit worlds within us, back through the increasingly rarefied strata of our spiritual activity from words to images to pure intuitive intent. When we reach the last two lines, we can hardly form any images for them. Here we have the feeling that we have just borrowed the imaginative content for the exercise, for the task of transmutation in our inner alchemical laboratory, and are now entrusting the fruits of the exercise to their rightful owner for further development of its forces within us. We can gradually acquire the feeling that we are truly participating in Cosmic aims and that our spiritual deeds are forming the building stones for a new Heaven and new Earth.

Again, I have to tell you something which will seem fantastic to the uninitiated, on account, I may say, of the comprehensive, all-embracing range of the idea. What man prints as a form deriving from his soul on the matter of this earth Round is eternal, it will not pass away. Even though the matter thus given form outwardly decays, what the Royal Art has given form to, in pyramids, temples and churches, is imperishable. What the human spirit has given shape to, in matter, will remain present in the world as a continuing force. That is completely clear to those who are initiated in such matters. Cologne's Gothic cathedral will, for example, pass away; but it is of far reaching significance that the atoms were once in this form. This form itself is the imperishable thing that will henceforth participate in the ongoing evolutionary process of humanity, just as the living force that is in the plant participates in the evolution of Nature! The painter, who paints a picture today, who prints dead matter with his soul's blood, is also creating something which will sooner or later be disposed in thousands of atoms. What has imperishable and continuing value, what is eternal, is that he has created, that something from his soul has flowed into matter.

States and all other human communities come and go before our eyes. But what men have formed out of their souls, as such communities, constitute humanly-conceived ideas of eternal value, with an eternally enduring significance. And when this human race once again appears on the earth in a new form, then it will see the fruits of these elements of eternal value.

We are in our tiny corner of the house, doing these short exercises here and there, traversing the inner landscape step by step with our spiritual activity, slowly but surely, and the world says we are being silly and superstitious to think this makes a difference in the affairs of the world. Yet spiritual cognition which penetrates beyond the veil of Maya knows that this is in fact the most world-transforming activity which we can engage in. All metamorphoses of nature and culture over the ages have come through exactly this activity, performed in mystery schools and esoteric circles (which have now been universalized through the MoG), even including the technology developed during the modern materialistic age. Before electricity was an outer physical force, it was an occult (inner) force. We can remember that there are many of us doing our humble inner exercises all across the globe, contributing the flame of our spiritual activity to an inner vigil which will gradually illuminate the darkness of the world, pressing out from the inner dimensions to that of the outer physiognomy.  

Thanks for sharing and commenting on these exercices, Ashvin.
In relation to these comments:

"Especially in this mantra [the first one] we can sense how the content of the verses closely aligns with what we are actually doing with our spiritual activity as we work through it"

"Although we can investigate the spiritual meaning of these images and words before or after the exercise, as we did above, we need to resist that during the exercise itself. A focus on the meaning will inevitably obscure the focus on the convoluting process itself and maintain the polarization of our thinking and its reflections."

I am not sure whether you were suggesting the exercise should be made in a similar way to a concentration, rather than as a wish of grasping the nature of physical reality (then we should sense the content/meaning rather than resisting it)? Do you read it, or know it by heart?

Federica,

The exercise should involve concentration as we try to devote our thinking force wholly to carrying it out with minimal interruption, just as with other exercises. But let's say we are trying to discern the meaning of the 'more radiant than the Sun' mantra right now. We arrive at something like, 'I am not identical with the transient lower convolutions which I must endure, but with that ineffable Self who dips down in the sensory-conceptual resistance to attain its freedom and fulfill its holistic intents in full consciousness'. When we sit down to do the exercise, we should resist the inner voice which simply repeats these words while we do it. Or we may be saying, 'ok now the intuitive depth activity is convoluting from images to words', which should also be avoided. Certainly we should avoid coming up with new interpretations of what it means for 'reality' while doing it. We should try to get in that unassuming, unexpecting mindset where we feel, 'the meaning of this hardly matters right now, but rather what matters is the fact that I am doing it and that I do it well'. We can treat it like an appointment we made with a close friend and that we intend to honor, no matter what comes up.

It's also a great concentration exercise even if we don't try to accompany the verses with images before the words. We can also try to sense how our activity impresses the words similar to 'I think the words'. This reminds me of a 'calmness of soul' exercise that was helpful for me, as preparation before doing exercises. It is similar to the TFW clock-dial orientation preparation that Cleric shared.

We observe how our thoughts have been flitting back and forth from topic to topic - then ask, "Is this I?"
(we don't try to answer the question, but just ask it into the spiritual 'void')
We begin breathing in and out more deeply and observe the breathing for a few cycles - then we ask, "Is this I?"
We then focus on where our feet meet the floor or our bottom meets the chair for some time - then we ask, "Is this I?"

Another thing I do is to light a candle, perhaps say a short consecration first for what you intend to work on with the exercise before incarnating the flame, and then silently observe how the will of the flame calmly strives upwards, back towards its supersensible home, but patiently waits until its Earthly task is fulfilled. This can also help attain a very relaxed state as we calmly and patiently strive with our will towards the supersensible.

[Federica]

Federica,

The exercise should involve concentration as we try to devote our thinking force wholly to carrying it out with minimal interruption, just as with other exercises. But let's say we are trying to discern the meaning of the 'more radiant than the Sun' mantra right now. We arrive at something like, 'I am not identical with the transient lower convolutions which I must endure, but with that ineffable Self who dips down in the sensory-conceptual resistance to attain its freedom and fulfill its holistic intents in full consciousness'. When we sit down to do the exercise, we should resist the inner voice which simply repeats these words while we do it. Or we may be saying, 'ok now the intuitive depth activity is convoluting from images to words', which should also be avoided. Certainly we should avoid coming up with new interpretations of what it means for 'reality' while doing it. We should try to get in that unassuming, unexpecting mindset where we feel, 'the meaning of this hardly matters right now, but rather what matters is the fact that I am doing it and that I do it well'. We can treat it like an appointment we made with a close friend and that we intend to honor, no matter what comes up.

It's also a great concentration exercise even if we don't try to accompany the verses with images before the words. We can also try to sense how our activity impresses the words similar to 'I think the words'. This reminds me of a 'calmness of soul' exercise that was helpful for me, as preparation before doing exercises. It is similar to the TFW clock-dial orientation preparation that Cleric shared.

We observe how our thoughts have been flitting back and forth from topic to topic - then ask, "Is this I?"
(we don't try to answer the question, but just ask it into the spiritual 'void')
We begin breathing in and out more deeply and observe the breathing for a few cycles - then we ask, "Is this I?"
We then focus on where our feet meet the floor or our bottom meets the chair for some time - then we ask, "Is this I?"

Another thing I do is to light a candle, perhaps say a short consecration first for what you intend to work on with the exercise before incarnating the flame, and then silently observe how the will of the flame calmly strives upwards, back towards its supersensible home, but patiently waits until its Earthly task is fulfilled. This can also help attain a very relaxed state as we calmly and patiently strive with our will towards the supersensible.

It’s all clarified, thanks!
These days I am navigating a few humbling thoughts, in relation to some recent experiences, and to how these exercises - with some previously shared ones - can help. One recent experience whose meaning I’m trying to better discern in this way is something similar to the experience of the walker Steiner describes here:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one: —

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

Not so much in the moment, but in retrospect, the experience is rather upsetting, because I was not alone. My dad, and a relative were involved. It's humbling to be reminded in abrupt ways of the fact that 'the things that are not happening' are always there. Or rather: regardless of how much attention we pay to them, there are always things that are not happening, steered from the higher strata. Another quite humbling experience I’ve had just this morning upon waking up, is this. I was thinking about the candle flame, which led me to the recent memory of staring at the flames in a big fireplace, intensely burning throughout all the logs. As I was visualizing the memory, the light suddenly became many times brighter, like an incredibly strong revolving sphere of light, becoming brighter and brighter. Confronted with this, all I could do was to be scared and 'look away', interrupting the thought. Yet another demonstration of how much of a complete beginner I still am, lacking even the minimal level of courage to remain there, and how much I need to work and exercise.

In general, in terms of preparation exercises, I doubt that looking at a flame, or thinking of it, can have a calming effect for me. The rare times I felt I needed to calm down, what I found extremely effective is the Klocek-inspired exercise of intently observing a simple object for a few minutes. I was amazed how drastically effective it was, maybe it can work similarly for others too. In this connection, the “Is this I?” exercise sounds ideal for me, even as a 'main exercise' in line with the previously mentioned attempts to ‘delocalize’, or expand, from the physical body, by thinking of it from a supposedly external perspective. I will paste here Cleric’s version, the Will-Feeling-Thinking calibration exercise. I hadn’t paid enough attention to it when it was posted, thanks for the appropriate reminder!

I would like to share an exercise that I've been experimenting with lately. It really came as an extension of the clutch disc metaphor.

In engineering, physics and so on, it’s always important to ‘reset the zero’. We have to adjust the origin of the coordinate system, to calibrate the tools and so on. Our inner investigations also benefit from such a reset. It’s always good to have a stable origin of the coordinate system before departing.

The first thing has been mentioned many times. These are the linear springs through which we find our center of imagination, the area in the head. In this way we find the origin in space.

To find the origin in time we have to go in three steps.


1. We take the clock dial of thinking. We begin to rotate left and right. We think about what we did few minutes ago, we think about we’ll be doing few minutes from now. We think about yesterday, about tomorrow, about birth, about death, about the beginning of the world, about its end. We can fly through time effortlessly in thought. As we feel the spring tension to left and right, past and future, we gradually feel the neutral now.
2. We take the dial of feeling. When we turn to the past, in the broadest sense we have positive and negative feelings. We feel nostalgia for what was good or regret for what went bad. For the future we feel either joyful anticipation – the things that we ‘can’t wait’ to come – or anxiety and fear. When we release the tension of the springs to the center, we find gratitude. This may sound strange at first but I hope everything said above gives proper context. We are grateful for the flow of time, for everything that continually incarnates in us and resurrects us to richer life. The dial of feelings is more inert to move.
3. Then we take the dial of bodily will. Here we don’t have much to do because we can’t really will in the future and past. This dial is very heavy. All we need is simply bring to consciousness our present bodily life. I’m not conclusive about this but so far it seems that I can very easily center in the present bodily state if I focus on the sense of weight. Just feel how our body presses against whatever we’re sitting, how our organs themselves press into each other down. It’s very interesting that it’s almost impossible to have memory of weight. If we try to remember that bench press in the fitness, we can see the image, we can feel the exertion but in a certain sense we live as a movie actor that lifts phony weights. In a way we have to pretend in our memory that we’re lifting a heavy weight. We can very easily modify the imagination and lift the weight with one hand, then throw it around, balance it on our finger. The true drag of gravity we feel only in the present. Other senses seem to me more similar to the corresponding memory images. So an easy way to find the origin of our bodily will is to simply feel our weight and how with our will we have to overcome it.


Once we have found the spatial center and the three temporal centers, we try to put them on the same axis passing through the center of space and try to keep things stable while time flows. The dials have their natural rotations in time and they spin with different ratios but we have to bring them to a musical chord. Most of the time they rotate wildly in all directions. These rotations are connected in mysterious ways, just like the three arrows of a clock are related through the gears. We swing one disc, all others move in unintended directions, we try to correct them, the first moves again and so on. It’s a wild three-arm pendulum and that’s how, alas, the inner life of modern man looks like.

This exercise is not the end, it is only the beginning. When we have the origin and can sustain centered space and musical rotation of time, we begin to grasp much more clearly the incarnating flow of our being. We begin to sense peripheral discs of time that we haven’t suspected could exist.

Here’s an image I’ve just found. I haven’t investigated it in depth but in a general sense I think it fits our topic. A spiral of this kind becomes a real Imaginative experience. We can indeed feel our central seed around which time has inflown. We can also feel that which is yet to flow and grow in our thinking and for which we prepare the soil.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

The exercise should involve concentration as we try to devote our thinking force wholly to carrying it out with minimal interruption, just as with other exercises. But let's say we are trying to discern the meaning of the 'more radiant than the Sun' mantra right now. We arrive at something like, 'I am not identical with the transient lower convolutions which I must endure, but with that ineffable Self who dips down in the sensory-conceptual resistance to attain its freedom and fulfill its holistic intents in full consciousness'. When we sit down to do the exercise, we should resist the inner voice which simply repeats these words while we do it. Or we may be saying, 'ok now the intuitive depth activity is convoluting from images to words', which should also be avoided. Certainly we should avoid coming up with new interpretations of what it means for 'reality' while doing it. We should try to get in that unassuming, unexpecting mindset where we feel, 'the meaning of this hardly matters right now, but rather what matters is the fact that I am doing it and that I do it well'. We can treat it like an appointment we made with a close friend and that we intend to honor, no matter what comes up.

It's also a great concentration exercise even if we don't try to accompany the verses with images before the words. We can also try to sense how our activity impresses the words similar to 'I think the words'. This reminds me of a 'calmness of soul' exercise that was helpful for me, as preparation before doing exercises. It is similar to the TFW clock-dial orientation preparation that Cleric shared.

We observe how our thoughts have been flitting back and forth from topic to topic - then ask, "Is this I?"
(we don't try to answer the question, but just ask it into the spiritual 'void')
We begin breathing in and out more deeply and observe the breathing for a few cycles - then we ask, "Is this I?"
We then focus on where our feet meet the floor or our bottom meets the chair for some time - then we ask, "Is this I?"

Another thing I do is to light a candle, perhaps say a short consecration first for what you intend to work on with the exercise before incarnating the flame, and then silently observe how the will of the flame calmly strives upwards, back towards its supersensible home, but patiently waits until its Earthly task is fulfilled. This can also help attain a very relaxed state as we calmly and patiently strive with our will towards the supersensible.

It’s all clarified, thanks!
These days I am navigating a few humbling thoughts, in relation to some recent experiences, and to how these exercises - with some previously shared ones - can help. One recent experience whose meaning I’m trying to better discern in this way is something similar to the experience of the walker Steiner describes here:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one: —

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

Not so much in the moment, but in retrospect, the experience is rather upsetting, because I was not alone. My dad, and a relative were involved. It's humbling to be reminded in abrupt ways of the fact that 'the things that are not happening' are always there. Or rather: regardless of how much attention we pay to them, there are always things that are not happening, steered from the higher strata. Another quite humbling experience I’ve had just this morning upon waking up, is this. I was thinking about the candle flame, which led me to the recent memory of staring at the flames in a big fireplace, intensely burning throughout all the logs. As I was visualizing the memory, the light suddenly became many times brighter, like an incredibly strong revolving sphere of light, becoming brighter and brighter. Confronted with this, all I could do was to be scared and 'look away', interrupting the thought. Yet another demonstration of how much of a complete beginner I still am, lacking even the minimal level of courage to remain there, and how much I need to work and exercise.

Federica,

That's an interesting occurrence and I would say it is a sign of progress. What you describe is a very familiar experience for me as well. I have frequently felt a sort of recoiling away when my concentration deepens to the point where light-phenomena are manifesting intensely within the inner volume, or generally when the thought-concentration takes on a life of its own, as it were. This should be an indication to us that we are actually managing to develop our germinal astral senses. Imagine someone suddenly showed up at your house and transported you to a facility where you were placed into a rocket and launched into the Earth's upper atmosphere without much preparation. It is only natural to lack courage and long for the firm ground of the Earth in such a situation!

With devoted preparation, we will eventually acclimate ourselves to the higher strata of consciousness, although it will continue to be an ongoing work. I have even noticed how, when things seem to be going the most smoothly for my spiritual practice, is exactly when I take it for granted, let the guard down, and slip back into old conditioned habits of the lower nature. We are frequently engaged in various forms of self-sabotage in this manner. Prayer is naturally what I find as the best tool for instilling the spirit of courage to resist the constantly tempting lower nature. For ex. we could inscribe Psalm 23 onto our hearts and have it at the ready.

The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
for the sake of His name.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.

In general, in terms of preparation exercises, I doubt that looking at a flame, or thinking of it, can have a calming effect for me. The rare times I felt I needed to calm down, what I found extremely effective is the Klocek-inspired exercise of intently observing a simple object for a few minutes. I was amazed how drastically effective it was, maybe it can work similarly for others too. In this connection, the “Is this I?” exercise sounds ideal for me, even as a 'main exercise' in line with the previously mentioned attempts to ‘delocalize’, or expand, from the physical body, by thinking of it from a supposedly external perspective. I will paste here Cleric’s version, the Will-Feeling-Thinking calibration exercise. I hadn’t paid enough attention to it when it was posted, thanks for the appropriate reminder!

Right, well it's all about experimentation and trial-error in this domain. There are practically infinite ways to approach it so we should find a routine which is suited to our individual needs and circumstances, perhaps throwing in some variation at times along the way if it starts to feel too monotonous. I'm very interested to hear how things progress for you with these exercises, which I am sure that I can learn from as well.

[Federica]

Another quite humbling experience I’ve had just this morning upon waking up, is this. I was thinking about the candle flame, which led me to the recent memory of staring at the flames in a big fireplace, intensely burning throughout all the logs. As I was visualizing the memory, the light suddenly became many times brighter, like an incredibly strong revolving sphere of light, becoming brighter and brighter. Confronted with this, all I could do was to be scared and 'look away', interrupting the thought. Yet another demonstration of how much of a complete beginner I still am, lacking even the minimal level of courage to remain there, and how much I need to work and exercise.

Federica,

That's an interesting occurrence and I would say it is a sign of progress. What you describe is a very familiar experience for me as well. I have frequently felt a sort of recoiling away when my concentration deepens to the point where light-phenomena are manifesting intensely within the inner volume, or generally when the thought-concentration takes on a life of its own, as it were. This should be an indication to us that we are actually managing to develop our germinal astral senses. Imagine someone suddenly showed up at your house and transported you to a facility where you were placed into a rocket and launched into the Earth's upper atmosphere without much preparation. It is only natural to lack courage and long for the firm ground of the Earth in such a situation!

With devoted preparation, we will eventually acclimate ourselves to the higher strata of consciousness, although it will continue to be an ongoing work. I have even noticed how, when things seem to be going the most smoothly for my spiritual practice, is exactly when I take it for granted, let the guard down, and slip back into old conditioned habits of the lower nature. We are frequently engaged in various forms of self-sabotage in this manner. Prayer is naturally what I find as the best tool for instilling the spirit of courage to resist the constantly tempting lower nature. For ex. we could inscribe Psalm 23 onto our hearts and have it at the ready.

The LORD is my shepherd;
I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
for the sake of His name.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil;
For You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You anoint my head with oil;
My cup runs over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
All the days of my life;
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord
Forever.

In general, in terms of preparation exercises, I doubt that looking at a flame, or thinking of it, can have a calming effect for me. The rare times I felt I needed to calm down, what I found extremely effective is the Klocek-inspired exercise of intently observing a simple object for a few minutes. I was amazed how drastically effective it was, maybe it can work similarly for others too. In this connection, the “Is this I?” exercise sounds ideal for me, even as a 'main exercise' in line with the previously mentioned attempts to ‘delocalize’, or expand, from the physical body, by thinking of it from a supposedly external perspective. I will paste here Cleric’s version, the Will-Feeling-Thinking calibration exercise. I hadn’t paid enough attention to it when it was posted, thanks for the appropriate reminder!

Right, well it's all about experimentation and trial-error in this domain. There are practically infinite ways to approach it so we should find a routine which is suited to our individual needs and circumstances, perhaps throwing in some variation at times along the way if it starts to feel too monotonous. I'm very interested to hear how things progress for you with these exercises, which I am sure that I can learn from as well.

Thanks for the suggestions, Ashvin. I have actually come to much appreciate the moments of prayer, that are probably the only thing I 'naturally' stick to, and do every day. As for the exercises, there are so many... it's necessary to create a reasonable routine, as you say. I haven't been systematic so far, but now I really feel I want, and have to, get organized. The 'problem' for me is that when I sit down with the intention to do a concentration exercise, nothing ever happens. I do the vowel exercise, not every day, but frequently. I feel I get better at it, managing the ‘breath interference’ well, most often it feels fluid, but that's it. (I know expectations are not helpful. This is not the mindset I have, and I quite enjoy the exercise).
Still, the few times something of a different quality has happened, as yesterday with the visualization of light, I was just thinking. Intensely thinking, maybe with eyes closed, but without any 'exercising intention', only lifted by very good will and feelings. But I keep in mind how perseverance and method would count in the long run. Sure, I will tell you what exercises or meditations I incorporate and how it goes!