Through unprejudiced logical reasoning, they have abstractly (outwardly) penetrated very deep into these dynamics and reached sound conclusions. IM even mentions the 'inversion horizon' that we often speak of here. He has philosophically reasoned out that the proper relation is that the fluid, temporal Idea structures the static, fixed physical perceptions. Of course that is nothing new, but he supplements it with the findings of cutting edge neuroscience. Most of us are familiar with Hoffman, who is on a similar path as IM except pursuing the structure of consciousness mathematically. He probably comes the closest to asserting that all is spiritual activity (what he calls qualitative conscious activity-experience) and we can investigate the mathematical structure of this activity and how it projects into the phenomenal spatio-temporal world we are familiar with.
What is conspicuously missing, however, is the role of the ideational Ego which uses the lower etheric configuration space (formative forces) as its instrument. The inevitable result is that the human organism is conceived more and more like an instinctive animal or a mindless machine or a set of mathematical formulas, or, in the case of IM, the supra-human intelligences who ideate our existence are kept as remote unknowable entities. As we often remark here, first-person thinking is left completely in the blind spot and that is always the sorely missing piece of the puzzle. Or, rather, it is the missing cipher which would allow the string of these heavily encoded insights to be decoded and woven into a coherent and holistic tapestry of spiritual evolution. It would allow the thinkers who are in this discussion to further awaken from within their dream-like philosophical and scientific activity into the realms of Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive thinking. The inevitable result of that awakening would be spiritual science.
Below I am sharing some time stamped clips from the discussion and corresponding quotes from Steiner's lectures, given 100 or more years ago, which already pointed towards the living inner explanations for their outward insights. I am sure there are even better quotes which are more on point, but I went with the first or second relevant ones that I found. I am also sure I could have continued with this exercise indefinitely through the TOE video. The point is not to fully understand what Steiner is speaking of or accept anything that was written as dogma or belief. That will not be possible without much further study and practice, and will not be valuable for freely strengthening our inner spiritual activity either. The point is only to discern how healthy logical reasoning in these circles of leading intellectual thinkers naturally leads one to the threshold of spiritual science, where the work to know the world in its living inner dynamics just begins. At this threshold, however, an entirely new effort is needed to move from the outer physiognomy of our sensory observations and our insightful philosophical and scientific concepts to the inner experience of that activity which weaves those concepts and to which those concepts are always pointing us. The higher order configuration spaces simply cannot be experienced through building up and rearranging concepts within the lower ones.
Levin
36 min - 'collective intelligence of groups of cells are able to deploy considerable sophistication and novelty'
Steiner wrote:If one would only observe how the soul gradually emerges after age seven — the Waldorf School teachers must observe it, for their whole teaching and education is based upon it — one would immediately understand in which direction one has to look in order to answer the question: Where was the element of intelligence that emerges after the seventh year? Where was it concealed? It was within the body; it was active in the organism. The same element that emancipates itself at age seven and turns into intelligence was within the body, was forming the body, and the culmination point of its activity of shaping the body is reached when the second teeth appear. The power that thrusts itself into being with the second teeth has been active in the whole organism. It is, however, a power that is active in the body only up to the seventh year. After that it has nothing more to do with the body; it then becomes intelligence. It already was intelligence earlier; as such, however, it was at work in the body. Look at what takes place in the child's body up until the seventh year. Next, look at what the child has as intelligence after age seven. You are looking at the same thing. Through birth, intelligence descended. At first it was not active as intelligence, as soul being; it becomes active in this way gradually after the seventh year. Here you have a concrete view of the working together of the soul with the body. Now you are able to see what was mainly at work in the human body until age seven. You do not have the foolish abstract concepts, fabricated and put into our textbooks and handbooks, concerning the interaction of body and soul. You have the concrete views of what works throughout seven years in blood and nerves, in muscles and bones, and then becomes the child's intelligence.
42 min - 'evolution doesn't take the past as seriously as we tend to assume that it does... there needs to be a certain amount of plasticity, because living organisms can never count on the future being exactly like the past'
From all of this you will gather that what is active in the human organism in the opposite direction, in its coming into being, is that into which one ascends when rising in knowledge. You will perceive that in reality what we attain in imagination are the same powers which, without our being conscious of them, reveal themselves in the phenomena of growth, in the plastic phenomena of growth. If we ascend to inspiration, we come upon the forces which inspire man from without inwards in his breathing, which shape him through and through as he breathes, which shape themselves into the plastic forces as they work these forces through, to a degree. And if we ascend to intuition, we rise in reality to the primal mover (“Agens”) who enters into our plastic forms from the world without as substantial being.
You see, in this way we grasp the human being as he takes shape out of the Cosmos. If we now apply the knowledge which we have gained in one way or another through anatomy or physiology and illuminate it with what is given us here, then we begin to understand the organs and their functions.
46:30 min - 'cancer is a shrinking of the 'computational boundaries' between the self and the outside world, so when that boundary shrinks to the level of single cells, they treat the rest of the world as external environment.'
Quite briefly, I will give two examples that illustrate what I have said. Let us suppose that by means of this kind of spiritual diagnosis (if I may use such an expression) it is seen that in a patient the etheric body is working too strongly in some particular organ. The astral body and the Ego-organisation are not in a position to control this super-activity of the etheric body, so that we are faced with an astral body that has become too weak, and possibly also with an Ego which is too weak, and the etheric body therefore predominates. The latter thereby brings about in some particular organ such a condition of the growing and nourishing processes that the whole organism cannot be properly held together, owing to the lack of control by the other two principles.
At this point, then, where the etheric body predominates, the human organism appears as though too much exposed to the centrifugal forces of the Cosmos. They are not in equipoise with the centripetal forces of the physical body. The astral body cannot control them. In such a case we are confronted on the one hand by a preponderance of the silicic acid processes, and on the other by an impotence of the Ego to control them.
This fact underlies the formation of tumours, and it is here that the way is indicated for the true understanding of the nature of carcinomatous processes (cancer). Researches into this matter have had very good results and have been carried out in practice. But one cannot understand carcinoma unless one realises that it is due to the predominance of the etheric body, which is not suppressed by a corresponding activity of the astral and the Ego,
IM
43:30 min - 'Movement is the norm and stasis is the limit case, simplicity is the limit case of complexity.'
Already when we achieve Imaginative Knowledge — the knowledge that enables us to live in the etheric world instead of in the physical world, so that instead of physical things we perceive the activities (for activities they are) in the ether — already when this is achieved, three-dimensional Space as it is on Earth falls away from our field of experience. To speak of a three-dimensional space has no meaning, for we are then living in Time. Hence from from other standpoints I have spoken of the etheric body as a Time-organism. I have said, for example, that here, in the spatial organism, we have the head and, let us say, the leg; and if we sting or cut our leg the head will feel it. Spatially, in this spatial body, one organ is connected with the others. So in the time-body which consists in processes — processes in which everything lying in the deeper foundations of our human nature between birth and death are involved — every detail is connected with every other.
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Now as I have said, if one contemplates this simplicity which develops out of the complicated one has the feeling that this. line has to be completed in thought (dotted line). Simplicity is created from concealed complexity. Simplicity is what is seen outwardly, that is actually to in nature. Man has no appendix in the eye, and apparently no fan but if one could add to the physical eye the etheric, then there should be added that which in the lower organic beings is developed physically. Just in the same way as (see drawing) I had to add, the dotted line here, just as I had to build up that which is externally visible on the foundation of this by the dotted line, so the human eye in its simplicity, in its physical; simplicity is formed out of a complicated etheric eye-formation: the apparently simple physical out of the complicated etheric.
This is a proof to you that when we really grow into the inner form in the way that the metamorphosis of forms demands, we grow into the creative principle of nature herself. For then we understand for the first time how evolution progresses in nature, and here, dear friend; you can see how necessary it is in order to understand a certain inward power of development that we must learn to know nature not only in intellectual ideas but to grasp her forms with the imagination of the artist. This is the thing that you must realise as most important in every sense of the word. If one is to try in the way that science till now has done to get at nature with ideas and conceptions of an intellectual kind one will never grasp nature in her fullness of evolution. One will, only grasp nature in her fullness of evolution when one has built up in pictures and in imaginations what are otherwise intellectual ideas and so-called natural laws, for nature creates not in intellectual ideas but in pictures and in imaginations.
Hoffman
49 min- new paper on why 'spacetime is doomed'
Let us continue our studies of yesterday. I then drew your attention to the fact that at the present period in human thought we compress the whole world within abstract lines of space, standing perpendicular to one another and forming the three dimensions of space, whereas in its life aspect this three-dimensional world proves to be much more complicated and much more concrete. In order to gain an adequate conception of all that this means, we must grasp it in even greater definition.
We must ask the question: If it is true that our Thinking is to be associated with the vertical plane which cuts through our axis of symmetry, our Willing with the vertical plane which stands perpendicularly to the thought-plane, while the plane of Feeling rests at right angles to both — how is it that we do not experience above and below, right and left, in front and behind, as three directions distinct in quality from each other and not interchangeable? How is it that we simply feel them as three space dimensions of equal value? We certainly speak of length, breadth and height, but if we form our three planes in this way, each one resting vertically upon the other, we might place the line which was horizontal in the first instance in a vertical position, and the other two would then become horizontal. In short, we could make three different arrangements. This only shows that the exactitude with which these three dimensions are built into the human body, when it is being used by man to describe and explain the whole Universe with the Sun and the stars, is made quite abstract.
The question is important: How do we manage to obtain abstract space dimensions from concrete ones?
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Ancient man felt as he thus experienced himself in the three-divisioned space that the Divinity ruled in the threefoldness. The divine ruling in space directed man then to the divine in duration.
He experienced — and what I am saying now was actually experienced — he experienced in space the divine manifestation, ruling in threefold manner. It was the image in him of the threefold God: Father, Son and Spirit or by what other terms the three-membered God was known. Threefoldness is truly not thought out in the mind, is not an invention. The threefoldness with all its qualities was experienced in its reflection when ancient man experienced livingly the three dimensions of space.
And just as in a certain respect want of clearness can prevail about the above and below, just as right and left can also be before and behind, so in certain circumstances an uncertainty can also enter into the reciprocal relationships of God, Son, Spirit. In the sphere of the transitory, the sphere of space, man experienced the three dimensions concretely, not abstractly or geometrically as we do. And as he experienced concretely how the divine expressed itself in space, in the transitory, he therefore related the transitory to the element of duration; the three-dimensioned space became for him the reflected image of the three-dimensioned spirituality.
The idea of ancient man was approximately: If I live here below on earth I live in the threefoldness of space, but this is to me the reflected proof of the threefold nature of the divine origin of the world.