The World as Illusion

[Anthony66]

In the time-stamped video:

Steiner goes through various models of perception but as he wraps up he states:

As thought is brought to life, it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is to be sure experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process.

How do we understand his use of "objective" here?

[AshvinP]

In the time-stamped video:

Steiner goes through various models of perception but as he wraps up he states:

As thought is brought to life, it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is to be sure experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process.

How do we understand his use of "objective" here?

Anthony,

We call something "objective" when it lawfully fits into the order of natural processes, and when that lawful integration can be observed and verified by many people (but not necessarily all people - many objective verifications require technical skill acquired through inner effort) . The aim of spiritual training is to begin discerning how our own thinking activity lawfully fits into that order. With ordinary reasoning, such as Steiner goes through in that chapter, we can logically discern that our spiritual activity must lawfully fit into the order of nature somehow - after all, it's a product of that order and is always participating in that order. Yet we can't discern exactly how it fits in as long as the thinking ego experiences itself to be enclosed within boundaries, forced to only know itself as abstract pictures and concepts. Every time it tries to capture itself in the latter, it changes and becomes something different; it is the only phenomena we are conscious of which evolves in real-time, in every moment we try to observe it.

Through spiritual training, we orient our activity within the concentric Ego-perspectives in which ours is nested - all our "I"-perspectives share the same 'center' but encompass different 'radii' of ideal activity. It is those higher Ego-perspectives which can behold our activity as an objective phenomena (yet not separate from themselves), like we can behold our own mental pictures. The spiritual activity of these concentric perspectives is the inner dimension of all the natural and cultural phenomena, the outer physiognomy, which we call 'objective'. We begin to discern how the perceptual spectrum flows through these concentric perspectives and therefore our own, through various convolutions, in the process of becoming manifest to our objective consciousness. This transpersonal intra-subjective process of spiritual activity then becomes known as the precondition for 'objectivity' in the manifest world. In that sense, we can transcend the subjective-objective duality of normal cognition. Then we don't only have fragmented domains of the manifest world which can be objectively identified, but the these domains can also be understood through their inner WFT nature as a harmonious whole in continuous becoming.

[Cleric K]

Steiner goes through various models of perception but as he wraps up he states:

As thought is brought to life, it emancipates the ego from a mere subjective existence. A process takes place that is to be sure experienced subjectively by the ego, but by its own nature is an objective process.

How do we understand his use of "objective" here?

Another angle to what Ashvin said.

This is most easily understood if we put our materialistic hat. In that case we conceive of an objective state of the world. Our subjective experience is how aspects of that state feel like (materialistic monism).

Imagine a computer analogy. The computer is the full objective world process, of which our brain is a part. For some reason our subjective experience grasps only some pixels of the screen. Nevertheless, these pixels can be what they are only when the workings of the whole computer are taken into account.

Today science believes that we can know the inner workings of the computer by building pixel-models on the screen (theories made of mental images) and correlate them with other pixels (those that we call sensory perceptions). It is clear that even if we make these theories by imagining ourselves to stand outside reality, these states of theoretical imagination are themselves still part of the objective state of the total computer. That is, we shouldn't confuse 'subjective' to mean 'independent of the world process'.

When we speak of the computer like this, we simply make more convoluted pixel arrangements on the screen. Thus we distinguish our mental representation of the world computer on the screen from the computer-in-itself. The important point however, is that these subjective representations are nevertheless how the objective world process feels like (that is, they don't belong to some parallel subjective universe).

Today's science and philosophy believe that this is all we can ever do - arrange mental pixels in different configurations and correlate them with other pixels (sensory perceptions). But if some aspects of the objective world process feel like subjective experience, why shouldn't it be possible that if that process is harmonized in specific ways, even more of it could be experienced as coherent subjectivity? If aspects of the world process can be experienced as mental pixels, why shouldn't it be possible that, for example, the electric currents that energize the pixels and which are undoubtedly also part of the objective world process, could themselves be experienced as unique subjective qualia?

Through proper transformation of our spiritual conduct it is possible that the currents that energize the pixels, can also become part of the subjective experience (which leads also to novel DoFs of spiritual activity). They key here is that this expansion of consciousness is not the inflation of a personal bubble where pixels reverberate but the experience of the actual objective world process of the electric currents.

To put it simply:
1. Our subjective states are how the objective world/brain states feel like.
2. We have two options:
a/ to build more and more complicated structures of mental pixels which make models of the supposed objective state. This of course doesn't happen in a parallel subjective universe - everything is still how the objective world/brain feels like.
b/ to expand the subjective experience to include deeper processes of the objective world/brain.

This is why the experience is subjective while at the same time this subjectivity is not a virtual bubble outside reality but is the experience of the objective world state. Thus spiritual cognition doesn't create a bubble of fantasy but grows into the objective world process, such that more of that process can experience itself subjectively.

[Anthony66]

Thanks Ashvin and Cleric. Both those explanations make sense and are very helpful.