A Phenomenology of Cognition (Max Leyf)

[Cleric K]

Ok, I understand this is primarily meant to treat the recurring separate-self affliction. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a Tanguy syndrome of present-day humanity. Anyway, it’s wide-spread enough for its tackling to be justified even in the kind of general thread with curated exercises for the inner path (by the way, thanks again for this collection of exercises). Also, I haven’t yet read with full focus the rest of your post. I thought I would understand this right first. What follows is simply a comment from my particular perspective. I imagine I am not the only one experiencing language in this way.

For my part, I feel that percepts are the meeting point between concepts and language, rather than the other way around. I understand that for many it may be the opposite. I think this is because life has brought me in a context in which I continually change between multiple languages on a daily basis. I remember, long ago Cleric said this would help me get what a concept is, in terms of what stands out as common amidst the variation of possible translations. I never really felt that was working for me, and so I understood concepts the logical and phenomenological way, through PoF and its processing here on the forum.

And now I get why using multiple languages didn't give me any shortcuts to grasp the phenomenology of cognition. It's precisely because for me the sphere of language as a whole, with all its idioms in it, has loosened altogether. It's been lifted separate from the sphere of direct experience. For someone who primarily uses one language in everyday life, the word does feel solidly attached to the meaning, while the thought remains unseen in the blind spot. Then one can speculate: "If you reflect that the bond is actually not so univocal and strong - since there are all those alternative translations - you will loosen the one-to-one word-meaning connection and the concept will stand out from the sea of instances of observation that all carry the same word-label."

But for me there was not any one-to-one word-meaning connection left. Thinking was surely in the blind spot, still, languages couldn't be used as leverage to unstuck stuff at that level. No leverage, because language was already entirely loose for me. As you say, we should indeed remember the words are also audial-visual percepts (I explicitly mentioned that in the post above). This only means, the language-percepts are added percepts. It's an additional layer that comes to complement the layer of direct experience prior to language encoding. But I don't think that in general we are "so intimately familiar with the nature of language". As long as we only use one, language remains in the blindspot. But with a sufficiently long simultaneous practice of multiple languages, one gets to see the added layer of meaning communicated through individual languages. Not so much that there are different shades of meaning between words of different languages (rouge, rot, red, all point to the exact same shade of meaning, since there is only one concept of redness). In my opinion it's rather at the level of the ideas - how concepts are combined together to create more complex dynamics of meaning - that the diversity of human languages plays a role, reflecting the diversity of ethical characters.

So maybe the exercise works as you indicate for those who experience meaning and word as one, but other than that, I feel it may backfire, in the sense that it may undo some of the progress made through posts like this, in the direction of better understanding intellect, through the encoding quality of language.

It's interesting to think about something like this https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/ho ... see-colour
To me, these are questions that need further elucidation, but such experiments suggest that our linguistic conceptual slots go much, much deeper than we imagine. Thus we shouldn't that easily conceive that our perceptions are fully objective facts that are only outlined by words.

This is really hard to comprehend for color. It seems unthinkable that the way our cognition has been developed makes us see colors differently. It's somewhat more conceivable when we take music, for example. If we develop our musical skills we begin to notice that songs that we have heard many times, begin to sound differently. It's simply that the inner gestures that we have developed begin to recognize themselves in certain auditory perceptions. We begin to distinguish the different instruments, the chord progressions, and so on.

[Federica]

It's interesting to think about something like this https://gondwana-collection.com/blog/ho ... see-colour
To me, these are questions that need further elucidation, but such experiments suggest that our linguistic conceptual slots go much, much deeper than we imagine. Thus we shouldn't that easily conceive that our perceptions are fully objective facts that are only outlined by words.

This is really hard to comprehend for color. It seems unthinkable that the way our cognition has been developed makes us see colors differently. It's somewhat more conceivable when we take music, for example. If we develop our musical skills we begin to notice that songs that we have heard many times, begin to sound differently. It's simply that the inner gestures that we have developed begin to recognize themselves in certain auditory perceptions. We begin to distinguish the different instruments, the chord progressions, and so on.

"we shouldn't that easily conceive that our perceptions are fully objective facts that are only outlined by words"

Yes, I wouldn't take any perception as objective. I wouldn't take words as an outline of perceptions either. I would take them as result of the interplay between the concept of, say, red (which I believe is universal) plus all other universal concepts that may be jointly experienced and the particular patterns of intuitive curvatures that characterize a given human culture, ethnicity, family, individual, that constrains in turn an oriented range of perceptual experiences. I would say that there is one universal concept of redness, to be extracted from a huge variety of combining percepts (including many shades of the color red), but the concept of red is always inevitably experienced in combination with much else, within each frame of the world groove, which I believe explains differences in color experiences such as the ones in the article linked above.


"This is really hard to comprehend for color. It seems unthinkable that the way our cognition has been developed makes us see colors differently."


It's not so difficult, I believe. On the one hand it's really easy to see the non objectivity of (color) perceptions. I can think about the videos about Goethe's color theory, or even about the optical illusion illustration in Bernardo's last essay. On the other hand, one has to recall that perceptions are nested within thinking, not on the other side if it. Still, it's hard for me to comprehend how the encoding in words comes about, to give rise to particular sounds and forms, and not others, in various human cultures and languages.

[AshvinP]

(...)
Language is practically the meeting point between percept and concept at our current stage of evolution since most people think through the mediation of the inner voice. That is why I would say it is the most directly approachable way to distinguish the two in a phenomenological way. We don't need to necessarily understand the various languages to grasp the idea that they encode the common knowing experience, since we are so intimately familiar with the nature of language. That being said, it doesn't hurt to also think through the varied imagistic percepts, such as sketches, photos, etc., or the various scenarios you mention for the concept of redness (we should remember the words are also audial-visual percepts). It seems to me that focusing on particular word percepts helps isolate the meaningful conceptual quality more, whereas that quality is intermingled with many others and therefore takes on varied shades of meaning in any given natural context. There are different shades of meaning between words of different languages as well, but less so.

Ok, I understand this is primarily meant to treat the recurring separate-self affliction. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a Tanguy syndrome of present-day humanity. Anyway, it’s wide-spread enough for its tackling to be justified even in the kind of general thread with curated exercises for the inner path (by the way, thanks again for this collection of exercises). Also, I haven’t yet read with full focus the rest of your post. I thought I would understand this right first. What follows is simply a comment from my particular perspective. I imagine I am not the only one experiencing language in this way.

For my part, I feel that percepts are the meeting point between concepts and language, rather than the other way around. I understand that for many it may be the opposite. I think this is because life has brought me in a context in which I continually change between multiple languages on a daily basis. I remember, long ago Cleric said this would help me get what a concept is, in terms of what stands out as common amidst the variation of possible translations. I never really felt that was working for me, and so I understood concepts the logical and phenomenological way, through PoF and its processing here on the forum.

And now I get why using multiple languages didn't give me any shortcuts to grasp the phenomenology of cognition. It's precisely because for me the sphere of language as a whole, with all its idioms in it, has loosened altogether. It's been lifted separate from the sphere of direct experience. For someone who primarily uses one language in everyday life, the word does feel solidly attached to the meaning, while the thought remains unseen in the blind spot. Then one can speculate: "If you reflect that the bond is actually not so univocal and strong - since there are all those alternative translations - you will loosen the one-to-one word-meaning connection and the concept will stand out from the sea of instances of observation that all carry the same word-label."

But for me there was not any one-to-one word-meaning connection left. Thinking was surely in the blind spot, still, languages couldn't be used as leverage to unstuck stuff at that level. No leverage, because language was already entirely loose for me. As you say, we should indeed remember the words are also audial-visual percepts (I explicitly mentioned that in the post above). This only means, the language-percepts are added percepts. It's an additional layer that comes to complement the layer of direct experience prior to language encoding. But I don't think that in general we are "so intimately familiar with the nature of language". As long as we only use one, language remains in the blindspot. But with a sufficiently long simultaneous practice of multiple languages, one gets to see the added layer of meaning communicated through individual languages. Not so much that there are different shades of meaning between words of different languages (rouge, rot, red, all point to the exact same shade of meaning, since there is only one concept of redness). In my opinion it's rather at the level of the ideas - how concepts are combined together to create more complex dynamics of meaning - that the diversity of human languages plays a role, reflecting the diversity of ethnic characters.

So maybe the exercise works as you indicate for those who experience meaning and word as one, but other than that, I feel it may backfire, in the sense that it may undo some of the progress made through posts like this, in the direction of better understanding intellect, through the encoding quality of language.

I can't speak to your personal experience and feeling for these things, of course. At the same time, we are speaking of archetypal soul constellations that are common to nearly all people in the age of the consciousness soul.

It is perhaps better expressed that we are intimately familiar with the nature of signs and symbols as perceptual portals to supersensible meaning. We can intuitively resonate with the logical structure of linguistic metamorphoses more easily than feeling or sensory metamorphoses. That is precisely because our thinking lives in the imagistic metamorphoses of the soul space which are encoded as language. In that sense, our thinking can resonate to some extent with the ideal basis of all languages (including mathematical and musical) even if we haven't learned a particular one. 

For ex., people can generally differentiate between a coherent language and a nonsensical string of letters/words, even if they have not learned to think/speak through the particular languages. We can perhaps test this out by trying to identify the nonsensical sentence from the following:

(1) Trí tưởng tượng vượt qua ngôn ngữ.

(2) Уява перевершує мову.

(3) Haayla ilasur gücdüsu.

(4) Mawazo yanapita lugha.

It seems to me that the nonsensical option would be picked out by the average literate person with more than a 25% chance. We don't have a big sample size here, but maybe we can see what happens if a few people guess at it. Another example is mathematics:





Most people probably have no idea what these mean, but can sense it means something of significance that can be reached through active thinking effort. In other words, they sense it is a language that has been intentionally condensed from intuitive movements through ideal relations. 

In any case, the inner path is about moving through the most intimate portal of the linguistic and imagistic space to the ideal basis of the feeling and sensory life, which we discover in an altogether different direction from the meaning we experience when reflecting on feelings and sensory experience. Even when we pictorially think through the tasks we want to accomplish in the day, we shouldn't imagine we are now weaving in the soul space of imagistic metamorphoses. The latter is only reached through experience of the soul constraints on our pictorial and linguistic thinking. In that sense, the linguistic forms of language are much more proximate to supersensible currents of meaning than pictorial forms we are familiar with from the natural world, in terms of our intuitive resonance. The sensory constraints are of a much higher spiritual order.

Why does this matter in the phenomenological approach? Part 2 of Cleric's essays addresses that up front:

Self-consciousness dawns when we recognize ourselves as a spiritual force that, so to speak, can raise its head above the flow of necessity. This is first achieved in a dim dream-like manner through instinctive pursuit of what feels sympathetic, and avoidance of the antipathetic. Then at a later stage, this activity reaches higher lucidity when memory afterimages of experiences begin to be lifted and we find ourselves capable of intuiting their relations. One of the consequences of this is that we begin to grasp our existence through time, we feel ourselves as a being that persists through time by encompassing the memory images of our previous states and anticipating the images of future states. When these images become contracted into symbolic representations, we arrive at our familiar thinking. At this point, the ‘distance’ between what we do as intuitive activity, and what we behold as the engraved phenomena of mental images, becomes so small that the latter feels like a faithful mirror of our intents.

The universal concept of 'redness' (reflected in the forms of sensory experience) is not very proximate to what we do as intuitive activity, while the encoded linguistic forms of the 'redness' experience are closer to that intuitive activity. We can more easily sense how the soul space constrains our thinking into those forms and, as you have shown through your life context, more easily loosen and manage those constraints so our imaginative life can be expressed in a variety of linguistic forms depending on our ideal circumstances and aims.

PS - For clarity, it is probably best to refer to anything that can be thought about, including linguistic concepts, as percepts or perceptions, and the supersensible meaning experienced in relation to them as intuition.

[Federica]

(...)
Language is practically the meeting point between percept and concept at our current stage of evolution since most people think through the mediation of the inner voice. That is why I would say it is the most directly approachable way to distinguish the two in a phenomenological way. We don't need to necessarily understand the various languages to grasp the idea that they encode the common knowing experience, since we are so intimately familiar with the nature of language. That being said, it doesn't hurt to also think through the varied imagistic percepts, such as sketches, photos, etc., or the various scenarios you mention for the concept of redness (we should remember the words are also audial-visual percepts). It seems to me that focusing on particular word percepts helps isolate the meaningful conceptual quality more, whereas that quality is intermingled with many others and therefore takes on varied shades of meaning in any given natural context. There are different shades of meaning between words of different languages as well, but less so.

Ok, I understand this is primarily meant to treat the recurring separate-self affliction. The more I think about it, the more I believe this is a Tanguy syndrome of present-day humanity. Anyway, it’s wide-spread enough for its tackling to be justified even in the kind of general thread with curated exercises for the inner path (by the way, thanks again for this collection of exercises). Also, I haven’t yet read with full focus the rest of your post. I thought I would understand this right first. What follows is simply a comment from my particular perspective. I imagine I am not the only one experiencing language in this way.

For my part, I feel that percepts are the meeting point between concepts and language, rather than the other way around. I understand that for many it may be the opposite. I think this is because life has brought me in a context in which I continually change between multiple languages on a daily basis. I remember, long ago Cleric said this would help me get what a concept is, in terms of what stands out as common amidst the variation of possible translations. I never really felt that was working for me, and so I understood concepts the logical and phenomenological way, through PoF and its processing here on the forum.

And now I get why using multiple languages didn't give me any shortcuts to grasp the phenomenology of cognition. It's precisely because for me the sphere of language as a whole, with all its idioms in it, has loosened altogether. It's been lifted separate from the sphere of direct experience. For someone who primarily uses one language in everyday life, the word does feel solidly attached to the meaning, while the thought remains unseen in the blind spot. Then one can speculate: "If you reflect that the bond is actually not so univocal and strong - since there are all those alternative translations - you will loosen the one-to-one word-meaning connection and the concept will stand out from the sea of instances of observation that all carry the same word-label."

But for me there was not any one-to-one word-meaning connection left. Thinking was surely in the blind spot, still, languages couldn't be used as leverage to unstuck stuff at that level. No leverage, because language was already entirely loose for me. As you say, we should indeed remember the words are also audial-visual percepts (I explicitly mentioned that in the post above). This only means, the language-percepts are added percepts. It's an additional layer that comes to complement the layer of direct experience prior to language encoding. But I don't think that in general we are "so intimately familiar with the nature of language". As long as we only use one, language remains in the blindspot. But with a sufficiently long simultaneous practice of multiple languages, one gets to see the added layer of meaning communicated through individual languages. Not so much that there are different shades of meaning between words of different languages (rouge, rot, red, all point to the exact same shade of meaning, since there is only one concept of redness). In my opinion it's rather at the level of the ideas - how concepts are combined together to create more complex dynamics of meaning - that the diversity of human languages plays a role, reflecting the diversity of ethnic characters.

So maybe the exercise works as you indicate for those who experience meaning and word as one, but other than that, I feel it may backfire, in the sense that it may undo some of the progress made through posts like this, in the direction of better understanding intellect, through the encoding quality of language.

I can't speak to your personal experience and feeling for these things, of course. At the same time, we are speaking of archetypal soul constellations that are common to nearly all people in the age of the consciousness soul.

It is perhaps better expressed that we are intimately familiar with the nature of signs and symbols as perceptual portals to supersensible meaning. We can intuitively resonate with the logical structure of linguistic metamorphoses more easily than feeling or sensory metamorphoses. That is precisely because our thinking lives in the imagistic metamorphoses of the soul space which are encoded as language. In that sense, our thinking can resonate to some extent with the ideal basis of all languages (including mathematical and musical) even if we haven't learned a particular one. 

For ex., people can generally differentiate between a coherent language and a nonsensical string of letters/words, even if they have not learned to think/speak through the particular languages. We can perhaps test this out by trying to identify the nonsensical sentence from the following:

(1) Trí tưởng tượng vượt qua ngôn ngữ.

(2) Уява перевершує мову.

(3) Haayla ilasur gücdüsu.

(4) Mawazo yanapita lugha.

It seems to me that the nonsensical option would be picked out by the average literate person with more than a 25% chance. We don't have a big sample size here, but maybe we can see what happens if a few people guess at it. Another example is mathematics:





Most people probably have no idea what these mean, but can sense it means something of significance that can be reached through active thinking effort. In other words, they sense it is a language that has been intentionally condensed from intuitive movements through ideal relations. 

In any case, the inner path is about moving through the most intimate portal of the linguistic and imagistic space to the ideal basis of the feeling and sensory life, which we discover in an altogether different direction from the meaning we experience when reflecting on feelings and sensory experience. Even when we pictorially think through the tasks we want to accomplish in the day, we shouldn't imagine we are now weaving in the soul space of imagistic metamorphoses. The latter is only reached through experience of the soul constraints on our pictorial and linguistic thinking. In that sense, the linguistic forms of language are much more proximate to supersensible currents of meaning than pictorial forms we are familiar with from the natural world, in terms of our intuitive resonance. The sensory constraints are of a much higher spiritual order.

Why does this matter in the phenomenological approach? Part 2 of Cleric's essays addresses that up front:

Self-consciousness dawns when we recognize ourselves as a spiritual force that, so to speak, can raise its head above the flow of necessity. This is first achieved in a dim dream-like manner through instinctive pursuit of what feels sympathetic, and avoidance of the antipathetic. Then at a later stage, this activity reaches higher lucidity when memory afterimages of experiences begin to be lifted and we find ourselves capable of intuiting their relations. One of the consequences of this is that we begin to grasp our existence through time, we feel ourselves as a being that persists through time by encompassing the memory images of our previous states and anticipating the images of future states. When these images become contracted into symbolic representations, we arrive at our familiar thinking. At this point, the ‘distance’ between what we do as intuitive activity, and what we behold as the engraved phenomena of mental images, becomes so small that the latter feels like a faithful mirror of our intents.

The universal concept of 'redness' (reflected in the forms of sensory experience) is not very proximate to what we do as intuitive activity, while the encoded linguistic forms of the 'redness' experience are closer to that intuitive activity. We can more easily sense how the soul space constrains our thinking into those forms and, as you have shown through your life context, more easily loosen and manage those constraints so our imaginative life can be expressed in a variety of linguistic forms depending on our ideal circumstances and aims.

PS - For clarity, it is probably best to refer to anything that can be thought about, including linguistic concepts, as percepts or perceptions, and the supersensible meaning experienced in relation to them as intuition.

Hmm.. it gets complicated for me here. Maybe my impression of being closer to percepts than to words has another explanation, that I will get later on. What I'm sure about is that, even before knowing anything about this path, I always considered language as an added layer, not one with perception or reality. Maybe it's not because of my everyday language habits. I would like to inquire with people who have been exposed to, and learned, 2-3 languages since birth. I am not such a person, but I was taught Latin from age three, in a methodical way, which is yet a different case, that could account for some unusual language impressions. Also, I have few reflective memories from a time where I could not yet speak and walk, or at least so I believe. Therefore, I've always had some sense (surely distorted, but at least some sense) of what language brings on top of experience. This being said, I also understand that all these musings may be misled, and I have a hard time grasping in some fruitful way the "ideal basis of all languages". I guess I should accept that I'll get that another time.

But thanks for the quiz - it's interesting! I only have one reservation. None of these strings seems nonsensical. I don't know if you made up the fake one, but all four strings respond to some human language logic, and are readable. A really nonsensical one would be the kind of string produced by, say, a password generator. So one could argue that even the fake one actually responds to some intuitive linguistic logic. It's clearly not random. If you made it, your own linguistic logic is expressed. With this said, If I had to guess, I would say the fourth is fake. I am very insecure, though. There is no clear intuition. So which one is it?

Regarding the mathematical formulas, it really gets too complicated for me. It seems to me a sort of multi-level type of language that spans larger than idiomatic language. It seems it's only partly an encoding of soul movements and partly an encoding of something else. Correspondingly - granted that one recognizes the presence of some meaning encapsulated in the signs - changing couple of symbols in the formulas would make them entirely meaningless, still it would be impossible to detect through intuition (in a way similar to the language strings).

I have not yet read Cleric's new essay, coming to it next!

[Federica]

The universal concept of 'redness' (reflected in the forms of sensory experience) is not very proximate to what we do as intuitive activity, while the encoded linguistic forms of the 'redness' experience are closer to that intuitive activity. We can more easily sense how the soul space constrains our thinking into those forms and, as you have shown through your life context, more easily loosen and manage those constraints so our imaginative life can be expressed in a variety of linguistic forms depending on our ideal circumstances and aims.

No I don't sense the soul space constraints that lead to "red" rather than to "rot", how they are different, how they constrain the linguistic form. It's like I have mapped out my intuitive activity to a larger spectrum of linguistic form that I can merge with, and choose from, but I am still responding to constraints I don't see through. All I was saying is that I don't mistake a word for a concept, because language feels like a loose superstructure anyway. I am really struggling with this whole topic!

And the quote from Cleric is not clear: If I make my thought the object of my engraving, what is the small 'distance' that remains'? And what is this path of progression towards making it smaller and smaller? Wasn't it the other way around?

[AshvinP]

The universal concept of 'redness' (reflected in the forms of sensory experience) is not very proximate to what we do as intuitive activity, while the encoded linguistic forms of the 'redness' experience are closer to that intuitive activity. We can more easily sense how the soul space constrains our thinking into those forms and, as you have shown through your life context, more easily loosen and manage those constraints so our imaginative life can be expressed in a variety of linguistic forms depending on our ideal circumstances and aims.

No I don't sense the soul space constraints that lead to "red" rather than to "rot", how they are different, how they constrain the linguistic form. It's like I have mapped out my intuitive activity to a larger spectrum of linguistic form that I can merge with, and choose from, but I am still responding to constraints I don't see through. All I was saying is that I don't mistake a word for a concept, because language feels like a loose superstructure anyway. I am really struggling with this whole topic!

And the quote from Cleric is not clear: If I make my thought the object of my engraving, what is the small 'distance' that remains'? And what is this path of progression towards making it smaller and smaller? Wasn't it the other way around?

Perhaps you are just overthinking it. Let's take the movie example from Part 1.

The metaphor tries to draw our attention to the basic characteristics of the movie of existence. We live in continuous metamorphosis of our perspective of the World state which we experience as ‘playback’ of the movie. At the same time, we can ‘write back’ to the World state through our meaningful intents. These intents meet various degrees of resistance, as if we can impart only so much momentum to the needle.

If this metaphor is not to remain an abstract floating conception, we need to enter the concrete inner experiences of which the metaphor is only an expression. The best way we can do this is by attaining a more intimate experience of our thinking process. As a simple example, we can try morphing our inner voice through vowels using different speeds and intonations while trying to experience as tightly as possible what we’re doing. Not philosophizing about it but trying to be lucidly unified with our activity that impresses sounds in the World state.

Such thinking experiences are the clearest example of something in the movie flow for which we have intimate knowledge. It is as if most of the movie is driven by unknown laws and intentions but for the very small part at the tip of our needle, we feel to be the movie director. We have direct intuition for the way our inner voice metamorphoses. We have a sense of being creatively responsible for the constraints within which this part of the movie unfolds. We are just like a movie director who sees his own movie and feels, “These lines were my idea. I know what I was trying to artistically express, and I know in what direction it will go.”

So if we're following the movie metaphor for our intuitive activity, the intuitive idea you had for the movie as director/writer is faithfully reflected in the lines of dialogue for various human characters - the perceptual metamorphoses of that dialog are following the curvature of the overall plot you intended. Now let's say the plot of your movie also requires birds as characters. On set, the birds are chirping back and forth with each other. You would not resonate as much with the constraints that shape the chirping dialogue, correct? We could loosely analogize a bird chirping to our experience of hearing single letter sounds, "b", "t", "p", etc. There is some dim resonance because we can relate to the ideal life of animals - the instincts and passions that animate their behavior and sounds, but even that experience is greatly dimmed down by our intellectual linguistic life. We cognize these impulsive soul constraints in so far as they fit into our linguistic molds.

Furthermore, if there is a babbling brook, a thunderstorm, gushing wind, and so forth in the movie, that's more like hearing white noise in terms of the intuitive intent that is reflected in the perceptual transformations. In this domain, we can only approximate the ideal basis by thinking through how they fit into a much larger ecosystem of plants, animals, and humans that undergo transformations over long stretches of time in order to regulate natural rhythms of development in a harmonious way. Then we would arrive at a still extremely dim idea of the purposeful life that animates these perceptual transformations. Compare that to the movie dialog where a few isolated lines will already speak something meaningful to us about the intuitive intent of the movie plot. You intuitively know the sort of ideal life that intended the plot and how it was constrained by certain interests and preferences, even if this intuition cannot be articulated in clear-cut concepts.

What we are really focusing on here is the sequential transformations of the dialog, the implicit logical structure that explains its metamorphoses, rather than the sounds or visual appearance of any particular words (although we may even start intuitively connecting these with various soul gestures eventually, as Steiner does in his lectures).

What I'm sure about is that, even before knowing anything about this path, I always considered language as an added layer, not one with perception or reality.

I think we spoke before about distinguishing the sense of insight from the sense of concrete reality. I hope it's clear how the linguistic life is generally how we gain insight into the ideal basis of the perceptual flow. By doing exercises like kinesthetic pictorial thinking, we bring more of the concrete sense of reality into our normal thought life. Conversely, by concentrating on thought-images, we bring more lucid insight into the perceptual flow of feeling and sensation, the latter start taking on more of a cognitive character (see Part 2 example of thinking through the nudges).

So language can be considered an 'added layer' on the sense of concrete reality in relation to feelings, desires, sensations, but it is exactly that added layer that brings us closer to true insight into the ideal basis of that perceptual flow. As we have mentioned before, the perceptual flow of our inner voice is immediately united with its meaning while we have to reflect on the meaning of feelings and sensations. That unity is expanded further through concentration into more holistic cognitions in which the sequential inner voice is embedded (see Part 2).

[Federica]

We can perhaps test this out by trying to identify the nonsensical sentence from the following:

(1) Trí tưởng tượng vượt qua ngôn ngữ.

(2) Уява перевершує мову.

(3) Haayla ilasur gücdüsu.

(4) Mawazo yanapita lugha.

I got it wrong........
Maybe the discord server could be a good place to test this on a sample > 1 (certainly my secret hope it's that nobody has a cue and the result is 25%)

[AshvinP]

We can perhaps test this out by trying to identify the nonsensical sentence from the following:

(1) Trí tưởng tượng vượt qua ngôn ngữ.

(2) Уява перевершує мову.

(3) Haayla ilasur gücdüsu.

(4) Mawazo yanapita lugha.

I got it wrong........
Maybe the discord server could be a good place to test this on a sample > 1 (certainly my secret hope it's that nobody has a cue and the result is 25%)

I think you are right it isn't a good example. It really tests the upper limits of intuitive linguistic resonance, if anything. The password key generator is a more clear example of the underlying principle.

I heard somewhere that this principle was studied experimentally, but I couldn't locate the relevant studies through a quick search.

[Federica]

Federica,

It should be mentioned that, in the context from which this exercise was lifted, the discussion was specifically about using the word "I" and how it shouldn't be used, according to Eugene (and somewhat Lou), because it refers to a 'separate self'. As we saw recently, when Eugene responded to one of my posts, he still automatically links the word "I" with the concept of 'separate self', rather than the direct experience of the willful force that animates thought-perceptions. Lorenzo also has difficulty with this direct experience. I have also come across several other people in the analytic idealist context who simply feel an 'intentional doer' is nowhere to be found in 'experience'. So that was the primary purpose of sharing this exercise, which is also helpful for the rest of us to cultivate the intimate "I" experience.

(this part is not directed at you per se, but simply to add some reasoning to why the exercise is helpful) An oft-used metaphor is that the "I" can't perceive itself, just as the physical eye can't perceive itself. In our age, the habit is that we only consider 'real' that which can be perceived (thought about) in some way. Yet the "I" cannot be perceived, rather it is the invisible force that makes possible thinking and perception in the first place. In the process of divesting its energy into thinking-perception, the "I" merges into the 'background' of experience. So it can only be intimately experienced by consistently focusing its power in short bursts, so to speak. In normal life, this power is distributed across a wide spectrum of experiences that unfold over long stretches of time. For ex. we may learn to play an instrument - this will require the active will force of the "I", but it will happen over such a long stretch of time, where the main focus is learning a new musical skill, that we hardly have an opportunity to pay attention to the willed thinking experience itself.

With concentration exercises such as the fireball, the intent is precisely to experience the willing force in our thinking by condensing its normally distributed intensity into unitary thought-perceptions. Such exercises bring us much closer to the experiential reality of the "I" as an essential will force and how it is distinct from the normal thinking personality (the idea of "me"), the latter being a conglomeration of patterned perceptual experiences (including desires, emotions, etc.) that have been identified with over time. This personality is the 'separate me' that many people refer to, but we can easily distinguish this from the experience of "I" through concentration exercises. The experience of "I", which can be condensed into the conceptual testimony of "I", is exactly what brings the separate self back into a concrete relationship with its Universal life.

Ashvin,

But the experience of I that an adept of the separate self or Federica could make through these exercises, to follow your advice, would be quite merged with the "idea on me", isn't it? The higher-self can only be intuited after sustained practice of concentration I believe? I think these exercises would primarily debunk the separate self statement, by creating a very distinct and contrasted experience of the will, within the normal personality.

In any case it's hard to imagine how a non dualist could somehow be convinced to seriously try any of these exercises. One may hear that sometimes an atheist becomes a religious person, or a materialist an idealist. But has a non dualist ever doubted non dualism? Is it even imaginable?

[Federica]

We can perhaps test this out by trying to identify the nonsensical sentence from the following:

(1) Trí tưởng tượng vượt qua ngôn ngữ.

(2) Уява перевершує мову.

(3) Haayla ilasur gücdüsu.

(4) Mawazo yanapita lugha.

I got it wrong........
Maybe the discord server could be a good place to test this on a sample > 1 (certainly my secret hope it's that nobody has a cue and the result is 25%)

I think you are right it isn't a good example. It really tests the upper limits of intuitive linguistic resonance, if anything. The password key generator is a more clear example of the underlying principle.

I heard somewhere that this principle was studied experimentally, but I couldn't locate the relevant studies through a quick search.

Curiously I was thinking that the password generator was probably not an appropriate example.
In any case, one problem with these social psychology studies is that they inevitably incorporate countless hidden hypothesis, choices and compromises, that are typically not ałl apparent but have great impact on the conclusions.