Pre-Verbal Thinking

[Güney27]

Hello everyone.
I have A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

I'm reading scaligero right now and have been thinking about it for a few days

Kind regards

[AshvinP]

Hello everyone.
I have A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

I'm reading scaligero right now and have been thinking about it for a few days

Kind regards

Guney,

I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of starting a new thread for your post. It is rather different from the 'Demiurge' topic and moreover that thread is already very cluttered, with perhaps more comments to come.

[AshvinP]

I am having great difficulty figuring out the 'topic ID' to move Stranger's response here, so for now I am just copying and pasting it.
***

Güney27 wrote: ↑Mon Feb 06, 2023 1:15 pm
Hello everyone.
I have A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

I'm reading scaligero right now and have been thinking about it for a few days

Kind regards

Even though you asked Cleric, the answer is yes, the intuitive thinking is based on nonverbal meanings, and on the intuitive level it is possible to think in full capacity without using discursive or verbal forms of thinking.

[Federica]

A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

Güney,
May I quote something Cleric wrote, that precisely answers your question:

When we advance on the path of spiritual development, we attain to the possibility to think directly within this layer of meaning in pictorial form, without having to precipitate words. Thinking pictorially about the sensory world is a good preparation. Most people in the morning may think verbally something like "I need to make a breakfast". Instead, we can exercise to think that pictorially. We can imagine ourselves preparing the breakfast. It's the same meaning except that we think it in much more immediate and living forms.

[Cleric K]

Hello everyone.
I have A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

I'm reading scaligero right now and have been thinking about it for a few days

Kind regards

Yes, it is possible. In fact, every one of us has started their present life with such thinking. To make this more clear consider the following:

In the animal state we live in the present, in a constant flux of soul phenomena, to which we are attracted or repelled. Man becomes a man when images of past soul states can be retained and experienced side by side with our present state. This is what accommodates the intuition of the "I". It's the overarching intuition that we exist as a be-ing going through a flow of becoming. Only now consciousness of memory and time can arise.

We can not only summon images of soul states that have happened before (this is remembering) but we can also summon images that haven't happened. These images may be like alternative past images or possible future images. Future images can become the inspirer of the will and we can steer our stream of becoming towards a state where we expect that the image can become a perceptual fact. This is already elementary pictorial thinking.

For example, when a child learns that a candy is sweet and pleasurable, it can experience memory images of its soul states. It can picture itself eating the candy, it can dimly remember the pleasure of its taste. Yet this image is fleeting, it doesn't engage the sense organs in the same way as physical candy can. Thus the child may picture itself going to the kitchen and secretly taking a candy. Now the image becomes like an attractor for the will. The child, driven by the desire for pleasure, from all the possible things it could do next, would filter only those transitions that would draw it towards the coincidence of its soul image with the sensory experiences.

All this can happen in the pre-verbal stage. Of course, all of it happens completely instinctively in the child's consciousness. Yet it is already a kind of thinking. For example, the child may also know soul images of its parents that are very stern and don't allow it to take anything from the box of candies (only the parents are supposed to give them when they decide it's appropriate). So now the future image of the child taking the candy interferes with another image of a parent being present in the room. In that case the feeling of being scold at mixes in and that feeling is unpleasant, it is undesirable. So there's a conflict between the images. Now the child through instinctive creativity has to wait patiently till no parents are present in the kitchen, so that it can pursue its original image.

Verbal thinking develops as symbolic 'encoding' of such soul images and their transformation (this is of course a quite materialistic way of putting it). This is obviously necessary for verbal communication but in many cases it is also more convenient to think through the symbolic tokens instead of energetically stirring our whole imagination. That's why it can also become a trap, where we become too lazy to think in pictures and become dependent on verbal tokenization.

Now this shouldn't make us think that linguistic thinking was an evolutionary mistake. For our evolutionary scenario it was completely necessary. And it is only through the hierarchical structure of linguistic cognition that we can gradually move towards the even deeper spiritual fractal-levels of reality. In that sense, we haven't yet even utilized the full significance of the spoken word.

So it's not about simply abandoning verbal thinking but uniting its hierarchical structure of meaning with pictorial thinking. The first step would be to simply relearn how to think pictorially, even if somewhat flatly. For example, you may have some plans for tonight. Usually we think verbally "When I get home I'll do this, I'll read that" and so on. You can try to make these plans entirely pictorially. Just picture yourself doing what you intend to do. It doesn't have to be vivid picture, but it must engage your full-body and senses imagination.

Probably it won't be immediately easy, you may find yourself 'commenting' on everything you imagine. That's OK. With little practice you'll see how you can pictorially imagine whole episodes of activities without having to utter a word. All the meaning that you intend is already reflected in the images. If you find that you think verbally, don't get frustrated but simply take what you just verbally thought and say "OK, let's see how that thought could be expressed in a completely pictorial way."

The important thing is that you can be fully creative in this pictorial flow. The spiritual activity that we employ in the flow of pictures is of the same essence as that which flows into words. We are only channeling it differently. In verbal thinking we channel it mainly through the etheric larynx. In full-body imagination we engage the full spectrum.

For example, we can take a single thought that we first express verbally - "I'm taking the cup from the table". If we observe closely we hear that thought in the head area (since this is where normally our sense of hearing is experienced) but if we are very observant we may sense how we very subtly speak the words as if through our larynx. The next step could to imagine only visually that we take the cup, only as a picture. And in the next step we can try to imagine clearly also the movement of our arm as kinesthetic feeling, how we have to overcome its weight, how we feel its position in space as it extends, how the weight of the cup is added and so on.

Another important distinction to make is that the meaning is not confined to the word. This is relatively easy to grasp through the fact that we can say 'table' or we can imagine a table. In both cases we live in the same meaning. It's more challenging with higher order concepts like, say, 'generosity'. We don't have a direct sensory perception that corresponds to generosity, like we have for a table. To make a picture of it we have to be mobile, we have to imagine, for example, a whole scene - a person that gives something with best intentions to others. It is clear that some insight is needed here. If the purely sensory layer of this scene is presented to someone else, they may not grasp that it is the quality of generosity that is portrayed. Thus, even if non-verbally, we still need the concept of generosity. For this reason language shouldn't be despised, as it allows us to move through this hierarchy of concepts. Only through this depth of intuition we can proceed from the flat sensory pictorial thinking towards Imagination.

[Güney27]

Hello everyone.
I have A question for cleric, it should be possible to think without using words. Because before I articulate a sentence, there must already be a certain meaning, which then manifests itself in words. What form of thinking would it be to think without words, and how can we achieve this activity by focusing on words?

I'm reading scaligero right now and have been thinking about it for a few days

Kind regards

Guney,

I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of starting a new thread for your post. It is rather different from the 'Demiurge' topic and moreover that thread is already very cluttered, with perhaps more comments to come.

Thanks very much. It was my fault. I didn't want to divert the other discussion

[AshvinP]

Yes, it is possible. In fact, every one of us has started their present life with such thinking. To make this more clear consider the following:

In the animal state we live in the present, in a constant flux of soul phenomena, to which we are attracted or repelled. Man becomes a man when images of past soul states can be retained and experienced side by side with our present state. This is what accommodates the intuition of the "I". It's the overarching intuition that we exist as a be-ing going through a flow of becoming. Only now consciousness of memory and time can arise.

We can not only summon images of soul states that have happened before (this is remembering) but we can also summon images that haven't happened. These images may be like alternative past images or possible future images. Future images can become the inspirer of the will and we can steer our stream of becoming towards a state where we expect that the image can become a perceptual fact. This is already elementary pictorial thinking.

It's interesting how this manifests in animals as well. There is a clear kinesthetic depth which takes place in their instinctive pictorial thinking. Take my cat, for ex. When she spots something which attracts her sympathy or antipathy, like a bird or squirrel on a tree outside, I notice the soul-impression activates her entire bodily organism. The rear portion of her body shakes or convulses. This is connected with the horizontal spine, which serves as continuous conductor of spiritual activity. Whereas current humans, with vertical spine, have inserted a discontinuity between sense perception-picturing and lower organic functions, so we can endure all manner of sense-impressions without allowing them to convulse our body each time! That is of course critical for our development and functioning in society/culture, through which we learn the abstract thinking skills which adds verticality and the ability to free our activity from the lower organic nature.

Our modern human task is to begin reintegrating this abstract verticality with the kinesthetic depth, i.e thinking with feeling and willing, in full clarity of consciousness. We can take advantage of the vertical discontinuity by leveraging it into what Steiner calls 'sense-free' thinking. Thereby the Cosmic spiritual activity which manifests as lower yet more livingly felt instincts, passions, and drives in the animal kingdom, which we are generally still very much entangled with at the subconscious level, can inflow our thinking consciousness as Imaginations which allow for the free attainment of our higher ideals as individuals and collectives.