Intuition, thinking and Antroposophy

[Güney27]

Hello everyone.

Hi Guney! Thank you for writing. This is really an important part of our own development. It’s not that different from school. Probably we all know how sometimes when we only read the material, especially true when looking at some mathematical solution, we think “I got it.” But then if we try to replicate the solution ourselves it turns out we don’t get it. So it is with PoF too. Everyone has to write their own unique PoF which is not simply a copy of the original book but explication of their own spiritual existence.

I just want to highlight two things which were somewhat touched upon already above by Ashvin and Federica. These are things that we have spoken about many times but I want to remind of them once again because they turn out to be serious stumbling blocks.

The first thing has to do with the nature of our thoughts and imagination. It turns out people today are especially prone to conceive higher consciousness as some kind of more powerful imagination. For example, taking the seed meditation, one can very easily conceive that by imagining the growth from seed to plant they do something similar to what a higher being is doing in order to manifest the real plant. But this would be very misleading. In fact, the human being is the only being in our present hierarchy of beings, which has such an external experience of a plant. Even an angel (the closest higher being to man) doesn’t have physical sight as we do. Thus we should remember that the power of these meditations is that they’re drawing us nearer to the inner forces that constitute the plant. A plant is something much more encompassing, we can only understand it by grasping the inner nature of a particular interplay of macrocosmic and elemental forces. For example, the most important macrocosmic archetype that we have to experience with the seed is the rhythm of growth and decay, and how through death a concentrate remains from which the new growth sprouts. These are patterns that are much more than some forces animating biological things within empty spiritual vacuum. Instead, these rhythms will be found to be like ‘carrier waves’ of our entire Cosmic unfolding.

If we neglect this, we end up in a kind of solipsistic view. It’s of course not explicitly solipsistic but it becomes implicitly so because we assume that our human consciousness (even if ‘non-dually realized’) already coincides with the so-called pure consciousness. This makes us feel that our intuitive sense for what consciousness and reality are, is already the fundamental perspective and all that’s left is expand it and fill the gaps within it. Such a position basically puts the lid on our development. With this attitude we can never find the reality of the plant because we secretly expect that reality to be added to the screen of our consciousness as some more subtle perceptions of thunderbolts or whatever, which shape the picture of the plant. All of this occurs for the sole reason that, consciously or not, we behave as if our consciousness already coincides with the supposed top observer of reality and it’s only that certain phenomena are presently filtered. In other words, we act as someone in a dark room who imagines the furniture and only expects the light to be turned on in order for the anticipated contours to be filled with more colorful perceptions.

The second thing is directly related to the above and it manifests when we try to grasp what meaning, concepts, ideas and intuition are. We more or less know what the experience of red is but what is the concept of red? Through metaphysical thinking we’re inclined to think abstractly about it and conceive concepts and ideas as some elements of reality. For example, today we imagine particles and antiparticles. We don’t perceive them directly yet we imagine some energetic dots zipping around. We can never approach the essence of PoF if we try to build a similar metaphysical picture where reality is made of perceptions and anti-perceptions (concepts/intuition), and we imagine these floating around and interacting within our pure consciousness. When we do that we unknowingly assume the top observer position and once again imagine that all reality can be beheld ‘objectively’ as some elements that float before our Divine gaze.

This turned out to be even more difficult to explain than the first point. People simply can’t help but imagine particles and antiparticles when they hear about perceptions and ideas. It’s just another metaphysical theory for them. This can be pointed out with the pictures that I’ve used so many times:



This is the secret perspective where we imagine that we’re the top experiencer/observer of reality and perceptions and intuition are imagined as things within consciousness. Note that both the mystic and the philosopher/metaphysicist (no matter if materialistic or idealistic) utilize this mode. This has to be contrasted with something like:



The point here is that whatever our state of being is, we’re always so to speak in between the manifested and the unmanifested. The tricky part though is that the unmanifested is not simply something which is as of yet missing from the screen of our consciousness and we expect its contours to be filled with color, as when we expect the furniture to appear with the light. Such an expectation leaves one important aspect completely unexamined. In the example with the furniture we implicitly assume that our spatial intuition of reality is absolute. Whatever we expect to be manifested, is already expected to fill with perceptual phenomena something of the spatial volume. To counterbalance this we have to conceive of something very different. It is as if our conscious experience is the point where consciousness (positive, conscious content) is inverted into negative consciousness (the intuitive spiritual world). This sounds incomprehensible only as long as we try to grasp things intellectually as in the first image, where we abstractly conceive of some consciousness and negative consciousness while secretly feeling as the top container of both of them. To grasp something of the real spiritual world we have to be ready that our whole intuitive sense of what be-ing is, will transform. And this transformation is not a one-shot event.

I know that I’m repeating myself above but it simply seems to me that these two points form the most substantial obstacles on the path to reality for modern man. I just wanted to emphasize them once more.

1. We shouldn’t imagine that our sense of having consciousness with imaginative contents is the same as the state of higher beings/Divine/One Consciousness. Otherwise we naively imagine that everything is created by imagining phenomena in the field of consciousness (for example a plant).
2. We shouldn’t imagine that we can ever find the essence of idea/intuition as some content within our consciousness, side by side with other perceptions. We can only approach this mystery if we’re willing to conceive that the world of meaning is akin to negative consciousness in respect to everything that we conceive as positive conscious phenomena – which includes also our thought perceptions as words, symbols, etc. This makes it challenging because in PoF we constantly have to think about meaning, ideas and concepts, yet we have to learn to feel that our perceptible thoughts are like the iron filings within magnetic field. The latter gives the meaningful dimension of our being, yet it’s not something that we can climb above and contemplate side by side with the filings.

cleric,

Your first point, I understand, is that we tend to anthropomorphize spiritual processes (in the sense that we project our current level of consciousness onto higher levels).
I have nothing to say against this point.


"Thus we should remember that the power of these meditations is that they're drawing us nearer to the inner forces that constitute the plant"


How can seed meditation lead to higher cognition when we end up mimicking a process perceived by our everyday consciousness when, in modern man, everything tends to be anthropophobic?
If we consider the "I think these words" meditation or the "A E I O U" meditation, we are still with thoughts that have already become rigid and fixed perceptions. How can we thereby arrive at perception, our invisible activity, if we create its by-product (thoughts that have already fallen into the realm of perception)?
Or should these exercises serve to give our higher beings (I) more and more control and awareness by sacrificing (concentrating) our everyday unconscious thinking?
In the end, it seems to me, at least, that seed grain meditation and actively producing words are different types of practice.
Words, thoughts and images are different contents of consciousness.
Could man still say that both fall into the realm of the imagination?




Your 2nd point, as I understand it, is that we try to understand things in our consciousness through abstract (dead) thoughts. As in a constant of consciousness in which the content should come to light. Instead, we should realize that many of the things we are trying to understand need to construct this more constant perspective and become conscious rather than thinking about them.
I can observe in myself that there is a need for me to grasp the things discussed in my current state of consciousness, i.e. to mentally understand them. So there is a danger of turning living forces into abstract theories.

It's very difficult for me to let go of that perspective.
Only during meditation can I temporarily surrender perspective, not when trying to understand what someone has written, such as when reading Steiner.

[Güney27]

Hello everyone.

In connection with Cleric's last post, perhaps this somewhat concrete example will also help. We can look at political ideologies and how they structure perception. In modern times, we have radical liberalism and radical conservatism at the extremes and then a gradient in between (in which it seems increasingly few people would locate themselves). It's clear that these are not simple concepts-ideas akin to anything in the content of our normal consciousness, such that we can easily label with a few words. A political ideology is the result of a whole array of nested forces, like our childhood upbringing, our character and temperament, our geographical location, our broader cultural sphere, the history of our nation, the history of human civilization, etc. I recently came across the following:

Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves – their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends – as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves – “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.”

Plotted as heat-maps on 16 concentric circles, where the first circle is “immediate family” and the sixteenth is “all things in existence”, the comparative results look like this:

So this simple image above represents to us an array of 'moral concerns', i.e. moral ideas, which are polarized and play into the political ideology. We often hear these days about how people under influence of these ideologies 'live in different realities', but it's probably not taken as seriously as it should be. They quite literally perceive facts and events in different, often opposite, ways. They will remember things completely differently. As a simple example, after the 2020 presidential election the radical liberals experienced the whole thing to be obviously free and fair while the radical conservatives experienced it to be obviously rigged and corrupt. Of course there are other influences involved here, like the reporting of the facts by news media and what news sources people paid attention to, but that also points to the pathways through which the ideologies manage to structure our perceptions-conceptions.

Although we may not be as influenced by radical political ideology, we all have various religious, political, or generally cultural opinions, beliefs, theories, dogmas, etc. which structure our normal consciousness. Although we can identify these things with certain word-concepts which act as tokens, we intuitively know that they stand in a very diferent relation to our normal experience than the concepts 'red' or 'blue'. Through higher development, however, we also begin to realize the latter concepts are not actually 'smaller' or more 'simple' than the political ideas woven of invisible forces related to our living history and our moral concerns. All concepts embed these meaningful spiritual forces of 'negative consciousness', as Cleric put it. These inner temporal forces constantly structure our perceptions but cannot be likened to anything we find in the spatial perceptual spectrum.

Hello everyone.

In connection with Cleric's last post, perhaps this somewhat concrete example will also help. We can look at political ideologies and how they structure perception. In modern times, we have radical liberalism and radical conservatism at the extremes and then a gradient in between (in which it seems increasingly few people would locate themselves). It's clear that these are not simple concepts-ideas akin to anything in the content of our normal consciousness, such that we can easily label with a few words. A political ideology is the result of a whole array of nested forces, like our childhood upbringing, our character and temperament, our geographical location, our broader cultural sphere, the history of our nation, the history of human civilization, etc. I recently came across the following:

Among other things, the authors asked study participants identifying as “conservatives” and “liberals” (in the American sense) to indicate their spheres of primary moral concern. “Conservatives” tended to emphasise those spheres nearest to themselves – their immediate family, their more extended relatives, their friends – as bearing the greatest moral weight. “Liberals,” meanwhile, expressed the greatest moral interest in those spheres furthest from themselves – “all people on all continents,” for example, or “all mammals.”

Plotted as heat-maps on 16 concentric circles, where the first circle is “immediate family” and the sixteenth is “all things in existence”, the comparative results look like this:

So this simple image above represents to us an array of 'moral concerns', i.e. moral ideas, which are polarized and play into the political ideology. We often hear these days about how people under influence of these ideologies 'live in different realities', but it's probably not taken as seriously as it should be. They quite literally perceive facts and events in different, often opposite, ways. They will remember things completely differently. As a simple example, after the 2020 presidential election the radical liberals experienced the whole thing to be obviously free and fair while the radical conservatives experienced it to be obviously rigged and corrupt. Of course there are other influences involved here, like the reporting of the facts by news media and what news sources people paid attention to, but that also points to the pathways through which the ideologies manage to structure our perceptions-conceptions.

Although we may not be as influenced by radical political ideology, we all have various religious, political, or generally cultural opinions, beliefs, theories, dogmas, etc. which structure our normal consciousness. Although we can identify these things with certain word-concepts which act as tokens, we intuitively know that they stand in a very diferent relation to our normal experience than the concepts 'red' or 'blue'. Through higher development, however, we also begin to realize the latter concepts are not actually 'smaller' or more 'simple' than the political ideas woven of invisible forces related to our living history and our moral concerns. All concepts embed these meaningful spiritual forces of 'negative consciousness', as Cleric put it. These inner temporal forces constantly structure our perceptions but cannot be likened to anything we find in the spatial perceptual spectrum.

Thanks for your commenst Ashvin.
I dont get the point of your comment.
Are you saying that our unconscious constitutation decides the way we see the world, simply put?

[AshvinP]

Thanks for your commenst Ashvin.
I dont get the point of your comment.
Are you saying that our unconscious constitutation decides the way we see the world, simply put?

Simply put, yes that is true. Although the 'unconscious' isn't an absolute boundary. As you said in a recent comment, we are tasked with bringing these unconscious processes into consciousness. Then we begin to experience ourselves participating in the way we see the world, i.e. in our own stream of destiny. That is the path to spiritual freedom.

The main point of the post was to bring the PoF relationship of concept-percept or idea-percept more out from the realm of abstraction into our living experience of how concepts-ideas meaningfully structure our perceptions. PoF does provide a lot of simple and helpful examples of that, for ex. the idea of 'parabola' structuring the path of a stone which is thrown, but that can remain pretty abstract since we normally don't feel any causal agency in the structuring of that process. In contrast, our cultural ideas (like those of politics) are more proximate to our current thinking agency and so we may relate more intimately to how they structure our perception of facts and events. Political ideas were just one of many examples which could be used. Perhaps an even more relatable one here is philosophical ideas such as materialism, idealism, spiritualism, etc. We can perhaps detect a subtle difference in our perception of the world when we were out and out materialists, versus when we developed a strong affinity for idealism. If we imagine all these political, philosophical, religious, scientific, etc. ideas superimposed on each other and together influencing our perception, we should have a more clear sense of how our own thinking agency is involved in our concrete view of the world. 

At the same time, the post was meant to further highlight the points Cleric made. It's somewhat more obvious to us that the forces behind our moral concerns informing our political ideas, for ex., are not similar to anything we find immediately in the perceptual spectrum. We can't locate our political concepts in our experience like we locate colors. It should also be obvious that the moral ideas cannot be reduced to our flattened concepts of 'justice', 'equality', 'fairness', 'compassion', etc. but unfortunately that is not so obvious to most people these days. If we pay attention, we can intuit there are mysterious supra-sensory impulses which constellate our ideas about how to relate to and treat other humans and living beings. On the other hand, the concept-percept of 'red' feels very simple, familiar and therefore we may more readily imagine the spiritual forces behind it manifesting the color in a similar way to how we experience perceiving it or thinking about it. 

As mentioned briefly to Federica, though, the forces manifesting Light and colors are even more lofty in the nested hierarchy, and therefore unfamiliar to the normal content of our experience, than those which manifest our soul-tendencies which inform our political or philosophical views. The forces which manifest colors have actually passed out of Time into Eternity, or they live and work at the border of Time and Eternity, so to speak. Through the Light, we perceive differentiated temporal rhythms of the entire Cosmos simultaneously. So we can hardly compare this lofty mode of spiritual activity with our normal consciousness and its content - rather it flows through and structures our normal consciousness (our entire personality) in the process of manifesting the content. These are the unfamiliar spiritual forces, existing well 'behind' our current perspective, that we should think of when we speak of ideas-concepts structuring our perceptions in phenomenological experience. Cleric previously provided an interesting way to approach this activity, which, if nothing else, should give us a sense of how unfamiliar it is to anything in our normal experience:

Let’s try to approach this through a mathematical example. We see a triangular form. It impresses as perception and evokes certain intuition – that of ‘triangle’. Then we can turn away from the perceptions and summon a memory image of the triangle. Now we’re doing elementary geometry, our geometric intuition is being expressed into a thought-image of our own making. Here we already have something analogous to Imaginative cognition. The difference is that we’re expressing intuition that is frozen. It is as a fixed standing wave in an ideal world. Mathematical intuition is timeless. It consists of timeless relations. They have temporal character only insofar as we need to serialize these relations in thoughts. For example, when we think of the natural numbers, they are not subject to time. We need time to count through them but their relations are something timeless. Two is always between one and three – this is an eternal relation. This has nothing to do with Platonism. There’s no need to fantasize mathematical intuition as some exotic metaphysical realm. It is a simple fact of experience – when we move through mathematical ideas we simply experience their timeless relations in the meaning of our thoughts. Because of this frozen nature of mathematical intuition, when we’re thinking math we’re always alone. It is as if we walk through a frosty kingdom and any movement that we sense can only be our own, reflected in the ice crystals. The difference with Imagination in the wider sense is that in the latter we no longer feel alone. The reflections in our imaginative pictures are not only of our own movement but also of a kingdom teeming with life. It is as if we’re expressing in images intuitive life that continually changes underneath us on its own accord.

The next step is to turn attention to what we’re doing when we think the mathematical thought-images. For example, if we take the triangle, we can try to visualize it as if we trace its edges with our ray of imagination, as if it is the tip of a pencil. When we become familiar with this activity we can try to disregard the imaginative element and focus entirely on the experience of how we will our thinking gestures. It’s no longer about how our thinking gestures are perceived in imagination but how it feels to be the active force that propels them. This gives us a hint about Inspirative cognition, where we live not in images of the living kingdom but in the interference of thinking gestures that impresses in the images.

Finally, we need to relinquish even our thinking gesticulation and remain in the pure intuitive meaning of the triangle. This is exceedingly difficult to do without practice but in the end, the idea of triangle becomes the intuitive form of our “I”. We always live in such intuitions. They are present all the time as our intuitive background, as the meaningful context which gives us the feeling that our reality ‘makes sense’ and that we have a certain sense of orientation within it. To reach Intuitive cognition is to live entirely within this intuitive context, which is identical to our sense of what we are as a spiritual being. So when we think ‘triangle’, this is normally convoluted in several layers of inner life – the perception, the image, the thinking gesture – yet our sense of being is actually identical with the intuition of a triangle that we currently think.

When we live in Intuitive cognition, we are not focused on images, there’s no movement of thoughts, no pushes and pulls of sympathies and antipathies, but only the intuitive awareness of our being’s becoming. Someone may imagine that what is thus described is identical to the mystic’s pure awareness but there’s one great difference – the latter lacks the awareness of being one with the intuitive intent that metamorphoses the state. Without this, such a state is felt to border on the absolute nothingness, where all existence sinks into oblivion. Only through the union with the “I am” force, we can exist in that nothingness because through that force the intuition of our existence is being continually recreated as a fiery phoenix.

[Federica]

Hi Federica,
Thank you for your thoughts and additions


,,Mm... this is a delicate point, would you elaborate it more?,,

I simply mean that our thinking is the meaningful element in our perception. Perception without thinking is incoherent and meaningless. I didn't want to go into the details of how our thinking coagulates from our spiritual activity because I can't say much about it.
It's the fact that was easiest for me to understand.
Our thinking gives structure and meaning to our perception through concepts.
I would like to ask you what you would say when it is said that concepts are nothing more than summarizing words for a thing and that they have no content of their own but are man-made.



,,Yes, I think these words express the forming of the correct direction in you. Here it helps to remember that actively doing is one face, and recognizing-knowing is the other face of the same head. We have to trust that by putting our efforts simultaneously in both, and with the support of our feelings of reverence, gratitude and burning thirst, we will make sure progress.,,



Can you explain exactly what you mean here?


,,Here I guess we must refrain from drawing intellectually satisfying conclusions, that would box and schematize the previously touched intuitions in too flattened ways. I am not sure we need to seal our progression in the airtight structure of abstract philosophical categories. I am saying that as a simple reminder, maybe there is no need, and I am over interpreting your words.,



I also agree with you here.
It would be pointless to understand these things in an abstract way. We have to bring these unconscious processes into consciousness.


,,Yes, because thinking is so very much coincident with us, we initially lack the inner maneuvering space to realize what we are doing (the activity) and we only see what we are manipulating by means of that doing (what we think about).,,


Yes, you are right and you put it in a very understandable way.

*******

,,Mm... this is a delicate point, would you elaborate it more?,,

I simply mean that our thinking is the meaningful element in our perception. Perception without thinking is incoherent and meaningless. I didn't want to go into the details of how our thinking coagulates from our spiritual activity because I can't say much about it.
It's the fact that was easiest for me to understand.
Our thinking gives structure and meaning to our perception through concepts.

Hi Güney - with the above clarification, your meaning seems on-point to me. What had left me in doubt in your initial post was this: “One could say that the real world is perception permeated by thought”. Here I was not sure whether you were making a clear distinction between thought and thinking, or not. Now I see that you wrote “thought” but you meant thinking. So it's all good. This distinction is important. As we know, thinking is living, spiritual activity that directly connects us to the spiritual worlds, while thoughts are the dead (or coagulated, as you say) precipitations of that activity, into the realm of perceptions/content. In fact, to contrast your older statement, one could say that the real world (let’s call it the physical world, for clarity) is perception and thought permeated by thinking, rather than perception permeated by thought.

I would like to ask you what you would say when it is said that concepts are nothing more than summarizing words for a thing and that they have no content of their own but are man-made.

Yes, I'll tell you how I see it (I trust Ashvin or Cleric will rectify if needed )
So we have the intuition that the nature of reality is spiritual in essence - either we have a pure feeling for that, or we come to it by means of Steiner’s epistemology, or we understand it through Cleric’s older posts about the given of experience, it doesn’t matter. Well, concepts are what stands immediately behind our screen of perceptions (our sensory experience of the World). Concepts constitute in this way the most directly attainable solid and structured fabric of reality. Concepts are the ideal/spiritual fabric of reality. It’s what sustains our standard perception of the World, from immediately behind the veil. Therefore, they are certainly not man-made, and they do have their own precise content, or meaning (better to say meaning, I would guess, as we don't want to suggest that concepts are containers of something).

Further down the depth of reality, behind concepts and ideas - that we can think of as more elaborated articulations of concepts - there are other deeper, archetypal levels of spiritual reality, that I cannot knowingly speak of. But to remain at the level of concepts, what is man-made in there, is not the concepts themselves, but our attempts to touch them, and grasp them as meaning, by hooking, so to say, the lowest-hanging fruit for us, in the dimension of our experience: that is to say, the perception. In a way, the perception is what remains for us of the concept, once we have reached out to it through the veil. The problem is that, by the time we have 'dragged' the concept on our dense, physical side of the world, through the veil, we have warped it, and deaden it, here and there.

The concept was pure lofty meaning, but now we have pulled it less than delicately through the veil, hoping to take part of it, but the thing is, as humans, we stand into the density of the sense world, and concepts, seen from our side, worked out through our five senses and thoughts, end up being not as ideal and crystal-clear as they were originally. Now they have become sensory perceptions. The concept is pure meaning that we aspire to literally participate in, to become one with, but because of our physical existence on the physical side of the threshold, as soon as we touch them, we also make them coagulate, in our own unique and imperfect way as individuals.

On that contorted, perceived concept - that we become aware of in our thought-image, or thought-perception - yes, we put a summarizing word, or label. We see a house and we say to ourselves 'house', or 'haus', or 'hus'. But the word is clearly not the pure meaning of the particular corresponding concept we are summoning in that moment (incidentally, many more concepts would be simultaneously evoked when we see a house, we are simplifying here). The word is our way to organize our perceptions and signify to ourselves that we are experiencing one perceptual instance of an ideal meaning that we only partially intuit. How fittingly we intuit it depends on the specific extent of our experience combined with the level of development of our living cognition.

Yes, I think these words express the forming of the correct direction in you. Here it helps to remember that actively doing is one face, and recognizing-knowing is the other face of the same head. We have to trust that by putting our efforts simultaneously in both, and with the support of our feelings of reverence, gratitude and burning thirst, we will make sure progress.

Can you explain exactly what you mean here?

Yes - I was trying to give you my take on what you had just said: “if we want to come to knowledge, instead of passively contemplating the given, we must make the given appear actively in our activity. However, the content must be objective, the content of which we do not add, but the content of which is self-determined” where I felt there could be some difficulty in discerning how we come to knowledge: do we have to actively make it, or is it objective?

And what I was saying is, it’s a difficult balance to strike, because we would like a clear-cut answer. But as we know, understanding - when it's living understanding - equals an act of becoming (what I called the side of doing, we have to actively experience the meaning in first-person) but also there is an objective reality existing as meaning (what I called the side of recognizing-knowing, in other words, knowledge is also real, objective). This is difficult to get, at least for me. What I meant is that we can ‘manage this ambiguity’ if we recruit our feelings and prayers (I remember you once said you do so).

[Federica]

Taking note of the various levels of interplay. It does help to consider concrete examples, as you proposed, it helps solidify intuitive understanding, it helps memorize it, and also integrate it with other ideas - thanks!

But it's also not that simple, because the entire gradient of forces is also at work in some way, shape, or form in every percept-concept-idea. Even our political ideas are informed by the lofty ideal of universal Love, for ex., although it expresses itself in rather grotesque ways when it remains subconscious and therefore abstract, simply a mirror of our decohered concepts rather than the living experience of the Sun-force.

This reminds me of the 'bicycle wheel' image Cleric recently used. It tells us, once again, to refrain from expecting comfortable and neat one-to-one connections.

[Cleric K]

How can seed meditation lead to higher cognition when we end up mimicking a process perceived by our everyday consciousness when, in modern man, everything tends to be anthropophobic?
If we consider the "I think these words" meditation or the "A E I O U" meditation, we are still with thoughts that have already become rigid and fixed perceptions. How can we thereby arrive at perception, our invisible activity, if we create its by-product (thoughts that have already fallen into the realm of perception)?
Or should these exercises serve to give our higher beings (I) more and more control and awareness by sacrificing (concentrating) our everyday unconscious thinking?
In the end, it seems to me, at least, that seed grain meditation and actively producing words are different types of practice.
Words, thoughts and images are different contents of consciousness.
Could man still say that both fall into the realm of the imagination?

We can think of these meditative exercises as stimulating certain slumbering forces in our being. Things are understandable if we conceive that what we experience at the surface of our consciousness is underlied by deeper currents of spiritual activity. Thus even if we’re not conscious of it, a lot more is going on when we think and imagine things.

Superficially, we say “What’s the big deal, I just imagine a succession of images. Instead of putting them in a random order, I picture them as a gradual movie.” Yes but in order to picture them in this way we have to do something particular, even if we’re not fully conscious of it. For example, if we have to move a pebble, we focus on it and on the target place. We rarely pay attention to the complicated and orchestrated motions of all the joints and muscles of our arm. Similarly, when we picture the growth of the plant, many things are set in motion in our subtle organism. In meditation we gradually become much more conscious of these inner movements. When we begin to sense them in ourselves, we begin to become sensitive to them everywhere. It’s like language. As long as we’re sensitive only to sounds, we hear random gibberish. When we develop concepts then we become sensitive to meaning in the sound too. In a similar way, by exercising these soul forces through which we imagine the growing seed, we become sensitive to them first and foremost in the way they manifest within ourselves. Later we begin to sense that such forces are present in the real plant too.

Now you may say that I contradict myself. First I said that plants don’t grow by some being imagining them but now I seem to imply just that by saying that there are forces in the real plant similar to the ones we use when we imagine it. Yet there’s no real contradiction here. We only have to remember that there’s a difference between our mental pictures of a plant and the actual plant organism that impresses as sense perceptions. The forces that act in both cases are indeed of common origin but they are manifested differently.

To make it more clear we can conceive that through our inner imaginative forces we do make something grow – structures in our brain and subtle organs take shape because of our efforts. This happens largely indirectly today but will become more conscious in the future. This is really how far today’s cognitive activity is disconnected from its deeper reality. In our soul we’re continuously engaged in growth processes. Our inner constellation of ideal forces continuously metamorphoses and seeks more perfect forms. In our intellect it is like we’re conscious only of the leaves falling from this growing process. We’ve made it our business to preoccupy with the patterns that falling leaves make. Our intellectual thinking is largely instinctive. Just like with the pebble, we’re interested only in certain patterns of leaves without any attention to the movements of ‘muscles and joints’ that we use to move them.

So this would be the first task: to at least anticipate that in our ordinary imagining of a plant we utilize deeper forces which are indeed of similar nature to the forces that live in the plant. Yet the plant that we imagine is only a succession of falling leaves in respect to the living imaginative activity. The forces in the plant are similar to the forces through which we imagine, not to the falling leaves (the mental picture of the plant). Thus what was said remains true – the archetypal plant being doesn’t perceive a picture of a plant which it tries to transform from the side. Instead, the whole plant world is its body and it metamorphoses analogously to the way our brain metamorphoses through our spiritual activity.

To summarize, the exercises help us become conscious of the not yet conscious forces within our being. Then we understand that such forces indeed are present in the plant too, yet they work there in specific ways. At our stage we instinctively use the forces to grow imagery even though we’re conscious only in the falling-leaf stage. The first task is to find the inner experience of the spiritual activity that grows the leaves before they fall like sensory-like perceptible sensations. When we live in these forces we call that Imaginative cognition. In that activity we already become more conscious of the way our brain is formed. We understand the plant world in its reality when we go even further to experience how the archetypal life forces build our whole body (Inspirative stage of cognition).

Your 2nd point, as I understand it, is that we try to understand things in our consciousness through abstract (dead) thoughts. As in a constant of consciousness in which the content should come to light. Instead, we should realize that many of the things we are trying to understand need to construct this more constant perspective and become conscious rather than thinking about them.
I can observe in myself that there is a need for me to grasp the things discussed in my current state of consciousness, i.e. to mentally understand them. So there is a danger of turning living forces into abstract theories.

It's very difficult for me to let go of that perspective.
Only during meditation can I temporarily surrender perspective, not when trying to understand what someone has written, such as when reading Steiner.

That’s fine. It’s not a problem that we feel the need to have concrete thoughts. We actually do need them. We have to study even the falling leaves and their patterns. It’s only that we shouldn’t imagine that we can build the living reality from their arrangements.

[AshvinP]

I would like to ask you what you would say when it is said that concepts are nothing more than summarizing words for a thing and that they have no content of their own but are man-made.

Yes, I'll tell you how I see it (I trust Ashvin or Cleric will rectify if needed )
So we have the intuition that the nature of reality is spiritual in essence - either we have a pure feeling for that, or we come to it by means of Steiner’s epistemology, or we understand it through Cleric’s older posts about the given of experience, it doesn’t matter. Well, concepts are what stands immediately behind our screen of perceptions (our sensory experience of the World). Concepts constitute in this way the most directly attainable solid and structured fabric of reality. Concepts are the ideal/spiritual fabric of reality. It’s what sustains our standard perception of the World, from immediately behind the veil. Therefore, they are certainly not man-made, and they do have their own precise content, or meaning (better to say meaning, I would guess, as we don't want to suggest that concepts are containers of something).

Further down the depth of reality, behind concepts and ideas - that we can think of as more elaborated articulations of concepts - there are other deeper, archetypal levels of spiritual reality, that I cannot knowingly speak of. But to remain at the level of concepts, what is man-made in there, is not the concepts themselves, but our attempts to touch them, and grasp them as meaning, by hooking, so to say, the lowest-hanging fruit for us, in the dimension of our experience: that is to say, the perception. In a way, the perception is what remains for us of the concept, once we have reached out to it through the veil. The problem is that, by the time we have 'dragged' the concept on our dense, physical side of the world, through the veil, we have warped it, and deaden it, here and there.

The concept was pure lofty meaning, but now we have pulled it less than delicately through the veil, hoping to take part of it, but the thing is, as humans, we stand into the density of the sense world, and concepts, seen from our side, worked out through our five senses and thoughts, end up being not as ideal and crystal-clear as they were originally. Now they have become sensory perceptions. The concept is pure meaning that we aspire to literally participate in, to become one with, but because of our physical existence on the physical side of the threshold, as soon as we touch them, we also make them coagulate, in our own unique and imperfect way as individuals.

Just to add a few thoughts on this issue of subjective (or man-made) vs. objective meaning. We could say what really makes the difference between perceived meaning which is 'subjective' and that which is 'objective' is the extent to which the perception of meaning is conditioned by our personalized opinions, interests, preferences, ideologies, etc. To the extent we can deidentify our thinking organism with those merely personal factors, our perception of meaning becomes more archetypal and 'objective'. Since most people aren't even aware that these personal factors influence their thinking perception, or how they influence it, which can only be illuminated through enlivening our thinking consciousness, they live in very subjective thoughts-perceptions. When they move rigorously through the World Content with logical reasoning, they temporarily lift from the subjective to the more objective perception of meaning. But when formulating beliefs and theories about the WC, the thinking snaps back to its subjective conditioning. The conceptual-perceptual spectrum is ordered so that it fits into a pre-packaged narrative which is desired, and everything which doesn't fit is ignored or marginalized in some way. The modern idealists/mystics also realized this limitation of modern thinking, but declared that, since they experience the WC subjectively, everyone else must as well and there's no way out. As Schopenhauer said, but failed himself to internalize, "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the World."

The personalized perspective which perceives the meaning of the WC in this way is itself objective content. If we can deepen our thinking consciousness into the forces which animate that perspective, through our shared soul-tendencies, then we are moving towards the archetypal. We gradually differentiate our core be-ing from that personal perspective, which is not to say we aim to abandon it, but rather to livingly understand how it arose and what role it serves in our spiritual evolution. Then we can participate in fulfilling the objective intentions for the personality - we spiral our personal intents into harmony with the Cosmic intents. We are tasked with bringing something truly new into the world, not through endless combining of the subjectivized content of our thinking, but through the new relationships we build between ourselves and the objective archetypal content we perceive in thinking, between ourselves and other beings. We can only fulfill this purpose of creating new relationships if we become increasingly self-aware of how that objective content manifests itself in our experience. And to do that we must sacrifice the personalized interests which condition our thinking perception. It's easier said than done, since we all start pursuing knowledge of reality exactly for personal comfort, pleasure, status, satisfaction in various ways, even if we often hide these motives from our surface consciousness.

That is why the various paths of modern initiation involve a purification of the personal soul-life. Federica shared a method from a Steiner to pursue this purification with regards to outer nature on the other thread. A phenomenology of thinking such as PoF is also a means of catharsis. It is sort of a two for one combo - through it we can purify the personal interests while also contemplating and experiencing the nature of our intimate spiritual activity. There are other methods oriented more towards the life of Feeling, which generally involve devotional practices and prayer. That was the approach of the medieval Christian mystics. The Rosicrucian initiation integrates the two approaches.

The Rosicrucian initiation, although resting upon a Christian foundation works more with other symbolic ideas which produce katharsis, chiefly with imaginative pictures. That is another modification which had to be used, because mankind had progressed a step further in its evolution and the methods of initiation must conform to what has gradually been evolved.

We must understand that when a person has attained this initiation, he is fundamentally quite different from the person he was before it. While formerly he was only associated with the things of the physical world, he now acquires the possibility likewise of association with the events and beings of the spiritual world. This pre-supposes that the human being acquires knowledge in a much more real sense than in that abstract, dry, prosaic sense in which we usually speak of knowledge. For a person who acquires spiritual knowledge, finds the process to be something quite different. It is a complete realization of that beautiful expression, “Know thyself.” But the most dangerous thing in the realm of knowledge is to grasp these words erroneously and today this occurs only too frequently. Many people construe these words to mean that they should no longer look about the physical world, but should gaze into their own inner being and seek there for everything spiritual. This is a very mistaken understanding of the saying, for that is not at all what it means. We must clearly understand that true higher knowledge is also an evolution from one standpoint, which the human being has attained, to another which he had not reached previously. If a person practices self-knowledge only by brooding upon himself, he sees only what he already possesses. He thereby acquires nothing new, but only knowledge of his own lower self in the present meaning of the word. This inner nature is only one part that is necessary for knowledge. The other part that is necessary must be added. Without the two parts, there is no real knowledge. By means of his inner nature, he can develop organs through which he can gain knowledge. But just as the eye, as an external sense organ, would not perceive the sun by gazing into itself, but only by looking outward at the sun, so must the inner perceptive organs gaze outwardly, in other words, gaze into an external spiritual in order actually to perceive. The concept “Knowledge” had a much deeper, a more real meaning in those ages when spiritual things were better understood than at present. Read in the Bible the words, “Abraham knew his wife!” or this or that Patriarch “knew his wife.” One does not need to seek very far in order to understand that by this expression fructification is meant. When one considers the words, “Know thyself,” in the Greek, they do not mean that you stare into your own inner being, but that you fructify yourself with what streams into you from the spiritual world. “Know thyself” means: Fructify thyself with the content of the spiritual world!

[Federica]

Just to add a few thoughts on this issue of subjective (or man-made) vs. objective meaning. We could say what really makes the difference between perceived meaning which is 'subjective' and that which is 'objective' is the extent to which the perception of meaning is conditioned by our personalized opinions, interests, preferences, ideologies, etc. To the extent we can deidentify our thinking organism with those merely personal factors, our perception of meaning becomes more archetypal and 'objective'. Since most people aren't even aware that these personal factors influence their thinking perception, or how they influence it, which can only be illuminated through enlivening our thinking consciousness, they live in very subjective thoughts-perceptions. When they move rigorously through the World Content with logical reasoning, they temporarily lift from the subjective to the more objective perception of meaning. But when formulating beliefs and theories about the WC, the thinking snaps back to its subjective conditioning. The conceptual-perceptual spectrum is ordered so that it fits into a pre-packaged narrative which is desired, and everything which doesn't fit is ignored or marginalized in some way. The modern idealists/mystics also realized this limitation of modern thinking, but declared that, since they experience the WC subjectively, everyone else must as well and there's no way out. As Schopenhauer said, but failed himself to internalize, "every man mistakes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the World."

The personalized perspective which perceives the meaning of the WC in this way is itself objective content. If we can deepen our thinking consciousness into the forces which animate that perspective, through our shared soul-tendencies, then we are moving towards the archetypal. We gradually differentiate our core be-ing from that personal perspective, which is not to say we aim to abandon it, but rather to livingly understand how it arose and what role it serves in our spiritual evolution. Then we can participate in fulfilling the objective intentions for the personality - we spiral our personal intents into harmony with the Cosmic intents. We are tasked with bringing something truly new into the world, not through endless combining of the subjectivized content of our thinking, but through the new relationships we build between ourselves and the objective archetypal content we perceive in thinking, between ourselves and other beings. We can only fulfill this purpose of creating new relationships if we become increasingly self-aware of how that objective content manifests itself in our experience. And to do that we must sacrifice the personalized interests which condition our thinking perception. It's easier said than done, since we all start pursuing knowledge of reality exactly for personal comfort, pleasure, status, satisfaction in various ways, even if we often hide these motives from our surface consciousness.

That is why the various paths of modern initiation involve a purification of the personal soul-life. Federica shared a method from a Steiner to pursue this purification with regards to outer nature on the other thread. A phenomenology of thinking such as PoF is also a means of catharsis. It is sort of a two for one combo - through it we can purify the personal interests while also contemplating and experiencing the nature of our intimate spiritual activity. There are other methods oriented more towards the life of Feeling, which generally involve devotional practices and prayer. That was the approach of the medieval Christian mystics. The Rosicrucian initiation integrates the two approaches.

The Rosicrucian initiation, although resting upon a Christian foundation works more with other symbolic ideas which produce katharsis, chiefly with imaginative pictures. That is another modification which had to be used, because mankind had progressed a step further in its evolution and the methods of initiation must conform to what has gradually been evolved.

We must understand that when a person has attained this initiation, he is fundamentally quite different from the person he was before it. While formerly he was only associated with the things of the physical world, he now acquires the possibility likewise of association with the events and beings of the spiritual world. This pre-supposes that the human being acquires knowledge in a much more real sense than in that abstract, dry, prosaic sense in which we usually speak of knowledge. For a person who acquires spiritual knowledge, finds the process to be something quite different. It is a complete realization of that beautiful expression, “Know thyself.” But the most dangerous thing in the realm of knowledge is to grasp these words erroneously and today this occurs only too frequently. Many people construe these words to mean that they should no longer look about the physical world, but should gaze into their own inner being and seek there for everything spiritual. This is a very mistaken understanding of the saying, for that is not at all what it means. We must clearly understand that true higher knowledge is also an evolution from one standpoint, which the human being has attained, to another which he had not reached previously. If a person practices self-knowledge only by brooding upon himself, he sees only what he already possesses. He thereby acquires nothing new, but only knowledge of his own lower self in the present meaning of the word. This inner nature is only one part that is necessary for knowledge. The other part that is necessary must be added. Without the two parts, there is no real knowledge. By means of his inner nature, he can develop organs through which he can gain knowledge. But just as the eye, as an external sense organ, would not perceive the sun by gazing into itself, but only by looking outward at the sun, so must the inner perceptive organs gaze outwardly, in other words, gaze into an external spiritual in order actually to perceive. The concept “Knowledge” had a much deeper, a more real meaning in those ages when spiritual things were better understood than at present. Read in the Bible the words, “Abraham knew his wife!” or this or that Patriarch “knew his wife.” One does not need to seek very far in order to understand that by this expression fructification is meant. When one considers the words, “Know thyself,” in the Greek, they do not mean that you stare into your own inner being, but that you fructify yourself with what streams into you from the spiritual world. “Know thyself” means: Fructify thyself with the content of the spiritual world!

Thanks, Ashvin! This not only cures the abstract character my thoughts were leaning to, but also adds depth and practical relatedness to the question of how we appropriate concepts in a soul-biased way. I don't know how much of it is biased impression, but I receive noticeably different impressions from your many posts, and this is one of those through which I very distinctly feel the improvement in my understanding, from the first reading - not everything was in focus then - to reading it again now, with the awareness that I am getting what's hinted to much better. I hope Güney has a similar experience!

[Lou Gold]

THANKS CLERIC


"Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings
— always darker, emptier, simpler."
~Friedrich Nietzsche


"La Marche", 2005 by the brilliant Gao Xingjian who is also a Nobel laureate in literature, the first Nobel award given for a work in the Chinese language.

[Güney27]

I'll try to give my understanding of cleric's essay CT as they may have more resonance on the forum than steiner's.
Ashvin's answer reminded me of the content of Cleric's essay

I think what Cleric is trying to point out to us in his CT essays is that the reality we label as such is sensory perception for which we do not know the reason for metamorphosis. He shows how, through our mental activity, we mimic our sensory experience (e.g., in the sense of the fallen apple).
So we have a gesture that we create, which we then name with words.
In addition, each of these gestures has a specific, tangible meaning, although I have not really understood why the word meaning is used here and how I should understand it. We do not know the metamorphosis of sense perceptions, but we do know the metamorphosis of ours. We feel that through our activity we are shaping and transforming them. I myself have noticed when trying to meditate that it is my activity that transforms thought cognition and it is distinguishable from other processes outside of me. I feel responsible for the transformation in meditation, but not for the growth of the tulips in the park. In the meditation I notice that I myself bring about this transformation and I can say that the reason for the transformation is clear to me.
I also feel that when I change my thoughts from a to e to i to ect. transform, not every thought is produced individually and isolated from another, but that it IS rhythmic and flowing into each other. I don't know exactly how to describe it, but it reminds me of music where each individual sound is not isolated, but is fluent in one another.
Instead of "cramming" everything into our consciousness, we should take on a different perspective of ourselves. The proposed perspective is reminiscent of Carl Gustav Jung's, collective subconscious.
Our being (our spiritual activity = I ?) unfolds in a form that is influenced by various "things".
As the flow of water flows in a given riverbed, our thinking unfolds through given influences. This includes ideologies, religion, character traits, concerns, sympathies and more. The deeper we go, the more universal these "influences" become (this means that they are not only personal influences.)
We understand our mental state better.
It's hard for me to express my thoughts because I don't have a deep understanding yet.
I would like to point out that we cannot fully comprehend these things through our intellect, because it has to be experienced, otherwise it remains no more than a thought perception that has arisen through living activity.
It should also be said that I cannot reproduce everything in the 4 essays here, I am only trying to articulate my understanding of T(true time).


I still have questions that came up while I was writing.


Citation:
But notice the big difference - this fly cannot surprise us because we grasp the temporal law of its movement, we live in its meaning by thinking the movement.


What do you mean by meaning, in that word.
What is the meaning of the movement of a fly? She moves erratically and that's about it I would say.
I think I don't understand the usage here.

-------------------------------------------------- -----------------------------

Is our ego equated with our mental activity, of which thinking is only the end product?
If so, how is our thinking shaped by other beings, feelings, ideas and so on.
Do these things live in our self(i) or is there a separation. Or is our ego not involved in the unfolding of thoughts


suppose we see a tree, how do we form a thinking gesture like we do with verbs?
And how does this gesture help us understand what a tree is?
For this we would first have to analyze the perception of the tree with our thinking.