Meditation

[Federica]

...let's take another quote from Steiner. The question here is simple - what is the purpose of Steiner mentioning these things below and do we gain a better understanding of these facts if we exert our thinking-will in a novel direction when washing our hands, or interacting with water more generally, or if we simply read them passively as interesting facts? When I put it this way, I am sure you will feel it is a silly question and say, of course, we should actively exert our thinking-will, without question. In which case, why do you see the hand-washing 'consecration' as something so different and 'arbitrary'?

Everything around us even if material, is a revelation of spirit. Matter has to be thought of in regard to spirit as ice is to water; matter is formed out of spirit. If you like you may call it consolidated spirit. Therefore if we come in contact with any substance, we contact the spirit in that substance. Any contact we make with substance, in so far as this is material, is Maya (illusion). In reality it is the spirit we encounter.

The way we come in touch with the spirit in water, when we wash our hands for instance, is seen — when life is observed with sharpened senses — to have a great influence on our whole disposition, however often we wash them. There are natures that have a certain preference for washing their hands, they must wash at once if they touch anything dirty. These natures are related in a quite special way to their surroundings. They are not restricted merely to what is material, for it is as if a fine force within the material substance begins to affect them, and that they have established the connection I mentioned between their hands and the element of water. Such people are even seen to possess, in an entirely healthy sense, more sensitive natures, finer powers of observation than others. They know at once, for instance, if they encounter anyone of a brutal or of a kindly nature. Whereas those others who endure dirt on their hands are actually of a coarser nature, and show by such ways that they have raised a wall between themselves and the more intimate relationships with the surrounding world. This is a fact and, if you like, it can be proved ethnographically. Pass through and observe the various countries of the world. You are then able to say: — “Here or there people wash their hands more.” Observe the relationship between such people, observe how different the relationship is between friend and friend, between acquaintance and acquaintance, in regions where hands are more frequently washed than in regions where walls have been raised between them owing to this being done less frequently.

Such things have the value of natural laws, Other connections can cancel them. If we throw a stone through the air, the line of its flight describes a parabole. But if the stone is caught by the wind the parabole is not there. This shows that we have to know the conditions before certain relationships can be observed correctly!

Whence does this knowledge come? It comes from clairvoyance, for it is revealed to this consciousness how finely the hands are permeated by soul and spirit qualities. This is so much the case that a special relationship of the hands to water is apparent, greater than in the case of the human countenance, and greater still than in respect of the surface of other parts of the human body. This must not be understood as an objection in any way to bathing and washing, but rather as throwing light on certain relationships. It is only to show how very differently man's soul and spirit-nature is related to his various members, and how differently this is impressed on them.

You will find it hard to believe, for instance, that anyone could suffer injury in his astral body through washing his hands too frequently. But this must be considered in its widest aspect. It depends on the maintenance of a healthy relationship between man and the surrounding world — that is, between the astral body of man and the surrounding world — through the relation-ship of his hands to water. For this reason excess in this is hardly possible.

If people think only in a materialistic way, clinging with their thoughts to what is material they say: — “What is good for the hands is good for the rest of the body.” Showing that they do not note the fine differences between them and the other members.

Yes - we should actively exert our thinking-will. I will try to reformulate the question about the hand-washing consecration.
As I already said, the activity as clarified by Cleric has solved the question:

The idea was simple - that everything in our sensory life can be seen through deeper meaning. Cleaning is something that we see everywhere in the living kingdoms. Even a single cell has to eliminate waste. But all these things also have their spiritual archetypes. So the exercise is more about connecting the physical action with higher meaning. There's no danger of falling into superstition here. We're just recognizing that the physical act is embedded into much more encompassing and meaningful inner life. We simply draw the parallel that just as our physical body can be purified, so the same is true for our psychic life. And not only that there's a parallel but in a sense the physical cleaning is the convoluted manifestation of the spiritual archetype. Thus by recognizing this we already work a tiny bit towards the spiritualization of the physical world, attuning it back to the higher flow.

If we call the above “consecration” - becoming aware of the pervasive connections between physical and spiritual through heightened attention to how we navigate our flow of transformation - I have obviously no issue with such activities.

Similarly, if OMA, or Cleric, or anyone else able to translate higher cognition into human concepts, were to tell me: “Know that the spiritual meaning of water that we know in the physical world is such and such, hence I recommend to pay attention to such and such gestures, and to recall such particular formula”, I also wouldn’t have any problem.

Now, based on how I understood the initial suggestion of consecration - again, this has been clarified since in satisfactory way, but because you keep asking me, I will refer to that again - what seemed problematic to me is if the student, while not understanding the nature of the said connections between, for example, physical water and the world of spirit, is invited to still work with the gesture, not simply by paying attention to water perceptions, striving to bring as much of the intuitive context as possible into consciousness (ceremonial exercise) but also by making up an arbitrary formula of his invention - a fantasy, really, in the sense Cleric uses this word - that formulates a wish for a certain effect ("may the water, or the grape, or the walk across the room, bring me such and such"), so not by freely entrusting the effect to a higher being (prayer, which would be ok) but by entrusting it under condition ("please, Spirit, such and such should come to me not by the mysterious ways of divine grace, but through my walk across the room, that I don't understand other than sensorily"). In other words, what I was concerned with was the risk for the student to end up formulating a fantasy and projecting it into will. Now, a fantasy projected into will is superstition, as I see it. This is the problematic aspect that came to mind when I first read that suggestion to consecrate perceptions (before Cleric clarified how he intended it).

To repeat, things would stand differently, if I knew - directly in higher cognition or through study, for example by studying an OMA lecture that proposes concentration and/or formulae for water - that my physical gestures with water, or my walking across the room, actually mean such and such, and so the experiences can be consecrated, and verbally reinforced, by a certain formula, or mantra, or prayer, that I would learn from someone who is conscious of the relevant connections. Then, I wouldn't see anything problematic (if I did, I should equally frown upon any mantra or prayer, which of course I don’t do).

[Cleric K]

Thank you, Cleric, for elaborating. Surely I don't doubt that this is your direct experience and wise recommendation. But I doubt that Steiner means study-meditation when he refers to the "actual study" of spiritual science that must precede clairvoyance.

There’s no contradiction here, Federica. It all boils down to understanding what ‘reasoned thinking’ means. Let’s look at this:



This is a very schematic attempt to represent the clairvoyant experience. The latter results not because of some clever trick that has been learned, through which we can see into the higher worlds, but because gradually our own depth structure has been attuned and has become self-similar to the Cosmic. Thus the clairvoyant's consciousness moves through the depth of the Cosmic ideal contextuality. These intuitive curvatures of existence are known as part of one’s own structure. Or rather, our own structure is embedded and musically resonant to the Cosmic context.

This doesn’t mean that discoveries here are made effortlessly, just by looking. No, everything has to be gradually and diligently explored and integrated.

The totality of this intuitive world can’t be conveyed in a simple way. The red line represents an ‘ideal vector’. The seer has to focus on some specific regularity or symmetry within the ideal order and express it in concepts.

When these are heard for the first time, we can distinguish three phases.

1/ The first is when the words are taken as literal physical descriptions (despite all attempts to explain that they are not). Here we meet the first level of attack against the communications of higher experiences. We have no choice but use words from our Earthly vocabulary. Thus, when for example such a person hears about an angel, they imagine a winged creature in the sky and laugh at it because they have an airline pilot friend who has thousands of hours in the air and has never seen one.

2/ The second stage is when we say “everything is only a symbol.” When this mode is taken to its extreme we arrive at something like BK’s and DH’s headset/dashboard metaphors. We can depict this in the following way:



Here we have the same contextual existence as that in which the clairvoyant lives, except that here it is much more aliased and detuned. But it’s still true that our being is weaved of the full depth of the Solar context. It’s only that we’re lucidly conscious only at the borderline of physical collapse of the wavefunction so to say.

When we think from this standpoint about the communications of SS, we imagine that they happen only in our mind’s bubble where we model reality but conceive that true reality is quite orthogonal to the model in the bubble. And ironically, in this particular case, it really is. (probably a more appropriate visualization would have been to picture the mind bubble as triangles of a single specific scale along the hierarchy)

Now I argue that Steiner has never suggested that thinking through the facts of SS requires us to first make such an abstract model. In a way, it is inevitable that we’ll first face the ideas in an abstract way but it wouldn’t be correct to imagine that this is what is demanded. If this was the goal, Steiner would have expressed like: “I warn you not to try enter livingly in these ideas. They first have to be studied abstractly, as some X, Y, Z without connection to real experiences.” Of course, we never hear such a thing. Then the question is: what does it mean to enter livingly in the ideas?

3/ The third phase is where things become once again literal but now within a fuller spectrum of existence. The problem of the literality of 1/ is that everything if flattened on the sensory plane. Here existence becomes once again literal but everything fits in its own place, we don’t reduce anything to anything else.

When we understand things in this way, it becomes clear that the goal of communication is not to simply imagine dashboard symbols for the ideal vector but set our inner being in motion such that we can feel its reality. The ideal vector is like a magnetic force line. The flow within the dreamscape is secretly aligned with that line. It is secret only because in our aliased and detuned inner life we can’t grasp this regularity.



Now what does it mean to reason through these facts? Nothing else but to slowly turn and attune the small triangles, such that we can feel the intuitive resonance with the ideal vector. Here the classical objection is “but what if in this way we’re simply brainwashed and Steiner makes us into copies of himself?” This objection can only be raised if we do not yet understand what it means that the foundations of existence are spiritual, ideal in nature. If we understand this, the objection sounds like “how can I be sure that by studying this mathematician I’m not simply brainwashed by his arbitrary ideas?” This can happen only if we don’t care that our intuitive being should keep growing and harmonizing with the Cosmic unity. If we do care, then if the ideal vector is incorrect, even without having higher cognition, just by trying to reason, to shift and rotate the triangles, we would say: “This doesn’t make sense.” Of course, we have to make clear difference here between “it doesn’t make sense” and “I don’t like this, it clashes with my opinion and conflicts with my desires.”

If we understand things in the context of the above picture, we’ll see that everything falls into place. First, it becomes transparently clear why study precedes seeing. Sure, we can forcefully loosen the etheric body but what we’ll see? The warped distortions of our disorganized being. To organize it we have two options: slowly and tediously to discover and attune the intuitive contextuality on our own, or step on the shoulders of giants and examine the ideal vectors already discovered and described. The first option would be just like one saying “Don’t tell me anything about mathematics, I want to discover everything by myself.” Anyone can decide for themselves how realistic such a goal is, whether we can discover in a lifetime what took humanity millennia. It’s quite the same with spiritual knowledge. This is the reason Steiner says that once discovered, the spiritual facts can be understood by many. Understood not simply as a mocked-up model but by really reasoning through the ideal vectors, shifting and rotating the triangles.

Second, we understand how there’s no real disconnect between reasoned thinking and deeper meditation. The clairvoyant experiences the exact same reasoned thoughts from his perspective, except that they are embedded in a much more encompassing Cosmic intuitive context (which unlike mathematics is something living, weaved of intuitive intents of beings). It is similar in mathematics. When we study the Pythagoras theorem we shift and rotate our intellectual triangles until they align with the ideal vector line. However, if we don’t have much experience in this domain, even though logical, this ideal line stands more or less isolated. We can say “If no one had told me about this ideal line, it would have never occurred to me. Nothing in my prior experience could have pointed me in that direction.” This is different in the mind of the mathematician, though. In his intuitive life, the line is embedded in a much more encompassing intuitive lattice. This line doesn’t stand in the void, as it were, but is related and supported by everything else.

This is also the difference between those who have developed their higher organization and regular people like us who only slowly try to align our inner life along ideal vectors, even if we don’t yet intuit them in their more comprehensive ideal context.

We remember our friend findingblanks. He is quite an enigma for me. Normally people dislike Steiner because they feel crushed by the tons of concepts that they can’t make sense of. But FB has spent years of studying them, yet obviously without anything reaching into the depth of the soul. One wonders from whence he draws the energy to do so. It all remains for him abstract conjecture. I remember that I asked him “OK, so after reading for all these years do you imagine it is possible that in the end it turns out that there’s no such thing as Saturn, Sun, Moon conditions, that it is all a mistake?” He was honest enough to affirm that this is a completely viable possibility for him. I can’t think of a better illustration for the image in 2/. After all these years of ‘studying’, in the end nothing has moved, nothing has clicked, and it all remains just as a floating conjecture.

So I guess we can all agree that Steiner has never suggested that we have to first ‘study’ SS in 2/. This would be wasted effort and there’s no telling if we’ll ever feel that it is time to move further.

So the question is to understand correctly the nature of 3/. Reasoned thinking through the ideal vectors is already a kind of meditation, except that we still experience it in a more wiggly way, through constant movements of thoughts supported by the brain. But the crucial thing is that these should not be abstract thoughts. For example, when we hear that the Saturn condition consists of pure inner warmth, to reason through this doesn’t mean to speak the words in our mind and see how they click together with other words. FB has certainly done that. To understand this we should realize that thinking is something much more encompassing. We can think with words, with light, with warmth, feelings and so on. This is the key. And we can do that perfectly well in our ordinary consciousness. We can easily convince ourselves of this fact by simply trying to remember some of these experiences. If we can remember them, we'll find out that we can 'remember' also similar experiences that have never happened to us. And this is already thinking. So, the triangles that we shift and rotate are not simply words or symbols. To reason through the descriptions of the Saturn condition we have to shift and rotate our inner experiences of warmth and will.

From this standpoint, passing from reasoned thinking to deeper meditation is something completely fluid. We don't move into another region (the 'real' one) but the 'aggregate state' of our intuitive activity changes. Our intuitive being flows through the same ideal vectors but now not in a 'choppy' way, through the more discrete shifts and rotations of the triangles. We continue to shift and rotate them but in more fluid, holistic ways.

This is the whole thing:
1. Yes, we can only advance by gradually shifting and rotating the triangles of our depth being (this is the studying and preparing process). We do that when we think livingly through the ideal vectors communicated by Initiates. The critical thing is that these triangles are not only words! We have to reason through the full spectrum of existence.
2. No, we don't gain anything if we imagine that we first have to study these things as something decoupled from reality, from its true ideal lines (re FB).

[Federica]

Federica,

We can't snip out passages from Steiner's lectures and use this as a basis for understanding his ideas on "clairvoyance" and "logical reasoning, ordinary thought, etc."

Ashvin,

I feel you are slipping into a confusing attitude in your last post.

Please concede to me that I don't "use snippets from lectures" to found my understanding of Steiner and Spiritual Science. If you don't concede it, well then you will have to accept it, because that is the truth, and your wording is wrong.

Now, if you prefer not to answer my question about how you and Steiner end up (as I wrote) making opposite statements about sensory and spiritual concepts, that's fine. But please don't use the reply button to my question, that you refuse to answer, to actually add your objections to my last post to Cleric. I will only address them when posted in reply to the statements you actually intend to object to.

[AshvinP]

Yes - we should actively exert our thinking-will. I will try to reformulate the question about the hand-washing consecration.
As I already said, the activity as clarified by Cleric has solved the question:

The idea was simple - that everything in our sensory life can be seen through deeper meaning. Cleaning is something that we see everywhere in the living kingdoms. Even a single cell has to eliminate waste. But all these things also have their spiritual archetypes. So the exercise is more about connecting the physical action with higher meaning. There's no danger of falling into superstition here. We're just recognizing that the physical act is embedded into much more encompassing and meaningful inner life. We simply draw the parallel that just as our physical body can be purified, so the same is true for our psychic life. And not only that there's a parallel but in a sense the physical cleaning is the convoluted manifestation of the spiritual archetype. Thus by recognizing this we already work a tiny bit towards the spiritualization of the physical world, attuning it back to the higher flow.

If we call the above “consecration” - becoming aware of the pervasive connections between physical and spiritual through heightened attention to how we navigate our flow of transformation - I have obviously no issue with such activities.

Similarly, if OMA, or Cleric, or anyone else able to translate higher cognition into human concepts, were to tell me: “Know that the spiritual meaning of water that we know in the physical world is such and such, hence I recommend to pay attention to such and such gestures, and to recall such particular formula”, I also wouldn’t have any problem.

Now, based on how I understood the initial suggestion of consecration - again, this has been clarified since in satisfactory way, but because you keep asking me, I will refer to that again - what seemed problematic to me is if the student, while not understanding the nature of the said connections between, for example, physical water and the world of spirit, is invited to still work with the gesture, not simply by paying attention to water perceptions, striving to bring as much of the intuitive context as possible into consciousness (ceremonial exercise) but also by making up an arbitrary formula of his invention - a fantasy, really, in the sense Cleric uses this word - that formulates a wish for a certain effect ("may the water, or the grape, or the walk across the room, bring me such and such") not by freely entrusting the effect to a higher being (prayer, which would be ok) but by entrusting it under condition ("such and such should come to me not by the mysterious ways of divine grace, but through my walk across the room, that I don't understand other than sensorily"). In other words, what I was concerned with was the risk for the student to end up formulating a fantasy and project it into will. Now, a fantasy projected into will is superstition, as I see it. This is the problematic aspect that came to mind when I first read that suggestion to consecrate perceptions (before Cleric clarified how he intended it).

To repeat, things would stand differently, if I knew - directly in higher cognition or through study, for example by studying an OMA lecture that proposes concentration and/or formulae for water - that my physical gestures with water, or my walking across the room, actually mean such and such, and so the experiences can be consecrated, and verbally reinforced, by a certain formula, or mantra, or prayer, that I would learn from someone who is conscious of the relevant connections. Then, I wouldn't see anything problematic (if I did, I should equally frown upon any mantra or prayer, which of course I don’t do).

I understand the above, Federica. You were initially worried about how the consecration example might react with someone who so far has not explored the spiritual connections with the physical spectrum, but decides to proceed on practically blind faith that it will bring some positive effect for them, perhaps as a mechanical exchange between a physical act and some abstract 'spiritual world'.

But the question still remains whether you are connecting living knowledge of the spiritual connections with 'study-meditate' or, instead, with some sort of accumulation of facts that disclose the 'meaning' to us and make us feel comfortable and secure that it's OK to move our spiritual activity in new directions. This critical difference will have bearings beyond only the hand-washing example, as I think we have seen on this forum, for ex. when Guney asked about Atlantean consciousness. It's completely natural to feel that way but we should also try to become more self-aware of the underlying reasons.

It's one thing to recognize this difference in our concepts and say "Yes, of course, it is better to actively explore the new degrees of freedom", but we also have to admit our default habits of passive, reflective, 'from a distance' thinking are so strong that we will fear and recoil from that exploration in many cases, at a quite subconscious level, and later our intellect will come along with the most varied commentaries for why that reaction was justified. This will keep happening until we confront the root issues, like leaks springing from new holes after the old ones were plugged up.

Now, if you prefer not to answer my question about how you and Steiner end up (as I wrote) making opposite statements about sensory and spiritual concepts, that's fine. But please don't use the reply button to my question, that you refuse to answer, to actually add your objections to my last post to Cleric. I will only address them when posted in reply to the statements you actually intend to object to.

If we still feel like productive discussion happens through some point-counterpoint analysis of Steiner's phraseology in isolated passages and comparing them to another's phraseology in isolated posts, without seeking the holistic intuition of what spiritual science is all about as a living enterprise that is being explored on this forum, then we're simply leaking from another hole without realizing it and using the 'you avoided my point and I won't move on to anything new until it is addressed on my presuppositions and terms' as an intellectual commentary to justify the leak. We are more interested in winning an argument than understanding what's at stake and what we can do to reorient our intuition. That means nothing of the above is being understood. If we're not open to that reorientation of the perspective from which we are asking our questions, then I can rephrase this:

It is much more aligned with the natural scientific approach independent of abstract metaphysics. Instead of just reading about the results of others' experiments and trying to fit them into some comprehensive theory, we turn our thinking-will into a method of experimentation. That is what Steiner was pointing to in that lecture you quoted - spiritual scientific thinking is not aligned with mystical speculation about the details of higher worlds, reincarnation, karma, and so forth, but with concrete and energetic experimentation with these concepts (study-meditate). We do indeed find the concepts of the physical world can help us triangulate spiritual realities IF we energetically work with them as crystallized symbols for the temporal structure of intuitive activity. In other words, we consistently experiment to lucidly think through how they have become such symbols in the course of evolution.

In a million different ways, with a million more details, and it still won't "answer your question" but will wash right over. In that sense, I intend to object to the very perspective from which the questions are being asked, which is also what Cleric is addressing. Otherwise, discussing the questions is a real wasted effort which may as well be happening on the analytic idealism discord server. It's a complete horizontal, expectation-laden analysis of the terminology being used that carries no prospect of reaching a deeper understanding of the issues at stake.

[Federica]

Yes - we should actively exert our thinking-will. I will try to reformulate the question about the hand-washing consecration.
As I already said, the activity as clarified by Cleric has solved the question:

The idea was simple - that everything in our sensory life can be seen through deeper meaning. Cleaning is something that we see everywhere in the living kingdoms. Even a single cell has to eliminate waste. But all these things also have their spiritual archetypes. So the exercise is more about connecting the physical action with higher meaning. There's no danger of falling into superstition here. We're just recognizing that the physical act is embedded into much more encompassing and meaningful inner life. We simply draw the parallel that just as our physical body can be purified, so the same is true for our psychic life. And not only that there's a parallel but in a sense the physical cleaning is the convoluted manifestation of the spiritual archetype. Thus by recognizing this we already work a tiny bit towards the spiritualization of the physical world, attuning it back to the higher flow.

If we call the above “consecration” - becoming aware of the pervasive connections between physical and spiritual through heightened attention to how we navigate our flow of transformation - I have obviously no issue with such activities.

Similarly, if OMA, or Cleric, or anyone else able to translate higher cognition into human concepts, were to tell me: “Know that the spiritual meaning of water that we know in the physical world is such and such, hence I recommend to pay attention to such and such gestures, and to recall such particular formula”, I also wouldn’t have any problem.

Now, based on how I understood the initial suggestion of consecration - again, this has been clarified since in satisfactory way, but because you keep asking me, I will refer to that again - what seemed problematic to me is if the student, while not understanding the nature of the said connections between, for example, physical water and the world of spirit, is invited to still work with the gesture, not simply by paying attention to water perceptions, striving to bring as much of the intuitive context as possible into consciousness (ceremonial exercise) but also by making up an arbitrary formula of his invention - a fantasy, really, in the sense Cleric uses this word - that formulates a wish for a certain effect ("may the water, or the grape, or the walk across the room, bring me such and such") not by freely entrusting the effect to a higher being (prayer, which would be ok) but by entrusting it under condition ("such and such should come to me not by the mysterious ways of divine grace, but through my walk across the room, that I don't understand other than sensorily"). In other words, what I was concerned with was the risk for the student to end up formulating a fantasy and project it into will. Now, a fantasy projected into will is superstition, as I see it. This is the problematic aspect that came to mind when I first read that suggestion to consecrate perceptions (before Cleric clarified how he intended it).

To repeat, things would stand differently, if I knew - directly in higher cognition or through study, for example by studying an OMA lecture that proposes concentration and/or formulae for water - that my physical gestures with water, or my walking across the room, actually mean such and such, and so the experiences can be consecrated, and verbally reinforced, by a certain formula, or mantra, or prayer, that I would learn from someone who is conscious of the relevant connections. Then, I wouldn't see anything problematic (if I did, I should equally frown upon any mantra or prayer, which of course I don’t do).

I understand the above, Federica. You were initially worried about how the consecration example might react with someone who so far has not explored the spiritual connections with the physical spectrum, but decides to proceed on practically blind faith that it will bring some positive effect for them, perhaps as a mechanical exchange between a physical act and some abstract 'spiritual world'.

This is not how I would put it, Ashvin.
You are constantly pulling and pushing on my words to drag the meaning hither and thither. I renounce reformulation.

But the question still remains whether you are connecting living knowledge of the spiritual connections with 'study-meditate' or, instead, with some sort of accumulation of facts that disclose the 'meaning' to us and make us feel comfortable and secure that it's OK to move our spiritual activity in new directions. This critical difference will have bearings beyond only the hand-washing example, as I think we have seen on this forum, for ex. when Guney asked about Atlantean consciousness. It's completely natural to feel that way but we should also try to become more self-aware of the underlying reasons.

It's one thing to recognize this difference in our concepts and say "Yes, of course, it is better to actively explore the new degrees of freedom", but we also have to admit our default habits of passive, reflective, 'from a distance' thinking are so strong that we will fear and recoil from that exploration in many cases, at a quite subconscious level, and later our intellect will come along with the most varied commentaries for why that reaction was justified. This will keep happening until we confront the root issues, like leaks springing from new holes after the old ones were plugged up.

Sure. And the best one can do is to maintain vigilance and self-observation, knowing that there will remain areas of failure. But they are dynamic. What keeps me focused is the perceived progression in time, even amidst major drawbacks, recoiling, justifying, as you say.

Now, if you prefer not to answer my question about how you and Steiner end up (as I wrote) making opposite statements about sensory and spiritual concepts, that's fine. But please don't use the reply button to my question, that you refuse to answer, to actually add your objections to my last post to Cleric. I will only address them when posted in reply to the statements you actually intend to object to.

If we still feel like productive discussion happens through some point-counterpoint analysis of Steiner's phraseology in isolated passages and comparing them to another's phraseology in isolated posts, without seeking the holistic intuition of what spiritual science is all about as a living enterprise that is being explored on this forum, then we're simply leaking from another hole without realizing it and using the 'you avoided my point and I won't move on to anything new until it is addressed on my presuppositions and terms' as an intellectual commentary to justify the leak. We are more interested in winning an argument than understanding what's at stake and what we can do to reorient our intuition. That means nothing of the above is being understood. If we're not open to that reorientation of the perspective from which we are asking our questions, then I can rephrase this:

It is much more aligned with the natural scientific approach independent of abstract metaphysics. Instead of just reading about the results of others' experiments and trying to fit them into some comprehensive theory, we turn our thinking-will into a method of experimentation. That is what Steiner was pointing to in that lecture you quoted - spiritual scientific thinking is not aligned with mystical speculation about the details of higher worlds, reincarnation, karma, and so forth, but with concrete and energetic experimentation with these concepts (study-meditate). We do indeed find the concepts of the physical world can help us triangulate spiritual realities IF we energetically work with them as crystallized symbols for the temporal structure of intuitive activity. In other words, we consistently experiment to lucidly think through how they have become such symbols in the course of evolution.

In a million different ways, with a million more details, and it still won't "answer your question" but will wash right over. In that sense, I intend to object to the very perspective from which the questions are being asked, which is also what Cleric is addressing. Otherwise, discussing the questions is a real wasted effort which may as well be happening on the analytic idealism discord server. It's a complete horizontal, expectation-laden analysis of the terminology being used that carries no prospect of reaching a deeper understanding of the issues at stake.

No... we don't still feel like all that. The reason for my comment has little to do with the sermon above. It has to do with your constant pulling and pushing to drag the meaning hither and thither.

[AshvinP]

No... we don't still feel like all that. The reason for my comment has little to do with the sermon above. It has to do with your constant pulling and pushing to drag the meaning hither and thither.

Please stop playing the victim card, Federica. You are projecting onto me what you yourself are doing consistently in this thread, trying to 'prove' that I am contradicting Steiner by meticulously dissecting each and every word of my posts, based on your flawed understanding of both Steiner's concepts and mine. Every time I try to elucidate the nature of your misunderstanding, you become recalcitrant and act like it's outside the realm of possibility you are misunderstanding Steiner, even though Cleric has pointed out the same thing in the last post.

The quote you kept asking me to address is as follows:

In the case of modern Spiritual Science, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier. It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind.

Not a single comment of mine on this thread is in opposition to the above. It could only be mistaken as such by someone who has never read PoF, never been on this forum, and never read my posts for the last few years. Clearly, you are not that person.

Obviously, concepts don't become some ontologically different category of reality just because they are derived from the physical world. The physical world is the spiritual world. The only thing I mentioned was that we can't employ the concepts with the abstract, passive way of thinking characteristic of normal sensory life if we want to gain deeper understanding of spiritual processes, which is again what Cleric illustrated in the last post. That is exactly what Steiner pointed out in the first quote you shared and dozens of other places that hardly need to be quoted.

As usual, the hand-washing thing simply provided the opportunity for deeper misunderstandings to come to light, and the only relevant question is whether we are going to use that opportunity to recalibrate our intuition of 'reasoned thinking' through spiritual reality or continue sweeping the misalignment under the rug and blaming others until the same process repeats all over again.

[Lou Gold]

"We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep."

A GREAT WAGON
by Rumi

When I see your face, the stones start spinning!
You appear; all studying wanders.
I lose my place.

Water turns pearly.
Fire dies down and doesn’t destroy.

In your presence I don’t want what I thought
I wanted, those three little hanging lamps.

Inside your face the ancient manuscripts
Seem like rusty mirrors.

You breathe; new shapes appear,
and the music of a desire as widespread
as Spring begins to move
like a great wagon.
Drive slowly.
Some of us walking alongside
are lame!

~

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

~

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.

~

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let’s buy it.

~

Daylight, full of small dancing particles
and the one great turning, our souls
are dancing with you, without feet, they dance.
Can you see them when I whisper in your ear?

~

They try to say what you are, spiritual or sexual?
They wonder about Solomon and all his wives.

In the body of the world, they say, there is a soul
and you are that.

But we have ways within each other
that will never be said by anyone.

~

Come to the orchard in Spring.
There is light and wine, and sweethearts
in the pomegranate flowers.

If you do not come, these do not matter.
If you do come, these do not matter.

[AshvinP]

The quote you kept asking me to address is as follows:

In the case of modern Spiritual Science, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier. It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind.

I would also like to add a quote from Steiner in those same Meditation and Concentration lectures. We should notice how things can be presented in seemingly different, perhaps even contradictory ways. But that is only appearance. Once we develop a more holistic intuition for the mysterious flows of spiritual reality, through the active shifting and rotations of the triangles (study-meditate), we can easily discern why the differences exist and thereby reconcile the passages. Until then, there is always a risk of starting from our own belief or preference and reading that into the text, because the concepts we perceive are not unambiguous by themselves, only when they are elucidated by the proper overarching ideas.

The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time — that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time.

I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense. — That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds — at best picture thoughts.

It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth.

[Federica]

Thank you, Cleric, for elaborating. Surely I don't doubt that this is your direct experience and wise recommendation. But I doubt that Steiner means study-meditation when he refers to the "actual study" of spiritual science that must precede clairvoyance.

There’s no contradiction here, Federica. It all boils down to understanding what ‘reasoned thinking’ means. Let’s look at this:



This is a very schematic attempt to represent the clairvoyant experience. The latter results not because of some clever trick that has been learned, through which we can see into the higher worlds, but because gradually our own depth structure has been attuned and has become self-similar to the Cosmic. Thus the clairvoyant's consciousness moves through the depth of the Cosmic ideal contextuality. These intuitive curvatures of existence are known as part of one’s own structure. Or rather, our own structure is embedded and musically resonant to the Cosmic context.

This doesn’t mean that discoveries here are made effortlessly, just by looking. No, everything has to be gradually and diligently explored and integrated.

The totality of this intuitive world can’t be conveyed in a simple way. The red line represents an ‘ideal vector’. The seer has to focus on some specific regularity or symmetry within the ideal order and express it in concepts.

When these are heard for the first time, we can distinguish three phases.

1/ The first is when the words are taken as literal physical descriptions (despite all attempts to explain that they are not). Here we meet the first level of attack against the communications of higher experiences. We have no choice but use words from our Earthly vocabulary. Thus, when for example such a person hears about an angel, they imagine a winged creature in the sky and laugh at it because they have an airline pilot friend who has thousands of hours in the air and has never seen one.

2/ The second stage is when we say “everything is only a symbol.” When this mode is taken to its extreme we arrive at something like BK’s and DH’s headset/dashboard metaphors. We can depict this in the following way:



Here we have the same contextual existence as that in which the clairvoyant lives, except that here it is much more aliased and detuned. But it’s still true that our being is weaved of the full depth of the Solar context. It’s only that we’re lucidly conscious only at the borderline of physical collapse of the wavefunction so to say.

When we think from this standpoint about the communications of SS, we imagine that they happen only in our mind’s bubble where we model reality but conceive that true reality is quite orthogonal to the model in the bubble. And ironically, in this particular case, it really is. (probably a more appropriate visualization would have been to picture the mind bubble as triangles of a single specific scale along the hierarchy)

Now I argue that Steiner has never suggested that thinking through the facts of SS requires us to first make such an abstract model. In a way, it is inevitable that we’ll first face the ideas in an abstract way but it wouldn’t be correct to imagine that this is what is demanded. If this was the goal, Steiner would have expressed like: “I warn you not to try enter livingly in these ideas. They first have to be studied abstractly, as some X, Y, Z without connection to real experiences.” Of course, we never hear such a thing. Then the question is: what does it mean to enter livingly in the ideas?

3/ The third phase is where things become once again literal but now within a fuller spectrum of existence. The problem of the literality of 1/ is that everything if flattened on the sensory plane. Here existence becomes once again literal but everything fits in its own place, we don’t reduce anything to anything else.

When we understand things in this way, it becomes clear that the goal of communication is not to simply imagine dashboard symbols for the ideal vector but set our inner being in motion such that we can feel its reality. The ideal vector is like a magnetic force line. The flow within the dreamscape is secretly aligned with that line. It is secret only because in our aliased and detuned inner life we can’t grasp this regularity.



Now what does it mean to reason through these facts? Nothing else but to slowly turn and attune the small triangles, such that we can feel the intuitive resonance with the ideal vector. Here the classical objection is “but what if in this way we’re simply brainwashed and Steiner makes us into copies of himself?” This objection can only be raised if we do not yet understand what it means that the foundations of existence are spiritual, ideal in nature. If we understand this, the objection sounds like “how can I be sure that by studying this mathematician I’m not simply brainwashed by his arbitrary ideas?” This can happen only if we don’t care that our intuitive being should keep growing and harmonizing with the Cosmic unity. If we do care, then if the ideal vector is incorrect, even without having higher cognition, just by trying to reason, to shift and rotate the triangles, we would say: “This doesn’t make sense.” Of course, we have to make clear difference here between “it doesn’t make sense” and “I don’t like this, it clashes with my opinion and conflicts with my desires.”

If we understand things in the context of the above picture, we’ll see that everything falls into place. First, it becomes transparently clear why study precedes seeing. Sure, we can forcefully loosen the etheric body but what we’ll see? The warped distortions of our disorganized being. To organize it we have two options: slowly and tediously to discover and attune the intuitive contextuality on our own, or step on the shoulders of giants and examine the ideal vectors already discovered and described. The first option would be just like one saying “Don’t tell me anything about mathematics, I want to discover everything by myself.” Anyone can decide for themselves how realistic such a goal is, whether we can discover in a lifetime what took humanity millennia. It’s quite the same with spiritual knowledge. This is the reason Steiner says that once discovered, the spiritual facts can be understood by many. Understood not simply as a mocked-up model but by really reasoning through the ideal vectors, shifting and rotating the triangles.

Second, we understand how there’s no real disconnect between reasoned thinking and deeper meditation. The clairvoyant experiences the exact same reasoned thoughts from his perspective, except that they are embedded in a much more encompassing Cosmic intuitive context (which unlike mathematics is something living, weaved of intuitive intents of beings). It is similar in mathematics. When we study the Pythagoras theorem we shift and rotate our intellectual triangles until they align with the ideal vector line. However, if we don’t have much experience in this domain, even though logical, this ideal line stands more or less isolated. We can say “If no one had told me about this ideal line, it would have never occurred to me. Nothing in my prior experience could have pointed me in that direction.” This is different in the mind of the mathematician, though. In his intuitive life, the line is embedded in a much more encompassing intuitive lattice. This line doesn’t stand in the void, as it were, but is related and supported by everything else.

This is also the difference between those who have developed their higher organization and regular people like us who only slowly try to align our inner life along ideal vectors, even if we don’t yet intuit them in their more comprehensive ideal context.

We remember our friend findingblanks. He is quite an enigma for me. Normally people dislike Steiner because they feel crushed by the tons of concepts that they can’t make sense of. But FB has spent years of studying them, yet obviously without anything reaching into the depth of the soul. One wonders from whence he draws the energy to do so. It all remains for him abstract conjecture. I remember that I asked him “OK, so after reading for all these years do you imagine it is possible that in the end it turns out that there’s no such thing as Saturn, Sun, Moon conditions, that it is all a mistake?” He was honest enough to affirm that this is a completely viable possibility for him. I can’t think of a better illustration for the image in 2/. After all these years of ‘studying’, in the end nothing has moved, nothing has clicked, and it all remains just as a floating conjecture.

So I guess we can all agree that Steiner has never suggested that we have to first ‘study’ SS in 2/. This would be wasted effort and there’s no telling if we’ll ever feel that it is time to move further.

So the question is to understand correctly the nature of 3/. Reasoned thinking through the ideal vectors is already a kind of meditation, except that we still experience it in a more wiggly way, through constant movements of thoughts supported by the brain. But the crucial thing is that these should not be abstract thoughts. For example, when we hear that the Saturn condition consists of pure inner warmth, to reason through this doesn’t mean to speak the words in our mind and see how they click together with other words. FB has certainly done that. To understand this we should realize that thinking is something much more encompassing. We can think with words, with light, with warmth, feelings and so on. This is the key. And we can do that perfectly well in our ordinary consciousness. We can easily convince ourselves of this fact by simply trying to remember some of these experiences. If we can remember them, we'll find out that we can 'remember' also similar experiences that have never happened to us. And this is already thinking. So, the triangles that we shift and rotate are not simply words or symbols. To reason through the descriptions of the Saturn condition we have to shift and rotate our inner experiences of warmth and will.

From this standpoint, passing from reasoned thinking to deeper meditation is something completely fluid. We don't move into another region (the 'real' one) but the 'aggregate state' of our intuitive activity changes. Our intuitive being flows through the same ideal vectors but now not in a 'choppy' way, through the more discrete shifts and rotations of the triangles. We continue to shift and rotate them but in more fluid, holistic ways.

This is the whole thing:
1. Yes, we can only advance by gradually shifting and rotating the triangles of our depth being (this is the studying and preparing process). We do that when we think livingly through the ideal vectors communicated by Initiates. The critical thing is that these triangles are not only words! We have to reason through the full spectrum of existence.
2. No, we don't gain anything if we imagine that we first have to study these things as something decoupled from reality, from its true ideal lines (re FB).

Cleric,

Leaving aside for a moment the question of how Steiner really meant to teach spiritual science, I want to thank you for presenting things in this new form. In a sense, this form has worked mainly as a confirmation, but the fractal illustration has been of much help to consolidate things. I have to add, without the fractal generator examples you recently shared, I wouldn’t have grasped this more schematic ‘triangle fractal’ metaphor as properly. In fact, before those examples, I hadn’t understood well enough the various references to fractals. I was not taking them literally enough. I was not connecting the various planes - our thinking modes, the other beings’ ideal flesh, flow in Earthly time, and meditation - coincidentally enough.

So the 'thank you' refers even more to those guidelines you laid out in the topic-specific discourse room. In this post (as far as I can consciously gauge!) the standpoints 1/ and 2/ are well understood, though the ironically self-fulfilling prophecy of dissociation expressed in the dashboard theories was new, and helps me gaze somewhat better into the soul characters these theories manifest, which is useful, because the characters could still be adjacent to, and somehow influence, my own.

Regarding phase 3/, I understand it as a phase, but the identification of the ideal vector and the “specific regularity or symmetry” from which it arises in our consciousness remain blurry. I don’t understand well the magnetic force line to follow. I was rather thinking more in terms of an expanding vista, not one converging along a vector (please believe me I am still not fantasizing here ). It’s as if I was intuiting the movement in one direction, within the IFS flow (the direction that goes away from it, as if distancing myself from the generation process, that is, moving in the same direction as the generation process) but here you are saying: no, it’s the opposite, we have to deep-dive into the fractal, continuously excluding countless panoramas, and letting infinite details slip away on all sides.

So this is the part that confronts me with difficulties. Now, I still understand the effortful attunement in 3/. I remember the pendulum metaphor for attunement you have given somewhere else, which is a more vivid image for me. Because I feel I have an experience of such attunement-in-progress, when for example I contemplate in my thoughts Raphael’s Saint Sebastian. Then, I really sense how I only grasp some all-round meaning captured in the expression, in pendulum-like moments. On the other hand, I admit I have to work more on the “no real disconnect between reasoned thinking and deeper meditation” and maybe I’m translating this lack into the lectures, I don’t know. For me, reasoned thinking and meditation still feel like distincts chapters of the daily conscious flow, distinct sets of gestures to will. I believe I get what “thinking with warmth” means - it means making the ‘rotating’ effort to descend into the experience, for example of Saturn existence - but at the same time I am very unable to do that ‘casually’, to do that at pace, contextually while listening to a lecture description of the planetary conditions, for example. I would be exhausted after a short while.

I tend to consider these rotating efforts of thinking with, say, warmth, as something to attempt under meditative conditions, in calmness, away from sensory stimuli, etcetera. It’s like the cylinders of a car engine. I entirely lack the power to keep this efforts going at the same time as I read/listen to a lecture! And so the question arises: should I stop reading/listening and wait until I can warmth-think that description of the Saturn condition, before moving to the next sentence??

My current answer is: NO! It’s completely unrealistic! I think it’s better to move on through the descriptions, and get a general sense of human evolution through those planetary conditions, even if it means that one has to slide through most of it intellectually. Because the value of gaining that vista will materialize later on, and it will prove itself precious. It reminds me of being taught piano for years, as a very young child, without ever being allowed to play any melody, only to solmizate and play exercises and scales. Until one day I saw myself doing the inconceivable act of throwing the musical score against the wall. I can still see the score lying on the floor, torn apart diagonally from its middle.

And this brings us back to the question of how Steiner meant to communicate the aims and tasks of spiritual science to his audiences. I always put myself ideally in the audience when I read a lecture, and try to hear the spoken words from that place, rather than reading the words and sentences as if they had been written for that purpose by the author. And, to be honest, I have to say I am still not convinced that Steiner was encouraging his audience to study-mediate in real time, when listening to the descriptions of spiritual science. That would have been unrealistic! I can’t convince myself he was telling that diverse audience of old and new members of the Society to somehow make all the effortful rotations click on the go (!) or otherwise to slowly read lecture-transcripts afterwards (for those who might have had the luxury to have access to such material for that purpose) and only move to the next sentence after having diligently thought the ideas through with light, or warmth, or else, and only after having succeeded at clicking the rotations into place along the ideal inner vector, one by one.

Rather, I think he knew that, at that pace, people would have ended up throwing the transcript against the wall, or, more likely, letting it collect dust on a bookshelf, which is why he said that “intellectual” understanding of spiritual science was not at all meaningless, and certainly more useful than easy gut-clairvoyance. And that’s why he also said that, when one gets an intellectual (abstract, as you would say) understanding of spiritual science, at least one has it, in some way - like when one is named in a testament but doesn’t yet know it, to use Steiner’s metaphor. Then he has the wealth, even if he’s not conscious of it. So I may be wrong, but at this point, I still believe he acknowledged that the reasoned thinking you speak of, embedded in the same fluid as deeper meditation, was largely disconnected from the reality of his audience, realistically inaccessible, and therefore he adapted his teachings accordingly, so that everyone would find reflected in the teachings their own present level of thinking power.

This is not to say that I don't feel drawn to making all the thinking efforts you keep illustrating and breaking down for us in your posts. And I consider these descriptions more important and valuable than understanding exactly how Steiner meant to speak to his audience, and for the opportunity enclosed in your descriptions, again, I want to say thank you.

[Federica]

The quote you kept asking me to address is as follows:

In the case of modern Spiritual Science, anyone who takes pains is able to make something of what it presents, because he can permeate it with the element of thought he acquires on the physical plane. For the same concepts are used to grasp what is in the spiritual world and what is in the physical world. Present-day Natural Science speaks of evolution; so does Spiritual Science. If you have grasped the concept of evolution you can understand what is set forth in Spiritual Science. You can create a concept of karma, because you can create a picture of it in thought. Of course if you simply say, as many theosophists do: “Every spiritual cause has a spiritual effect and this is karma”, you have then no conception of karma. You can see the law of cause and effect in a billiard ball, but that would be no right comparison for karma. But now take an iron ball and throw it into a vessel of water. If the ball is cold the water will remain as it is. But if you make the ball hot and then throw it in, the water will get warm as a result of what has been done to the ball. Here we have something which may be compared with karma; here we have a later event that is the result of an earlier. It must be quite clear to us that one who permeates the facts of the spiritual world with thought can also impart them in such a way that everyone who has thoughts acquired here on the physical plane can apply these same thoughts to what is imparted from the spiritual worlds. If he does this he can understand it. Everyone ought to keep this in mind.

I would also like to add a quote from Steiner in those same Meditation and Concentration lectures. We should notice how things can be presented in seemingly different, perhaps even contradictory ways. But that is only appearance. Once we develop a more holistic intuition for the mysterious flows of spiritual reality, through the active shifting and rotations of the triangles (study-meditate), we can easily discern why the differences exist and thereby reconcile the passages. Until then, there is always a risk of starting from our own belief or preference and reading that into the text, because the concepts we perceive are not unambiguous by themselves, only when they are elucidated by the proper overarching ideas.

The particular difficulty in speaking about the facts of spiritual science is that, as soon as we turn our gaze to the spiritual worlds, we have really to renounce the whole outlook we have developed for existence in space; we must entirely give up this spatial conception and realize that there space no longer exists, everything running its course in time — that there even the organs are temporal processes. If we would find our way about among the events in spiritual life, we have not only to transform our way of learning; we must entirely transform ourselves, re-model ourselves, acquire fresh life, in such a way that we adopt quite a different method of conception. Here lies the difficulty referred to yesterday, which so many people shun, however ingenious for the physical plane their philosophy may be. People indeed are wedded to their spatial conceptions and cannot find their bearings in a life that runs its course entirely in time.

I know quite well that there may be many souls who say: But I just cannot conceive that when I enter the spiritual world this spiritual world is not to be there in a spatial sense. — That may be, but if we wish to enter the spiritual world the most necessary thing of all is for us to make every effort to grow beyond forming our conceptions as we do on the physical plane. If in forming our conceptions of the higher worlds we never take for our standards and models any but those of the physical world, we shall never attain to real thoughts about the higher worlds — at best picture thoughts.

It is thus where thinking is concerned. After death thinking takes its course in such a way that it reflects itself in what we have lived through, what we were, in physical earthly life between birth and death. All the occurrences we have experienced constitute after death our eyes and our ears. Try by meditating to make real to yourselves all that is contained in the significant sentence: Your life between birth and death will become eye and ear for you, it will constitute your organs between death and rebirth.

Ashvin,

Please consider, there's no projection and there's no victim here. When you say that I base my understanding on passages snipped out from lectures, you're pushing and pulling the truth (I know how I do it, and I refer to inner approach) and when you say that I was worried about how the consecration example might react with someone who decides to proceed on blind faith, you might not agree, but from my perspective you are distorting again, based on your judgments on how I operate, and judgments on how perfect Cleric's consacration suggestion was (and just this once, I don't think it was). Anyway, if you agree, I would now prefer to focus on your last post, quoted in this one.

I read these Meditation and Concentration lectures too. As said, when I read a lecture, I put effort in changing my attitude into ‘listening to the lecture’ in the time and context in which it was given, rather than simply reading it as a transcript. I think it's clear, this is already a kind of attuning rotation, as it were. Also, believe it or not, my argument that Steiner was speaking somewhat favorably about an intellectual understanding of spiritual science (as I tried to render in my post just above) does not mean at all that my “personal belief and preference” goes to an abstract and intellectual reading of the concepts of spiritual science. Therefore, I am telling you, this is not a personal preference I am projecting into the lecture. It’s only just not my preference, as it turns out. Therefore - even in we say that I blindly project my preferences in what I read - that particular preference could not be projected, since it’s not mine.

Anyhow, I am familiar with the passage you quote, and I have been reflecting on it, in connection with the posts of page 19-20 of this thread. I have a question. As I understand it, the ultimate meaning of perception, in the widest sense possible - be it in the physical, in the etheric, or in the soul-spiritual - is the experience of finding the ever-emerging, contourless shape of our own individual activity as beings, no matter if alive or dead. This involves realizing the working of some kind of feedback to our activity. When awake in the etheric, the feedback to our thinking activity is provided by the ‘narrowing down of possibilities’ jointly brought about by the ideal constraints, or rotations of the Ls, and our brain, that filters, photographs and reflects back the end-results. We adjust to them, and as a consequence, we get confirmation of the nature and form of our activity, of our self.

Now, Steiner says that when we lose the ether body, past the gate of death, our organs of perception become the thoughts and actions that we impressed during our life on Earth. These become our eyes and ears. I get that there is no more visual/spatial dimension, and perception becomes a solely temporal, musical experience. And our life on Earth is a temporal expression of our being that we have with us. But I would have expected that, after death, feedback and sense of the shape of our individuality (perception) would be provided directly, continuously and solely by an endless flow of harmonization of our activity with the evolving flow of ideal constraints expressed by the other beings. And I would have expected that our past thoughts and actions would have worked as karmic constraints, sort of fixed constraints to the quality of spiritual activity one is able to become.

I thought that (once dead, without the detour of brain reflection) feedback would be perceived directly in the soul, as spiritual activity that is not expression of our will, but comes to meet ours from 'outside'. So I am struggling to grasp how the activity of other beings and our life record may integrate then (if they do) so as to give us overall perception of how we become in the spiritual world between death and rebirth. Is there anything that can be added to clarify this?