Meditation

[AshvinP]

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.

Federica,

Thanks for these additional considerations. The only thing I meant by 'basing understanding on snippets' is that we can become quite selective in what we focus on without realizing it. Steiner's archive presents endless angles of approach on the same essential topics and sometimes they can seem in direct conflict, as we saw with those quotes from the same lecture cycle. Are we fully conscious of why we are drawn to certain formalizations and not others?

Personally, I don't think trying to transport into the 'time and context' of the lecture is going to help alleviate the issue too much. The context of early 19th century Germany is still going to be quite a black box into which we project our personalized shades of meaning. The only safe way I see is to resist forming any firm conclusions about what is meant until we build a holistic intuition for how our spiritual activity meets resistance in various domains of experience - sensory, soul, and spiritual worlds.

In the context of this question of 'intellectual understanding', 'reasoned thinking', and so forth, we should be able to know from within exactly what sort of spiritual activity is necessary to move from one domain to another. Since Steiner is fundamentally speaking of these universal aspects of spiritual activity, we will resonate with the concepts he is employing once we develop our intuition for how our inner activity moves in relation to the sensory, psychic, and ideal stream of experience. Then we no longer need to add any personalized shades of meaning to reach firm conclusions about the spirit of what is meant. We know that Steiner could only be speaking of 'reasoned thinking' in certain ways because that's the only thing that makes sense for approaching the soul-spiritual domains of experience in a fruitful way.

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?

Yes. the first paragraph seems mostly on point to me. When awake in the etheric, it's no longer the physical brain (sensory system) reflecting our activity, but the 'etheric brain' that can reflect holistic curvatures of life experience through images, independent of the physical senses.

Here's one angle of approach on your question - imagine that you went through life with perfect attention to all your experiences. You were always centered in the first-person flow of activity and could therefore understand the opportunities for inner perfection that arose from every experience. You reacted in the most Good, Beautiful, and True way to every interaction and relationship with other people that destiny brought your way. In these completely idealistic circumstances, you could immortalize your sheaths in a single incarnation and attain complete continuity of consciousness, i.e. transcend the cycle of reincarnation. In that sense, each life between birth and death presents us with such an idealized opportunity but, of course, the reality is that much of it is wasted and remains as untapped potential for future incarnations. 

So, after death, this 'differential' between the idealized scenario and what was actually realized becomes the organ of perception that reflects Cosmic spiritual activity. Just as we use eyes, ears, etc. to reflect on the sensory spectrum and triangulate the meaning that will help us move toward various Earthly goals, the Cosmic hierarchies with which our individuality is interwoven after death reflect on this differential to triangulate the inner configurations necessary to move toward the Cosmic goals. We are always bouncing between 'past' (karmic constraints) and 'future' (potential development) in that sense, both during life and after death. Only, after death, the aperture of past and future we are bouncing between becomes much more expansive, Cosmic-scale (in the temporal sense).

I would remind here of a simple example I gave to Lorenzo and Guney before. 

For ex. imagine you are stopped at a stop sign and need to turn left. For that, you need to cross two lanes of traffic going from your left to right and merge into another lane of traffic going from right to left. What do you do? First, you visually sense the oncoming cars in either direction, looking left and right. These visual sensations stimulate your thinking to expand into a broader intuitive context of principles that help you anticipate the future. In this case, you expand into the intuition of how distance and speed relate to the time it takes for moving objects to reach certain locations, both the other vehicles and your own. The whole time you are also rhythmically moving back to the sensations and allowing those to feed back into your expansive intuitive context that anctipates the future. All of this rhythmic activity takes place very quickly and smoothly without you needing to explore it in clear-cut concepts. Even without such concepts, we can know it is actually happening and we can later use our concepts to make this experience clearer to ourselves like we are doing now.
...
On a larger scale, our entire incarnation in the sensory world is like the visual sensations of cars above. We are 'looking back' to what our intuitive activity previously imploded into manifest structures - the elements, the natural kingdoms, cultural institutions - so as to stimulate our current activity and triangulate the most optimal course forward to fulfill Divine intents. The sensory spectrum experienced through the physical body kindles new intuitions that help us anticipate the remaining intuitive potential that has yet to be incarnated. We try our best to incarnate that intuitive potential and then continue our work within the higher modes of consciousness after death (the Cosmic spheres we expand into), where the experiences during incarnation can be worked on much more directly, from a higher vantage point, in concert with communities of living souls and the higher hierarchies. With this work, however, we cannot make perfect sense of the holistic Cosmic evolution - there are still capacities and qualities missing to fulfill the holistic intent - so we contract back into the sensory world to develop the missing elements. By cycling through the modes of consciousness, we are viewing the same spiritual relations from different temporal angles, bouncing between what we experience as 'past' and 'future', to triangulate the perfect Cosmic intent where all beings know themselves as One.

This is the essential rhythm that we know from PoF, between Intuition (future potential), Thinking (mediating link), and Perception (karmic constraints). It should be noted, in that sense, the sensory-brain reflection is only a 'detour' to the extent we fail to use it for its higher intended purposes, i.e. to work for inner perfection and thereby spiral together the Earthly and Cosmic goals. As long as our rhythm consists of tasks related to navigating stop signs and so forth (or even speculating on spiritual questions via abstract philosophies), and nothing more, we are stuck in an infernal loop, repetitively taking the same detour over and over again without extracting the deeper lessons for our inner perfection. But as soon as we become self-aware of the rhythms involved in navigating stop signs (and everything else), we are in a position to leverage the sensory 'detour' into the fulfillment of more expansive Cosmic tasks that we normally work on only after death. 

[Federica]

Federica,


Thanks for these additional considerations. The only thing I meant by 'basing understanding on snippets' is that we can become quite selective in what we focus on without realizing it. Steiner's archive presents endless angles of approach on the same essential topics and sometimes they can seem in direct conflict, as we saw with those quotes from the same lecture cycle. Are we fully conscious of why we are drawn to certain formalizations and not others?

Admittedly not always, but in this case, it was not disconnected from the turns of our discussion.

Personally, I don't think trying to transport into the 'time and context' of the lecture is going to help alleviate the issue too much. The context of early 19th century Germany is still going to be quite a black box into which we project our personalized shades of meaning. The only safe way I see is to resist forming any firm conclusions about what is meant until we build a holistic intuition for how our spiritual activity meets resistance in various domains of experience - sensory, soul, and spiritual worlds.

Transporting in that time and context is not an historical attempt to familiarize myself with the mood, language habits and so of that period in Europe. What I mean is I want to ‘listen’ to the ideas as if I was hearing them in real time, like they were given, and observe how they are understood, therefore I start by pinning down the lecturing context - constraints and concerns. This seems necessary to me for this not to remain a floating digression, but one in which I can focus on observation. This doesn’t mean I consider my conclusions unshakable. Conclusions may be firm and not immutable at the same time. They may be fully armor-plated in the moment they are reasoned out, based on the individual perspective in that moment. It doesn’t mean they are set in stone.

In the context of this question of 'intellectual understanding', 'reasoned thinking', and so forth, we should be able to know from within exactly what sort of spiritual activity is necessary to move from one domain to another. Since Steiner is fundamentally speaking of these universal aspects of spiritual activity, we will resonate with the concepts he is employing once we develop our intuition for how our inner activity moves in relation to the sensory, psychic, and ideal stream of experience. Then we no longer need to add any personalized shades of meaning to reach firm conclusions about the spirit of what is meant. We know that Steiner could only be speaking of 'reasoned thinking' in certain ways because that's the only thing that makes sense for approaching the soul-spiritual domains of experience in a fruitful way.

I am not able to fluidly move from one domain to the other. That's why I cannot meditate on the go, or even at home in ideal conditions, if I have a meeting coming up one hour later. However, I am seeking to pay more attention to Steiners descriptions of thinking, and I'm seeing that "reasoned thinking" and "practical thinking" are more similar than I had imagined to what you and Cleric have often call living thinking. On the other hand I'm still struggling to read the same meaning when he speaks of "intellectual" thinking... In any case I guess there's no point in adding more thoughts for the time being, since in your view they only can be personalized shades of meaning.

Thank you for addressing the question of the life record as an organ of perception after death. I will further reflect on your points.

[AshvinP]

Federica,


Thanks for these additional considerations. The only thing I meant by 'basing understanding on snippets' is that we can become quite selective in what we focus on without realizing it. Steiner's archive presents endless angles of approach on the same essential topics and sometimes they can seem in direct conflict, as we saw with those quotes from the same lecture cycle. Are we fully conscious of why we are drawn to certain formalizations and not others?

Admittedly not always, but in this case, it was not disconnected from the turns of our discussion.

Personally, I don't think trying to transport into the 'time and context' of the lecture is going to help alleviate the issue too much. The context of early 19th century Germany is still going to be quite a black box into which we project our personalized shades of meaning. The only safe way I see is to resist forming any firm conclusions about what is meant until we build a holistic intuition for how our spiritual activity meets resistance in various domains of experience - sensory, soul, and spiritual worlds.

Transporting in that time and context is not an historical attempt to familiarize myself with the mood, language habits and so of that period in Europe. What I mean is I want to ‘listen’ to the ideas as if I was hearing them in real time, like they were given, and observe how they are understood, therefore I start by pinning down the lecturing context - constraints and concerns. This seems necessary to me for this not to remain a floating digression, but one in which I can focus on observation. This doesn’t mean I consider my conclusions unshakable. Conclusions may be firm and not immutable at the same time. They may be fully armor-plated in the moment they are reasoned out, based on the individual perspective in that moment. It doesn’t mean they are set in stone.

Federica,

To me, this transporting seems like even more effort, with the risk of arbitrariness, than the study-meditate on the ideas expressed while we are reading. It can be helpful to read the summaries at the beginning which give a context for the lecture, but I would just keep this as a loose feeling in the background rather than trying to triangulate the meaning of the spiritual ideas through them.

If anything, the overall context I would keep in mind is that, even when he is lecturing to 'lay people', we are dealing with generally more educated and well-rounded thinkers than most people today, who had more exposure to living experience and social interactions. I always have the sense that when Steiner speaks of 'cultivating energetic thinking', from the perspective of digital GPT-infused thinking culture today, which is terribly remote and isolated from living experience, this would be seen as a downright superhuman ability. As we see on this forum (and I have seen all over discord), even the most basic ABC of developing intuitive thinking is seen as beyond the realm of thought-possibilities for the average person. It is experienced as completely within the domain of the 'high priests'. I don't think that was so much the case back then. Instead, I think Steiner generally approached his audiences with much higher standards for what they could accomplish with their spiritual activity and expressed ideas accordingly.

By the way, on the study-meditate, it does help for me to pause at various junctures, close my eyes, and try to contemplate the ideas more deeply and probe the sense-free states in question. Of course, if Steiner is speaking of experiences in the sensory spectrum, for ex. the soul-experience of colors or the rhythms of plant development, it also helps to pause and really engage with those in our kinesthetic imagination. This may feel tedious at first, but it becomes a much more fluid and rewarding experience as time goes by because the beneficial effects for our intuitive orientation compound (like compounded interest). Then we may find we are naturally probing the ideas in a meditative way without even pausing too much.

In the context of this question of 'intellectual understanding', 'reasoned thinking', and so forth, we should be able to know from within exactly what sort of spiritual activity is necessary to move from one domain to another. Since Steiner is fundamentally speaking of these universal aspects of spiritual activity, we will resonate with the concepts he is employing once we develop our intuition for how our inner activity moves in relation to the sensory, psychic, and ideal stream of experience. Then we no longer need to add any personalized shades of meaning to reach firm conclusions about the spirit of what is meant. We know that Steiner could only be speaking of 'reasoned thinking' in certain ways because that's the only thing that makes sense for approaching the soul-spiritual domains of experience in a fruitful way.

I am not able to fluidly move from one domain to the other. That's why I cannot meditate on the go, or even at home in ideal conditions, if I have a meeting coming up one hour later. However, I am seeking to pay more attention to Steiners descriptions of thinking, and I'm seeing that "reasoned thinking" and "practical thinking" are more similar than I had imagined to what you and Cleric have often call living thinking. On the other hand I'm still struggling to read the same meaning when he speaks of "intellectual" thinking... In any case I guess there's no point in adding more thoughts for the time being, since in your view they only can be personalized shades of meaning.

Thank you for addressing the question of the life record as an organ of perception after death. I will further reflect on your points.

If you can make the comparison from living thinking to reasoned and practical thinking, or from dead thinking to living thinking, then you have already discerned enough of the gradient and can trust in your spiritual activity to delaminate the layers of thinking further. The key is to just keep these things as fluid experiences within our intuitive orientation to spiritual activity. There is no need to find a definitional box for everything - one for reasoned thinking, one for practical thinking, one for "intellectual thinking", and so forth.

Clearly, Steiner is not advocating anyone approach spiritual scientific ideas with dead thinking, which we are all familiar with because it has been the normal default state of thinking for most of our lives. As long we realize that our thinking needs to be more living, the finer gradations will naturally unfold if we trust our spiritual activity and repeatedly give it the opportunities to feel its way through diverse contours of meaning, without boxing any of that meaning up so we can carry it home with us, so to speak. At first, this may feel like we have lost the ground beneath our feet and we are swimming in meaning without proper orientation, but that's exactly the point. Our thinking organism will gradually adapt itself to these new conditions if we faithfully expose it to them enough.

PS - I also cannot meditate on the go and find it difficult to meditate if something is coming up (or even more so if my 'soul waves' were stirred up recently). Nevertheless, my intuitive orientation continually expands if for no other reason than I prayerfully trust that it can do so when I do get the opportunity to concentrate, even if I don't have any noticeable experiences, or when my activity streams up against various esoteric ideas.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

To me, this transporting seems like even more effort, with the risk of arbitrariness, than the study-meditate on the ideas expressed while we are reading. It can be helpful to read the summaries at the beginning which give a context for the lecture, but I would just keep this as a loose feeling in the background rather than trying to triangulate the meaning of the spiritual ideas through them.

BTW, Federica, I realize that I might still be completely misunderstanding what your practice is in this respect. In which case, it might help if you gave a recent example of your thought-process when approaching a specific lecture.

[Cleric K]

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.
...

Federica, I’m very happy that you have found some value in the latest images. You are fully correct that there’s a marked difference between the intellectual mode and the meditative flow. The whole point was only to avoid imagining that these modes are somehow completely orthogonal. What’s important is simply not to place an artificial boundary between them.

One way in which we can better understand this is by remembering that intellectual thinking can be considered as symbolically encoded flow of Imagination. We have to keep in mind that even if unconsciously, our soul always lives in Imaginative metamorphoses. Whatever precipitates as intellectual thoughts can be thought of as Imaginations that have been subconsciously encoded into symbolic thought sequences.

I guess that you can experiment with this through something from your own experience – namely, the gymnastic exercises. Try to feel that there are two different modes of thinking an exercise. In one mode you can stop your inner voice (it might be easier if you hold your breath, even though this is not how the real exercise should be performed) and imagine as vividly as possible all the movements with full body imagination. You can gradually transition to the other mode if you begin to verbalize everything you do while you do it in your imagination. Try to feel how every word matches something from the imagination. For example, when you think “The arms rise in front of the chest”, you can imagine how while you pronounce ‘arms’ your imagined arms light up as if to confirm that that’s what the word connects to. Similarly for the other words. Verbs are naturally more difficult because they have meaning only in motion. You can describe ‘rising’ only by playing it out.

Then gradually put away the full body imagination, contract your attention in the larynx area and try to experience only the verbal descriptions as pure imagined sound. Since you are very familiar with the movements, you may actually find it difficult to think them verbally without also feeling at least marginally that your full body imagination is also active. In a sense, the verbal thoughts are contracted/ encoded/represented full body imagination. This mode can also reach such a level that you actually imagine a human figure in your mind’s eye, like a small doll, and describe its movements. If you observe very closely you may find out that making the doll move is similar to the way you have played with actual dolls as a girl. In other words, you’re still engaged in full body imagination, however now you use your full body imagined hands to move the doll and you use your full body imagined larynx to speak the thought-descriptions of the movements.

It’s really very valuable if we get a sense for how all our intellectual thinking is really an encoded description of deeper and usually unconscious soul gestures.

This can go in both directions. You can communicate verbally your exercise descriptions to someone else. If we imagine an extreme case where you are speaking to a brain in a vat, who doesn’t know what movement is, then these words will remain completely abstract, occult even. But anyone with somewhat adequate motor culture will be able to amplify the descriptions into full body imagination.

The point is, and I realize that this once again has turned into asana metaphor, that when we read the descriptions of SS, the true value is that they secretly agitate our deeper full soul Imagination. This is simply due to the fact that these descriptions have proceeded from there in the first place.

In other words, the fact that we first meet SS with our intellect doesn’t mean that this is a ‘merely intellectual’ study. The most fruitful attitude is to feel that when we think through the concepts of SS, we’re describing movements of soul organs which we haven't yet awakened (some time ago I tried to express something similar with the ‘man on the couch’ metaphor).

This is also the reason why SS is difficult while without knowing we’re still thinking in ‘doll mode’. This is a much greater problem than it seems. In fact, this is the main reason why people can’t understand what it means to experience thinking. When they think of thinking, they imagine a doll-ego or doll-brain that thinks doll-thoughts, and the real thinking (the hands that play with the doll) once again remains in the blind spot. Thus we are creating difficulties for us as long as we think of doll subtle bodies, doll Saturn and so on.

So in a nutshell: yes, purely intellectual encodings and Imagination are different chapters, there’s marked difference. But the point is to understand how the intellect relates to the Imaginative mode. This is critical. It is true that when we study SS, initially we agitate only small part of the larynx soul organ, simply due to the fact that we repeat the verbal movements as we read. Yet the key is that these intellectual vibrations only serve their right purpose if we anticipate how they are embedded and self-similar to the much greater dynamics of the soul body. Our intellectual movements are only encoded projections of full soul Imagination.

Thus, we’re not trying here to smear out the distinction between reasoned thinking and Imagination. They are as distinct as ice is from water. But at the same time we should understand their nested nature, namely, the ice-thoughts are like the encoded gymnastic gestures of the full body imagination.

It can be of great value when we think intellectually, if we try to feel what soul subconscious images we are really describing. If we try to do this we’ll see that our intellect and logical thinking as a whole are not some stratum of existence that stays in isolation from everything else. For example, we may think: “I'm getting late for the plane and this cab driver is not helping! Maybe if I tell him to take the shortcut through 6th avenue?” Such inner narrations go on most of the time. But if we try to examine our inner life, we can convince ourselves that they are only encodings of soul imagery. For example, when we realize that we’re late, we live in the image of approaching the airport and seeing how the plane flies away. Then we live in the image of going through another road which we intuitively feel will take less time. Then we live in the image of speaking to the driver and maybe how he gets angry because he doesn’t like to be told how to do his job.

It is really amazing but through our meditative efforts these experiences become completely real. We begin to sense how our inner life continually morphs through such superimposed images and we instinctively steer through them according to our intuitive orientation. All our intellectual thinking is simply the semi-automatic encoding process which collapses these images into liner sequences of thoughts. Our soul, in the most literal sense, continuously dreams these images. If the support of our physical body was to be suddenly taken away, then any of these images could turn into a dream line. For example, seeing the plane fly away could continue in this line, then we try to figure out what to do, go here or there, and so on – a classical dream. There’s really no difference in the kind of activity our soul is engaged in. The difference is only that in our waking life the dreaming process is continuously corrected, sucked in by the gravity of the physical spectrum. We’re normally so weighed down by this gravity collapse that we’re conscious only within the intellectual encodings which narrate the subconscious dreaming process.

If we can get a sense for this, then we’ll also have intuition for the right attitude in which our reasoned thinking of SS should be placed. I repeat – this doesn’t mean that thinking and the Imaginative flow have to be smeared out. This would be a great mistake. But we also create the most fertile conditions within ourselves when we conceive how our thoughts should be experienced as encodings of our deeper soul experiences, just like your intellectual thinking of the exercise is encoded full body imagination. We make things difficult for us if we add additional level of indirection and we think the movements of spiritual-scientific dolls. This makes it difficult because now our soul movements, those of the ‘hands’ through which we play with the dolls, might not be very similar to the full soul movements that we otherwise try to reach. For example, when we play with the doll, we can use our hands and make the doll do somersaults and other acrobatic tricks but in our full body imagination our legs remain completely sleeping. This example captures the whole thing that we’re discussing. It’s completely fine to study intellectually SS but we’re only unnecessarily delaying our progress if we apply things to dolls. Instead, even though we still can’t even imagine it, we can at least try to feel how our intellectual movements describe deeper full soul movements.

We shouldn’t be misled by imagining that we must first grasp the logic of existence by finding it within doll relations. The true logic can only be known from the full body/soul experience. This is the value of trying to see what soul imagery and intuitions our intellect describes. Then we’ll see that all our intellectual logic is really encoded wisdom integrated through experience, through which we make intuitive sense of our soul metamorphoses.

It should be noted that at this stage of intellectual study, most of the transformations happen in our sleep. While we read, we’re still engaged only in the intellectual gestures. You are right that there’s no need to meditate while we read. But at night, these intellectual gestures continue to reverberate from the larynx through our soul body and as if by resonance our soul recognizes there some of the dream movements within which the intellectual vibrations can be musically embedded.

It should also be mentioned that the being that dreams, is of a higher nature compared to our intellectual ego. That is, we shouldn’t imagine that while we dream at night we are the soul in its full essence. We’ll feel the soul as our self only much later in evolution (Spirit-Self/Manas). Thus the soul life that rotates the Ls can be known only through development of the higher forms of cognition, and even then we can’t say that we become the higher self in its fullness. Our intellectual ego concentrically describes the dreaming process of the soul. We reach Imagination when our descriptions feel like explications of the instinctive intuitive movements of our soul.

[Federica]

Federica,


To me, this transporting seems like even more effort, with the risk of arbitrariness, than the study-meditate on the ideas expressed while we are reading. It can be helpful to read the summaries at the beginning which give a context for the lecture, but I would just keep this as a loose feeling in the background rather than trying to triangulate the meaning of the spiritual ideas through them.


If anything, the overall context I would keep in mind is that, even when he is lecturing to 'lay people', we are dealing with generally more educated and well-rounded thinkers than most people today, who had more exposure to living experience and social interactions. I always have the sense that when Steiner speaks of 'cultivating energetic thinking', from the perspective of digital GPT-infused thinking culture today, which is terribly remote and isolated from living experience, this would be seen as a downright superhuman ability. As we see on this forum (and I have seen all over discord), even the most basic ABC of developing intuitive thinking is seen as beyond the realm of thought-possibilities for the average person. It is experienced as completely within the domain of the 'high priests'. I don't think that was so much the case back then. Instead, I think Steiner generally approached his audiences with much higher standards for what they could accomplish with their spiritual activity and expressed ideas accordingly.


By the way, on the study-meditate, it does help for me to pause at various junctures, close my eyes, and try to contemplate the ideas more deeply and probe the sense-free states in question. Of course, if Steiner is speaking of experiences in the sensory spectrum, for ex. the soul-experience of colors or the rhythms of plant development, it also helps to pause and really engage with those in our kinesthetic imagination. This may feel tedious at first, but it becomes a much more fluid and rewarding experience as time goes by because the beneficial effects for our intuitive orientation compound (like compounded interest). Then we may find we are naturally probing the ideas in a meditative way without even pausing too much.

In the context of this question of 'intellectual understanding', 'reasoned thinking', and so forth, we should be able to know from within exactly what sort of spiritual activity is necessary to move from one domain to another. Since Steiner is fundamentally speaking of these universal aspects of spiritual activity, we will resonate with the concepts he is employing once we develop our intuition for how our inner activity moves in relation to the sensory, psychic, and ideal stream of experience. Then we no longer need to add any personalized shades of meaning to reach firm conclusions about the spirit of what is meant. We know that Steiner could only be speaking of 'reasoned thinking' in certain ways because that's the only thing that makes sense for approaching the soul-spiritual domains of experience in a fruitful way.

I am not able to fluidly move from one domain to the other. That's why I cannot meditate on the go, or even at home in ideal conditions, if I have a meeting coming up one hour later. However, I am seeking to pay more attention to Steiners descriptions of thinking, and I'm seeing that "reasoned thinking" and "practical thinking" are more similar than I had imagined to what you and Cleric have often call living thinking. On the other hand I'm still struggling to read the same meaning when he speaks of "intellectual" thinking... In any case I guess there's no point in adding more thoughts for the time being, since in your view they only can be personalized shades of meaning.


Thank you for addressing the question of the life record as an organ of perception after death. I will further reflect on your points.

If you can make the comparison from living thinking to reasoned and practical thinking, or from dead thinking to living thinking, then you have already discerned enough of the gradient and can trust in your spiritual activity to delaminate the layers of thinking further. The key is to just keep these things as fluid experiences within our intuitive orientation to spiritual activity. There is no need to find a definitional box for everything - one for reasoned thinking, one for practical thinking, one for "intellectual thinking", and so forth.


Clearly, Steiner is not advocating anyone approach spiritual scientific ideas with dead thinking, which we are all familiar with because it has been the normal default state of thinking for most of our lives. As long we realize that our thinking needs to be more living, the finer gradations will naturally unfold if we trust our spiritual activity and repeatedly give it the opportunities to feel its way through diverse contours of meaning, without boxing any of that meaning up so we can carry it home with us, so to speak. At first, this may feel like we have lost the ground beneath our feet and we are swimming in meaning without proper orientation, but that's exactly the point. Our thinking organism will gradually adapt itself to these new conditions if we faithfully expose it to them enough.


PS - I also cannot meditate on the go and find it difficult to meditate if something is coming up (or even more so if my 'soul waves' were stirred up recently). Nevertheless, my intuitive orientation continually expands if for no other reason than I prayerfully trust that it can do so when I do get the opportunity to concentrate, even if I don't have any noticeable experiences, or when my activity streams up against various esoteric ideas.

Ashvin,

Thanks for your notes on meditation. You also said that we shouldn't impatiently box up meaning from the descriptions of spiritual science, as if we could carry it home, and I see the alignment with Cleric's last post: intellectually encoded concepts are portable, transferable to others, but as such they remain coded.

About the impoverishment of people’s thinking vitality today, compared to Steiners times, I would be inclined to agree, but at the same time I have been familiar with, and influenced by, a thinking habit of always saying “it was better before”, be it in education, economics, world dynamics, national politics, etcetera. So I am now careful with statements that evoke that pessimism (not arguing that it's not accurate in this particular case).

Federica,


To me, this transporting seems like even more effort, with the risk of arbitrariness, than the study-meditate on the ideas expressed while we are reading. It can be helpful to read the summaries at the beginning which give a context for the lecture, but I would just keep this as a loose feeling in the background rather than trying to triangulate the meaning of the spiritual ideas through them.

BTW, Federica, I realize that I might still be completely misunderstanding what your practice is in this respect. In which case, it might help if you gave a recent example of your thought-process when approaching a specific lecture.

It’s nothing especially structured, you will probably find it arbitrary and I admit it's a preference. If I take for instance the last lecture I read and quoted - GA 108 - I notice it’s been given in mid January. It was 1909, so little after the separation from the Theosophical Society, and we’re in Karlsruhe, a small town in SW Germany near the French border. The audience is a group of friends. For me, each one of these elements brings a particular character to the context of this event. I have never been to Karlsruhe, but I have some sense of the character of that region and you don’t give or attend a lecture in the same way in a small city as you do in a capital, and not under the same physical and spiritual influences in the middle of the winter as in early spring, or in late summer. Keeping in mind the friendly audience also gives me insights: how explicit, how direct, how formal, could the tone be?

These are some of the perceptual (not only physical) constraints that shaped the unfolding of that flow, in that moment, and I believe I can use them as indications to orient my understanding of the whole depth of information that exists, available to be accessed somehow, by whoever is able to. Why did Steiner speak about practical thinking and its development for this group of friends? What was the more precise intention?

Not that I spend too much time on these things, but remaining open to questions like these allows me to better contemplate the larger meaning of the event as a whole. Not exclusively the meaning of the pronounced words. When you contemplate the School of Athens, for example, what do you gather from that perceptual panorama? So it’s as if I was depicting in my mind’s eye the larger context of the event as a whole, starting from the entry point of the archive record, but possibly expanding it in all available physical, soul, and spiritual directions. I know that every detail has some precise significance, it aligns non-casually with other details, to form intention, to form directions of destiny and meaning, in concert with everyone else who in some way has come, and still comes in contact with that event, including us now discussing it and connecting it with its larger relevance, through our intuitive context.

In other words, on the one hand I try to stay open and expand on my intuitive capacity; on the other end I use the invitations provided by the event itself to expand on that context too; then I remain hopeful that the two expanding cores of meaning will eventually intersect, even if today I don’t have the least ability to really penetrate these perceptions effectively, and trace their ‘behavior’ across the temporal axis. For example - and I know this very well from comparing some transcriptions from Scaligero with the corresponding audio recordings - a recording definitely provides additional meaning. Had we a recording of GA 108, additional meaning would be available. But actually that meaning is available. It is ‘somewhere’. So I am simply formulating an interest, or making a bid, if you will, trusting that I’ll have the 'money', by the time I have to pay it . You could say that I’m faking it until I make it. It would not be entirely false. Or I could say it’s about anticipating with the intellect the not-yet developed soul organs - as Cleric said - feeling that what we are manipulating is a code to crack, or trusting our spiritual activity, as you said.

[Federica]

Federica, I’m very happy that you have found some value in the latest images. You are fully correct that there’s a marked difference between the intellectual mode and the meditative flow. The whole point was only to avoid imagining that these modes are somehow completely orthogonal. What’s important is simply not to place an artificial boundary between them.

One way in which we can better understand this is by remembering that intellectual thinking can be considered as symbolically encoded flow of Imagination. We have to keep in mind that even if unconsciously, our soul always lives in Imaginative metamorphoses. Whatever precipitates as intellectual thoughts can be thought of as Imaginations that have been subconsciously encoded into symbolic thought sequences.

I guess that you can experiment with this through something from your own experience – namely, the gymnastic exercises. Try to feel that there are two different modes of thinking an exercise. In one mode you can stop your inner voice (it might be easier if you hold your breath, even though this is not how the real exercise should be performed) and imagine as vividly as possible all the movements with full body imagination. You can gradually transition to the other mode if you begin to verbalize everything you do while you do it in your imagination. Try to feel how every word matches something from the imagination. For example, when you think “The arms rise in front of the chest”, you can imagine how while you pronounce ‘arms’ your imagined arms light up as if to confirm that that’s what the word connects to. Similarly for the other words. Verbs are naturally more difficult because they have meaning only in motion. You can describe ‘rising’ only by playing it out.

Then gradually put away the full body imagination, contract your attention in the larynx area and try to experience only the verbal descriptions as pure imagined sound. Since you are very familiar with the movements, you may actually find it difficult to think them verbally without also feeling at least marginally that your full body imagination is also active. In a sense, the verbal thoughts are contracted/ encoded/represented full body imagination. This mode can also reach such a level that you actually imagine a human figure in your mind’s eye, like a small doll, and describe its movements. If you observe very closely you may find out that making the doll move is similar to the way you have played with actual dolls as a girl. In other words, you’re still engaged in full body imagination, however now you use your full body imagined hands to move the doll and you use your full body imagined larynx to speak the thought-descriptions of the movements.

It’s really very valuable if we get a sense for how all our intellectual thinking is really an encoded description of deeper and usually unconscious soul gestures.

This can go in both directions. You can communicate verbally your exercise descriptions to someone else. If we imagine an extreme case where you are speaking to a brain in a vat, who doesn’t know what movement is, then these words will remain completely abstract, occult even. But anyone with somewhat adequate motor culture will be able to amplify the descriptions into full body imagination.

The point is, and I realize that this once again has turned into asana metaphor, that when we read the descriptions of SS, the true value is that they secretly agitate our deeper full soul Imagination. This is simply due to the fact that these descriptions have proceeded from there in the first place.

In other words, the fact that we first meet SS with our intellect doesn’t mean that this is a ‘merely intellectual’ study. The most fruitful attitude is to feel that when we think through the concepts of SS, we’re describing movements of soul organs which we haven't yet awakened (some time ago I tried to express something similar with the ‘man on the couch’ metaphor).

This is also the reason why SS is difficult while without knowing we’re still thinking in ‘doll mode’. This is a much greater problem than it seems. In fact, this is the main reason why people can’t understand what it means to experience thinking. When they think of thinking, they imagine a doll-ego or doll-brain that thinks doll-thoughts, and the real thinking (the hands that play with the doll) once again remains in the blind spot. Thus we are creating difficulties for us as long as we think of doll subtle bodies, doll Saturn and so on.

So in a nutshell: yes, purely intellectual encodings and Imagination are different chapters, there’s marked difference. But the point is to understand how the intellect relates to the Imaginative mode. This is critical. It is true that when we study SS, initially we agitate only small part of the larynx soul organ, simply due to the fact that we repeat the verbal movements as we read. Yet the key is that these intellectual vibrations only serve their right purpose if we anticipate how they are embedded and self-similar to the much greater dynamics of the soul body. Our intellectual movements are only encoded projections of full soul Imagination.

Thus, we’re not trying here to smear out the distinction between reasoned thinking and Imagination. They are as distinct as ice is from water. But at the same time we should understand their nested nature, namely, the ice-thoughts are like the encoded gymnastic gestures of the full body imagination.

It can be of great value when we think intellectually, if we try to feel what soul subconscious images we are really describing. If we try to do this we’ll see that our intellect and logical thinking as a whole are not some stratum of existence that stays in isolation from everything else. For example, we may think: “I'm getting late for the plane and this cab driver is not helping! Maybe if I tell him to take the shortcut through 6th avenue?” Such inner narrations go on most of the time. But if we try to examine our inner life, we can convince ourselves that they are only encodings of soul imagery. For example, when we realize that we’re late, we live in the image of approaching the airport and seeing how the plane flies away. Then we live in the image of going through another road which we intuitively feel will take less time. Then we live in the image of speaking to the driver and maybe how he gets angry because he doesn’t like to be told how to do his job.

It is really amazing but through our meditative efforts these experiences become completely real. We begin to sense how our inner life continually morphs through such superimposed images and we instinctively steer through them according to our intuitive orientation. All our intellectual thinking is simply the semi-automatic encoding process which collapses these images into liner sequences of thoughts. Our soul, in the most literal sense, continuously dreams these images. If the support of our physical body was to be suddenly taken away, then any of these images could turn into a dream line. For example, seeing the plane fly away could continue in this line, then we try to figure out what to do, go here or there, and so on – a classical dream. There’s really no difference in the kind of activity our soul is engaged in. The difference is only that in our waking life the dreaming process is continuously corrected, sucked in by the gravity of the physical spectrum. We’re normally so weighed down by this gravity collapse that we’re conscious only within the intellectual encodings which narrate the subconscious dreaming process.

If we can get a sense for this, then we’ll also have intuition for the right attitude in which our reasoned thinking of SS should be placed. I repeat – this doesn’t mean that thinking and the Imaginative flow have to be smeared out. This would be a great mistake. But we also create the most fertile conditions within ourselves when we conceive how our thoughts should be experienced as encodings of our deeper soul experiences, just like your intellectual thinking of the exercise is encoded full body imagination. We make things difficult for us if we add additional level of indirection and we think the movements of spiritual-scientific dolls. This makes it difficult because now our soul movements, those of the ‘hands’ through which we play with the dolls, might not be very similar to the full soul movements that we otherwise try to reach. For example, when we play with the doll, we can use our hands and make the doll do somersaults and other acrobatic tricks but in our full body imagination our legs remain completely sleeping. This example captures the whole thing that we’re discussing. It’s completely fine to study intellectually SS but we’re only unnecessarily delaying our progress if we apply things to dolls. Instead, even though we still can’t even imagine it, we can at least try to feel how our intellectual movements describe deeper full soul movements.

We shouldn’t be misled by imagining that we must first grasp the logic of existence by finding it within doll relations. The true logic can only be known from the full body/soul experience. This is the value of trying to see what soul imagery and intuitions our intellect describes. Then we’ll see that all our intellectual logic is really encoded wisdom integrated through experience, through which we make intuitive sense of our soul metamorphoses.

It should be noted that at this stage of intellectual study, most of the transformations happen in our sleep. While we read, we’re still engaged only in the intellectual gestures. You are right that there’s no need to meditate while we read. But at night, these intellectual gestures continue to reverberate from the larynx through our soul body and as if by resonance our soul recognizes there some of the dream movements within which the intellectual vibrations can be musically embedded.

It should also be mentioned that the being that dreams, is of a higher nature compared to our intellectual ego. That is, we shouldn’t imagine that while we dream at night we are the soul in its full essence. We’ll feel the soul as our self only much later in evolution (Spirit-Self/Manas). Thus the soul life that rotates the Ls can be known only through development of the higher forms of cognition, and even then we can’t say that we become the higher self in its fullness. Our intellectual ego concentrically describes the dreaming process of the soul. We reach Imagination when our descriptions feel like explications of the instinctive intuitive movements of our soul.

Fantastic experiment, Cleric! Thank you, I have tried it, and it has served its purpose
I remember the "man on the couch" who doesn't see his hand but this new illustration has been more effective for me. I’ve 'only' struggled to focus on my full body imagination, at the beginning, rather than on a crowd of tweakable dolls (the class participants).

I hope everyone else reading here has been inspired to experiment with it too, going from the physical imagination of executing an exercise with one’s body, to its codified equivalent in words - a ‘piece of code’ that presents us with the bare intellectual indication of what the exercise does, using indirect cues (the words) that are detached from the direct experience of doing the exercise.

You can communicate verbally your exercise descriptions to someone else. If we imagine an extreme case where you are speaking to a brain in a vat, who doesn’t know what movement is, then these words will remain completely abstract, occult even. But anyone with somewhat adequate motor culture will be able to amplify the descriptions into full body imagination.

OK! Let’s try with the same exercise you picked as an example, but, as you suggested, in the other direction: from words to full body imagination. Everyone reading here: I hope you will try and use the verbally encoded indications below to imagine your own body (not a visualized external “doll”) engaged in this exercise. Let's try it!


Physical exercise to execute in full body imagination

1/ Set standing position

> Feet hip width apart
> Knees soft
> Hips square
> Spine neutral - back straight
> Shoulders back and down
> Shoulderblades squeezed together
> Chest lifted

2/ Then, arms slowly rise in front of chest, up to shoulder level, with soft elbows. And back down.

This is also the reason why SS is difficult while without knowing we’re still thinking in ‘doll mode’. This is a much greater problem than it seems. In fact, this is the main reason why people can’t understand what it means to experience thinking. When they think of thinking, they imagine a doll-ego or doll-brain that thinks doll-thoughts, and the real thinking (the hands that play with the doll) once again remains in the blind spot. Thus we are creating difficulties for us as long as we think of doll subtle bodies, doll Saturn and so on.

Yes I see! I really hope everyone here will read this as many times as necessary and get a real sense of what the problem with thinking is. The doll is the perfect metaphoric aid.

It can be of great value when we think intellectually, if we try to feel what soul subconscious images we are really describing. If we try to do this we’ll see that our intellect and logical thinking as a whole are not some stratum of existence that stays in isolation from everything else. For example, we may think: “I'm getting late for the plane and this cab driver is not helping! Maybe if I tell him to take the shortcut through 6th avenue?” Such inner narrations go on most of the time. But if we try to examine our inner life, we can convince ourselves that they are only encodings of soul imagery. For example, when we realize that we’re late, we live in the image of approaching the airport and seeing how the plane flies away. Then we live in the image of going through another road which we intuitively feel will take less time. Then we live in the image of speaking to the driver and maybe how he gets angry because he doesn’t like to be told how to do his job.

This was a much beneficial show of reconciliation. And that the soul continuously dreams all the possible dreamlines, that only collapse in one manifested event line, through the gravity of the physical spectrum, sheds light on the real difference between the remembered breakfast and the breakfast we didn’t have, but only made up in our imagination. That difference is in itself, puzzling, since it can’t be spotted in the look and feel of the mental pictures. This post is exceedingly clear, thank you! It may not be instantly clear, and a child wouldn’t probably be able to access this clarity (Lorenzo) but I trust that anyone here investing little time and goodwill in giving it a few reads and experimental attempts will inevitably find it illuminating.



PS: Ashvin, I've read again your initial asana metaphor. Sorry I bluntly dismissed it as obvious. I better see now what you were trying to convey - the depth of how we can enliven our thinking.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Thanks for your notes on meditation. You also said that we shouldn't impatiently box up meaning from the descriptions of spiritual science, as if we could carry it home, and I see the alignment with Cleric's last post: intellectually encoded concepts are portable, transferable to others, but as such they remain coded.

About the impoverishment of people’s thinking vitality today, compared to Steiners times, I would be inclined to agree, but at the same time I have been familiar with, and influenced by, a thinking habit of always saying “it was better before”, be it in education, economics, world dynamics, national politics, etcetera. So I am now careful with statements that evoke that pessimism (not arguing that it's not accurate in this particular case).

I agree, Federica, we can try to observe these cultural trends objectively without straying into undue pessimism or cynicism. The more our intuitive orientation to spiritual reality expands, the more basis we have for faith in the wisdom of these descent-ascent rhythms. It may have been 'better before', but it could also be 'much better after', which is usually also the case with our personal rhythms of relative alienation, isolation, suffering, etc. followed by inner growth. Of course, we experience that to a much greater extent with our incarnational rhythms which also coincide with rhtyhms of cultural development. So we shouldn't underestimate what Good can come from humanity being contracted to a solipsistic point and thrown back upon its own forces to such an extent. Nevertheless, we can observe these developments objectively and use them to modulate our efforts to understand and reach others.

Federica,


To me, this transporting seems like even more effort, with the risk of arbitrariness, than the study-meditate on the ideas expressed while we are reading. It can be helpful to read the summaries at the beginning which give a context for the lecture, but I would just keep this as a loose feeling in the background rather than trying to triangulate the meaning of the spiritual ideas through them.

BTW, Federica, I realize that I might still be completely misunderstanding what your practice is in this respect. In which case, it might help if you gave a recent example of your thought-process when approaching a specific lecture.

It’s nothing especially structured, you will probably find it arbitrary and I admit it's a preference. If I take for instance the last lecture I read and quoted - GA 108 - I notice it’s been given in mid January. It was 1909, so little after the separation from the Theosophical Society, and we’re in Karlsruhe, a small town in SW Germany near the French border. The audience is a group of friends. For me, each one of these elements brings a particular character to the context of this event. I have never been to Karlsruhe, but I have some sense of the character of that region and you don’t give or attend a lecture in the same way in a small city as you do in a capital, and not under the same physical and spiritual influences in the middle of the winter as in early spring, or in late summer. Keeping in mind the friendly audience also gives me insights: how explicit, how direct, how formal, could the tone be?

These are some of the perceptual (not only physical) constraints that shaped the unfolding of that flow, in that moment, and I believe I can use them as indications to orient my understanding of the whole depth of information that exists, available to be accessed somehow, by whoever is able to. Why did Steiner speak about practical thinking and its development for this group of friends? What was the more precise intention?

Not that I spend too much time on these things, but remaining open to questions like these allows me to better contemplate the larger meaning of the event as a whole. Not exclusively the meaning of the pronounced words. When you contemplate the School of Athens, for example, what do you gather from that perceptual panorama? So it’s as if I was depicting in my mind’s eye the larger context of the event as a whole, starting from the entry point of the archive record, but possibly expanding it in all available physical, soul, and spiritual directions. I know that every detail has some precise significance, it aligns non-casually with other details, to form intention, to form directions of destiny and meaning, in concert with everyone else who in some way has come, and still comes in contact with that event, including us now discussing it and connecting it with its larger relevance, through our intuitive context.

In other words, on the one hand I try to stay open and expand on my intuitive capacity; on the other end I use the invitations provided by the event itself to expand on that context too; then I remain hopeful that the two expanding cores of meaning will eventually intersect, even if today I don’t have the least ability to really penetrate these perceptions effectively, and trace their ‘behavior’ across the temporal axis. For example - and I know this very well from comparing some transcriptions from Scaligero with the corresponding audio recordings - a recording definitely provides additional meaning. Had we a recording of GA 108, additional meaning would be available. But actually that meaning is available. It is ‘somewhere’. So I am simply formulating an interest, or making a bid, if you will, trusting that I’ll have the 'money', by the time I have to pay it . You could say that I’m faking it until I make it. It would not be entirely false. Or I could say it’s about anticipating with the intellect the not-yet developed soul organs - as Cleric said - feeling that what we are manipulating is a code to crack, or trusting our spiritual activity, as you said.

Thanks for elaborating. My initial thought is that what you are describing makes a lot of sense for approaching lectures or texts on many topics we may come across, like art history, anthropology, religious history, history of science, and so forth. However, if we think about it, topics on supersensible reality shift our focus towards forces that transcend all such cultural and natural contexts. They point us to the forces that structure those soul and natural contexts but cannot be limited, reduced, or otherwise derived from them.

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we can gain a direct understanding of supersensible ideas without any reference to the flow of perceptual experience, but simply that we shouldn't first start with the perceptual context that we feel we can readily encompass, like the temporal and geographical setting, as a means of elucidating those ideas (and of course there is the risk we are overestimating our ability to discern that context as well). The living ideas that structure our willing-feeling-thinking activity transcend those cultural boundaries. In a certain sense, when engaging with all these ideas, we are seeking to resonate with the spiritual gestures we experience after death. In these gestures, the meaning we experience is no longer tinged so much with the contextual factors as we experience them on the sensory plane.

One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane, is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind's eye to what we call man's higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off.

We can apply that to many other contextual factors as well. Beginning with our personal soul context, then the more collective context, all the way up through the context of the natural kingdoms, we cast these off to live experientially in the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive gestures that structure them. In that sense, we are sort of working at cross-purposes if we seek to orient toward the meaning of the living ideas by immersing ourselves even more in the particular cultural context in which they were expressed.

I would say the additional meaning from the audio recording, or a live lecture, comes from the living inspirational forces embedded in the speech of initiates and masters, which become much more crystallized in text, especially digital text (and this also applies, at a lesser level, to people more broadly). In other words, it's not something we need to reflect on too much, but simply flows together with the speech. That stands in contrast to the reflective process we engage to gain 'additional meaning' from the various contexts in which the lectures are taking place.

[Federica]

Thanks for elaborating. My initial thought is that what you are describing makes a lot of sense for approaching lectures or texts on many topics we may come across, like art history, anthropology, religious history, history of science, and so forth. However, if we think about it, topics on supersensible reality shift our focus towards forces that transcend all such cultural and natural contexts. They point us to the forces that structure those soul and natural contexts but cannot be limited, reduced, or otherwise derived from them.

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we can gain a direct understanding of supersensible ideas without any reference to the flow of perceptual experience, but simply that we shouldn't first start with the perceptual context that we feel we can readily encompass, like the temporal and geographical setting, as a means of elucidating those ideas (and of course there is the risk we are overestimating our ability to discern that context as well). The living ideas that structure our willing-feeling-thinking activity transcend those cultural boundaries. In a certain sense, when engaging with all these ideas, we are seeking to resonate with the spiritual gestures we experience after death. In these gestures, the meaning we experience is no longer tinged so much with the contextual factors as we experience them on the sensory plane.

One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane, is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind's eye to what we call man's higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off.

We can apply that to many other contextual factors as well. Beginning with our personal soul context, then the more collective context, all the way up through the context of the natural kingdoms, we cast these off to live experientially in the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive gestures that structure them. In that sense, we are sort of working at cross-purposes if we seek to orient toward the meaning of the living ideas by immersing ourselves even more in the particular cultural context in which they were expressed.

I would say the additional meaning from the audio recording, or a live lecture, comes from the living inspirational forces embedded in the speech of initiates and masters, which become much more crystallized in text, especially digital text (and this also applies, at a lesser level, to people more broadly). In other words, it's not something we need to reflect on too much, but simply flows together with the speech. That stands in contrast to the reflective process we engage to gain 'additional meaning' from the various contexts in which the lectures are taking place.

****

The living ideas that structure our willing-feeling-thinking activity transcend those cultural boundaries. In a certain sense, when engaging with all these ideas, we are seeking to resonate with the spiritual gestures we experience after death. In these gestures, the meaning we experience is no longer tinged so much with the contextual factors as we experience them on the sensory plane.

Yes, but may I ask for a clarification? hasn't it often been discussed that it'd be a great mistake to disregard the perceptual aspects with the intention to move straight to the spiritual world of ideas, and that the perceptual aspects are the ones to be turned around and infused with understanding in order to attain that meaning? We are in this precipitated world so that we can learn to find our way back up precisely through the perceptual configurations. Imagining that I go and attend a lecture today, I would think that the significance of the event for me can emerge from the study-meditation of the lecture content, but also from the observation of the perceptual larger context, by which I attended that lecture and not another one, in certain conditions that have all meaning.

I understand the importance of focusing on the content, but I don't get why the two aspects are not part of one and the same wave, but would even work cross-purposes. Initially, the words of the lecture are also a perceptual element, and an intellectual code, part of the whole perceptual profile of the event. Why not take the whole large-spectrum profile as the code?

[AshvinP]

Thanks for elaborating. My initial thought is that what you are describing makes a lot of sense for approaching lectures or texts on many topics we may come across, like art history, anthropology, religious history, history of science, and so forth. However, if we think about it, topics on supersensible reality shift our focus towards forces that transcend all such cultural and natural contexts. They point us to the forces that structure those soul and natural contexts but cannot be limited, reduced, or otherwise derived from them.

Don't get me wrong - I am not saying we can gain a direct understanding of supersensible ideas without any reference to the flow of perceptual experience, but simply that we shouldn't first start with the perceptual context that we feel we can readily encompass, like the temporal and geographical setting, as a means of elucidating those ideas (and of course there is the risk we are overestimating our ability to discern that context as well). The living ideas that structure our willing-feeling-thinking activity transcend those cultural boundaries. In a certain sense, when engaging with all these ideas, we are seeking to resonate with the spiritual gestures we experience after death. In these gestures, the meaning we experience is no longer tinged so much with the contextual factors as we experience them on the sensory plane.

One particular thing that provides the outer stamp, determining the character of a person as it were, in so far as he is living in a physical body on the physical plane, is what may collectively be referred to as nationality. This is something we should never forget, especially today. If we turn the mind's eye to what we call man's higher self, the concept of nationality loses significance. For when we pass through the gate of death everything encompassed by the term ‘nationality’ is among the things we cast off.

We can apply that to many other contextual factors as well. Beginning with our personal soul context, then the more collective context, all the way up through the context of the natural kingdoms, we cast these off to live experientially in the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive gestures that structure them. In that sense, we are sort of working at cross-purposes if we seek to orient toward the meaning of the living ideas by immersing ourselves even more in the particular cultural context in which they were expressed.

I would say the additional meaning from the audio recording, or a live lecture, comes from the living inspirational forces embedded in the speech of initiates and masters, which become much more crystallized in text, especially digital text (and this also applies, at a lesser level, to people more broadly). In other words, it's not something we need to reflect on too much, but simply flows together with the speech. That stands in contrast to the reflective process we engage to gain 'additional meaning' from the various contexts in which the lectures are taking place.

****

The living ideas that structure our willing-feeling-thinking activity transcend those cultural boundaries. In a certain sense, when engaging with all these ideas, we are seeking to resonate with the spiritual gestures we experience after death. In these gestures, the meaning we experience is no longer tinged so much with the contextual factors as we experience them on the sensory plane.

Yes, but may I ask for a clarification? hasn't it often been discussed that it'd be a great mistake to disregard the perceptual aspects with the intention to move straight to the spiritual world of ideas, and that the perceptual aspects are the ones to be turned around and infused with understanding in order to attain that meaning? We are in this precipitated world so that we can learn to find our way back up precisely through the perceptual configurations. Imagining that I go and attend a lecture today, I would think that the significance of the event for me can emerge from the study-meditation of the lecture content, but also from the observation of the perceptual larger context, by which I attended that lecture and not another one, in certain conditions that have all meaning.

I understand the importance of focusing on the content, but I don't get why the two aspects are not part of one and the same wave, but would even work cross-purposes. Initially, the words of the lecture are also a perceptual element, and an intellectual code, part of the whole perceptual profile of the event. Why not take the whole large-spectrum profile as the code?

Right, I can see how this would seem in conflict with what we have discussed before. First, we should be clear on what the 'perceptual aspect' is in this case. We often speak of the 'givens of experience' - the sensations, desires, feelings, thoughts, etc. that naturally appear in our flow of experience as we exert our spiritual activity. When we speak of something like, for ex.

...of the character of that region and you don’t give or attend a lecture in the same way in a small city as you do in a capital, and not under the same physical and spiritual influences in the middle of the winter as in early spring, or in late summer. Keeping in mind the friendly audience also gives me insights: how explicit, how direct, how formal, could the tone be?

This is something added by us to the perceptual givens of experience. We may feel like we have a keen intuitive sense of these factors, but nevertheless, it is something added. In other words, it isn't invariant - all the concepts we derive from perceiving the context in this way could be in error. You certainly recognized this to some extent in describing it as your preference. Actually, it reminds me of my days playing poker - everyone at the table felt like they had the 'best reads' on the other players, whether those players were playing a good hand, were bluffing, could be bluffed out, etc. I was certainly one of those people, feeling as though I could gaze directly into their souls Looking back, it was probably more the case that I only paid attention to when the 'reads' worked out and took that as evidence of my superior reading ability, ignoring all the times it didn't work out so well.

So that's the first thing - we are working from our somewhat preferentially tinged concepts about the givens of the lecture context. The next thing to mention is that, in this case, we are not necessarily using the perceptual flow of experience (which isn't the 'raw' perceptual flow) as a symbolic testimony for the spiritual gestures structuring the depth of intuitive activity, but as a framework through which we view and understand the ideas. In other words, we aren't distancing from the perceptual flow to view it objectively through the lens of the idea, but merging closer with it to view the idea through its lens (which is what we normally do in sensory life). This is certainly a subtle distinction.

In a certain sense, the process of resonating with supersensible ideas is shaving off that which makes our normal soul-gestures too dissimilar from the higher-order spiritual gestures, thereby aliasing the latter from our perspective. Let's say hypothetically we have traveled around the world, visited many cultures, learned many languages, tried many cuisines, and so forth, and therefore pride ourselves in our capacity to penetrate the soul-life of humanity. We feel as if the World cultures read like an open book for us. Then our confidence in that outer capacity is exactly what we will need to sacrifice for a genuine inner penetration into that soul-life. In that process, we don't lose the former qualities or perceptual flow but gain the proper distance we need to usefully return to and spiritualize them with the light of intuitive insight.

If we relate it to Cleric's illustration, we are giving up our doll-thoughts of the 'lecture context' to experience the spiritual gestures of that context in 'full body imaginative thinking' through the encoded concepts. As long as we play with the doll versions of that context, through our 'reading ability', we block our conscious intuition of the real-time imaginative gestures that are precipitating the doll-thoughts. We keep adding levels of indirection, like in the mirror images of hands drawing triangles. The amazing thing is that, in our deeper imaginative gestures when reading through lectures, we are quite literally weaving in the same context from which the lectures were initially given - the forces that structure the language, the region, the seasons, etc. If we can 'trust fall' upward into these forces, then the perceptual flow will indeed be infused with ever-expanding contextual understanding.