Federica wrote: ↑Thu Jul 27, 2023 9:12 pm
Ashvin, I find it a little disconcerting that you first asked me specific questions about how I see the difference between this and that exercice, but when I provide precise answers, you wipe it all off, and you tell me off, suggesting that I lack respect (basically that’s what you’re saying) and devotion towards Scaligero, and that I lack “reasoned faith”, and even hospitality. I pointed to very specific discrepancies between Scaligero and Steiner, and between what Scaligero writes and what you stated he means, but these are wiped off all at once. You say that this tripartite classification, that includes man-made objects, is to be found in Steiner as well, but then you don’t quote Steiner, you quote Scaligero again and again, and Kühlewind. You have more or less stopped quoting Steiner, anyway. And the most surprising is this partition that you have now accepted from Scaligero, between human thoughts and universal thoughts. You used to speak of a tree citing PoF, but now very surprisingly you speak of a tree as incarnating a thought that is not our own, and of a table as incarnating a thought of our own. What does that even mean from a PoF perspective? Not to speak of this idea of “pure perception”.
Can you please show where Steiner endorses all that?
Sorry if the question is not devotional enough, but what I notice is, I never heard you refer to such a partition of thinking before this thread. Scaligero states it, you are finding it valuable, for reasons that I don’t get, and now we are all supposed to show devotion, be hospitable, and accept it as well. I get that in your views spiritual science has gone out of trend, as an approach to knowledge, but I am sorry, I don’t feel sorry for still appreciating it (which doesn’t prevent me from having a reasoned faith in the individuality of Rudolf Steiner) and I really would like to see how Steiner makes these distinctions in his own words, if it’s true that they can be found in his work.
Federica,
There is no doubt that this 'tri-partite classification' is found in Steiner and practically all other esoteric thinkers who speak on the topic. Scaligero and Kuhlewind are simply examples of people who internalized Anthroposophy/SS better than most other people in the world, so I think their thoughts on the matter are worth taking seriously. We have discussed it here on this forum plenty of times as well, just not in the particular form you are encountering it now in Scaligero. That's why I also referenced Cleric's essay on the morphic spaces - that, along with many other posts, are speaking of this exact same differentiation when it comes to our conceptual ability to resonate with the spiritual intents underlying various domains of experience. That is the basis for speaking of 'human thought' is distinction to 'universal thought', the latter being responsible for the higher three spaces that are also reflected in the lower three spaces. Obviously, this isn't an ontological or metaphysical
division of "thinking" but a phenomenological
distinction that is perfectly evident in our experience of the World.
I did quote Steiner in regards to the concentration exercise on man-made objects, but you are refusing to accept that he is speaking of the same thing as Scaligero and Kuhlewinde. Why? The only reason I can tell is because, to do so, would undermine your conclusion that Scaligero is way off base and is arbitrarily making up his own distinctions, and I am only defending him because I want to integrate him into the discussion like I wanted to with Tomberg. That's not at all true, though. Now I have quoted Kuhlewinde as well. At what point do we start to question ourselves and say, 'maybe the misunderstanding resides within
my limited knowledge and perspective and I should withhold conclusive judgments until I have a chance to expand that out further'? That is why I bring up the underlying tendency of undue skepticism and judgment, which has been a recurring issue in these discussions. For ex. Cleric gave us a good example recently:
I won't pretend that I understand the OT in all (or even a few) of its aspects. There are so many things which are still complete mysteries to me. For example, I have no clue why circumcision has become a paramount aspect of the Covenant. It seems to me like a grotesque request for a God to make to its people. But so far I have no reason to doubt that these things will find their logical explanation when the corresponding depth is reached.
It's clear that you have a difficult time adopting that attitude when meeting with ideas that strike you as 'grotesque' from others, even after I provide plenty of reasons why they are sound spiritual scientific ideas. We can make untold progress in our development if we start to concretely understand everything that the wise guidance of Karma puts on our path as a means to develop our inner moral forces, not by forsaking our reasoning, but by freely holding it
open, receptive, and humble. When it starts to become a consistent pattern that we question ideas from others only later to realize the intensity of our skepticism was not at all justified, we should take that as a lesson to learn from and an opportunity to help break out of repetitive cycles of habitual tendencies. That is the actual
experience of spiritual evolution.
Federica wrote:To be honest, Ashvin, I have the feeling that, once you have recognized an author as an authentic spiritual seer, you feel that you absolutely have to integrate and validate everything they have written, at all costs. Opposites have to spiral together, and you will make them spiral. It’s almost like you make it a determined exercise. For a long time, you have been quoting Steiner profusely, but this has almost ceased today. More recently you have been reading Tomberg, and so you were addressing any questions with quotes from Tomberg, to the point that Güney told you the other day that the quote you used didn’t bring any clarity to the question, Anthony also expressed that, and I certainly felt the same, more than once. With Tomberg, it seemed that you had decided to abandon the idea of “structure” (a word you had previously been consistently fond of) in favor of the idea of order, within the context of Tomberg’s symbolic logic. It made complete sense. But now, as it happens, you are reading Scaligero, and so you have come back to your old favorite word “structure”, whilst Tombergs symbolic ordering seems to sink down into the background. And right now nearly every topic calls for a Scaligero quote. I feel that you are making this into a firm exercise, and I get that feeling of arm-twisting again, and arbitrariness. Last year every topic had a Steiner-answer, last month every topic had a Tomberg-answer, and now every topic has started to have a Scaligero-answer, that we like it or not. And if we don’t like it, it’s because one is intellectual, analytical, or down right respectless towards an Anthroposophist par excellence (I don’t know what exact meaning the expression has come to acquire in English, but in French it basically means “the archetypal Anthroposophist”).
While I see the value of such an exercise, and I understand the importance of uncovering the common thread across all esoteric authors, and across all reality for that matter, don’t you think that it stands to reason that there’s a limit and a balance pressing against the ideal of unity in our time, and that although we can and should act in ourselves the convergence we grasp as fundamental principle of all reality, and we can use certain inbuilt flexibility to push evolution forward through conscious intent, there is at the same time a lawful limit to how much we can force the opposites to coincide by making them coincide with/in our willed activity? We have abundantly criticized Eugene for his attitude of bypassing reality, and burning bridges into the ashes of unconsciousness, in order to instantly become Oneness. But when we do acknowledge the bridges, and work through them, only to squeeze them tightly together all the way towards non-existence, by declaring them spiraling, or spiraled, are we not in the end manifesting an intent of a similar nature?
Steiner, Cleric, and myself have all written about the need for exploring spiritual reality from as many angles and perspectives as possible, because it is something fluid and dynamic that doesn't 'stand still' like physical reality. I try to insert my own reasoning and metaphors as well, and could probably do more of that, but I still feel most comfortable with a healthy dose of quotes from Steiner, Scaligero, Tomberg, Cleric, and whomever else has clearly demonstrated a depth of knowledge and wisdom concerning these inner realities. I am not simply integrating anyone and everyone who I happen to come across. I started to make that mistake with Martinus but, as soon as I spotted an inconsistency, I tried to rectify that. Even before that, I could tell that Martinus had not developed higher cognition proper. In stark contrast, it is perfectly clear to me that Scaligero and Tomberg had developed equal intuitive thinking capacities to Steiner himself. The more I read them, the more clear it becomes. We can't reach the corresponding depths where these things become inwardly clear to us, in a consistent and sustained way, unless we give ourselves the
opportunities to do so, in humility and faith. We should be clear that our lower nature is constantly fighting against those opportunities, trying to distract and divert us from them. We shouldn't help its efforts by indulging the distractions through radical skepticism and cynicism. Steiner himself makes this point in many places, such as HTKHW, and I don't think I need to quote that for you.
Since you asked for something from Steiner on 'pure perception', here is an excerpt:
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA322/En ... 02p01.html
Steiner wrote:I have spoken to you about the conception underlying my book, Philosophy of Freedom. This book is actually a modest attempt to win through to pure thinking, the pure thinking in which the ego can live and maintain a firm footing. Then, when pure thinking has been grasped in this way, one can strive for something else. This thinking, left in the power of an ego that now feels itself to be liberated within free spirituality [frei und unabhängig in freier Geistigkeit], can then be excluded from the process of perception. Whereas in ordinary life one sees color, let us say, and at the same time imbues the color with conceptual activity, one can now extract the concepts from the entire process of elaborating percepts and draw the percept itself directly into ones bodily constitution.
Goethe undertook to do this and has already taken the First steps in this direction. Read the last chapter of his Theory of Colors, entitled “The Sensory-Moral Effect of Color”: in every color-effect he experiences something that unites itself profoundly not only with the faculty of perception but with the whole man. He experiences yellow and scarlet as “attacking” colors, penetrating him, as it were, through and through, filling him with warmth, while he regards blue and violet as colors that draw one out of oneself, as cold colors. The whole man experiences something in the act of sense perception. Sense perception, together with its content, passes down into the organism, and the ego with its pure thought content remains, so to speak, hovering above. We exclude thinking inasmuch as we take into and fill ourselves with the whole content of the perception, instead of weakening it with concepts, as we usually do. We train ourselves specially to achieve this by systematically pursuing what came to be practiced in a decadent form by the men of the East. Instead of grasping the content of the perception in pure, strictly logical thought, we grasp it symbolically, in pictures, allowing it to stream into us as a result of a kind of detour around thinking. We steep ourselves in the richness of the colors, the richness of the tone, by learning to experience the images inwardly, not in terms of thought but as pictures, as symbols. Because we do not suffuse our inner life with the thought content, as the psychology of association would have it, but with the content of perception indicated through symbols and pictures, the living inner forces of the etheric and astral bodies stream toward us from within, and we come to know the depths of consciousness and of the soul.
And I will quote more from Kuhlewinde since he goes into the distinctions quite precisely, exactly as Scaligero does. He even separates them into 3 different chapters, from which I am taking a few excerpt each. But unless you are
willing to consider your initial judgments were premature, based on incomplete information and a lack of depth, these things will keep sounding to you like they are "avoiding" the topic, when in fact they couldn't be speaking to the topic of the 'tri-partite classification' any more directly.
Once we have learned discontinuous, conceptual thinking and have become able to synthesize, and once this has brought us to the structure of the consciousness soul, we can continue the further development of consciousness through conscious schooling. For, by this time, because of the structure of the consciousness soul, we no longer receive anything positive from the given without effort on our part. Our first goal has to be to strengthen the autonomy of our consciousness, that is, to strengthen our attention, a considerable part of which is caught in subconscious formations and habits. We can realize this goal by concentrating our attention on objects that are not appealing or interesting in themselves. For this, we must choose things that we can completely think through. Man-made objects with their functional ideas are appropriate for such exercises.67
To avoid becoming distracted we must picture the object and think thoughts proper and relevant to it as a preparatory exercise. The actual concentration on the function or idea of the object, however, requires that our now-strengthened attention become more continuous. We cannot “think” an idea, such as an invention, or the function of an object, with interruptions because it is neither a word nor a picture. That is also why the idea or function cannot be remembered or repeated; rather, it requires continuous intuition. To ensure that an idea stays in our consciousness, our concentrated attention must stay in the immediate present. The mental image and thought of the object, as well as its idea, are woven out of our attention; they are this attention. That is why we must make our attention more and more continuous through these exercises. Then, with the help of the idea as subject to focus on, we raise our attention to the continuity of the immediate present.
Our consciousness thus arrives at the “how” of thinking, which is the logic of the discontinuous expression of our thoughts. The functional idea of the man-made object is given to us superconsciously in childhood as our ability-to-cognize all similar objects as the same. Now we seek to raise our consciousness to a level that is usually superconscious. This answers the question of whether thinking consciousness can come closer to its sources. It also allows us to describe the self-awareness of the I, which was mentioned in chapter 5, in more detail. When we practice the exercises presented above, we realize that the theme we pictured or thought of, especially the idea of the chosen object, consists of attention. This attention is concentrated by virtue of the theme and simultaneously focused on it. In other words, our attention is focused on itself. We can now experience and perceive it just like any other percept, because it has been strengthened within itself. In our attention's encounter with itself, the idea of the I lights up and is realized. This is how our experience of the I on the level of the immediate present develops. This experience is fundamental to our pursuit of spiritual science.
... (chapter on Meditation)
Meditation is an attempt—by means of concentration and a continuity of attention in thinking and representing—to reach a truth saturated with reality in the experience of evidence. In perception on the other hand, that is to say, in perceptual meditation [or pure perception], the attempt is—again in the experience of evidence—to come to a reality saturated with truth. Meditation in any form always involves words. In fact, even the themes of pictorial and perceptual meditation are wordlike, although we cannot express such “words” in a particular language. Meditation themes have been conceived with enhanced powers of cognition and are expressed in the form of a text or a picture. In perceptual meditation, we take our theme from nature; the phenomena of nature are in themselves expressions of higher concepts. The subjects we choose to meditate on do not describe facts or refer to a world that is already past. Rather, they point to the common source of world and cognition, that is, to the Logos. In the Logos all being is cognition and already contains the latter. We can cognize and know our outer and inner worlds because they are Logos worlds and are created through the Word. The text or theme we meditate on is taken from a phase of the way the word travels “downward” toward the world of the past and is then expressed in the words of a particular language or in a picture. For this reason a meditator can find the way up to the source of the theme through meditation—that is, we find the way into a “wordless” sphere, “wordless” if we define “word” as necessarily always having a sound.
... (chapter on Perceptual Meditation i.e. "pure perception")
If we do not elevate ourselves to the level of meditation, we will be blinded by the ideas of nature that exceed our comprehension. As these ideas are inaccessible to us, they implant themselves in our mind as perceptual sensations and make us believe that they contain a nonconceptual element. This nonconceptual element seems to affect our senses, but we could comprehend the ideal with our spirit. Our affected senses “respond,” give us a picture. We assume that there is a nonideal “reality-in-itself” behind this picture. However, in reality, these substitute concepts are merely mental pictures, impure “half-concepts,” and lead us to misunderstand the nature of ideas. We mistake ideas for abstractions from the nonconceptual, as though concepts were not already a precondition for abstraction: after all, we must select and decide what we are abstracting from. The systematic cultivation of “nonthoughts” leads to impenetrable inclusions in our consciousness that obstruct the healthy circulation of light. As a result, our intuitive thinking is more and more weakened. We construct a labyrinth made up of thoughts that move in circles, and we can hardly find a way out. The intuitive forces that are prevented from functioning in a healthy way then develop into the dynamic and powerful habits of our subconscious—into the inverted, yet profoundly effective, inspirations of our feeling and will. These work to prevent us from becoming truly human. Were they to succeed in this, nature would be eternalized in its obscured existence and unredeemed through our failure to read it with understanding—eternalized like a being that never wakes from its sleep, mummified while it sleeps. In pure perception we are no longer blinded, and the incomprehensible regains its rank as a high idea. Our perception dissolves into understanding, into spiritual presence in the here and now.
Kühlewind, Georg. The Logos-Structure of the World . Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.