On Symbolic Ordering, Theology, and Hierarchical Mystagogy

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Please stop saying that "there is no doubt" that Steiner distinguished these three types of cognition based on the nature of the object. The doubt is there, and I am that doubt.

...

Federica,

Forget all the quotes, Steiner, and all the other thinkers that I referenced. Clearly, these references are making something very simple seem very complicated to you. I apologize for that.

In normal experience, we are always encountering at least three levels of transparency within our spiritual activity i.e. our thinking, feeling, and willing. We are awake in our thinking, dreaming in our feeling, and asleep in our willing. These also associate with the domains of nature (will), culture (feeling), and supersensible experience that is independent of nature and culture (thinking). Obviously, these domains overlap and there is no simple categorization or equation we are trying to formulate with these intuitive associations, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of making the distinction in this context.

What does it mean to be awake in our thinking? It means the intuitive lawfulness of thought-perceptions is the most clear to us. Where do we normally find thought-perceptions that are most free of feeling and will, i.e. that we can manifest relatively independent of stirring our emotions and some bodily movement that we reflectively perceive through the senses? That is in thinking about supersensible concepts, like mathematical ones, which is already a basic form of thinking about thinking activity itself. Thinking is being pointed to its own activity in a very direct way. I remind here of Cleric's comment to you on the TC spectrum essay:


viewtopic.php?p=19700#p19700

When speaking of 'rules of transformation' we shouldn't imagine that intellectual models continually insert themselves between spiritual phenomena and and our meaningful experience. These rules are innerly known in the way we know the extents of our limbs, the ranges of the joints and so on. The rules are the background intuition through which we know the ways we can transform our bodily states.

It is similar with thinking. The rules here are not about stepping outside our thinking process and overlaying on it some theory of logic, while forgetting that we're still thinking this whole process. Instead, the rules of transformation of thinking are once again about the intuitive orientation within the ideal space that we're traversing. We don't have to make abstract model of this space. When we're active in steering through that space, our perceptual content (thought-images) already tell something about that landscape since they are formed according to its curvatures.

As soon as our thinking begins steering through an ideal space that stirs our emotions and/or our bodily will, a more mysterious element is added to the intuitive lawfulness, making it less transparent to our thinking. We don't even have to identify what this element is right now, just that it clearly exists in our experience. That is why I asked you about your experience of perceiving a man-made object, like a car or a table etc., in comparison to perceiving a natural object like a tree, in relation to your feeling and will. I would like to return to that question now, since that is the most fruitful direction to proceed without relying on anyone else (except the small quote from Cleric for additional context on 'intuitive lawfulness').

[Anthony66]

That is true, there is a semantic range. But when we move from isolated concepts like 'hell' or 'heaven', which as you note are already quite deep, and move to the relations of these concepts that constellate a semantic space like 'salvation through faith in Christ', or an even broader/deeper space like 'salvation through faith in Christ as embodied by the institution of the RCC', do you see how the issue becomes much more complex? It seems you implicitly acknowledge there are great mysteries surrounding such things, but you are still hesitant to renounce very firm and definite thoughts about what they mean. Both the fundamentalists and the atheists put themselves in the same position - they want these things to be very transparent to their modern conceptual understanding and then project that desire for surface-level transparency back through the entire history of the Church.

But any honest and effortful survey of the scriptures and the early Church writings, for ex., reveals that the mysterious character of such things was front and center in the early Christian consciousness. We could take the example of Origen, who surely must be considered influential in the organic development of the early Church and its traditional doctrine. What are your thoughts on the following passage?

Perhaps an appropriate way to view all of this is via the mathematical concept of projection - reducing a higher dimensional space to a lower one. In terms of our day-to-day experience, we can similarly think of a 3-dimensional object casting a 2-D shadow onto the ground. In either case the projected image has lost information in relation to the higher dimensional counterpart.

We can agree that the various spiritual concepts have layers of meaning or depth. They lie in a high dimensional space. But my contention is that the RCC (and other denominations/communions) have mapped these meanings into a lower dimensional space, a crystallized space, where the meaning has been largely lost and most likely distorted. This latter is captured in the creeds and dogmas and is the space the exoteric churches operate in. It is the space which declares esotericism as heretical. But you seem to be arguing that the richer meaning can be resurrected from the ashes of the projection after the information has been lost. In the mathematical world, this is known to be impossible.

Anthony,

The bold is the heart and soul of Christianity and what Christ accomplished for us, is it not? Our entire known personality is a 'projection' in the same sense. I'm not even sure it's impossible in the mathematical world, since there is the holographic principle which says all of 3D reality can be recovered from a 2D hologram. 

The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon

If there is anything I have been trying to convey about the creeds and dogmas of the RCC, it's that they should not be treated essentially differently from any other natural or cultural forms that have been flattened and encrusted in the modern age through our habits of thinking. Every form has an ideal archetype that emanates from the top-down, through human I-consciousness, and into the manifest world. The distortion always occurs in our particular mode of thinking, habits of soul, and myopic perspective rather than the ideal archetype itself. We need to learn to look upon even the forms that we find very disturbing or disagreeable as manifestations of ideal archetypes that are quite independent of human intellectual consciousness and that we have distorted through the latter. The process of redemption can only come from retracing the process of descent, first in our thinking consciousness and later through the soul, life, and physical spaces. That is not only the heart of the Christian faith but also the heart of esoteric science.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear...

Through faith... Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11)

The creeds and dogmas were not made by human concepts 'which do appear' from the bottom-up but through top-down ideal impulses which are 'not seen'. We should try to notice what we are subtly doing in our thinking when we locate the source of problems in the creeds and dogmas and traditions themselves, which is similar to the spiritualist/mystic/fundamentalist who locates the source of problems in the perceptual world and the physical body. Practically, we are forsaking our faith in the Spirit that lives in our thinking consciousness and is alone capable of redeeming the ashes of the World from the deserts, dens, and caves of the modern age. These things remain pretty abstract until we also explore concrete examples through our imaginative and intuitive thinking. I previously shared an example of a dogma that I had found disagreeable and even irredeemable to some extent, i.e. that of the Virgin Birth. At that time, I was thinking that it could only refer to the purity of Mary's soul and had nothing to do with the biological process of reproduction, i.e. it couldn't be the case that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus.

Here is a simple example - that of the 'virgin birth'. The evangelicals dogmatically hold that the Bible teaches Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of the Jesus child. Yet when we look at the actual content of the Gospels, particularly Luke and Matthew, we find genealogies traced out in great detail for the precise purpose of showing how the lineages of Jesus go through Jospeh (and another father, since there were in fact two Jesus children to begin with). What would be the point of all that if Joseph actually had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus? We don't need clairvoyant perception here, just simple and sound reasoning. Do the critical scholars fare any better? No, they hold to the exact same dogmatic interpretation and then use that as a reason for dismissing the content, because it is absurd that a human child could be physically born without a human father. So the evangelicals and critical scholars are arguing over their own dogmatic illusions and the actual content has fallen by the wayside. We will find the same thing applies to many other aspects of scripture as well.

The above is not necessarily incorrect, but I have since intuited with the help of Tomberg that the dogma of the Virgin Birth is not so simple. There is a biological dimension to it that indeed makes it unique from all other human births and is entirely aligned with esoteric science. I can't really go into the details of that because it is still a hazy intuition for me that I cannot usefully condense into conceptual terms. I think it would take quite a few posts to meaningfully convey what I am referring to. Suffice it to say, what I wrote above was equally an expression of my own cognitive limitations as it was of the shortcomings of the Christian faithful who hold fast to the Virgin Birth dogma or the skeptics who believe such a dogma clearly has a biological component. I was separating out the "biological" from the spiritual in an unwarranted manner. These are things we need to pay attention to and strive to overcome through faith in our living spiritual principles of redemption and resurrection. Our Hope is in the fact that even the densest, most hardened thing of all, our physical bodies and mineral nature, is being raised back to life through us.

We usually feel that the esoteric understanding of the Christ events and scripture is something more recent, added on top of the "traditional" dogmas of the Church, but that's an inversion. The esoteric understanding came first and only later hardened into exoteric forms. That is how the progression goes for all natural and cultural developments - things are occultly prepared and then outwardly manifested. But the esoteric stream continued throughout the centuries of Christian history and we find more or less direct references to it in the theological writings of the saints of the RCC. We mentioned Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and John of the Cross already, and could add many more names to that list (I realize not all of them were deemed saints by the Church). Who is to say that the creeds and dogmas are to be universally interpreted by the rules of modern theology and we are to exclude all the earlier theologians, mystics, and saints who thought through and inwardly experienced the truths of Scripture and held fast to their outer expression in dogmas? We would only do that if we are seeking to locate the blame for these interpretations in our cultural institutions rather than in our own thinking consciousness. Only when we permeate the exoteric with the esoteric do we get something whole and all our judgments in the World should strive for wholeness. 

The quote you provide from Origen is fascinating. Of course much of what Origen said was viewed with suspicion and declared as heretical by the latter church councils. But I'd love to know how much the sense of a spiritual Gospel (whatever is meant by this term) permeated the thinking of the early church and of Jesus' teaching itself versus "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" which became the central teaching of Christianity.

Yes, that is a great question to explore and we should do so before casting out our judgments. Again, we can only say "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" became the "central teaching of Christianity" if we have excluded everything 'not seen', or even things seen but not paid attention to, from the teaching. Everything is fluid, mobile, in process of development through rhythms of descents and ascents and the more we deepen our own intuitive thinking, the more we will notice how the 'teaching' once was and could again be much more than we currently assess it to be.

From a mathematical conceptual perspective, projection is not a bijective function - there is not a one-to-one relationship between the domain and range. For example a 3-D point (1,2,3) may project to a 2-D plane as (1,2) but so may (1,2,4). From the 2-D point (1,2) one can't uniquely map back to 3-D - one can't determine whether to traverse back to (1,2,3) or (1,2,4) or to (1,2,5) for that matter.

What I'm trying to get at with this analogy is that the creeds and dogmas lie in the "2-D plane" in the minds of the formulators and the faithful. The virgin birth is a proposition, Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit without sexual intercourse. Hell is a proposition, there exists a bad postmortem place or state reserved for those outside the church. These may will be manifestations of ideal archetypes as you say, but at the level they are understood by the church, one is doing a certain level of violence to the intent to suggest "you may say that, but I know you don't really mean that". There is no mapping back to 3-D from the perspective of the ways these teachings are manifest without being charged with, "No, that is not what I mean".

[AshvinP]

Perhaps an appropriate way to view all of this is via the mathematical concept of projection - reducing a higher dimensional space to a lower one. In terms of our day-to-day experience, we can similarly think of a 3-dimensional object casting a 2-D shadow onto the ground. In either case the projected image has lost information in relation to the higher dimensional counterpart.

We can agree that the various spiritual concepts have layers of meaning or depth. They lie in a high dimensional space. But my contention is that the RCC (and other denominations/communions) have mapped these meanings into a lower dimensional space, a crystallized space, where the meaning has been largely lost and most likely distorted. This latter is captured in the creeds and dogmas and is the space the exoteric churches operate in. It is the space which declares esotericism as heretical. But you seem to be arguing that the richer meaning can be resurrected from the ashes of the projection after the information has been lost. In the mathematical world, this is known to be impossible.

Anthony,

The bold is the heart and soul of Christianity and what Christ accomplished for us, is it not? Our entire known personality is a 'projection' in the same sense. I'm not even sure it's impossible in the mathematical world, since there is the holographic principle which says all of 3D reality can be recovered from a 2D hologram. 

The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon

If there is anything I have been trying to convey about the creeds and dogmas of the RCC, it's that they should not be treated essentially differently from any other natural or cultural forms that have been flattened and encrusted in the modern age through our habits of thinking. Every form has an ideal archetype that emanates from the top-down, through human I-consciousness, and into the manifest world. The distortion always occurs in our particular mode of thinking, habits of soul, and myopic perspective rather than the ideal archetype itself. We need to learn to look upon even the forms that we find very disturbing or disagreeable as manifestations of ideal archetypes that are quite independent of human intellectual consciousness and that we have distorted through the latter. The process of redemption can only come from retracing the process of descent, first in our thinking consciousness and later through the soul, life, and physical spaces. That is not only the heart of the Christian faith but also the heart of esoteric science.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.

Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear...

Through faith... Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11)

The creeds and dogmas were not made by human concepts 'which do appear' from the bottom-up but through top-down ideal impulses which are 'not seen'. We should try to notice what we are subtly doing in our thinking when we locate the source of problems in the creeds and dogmas and traditions themselves, which is similar to the spiritualist/mystic/fundamentalist who locates the source of problems in the perceptual world and the physical body. Practically, we are forsaking our faith in the Spirit that lives in our thinking consciousness and is alone capable of redeeming the ashes of the World from the deserts, dens, and caves of the modern age. These things remain pretty abstract until we also explore concrete examples through our imaginative and intuitive thinking. I previously shared an example of a dogma that I had found disagreeable and even irredeemable to some extent, i.e. that of the Virgin Birth. At that time, I was thinking that it could only refer to the purity of Mary's soul and had nothing to do with the biological process of reproduction, i.e. it couldn't be the case that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus.

Here is a simple example - that of the 'virgin birth'. The evangelicals dogmatically hold that the Bible teaches Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of the Jesus child. Yet when we look at the actual content of the Gospels, particularly Luke and Matthew, we find genealogies traced out in great detail for the precise purpose of showing how the lineages of Jesus go through Jospeh (and another father, since there were in fact two Jesus children to begin with). What would be the point of all that if Joseph actually had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus? We don't need clairvoyant perception here, just simple and sound reasoning. Do the critical scholars fare any better? No, they hold to the exact same dogmatic interpretation and then use that as a reason for dismissing the content, because it is absurd that a human child could be physically born without a human father. So the evangelicals and critical scholars are arguing over their own dogmatic illusions and the actual content has fallen by the wayside. We will find the same thing applies to many other aspects of scripture as well.

The above is not necessarily incorrect, but I have since intuited with the help of Tomberg that the dogma of the Virgin Birth is not so simple. There is a biological dimension to it that indeed makes it unique from all other human births and is entirely aligned with esoteric science. I can't really go into the details of that because it is still a hazy intuition for me that I cannot usefully condense into conceptual terms. I think it would take quite a few posts to meaningfully convey what I am referring to. Suffice it to say, what I wrote above was equally an expression of my own cognitive limitations as it was of the shortcomings of the Christian faithful who hold fast to the Virgin Birth dogma or the skeptics who believe such a dogma clearly has a biological component. I was separating out the "biological" from the spiritual in an unwarranted manner. These are things we need to pay attention to and strive to overcome through faith in our living spiritual principles of redemption and resurrection. Our Hope is in the fact that even the densest, most hardened thing of all, our physical bodies and mineral nature, is being raised back to life through us.

We usually feel that the esoteric understanding of the Christ events and scripture is something more recent, added on top of the "traditional" dogmas of the Church, but that's an inversion. The esoteric understanding came first and only later hardened into exoteric forms. That is how the progression goes for all natural and cultural developments - things are occultly prepared and then outwardly manifested. But the esoteric stream continued throughout the centuries of Christian history and we find more or less direct references to it in the theological writings of the saints of the RCC. We mentioned Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and John of the Cross already, and could add many more names to that list (I realize not all of them were deemed saints by the Church). Who is to say that the creeds and dogmas are to be universally interpreted by the rules of modern theology and we are to exclude all the earlier theologians, mystics, and saints who thought through and inwardly experienced the truths of Scripture and held fast to their outer expression in dogmas? We would only do that if we are seeking to locate the blame for these interpretations in our cultural institutions rather than in our own thinking consciousness. Only when we permeate the exoteric with the esoteric do we get something whole and all our judgments in the World should strive for wholeness. 

The quote you provide from Origen is fascinating. Of course much of what Origen said was viewed with suspicion and declared as heretical by the latter church councils. But I'd love to know how much the sense of a spiritual Gospel (whatever is meant by this term) permeated the thinking of the early church and of Jesus' teaching itself versus "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" which became the central teaching of Christianity.

Yes, that is a great question to explore and we should do so before casting out our judgments. Again, we can only say "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" became the "central teaching of Christianity" if we have excluded everything 'not seen', or even things seen but not paid attention to, from the teaching. Everything is fluid, mobile, in process of development through rhythms of descents and ascents and the more we deepen our own intuitive thinking, the more we will notice how the 'teaching' once was and could again be much more than we currently assess it to be.

From a mathematical conceptual perspective, projection is not a bijective function - there is not a one-to-one relationship between the domain and range. For example a 3-D point (1,2,3) may project to a 2-D plane as (1,2) but so may (1,2,4). From the 2-D point (1,2) one can't uniquely map back to 3-D - one can't determine whether to traverse back to (1,2,3) or (1,2,4) or to (1,2,5) for that matter.

What I'm trying to get at with this analogy is that the creeds and dogmas lie in the "2-D plane" in the minds of the formulators and the faithful. The virgin birth is a proposition, Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit without sexual intercourse. Hell is a proposition, there exists a bad postmortem place or state reserved for those outside the church. These may will be manifestations of ideal archetypes as you say, but at the level they are understood by the church, one is doing a certain level of violence to the intent to suggest "you may say that, but I know you don't really mean that". There is no mapping back to 3-D from the perspective of the ways these teachings are manifest without being charged with, "No, that is not what I mean".

Anthony,

I think it would be really useful to get back to the PoF basics (or the various phenomenological illustrations provided by Cleric). Sometimes we read these things, feel like they have been understood (and maybe they were somewhat understood for a little while), and then put them aside and want to move on to new spiritual ideas, sort of like we do with our cultural traditions and heritage, but then we fall back into old habits of thinking which reveal that we have not made concrete the principles of our first-person cognitive experience. It is clear to me that this is the most important factor in all spiritual development, far and away. I actually wouldn't recommend someone like Tomberg to anyone who hasn't first thoroughly worked through Steiner and his philosophical works, and perhaps some spiritual science as well. I hope it's clear that the real value of considering such things as the 'RCC creeds/dogmas' is in testing our principled thinking activity and its approach to the World so as to constantly refine it. There is no value in simply arguing about what modern believers understand the content of dogmas to be or not to be. 

A key part of cognitive phenomenology is experiencing the weaknesses and limitations of our normal conceptual activity. Everything we encounter in the World is bound up with our flattened concepts, including our very sense of who we are as personalities. We can get a sense of this if we compare what we are able to think with our inner voice to what we are able to express to others with our outer voice. Everyone has probably experienced how much more clearly we can think to ourselves compared to when we speak our thoughts to others, i.e. how the latter seems extremely feeble and limited compared to the former. It is a similar relationship between our inner voice and our intuitive thinking, except, because the latter is normally not at all conscious, we aren't able to make the comparison since we have nothing to compare the inner voice to. But through the reasoned analogy, we can at least discern that our inner conceptual activity is prone to similar weaknesses and limitations as our capacity to outwardly express concepts we have thought through to others. The very act of putting intuitive realities into the inner voice renders the former something less substantial, less concrete, less serious, more frivolous and trivial. So in the face of such inherent limitations, how can we understand the purpose of our conceptual activity which is obviously necessary for our current existence?

Let's say we suddenly have the urge to drink and recklessly reach out for a cup on the table, knocking it over and spilling all its contents over the table. We perceive this event and it feeds back to our thinking consciousness, so now we have more living cues for how to steer our spiritual activity going forward. We know to pay better attention, to be more deliberate, to be more in control of our passions, and so forth, so as to avoid negative consequences. We should understand all forms we encounter in the same way, including our own bodies and our own soul-life that engages in conceptual activity. The feedback doesn't stop with our conscious ego but continues on to our higher self who is superconscious. How we adjust, adapt, react, etc. with our spiritual activity also feeds back to our higher self for the purpose of expanding true knowledge and wisdom in our stream of becoming towards shared ideals. That wisdom is elaborated in the liminal spaces of sleep and is the very source of our continual development as humans. We can greatly deepen our sense of this stream if we approach all forms of the World, including cultural institutions and other living souls, with this higher purpose of inner perfection in our consciousness. Our higher spiritual activity is constantly and clumsily bumping into spiritual forms so that it can learn to better adapt its approach in the future, which is to say, to learn how to be more thoughtful, precise, deliberate, humble, grateful, and loving. 

So in your mathematical analogy, the 2D plane is in our mode of thinking and structural organization which shapes that thinking. It is never in the forms we encounter. When it comes to spiritual creeds and dogmas, it should be especially clear that we are dealing with supersensible ideas. Practically none of those formulations relate to the normal impressions or events we encounter on the sensory plane, but to the lofty redemptive activities of normally inconceivable spiritual beings. Our thinking habitually reduces the supersensible ideas it encounters to their lowest common denominator, which for most people are sensory perceptions and paper-thin concepts. There isn't any form in the physical world that is not incarnating a supersensible idea - the very sense of meaning that we feel indicates to us that whatever we are perceiving in thought has flowed in from the superconscious realms. Of course, we aren't speaking of "ideas" as floating abstractions but as actual beings and their relational activity. If we were to develop more imaginative thinking, then our lowest common denominator would be much more living and dynamic concepts.

I could also say the tree outside my house is a "proposition", asserting to me green colors, leafy shapes, a brown cylinder, and so forth. In my idealistic concepts reported by the inner voice, I may think to myself that it is a living being with ancient wisdom and noble qualities, but if I am honest with myself, those things are not experienced in my normal interaction with the tree. The question is whether I am going to locate the source of that lack within the tree itself or whatever stands behind the tree, or rather I am going to locate the source within my own highly formatted cognitive experience? The materialist will have the hardest time understanding this question and what it is pointing to, even though it probably seems pretty obvious to everyone on this forum. When we move to the realm of culture and cultural forms, however, that idealist meets the same stumbling block as the materialist and fails to notice the similarity. One then attributes the flattened meaning of these cultural forms to the ideas themselves, such "the Church" or "the faithful" or "the propositions", rather than their own cognitive interaction with the ideas. We don't need clairvoyant perception of ideas to notice the flaw in this approach. As soon as we start asking the right questions and genuinely seeking the answers, all sorts of hard problems arise.

Who is 'the Church', who are 'the faithful', what are their spatial and temporal boundaries, and so forth? We will quickly find that any attempt to draw boundaries around supersensible ideas becomes arbitrary reflections of our own subjective preferences. A common retort is that "words (forms) have common meanings that we must adhere to". No, spiritual activity has common meanings that we share and our task is to adapt the forms to the higher meanings that feedback to perfect our spiritual activity. At the end of the day, what you are arguing is really simple and can be summed up as, "there are a lot of people in the modern age who have not developed their interest in spiritual reality and are still immersed in abstract materialistic thinking, so they confuse their flattened perception of early Church ideas for the ideas-themselves". And in the process of making that argument or making it into something that actually influences the way you approach spiritual reality, you are adopting the exact same flattened perception for yourself. These are entirely self-sabotaging impulses that work up from the depths of the subconscious when we fear approaching the spiritual essence of natural and cultural forms that we encounter. It is a natural fear because we are, in fact, confronting new inner territory that has the potential of completely transforming our understanding of who we are and our way of life - "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom". This fear is working subconsciously or superconsciously, so we have no chance of deconditioning its habitual tyranny over our thinking activity apart from faithfully pursuing a concrete encounter with that activity itself. It is the beginning of Wisdom when we make it more conscious and into an instrument for our inner perfection.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Please stop saying that "there is no doubt" that Steiner distinguished these three types of cognition based on the nature of the object. The doubt is there, and I am that doubt.

...

Federica,

Forget all the quotes, Steiner, and all the other thinkers that I referenced. Clearly, these references are making something very simple seem very complicated to you. I apologize for that.

In normal experience, we are always encountering at least three levels of transparency within our spiritual activity i.e. our thinking, feeling, and willing. We are awake in our thinking, dreaming in our feeling, and asleep in our willing. These also associate with the domains of nature (will), culture (feeling), and supersensible experience that is independent of nature and culture (thinking). Obviously, these domains overlap and there is no simple categorization or equation we are trying to formulate with these intuitive associations, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of making the distinction in this context.

What does it mean to be awake in our thinking? It means the intuitive lawfulness of thought-perceptions is the most clear to us. Where do we normally find thought-perceptions that are most free of feeling and will, i.e. that we can manifest relatively independent of stirring our emotions and some bodily movement that we reflectively perceive through the senses? That is in thinking about supersensible concepts, like mathematical ones, which is already a basic form of thinking about thinking activity itself. Thinking is being pointed to its own activity in a very direct way. I remind here of Cleric's comment to you on the TC spectrum essay:


viewtopic.php?p=19700#p19700

When speaking of 'rules of transformation' we shouldn't imagine that intellectual models continually insert themselves between spiritual phenomena and and our meaningful experience. These rules are innerly known in the way we know the extents of our limbs, the ranges of the joints and so on. The rules are the background intuition through which we know the ways we can transform our bodily states.

It is similar with thinking. The rules here are not about stepping outside our thinking process and overlaying on it some theory of logic, while forgetting that we're still thinking this whole process. Instead, the rules of transformation of thinking are once again about the intuitive orientation within the ideal space that we're traversing. We don't have to make abstract model of this space. When we're active in steering through that space, our perceptual content (thought-images) already tell something about that landscape since they are formed according to its curvatures.

As soon as our thinking begins steering through an ideal space that stirs our emotions and/or our bodily will, a more mysterious element is added to the intuitive lawfulness, making it less transparent to our thinking. We don't even have to identify what this element is right now, just that it clearly exists in our experience. That is why I asked you about your experience of perceiving a man-made object, like a car or a table etc., in comparison to perceiving a natural object like a tree, in relation to your feeling and will. I would like to return to that question now, since that is the most fruitful direction to proceed without relying on anyone else (except the small quote from Cleric for additional context on 'intuitive lawfulness').

There's no reason to apologize, Ashvin, but thanks. Allow me a preliminary consideration before I come to your question.

Perhaps there is a relation between your confusion about Scaligero's elaboration of the concentration exercise and your feeling that the man-made distinction for our experience of concepts is an arbitrary one, or generally not helpful. And it all may relate back to your general antipathy or suspicion towards cultural institutions which are, of course, also man-made. At the metaphysical level, we know that none of these things are strictly "man-made" - not the tree, not the table, not the cultural institution, nor the hexagon. But with our phenomenological inquiry, we can say the table and the cultural institution are man-made and the hexagon is our personal making.

I think the bold is incorrect, because, yes, we can say that the table is man-made, and the hexagon is our personal making, but this means that the hexagon is also man-made, correct? So a lawful, useful distinction of experience cannot be whether there is an element of creation that is understood as human intent (because this is the case with both the table and the hexagon). The distinction resides in whether an interference with nature - with the sensory spectrum - is or is not perceived. That’s the main point for me. Hexagon: not perceived, the thinking activity turns around onto itself, as pictured in the morphic space graph (that space has a round arrow, it’s a turning point of experience). Table, cultural institution, tree: the sensory spectrum is perceived. Our thinking activity is interfered down into the lowest morphic space: the physical. In reality, we have to admit that the man-made quality exists across the levels of morphic spaces, from the thinking space downwards. Even when I am only living in the morphic spaces thinking + feeling (without descending into life and physical) there are man-made (supersensible) objects to apprehend - ours, and other humans' - although man-made objects are more obvious when we reach all the way down into the lowest level, the physical.
So we can be either only in Thinking, or in Thinking + Feeling, or in Thinking + Feeling + Life, or in Thinking + Feeling + Life + Physical. and the man-made quality is found all the way across. I believe this observation subtracts even more sense and relevance to Scaligero’s distinction. Now coming to your question about physical objects alone:

For this experiment, we should use real objects such as a table and a tree rather than imagined ones. The distinction can still be sensed with the latter but it is much more difficult. When focusing on the perceptual structure of a man-made object in comparison to a natural object, I am wondering whether you sense a difference in relation to your feeling and will?

I first recall what I said above in this thread, that feelings arise strongly from immersion in the sensory spectrum, but have to be intentionally summoned when we are in supersensible space.

Feeling: starting from multiplicity (tree), working through meditative effort, feelings have to be tamed, guided and concentrated. Starting from oneness (hexagon), in concentrating effort, feeling has to be created, just as the thought-image is created, and they have to be expanded and multiplied from there.

So - in my experience, for natural physical objects, there is a feeling of outrightness, immediacy, and relief. There's the feeling of touching something of the ground level of perception. Maybe the other way to say it is, the feeling provided by physical perception of natural objects is a feeling of contact with their symbolic relevance. Not that such relevance is understood, but that it's evident that there is one. (Similar to seeing a cuneiform inscription and recognizing that it’s a language, although nothing of the expressed message is understood). That’s why I don’t very much align with your thought that they are “less transparent”, although I understand it. Indeed, in the specific sense I'm trying to render, natural objects are actually more transparent to me.

Maybe I could take the example of a natural scenery as natural object, and a painting that pictures that scenery as man-made object. A man-made physical object feels more like a mirror, and generates a more tensed sort of feeling. By perceiving the material creation of another human we are necessarily sent back to our own will/creative process, there is necessarily a relational movement of the soul in relation to the questions: how would I have gone about that same task? Through juxtaposing the perceived intent with my own, what can I learn about the particular human intent, individual and collective, that created that object? What can I discover about myself through this relational activity? That is the invitation of a man-made object, that stirs feelings. In this sense too, because we encounter a kind of mirror, a filter that discourages any vertical inquiries and sends us instead horizontally, along spatial expressions of intents of human origin, I sense a lack of transparency. Said in yet another way: the connection to the being-Earth can be felt and explored directly, through perception of natural objects (among which we could include the human physical body, and maybe even more of our own organization) but this exploration is clouded, impeded, when we are confronted with a man-made object, because we remain caught in the imperfect intersection resulting from the intents of the creator of the object and our own. We use this intersection reflectively, trying to refine our sense of their intents and our intents, through sort of a 'discrepancy analysis'. So, whatever specific feeling may appear with respect to a given man-made object - awe, admiration, repulsion, anger, refreshment, solidarity, challenge, comfort, discomfort, etc. - there is a common feeling of laterality, of horizontal comparison, whilst one can always let oneself vertically fall with one’s feelings into natural objects. In terms of will, physical natural objects span on a much larger scale - the sky, the universe, the Earth… - while man-made objects are always finite, apprehendable, often relatable, and we can look into them as in a mirror.
This is all I can say, in terms of generalized difference in feelings, when I experience physical objects, depending on their natural versus man-mae character.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Please stop saying that "there is no doubt" that Steiner distinguished these three types of cognition based on the nature of the object. The doubt is there, and I am that doubt.

...

Federica,

Forget all the quotes, Steiner, and all the other thinkers that I referenced. Clearly, these references are making something very simple seem very complicated to you. I apologize for that.

In normal experience, we are always encountering at least three levels of transparency within our spiritual activity i.e. our thinking, feeling, and willing. We are awake in our thinking, dreaming in our feeling, and asleep in our willing. These also associate with the domains of nature (will), culture (feeling), and supersensible experience that is independent of nature and culture (thinking). Obviously, these domains overlap and there is no simple categorization or equation we are trying to formulate with these intuitive associations, but that doesn't negate the usefulness of making the distinction in this context.

What does it mean to be awake in our thinking? It means the intuitive lawfulness of thought-perceptions is the most clear to us. Where do we normally find thought-perceptions that are most free of feeling and will, i.e. that we can manifest relatively independent of stirring our emotions and some bodily movement that we reflectively perceive through the senses? That is in thinking about supersensible concepts, like mathematical ones, which is already a basic form of thinking about thinking activity itself. Thinking is being pointed to its own activity in a very direct way. I remind here of Cleric's comment to you on the TC spectrum essay:


viewtopic.php?p=19700#p19700

When speaking of 'rules of transformation' we shouldn't imagine that intellectual models continually insert themselves between spiritual phenomena and and our meaningful experience. These rules are innerly known in the way we know the extents of our limbs, the ranges of the joints and so on. The rules are the background intuition through which we know the ways we can transform our bodily states.

It is similar with thinking. The rules here are not about stepping outside our thinking process and overlaying on it some theory of logic, while forgetting that we're still thinking this whole process. Instead, the rules of transformation of thinking are once again about the intuitive orientation within the ideal space that we're traversing. We don't have to make abstract model of this space. When we're active in steering through that space, our perceptual content (thought-images) already tell something about that landscape since they are formed according to its curvatures.

As soon as our thinking begins steering through an ideal space that stirs our emotions and/or our bodily will, a more mysterious element is added to the intuitive lawfulness, making it less transparent to our thinking. We don't even have to identify what this element is right now, just that it clearly exists in our experience. That is why I asked you about your experience of perceiving a man-made object, like a car or a table etc., in comparison to perceiving a natural object like a tree, in relation to your feeling and will. I would like to return to that question now, since that is the most fruitful direction to proceed without relying on anyone else (except the small quote from Cleric for additional context on 'intuitive lawfulness').

There's no reason to apologize, Ashvin, but thanks. Allow me a preliminary consideration before I come to your question.

Perhaps there is a relation between your confusion about Scaligero's elaboration of the concentration exercise and your feeling that the man-made distinction for our experience of concepts is an arbitrary one, or generally not helpful. And it all may relate back to your general antipathy or suspicion towards cultural institutions which are, of course, also man-made. At the metaphysical level, we know that none of these things are strictly "man-made" - not the tree, not the table, not the cultural institution, nor the hexagon. But with our phenomenological inquiry, we can say the table and the cultural institution are man-made and the hexagon is our personal making.

I think the bold is incorrect, because, yes, we can say that the table is man-made, and the hexagon is our personal making, but this means that the hexagon is also man-made, correct? So a lawful, useful distinction of experience cannot be whether there is an element of creation that is understood as human intent (because this is the case with both the table and the hexagon). The distinction resides in whether an interference with nature - with the sensory spectrum - is or is not perceived. That’s the main point for me. Hexagon: not perceived, the thinking activity turns around onto itself, as pictured in the morphic space graph (that space has a round arrow, it’s a turning point of experience). Table, cultural institution, tree: the sensory spectrum is perceived. Our thinking activity is interfered down into the lowest morphic space: the physical. In reality, we have to admit that the man-made quality exists across the levels of morphic spaces, from the thinking space downwards. Even when I am only living in the morphic spaces thinking + feeling (without descending into life and physical) there are man-made (supersensible) objects to apprehend - ours, and other humans' - although man-made objects are more obvious when we reach all the way down into the lowest level, the physical.
So we can be either only in Thinking, or in Thinking + Feeling, or in Thinking + Feeling + Life, or in Thinking + Feeling + Life + Physical. and the man-made quality is found all the way across. I believe this observation subtracts even more sense and relevance to Scaligero’s distinction.

Federica,

I am confused by this. In what way are rocks, mountains, trees, plants, animals, and so forth man-made in the phenomenological sense?

When I was using "man-made", I was referring to anything that is the product of human cultural activity. I suppose that could include every thought form we can possibly imagine, since our cultural institutions give us the opportunity to realize those inner forces, but then I think we would have to distinguish between 2 different types of man-made objects, i.e. those which are mixed with objects of the natural world and those which are not and only exist in our imagination. Because our sense of the intuitive lawfulness, or the transparency of the object to our thinking, certainly changes between a car we perceive on the road and a buzzing fly or hexagon we imagine (it becomes more transparent with the latter).

Now coming to your question about physical objects alone:

For this experiment, we should use real objects such as a table and a tree rather than imagined ones. The distinction can still be sensed with the latter but it is much more difficult. When focusing on the perceptual structure of a man-made object in comparison to a natural object, I am wondering whether you sense a difference in relation to your feeling and will?

I first recall what I said above in this thread, that feelings arise strongly from immersion in the sensory spectrum, but have to be intentionally summoned when we are in supersensible space.

Feeling: starting from multiplicity (tree), working through meditative effort, feelings have to be tamed, guided and concentrated. Starting from oneness (hexagon), in concentrating effort, feeling has to be created, just as the thought-image is created, and they have to be expanded and multiplied from there.

So - in my experience, for natural physical objects, there is a feeling of outrightness, immediacy, and relief. There's the feeling of touching something of the ground level of perception. Maybe the other way to say it is, the feeling provided by physical perception of natural objects is a feeling of contact with their symbolic relevance. Not that such relevance is understood, but that it's evident that there is one. (Similar to seeing a cuneiform inscription and recognizing that it’s a language, although nothing of the expressed message is understood). That’s why I don’t very much align with your thought that they are “less transparent”, although I understand it. Indeed, in the specific sense I'm trying to render, natural objects are actually more transparent to me.

Maybe I could take the example of a natural scenery as natural object, and a painting that pictures that scenery as man-made object. A man-made physical object feels more like a mirror, and generates a more tensed sort of feeling. By perceiving the material creation of another human we are necessarily sent back to our own will/creative process, there is necessarily a relational movement of the soul in relation to the questions: how would I have gone about that same task? Through juxtaposing the perceived intent with my own, what can I learn about the particular human intent, individual and collective, that created that object? What can I discover about myself through this relational activity? That is the invitation of a man-made object, that stirs feelings. In this sense too, because we encounter a kind of mirror, a filter that discourages any vertical inquiries and sends us instead horizontally, along spatial expressions of intents of human origin, I sense a lack of transparency. Said in yet another way: the connection to the being-Earth can be felt and explored directly, through perception of natural objects (among which we could include the human physical body, and maybe even more of our own organization) but this exploration is clouded, impeded, when we are confronted with a man-made object, because we remain caught in the imperfect intersection resulting from the intents of the creator of the object and our own. We use this intersection reflectively, trying to refine our sense of their intents and our intents, through sort of a 'discrepancy analysis'. So, whatever specific feeling may appear with respect to a given man-made object - awe, admiration, repulsion, anger, refreshment, solidarity, challenge, comfort, discomfort, etc. - there is a common feeling of laterality, of horizontal comparison, whilst one can always let oneself vertically fall with one’s feelings into natural objects. In terms of will, physical natural objects span on a much larger scale - the sky, the universe, the Earth… - while man-made objects are always finite, apprehendable, often relatable, and we can look into them as in a mirror.
This is all I can say, in terms of generalized difference in feelings, when I experience physical objects, depending on their natural versus man-mae character.

Thanks for this description of your experience and the example. It seems to me that you are calling "transparency" what I would call the sense of reality, i.e. outrightness, immediacy, etc., but that sense of reality actually exists with inverse proportion to the level of intuitive insight we have in relation to the object, which is what I would call transparency. It is similar to what the naïve realist does when saying the sensory spectrum must be the foundation of reality while human concepts and ideas must be epiphenomenal because the latter lacks the same sense of reality as the former. I know you don't hold to such a view, obviously, but you have curiously arrived at a similar way of thinking about it with respect to the "transparency" of the domains. In my mind, without significant higher cognitive development, the sense of reality and the sense of insight/truth (transparency) are bifurcated and come at the expense of one another. That is really how we get the inner/outer experiential distinction to begin with.

So we can contrast the sense of reality with the sense of truth which we find most clearly in logical and mathematical thinking. In this discussion, for ex., we feel the concepts employed are transparent enough to form a basis for arriving at truth because we can logically reason through them. There is some murkiness there, though. Pure logic and mathematics are practically the only domains where we can say to have proved something to be true with absolute certainty. We can say that because we have real intuitive insight into the way logical/mathematical thinking unfolds, since it is a direct reflection of our current thinking space. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to accept that as verified by our thinking experience, but when we move one layer further to man-made objects, you feel that these are actually less transparent than natural objects. But, again, the fact that you would experience more feeling of verticality with natural objects means that it must be less transparent to your thinking. At our current stage, these act mostly as polar opposites. What 'tugs' the most on our will and feeling is what we have the least intuitive insight into. We could simply ask, to what extent is it intuitively clear to me how a tree came into manifesting in my experience vs. a man-made object?

It is true that if we are simply populating a man-made object with concepts about its localized structure, then we are moving horizontally with our thinking, but as soon as we start inquiring into its temporally extended history of human intents, we are moving vertically. That is because we are moving into the collective spiritual forces and intents of human beings - corporations, communities, nations, etc. - and that is always a vertical direction. Anyway, you seem to find a clear distinction between man-made and natural objects in your experience, which means we have at least 3 phenomenological categories of how objects interfere with our spiritual activity, but your conclusion is the opposite of what I would expect and of how I experience the distinction. Again, my sense right now is that you are using "transparency" to mean the feeling of reality while I am using it to mean the sense of insight/truth. What do you think? 

[Federica]

Federica,

I am confused by this. In what way are rocks, mountains, trees, plants, animals, and so forth man-made in the phenomenological sense?

In no way, of course. I was not suggesting that rock and plants and animals are somehow man-made, but only that supersensible objects like a hexagon are man-made in our experience (what you call transparency). The fact that 'man-made' and 'supersensible' intersect shows that Scaligero's distinction between natural, supersensible and man-made objects is weak on yet another account. Of course, one could add the further specification that with "man-made" one only intends offsprings of human cultural activity, but do you see how this weakens Scaligero's tripartite distinction even further? It further reveals its character of being artificial, as opposed to being experiential. So I was bringing this observation as an additional proof - on top of what I said earlier in this thread - that speaks against the 1) experiential character, 2) usefulness, 3) presence in Steiner or Cleric, of this supposed partition of experience (I have tried to use the word "distinction" but I have to come back to partition). This is a man-made (yes) partition, not a curvature of morphic space that we discover experientially.

When I was using "man-made", I was referring to anything that is the product of human cultural activity. I suppose that could include every thought form we can possibly imagine, since our cultural institutions give us the opportunity to realize those inner forces, but then I think we would have to distinguish between 2 different types of man-made objects, i.e. those which are mixed with objects of the natural world and those which are not and only exist in our imagination. Because our sense of the intuitive lawfulness, or the transparency of the object to our thinking, certainly changes between a car we perceive on the road and a buzzing fly or hexagon we imagine (it becomes more transparent with the latter).

Exactly! Our sense of intuitive lawfulness is different. And along which distinction does it change? Quite evidently, this has to be ascribed (as I already stated above) to whether our experience descends or does not descend into the lowest morphic space, the sensory spectrum. You are saying it yourself! Our sense of intuitive lawfulness - the experiential distinction we can make - depends on interference with the physical, not on what Scaligero says it depends on.

I will later come to the second part of your post.

[Federica]

Thanks for this description of your experience and the example. It seems to me that you are calling "transparency" what I would call the sense of reality, i.e. outrightness, immediacy, etc., but that sense of reality actually exists with inverse proportion to the level of intuitive insight we have in relation to the object, which is what I would call transparency.

Yes, the level of intelligibility, or intuitive insight, is low with natural objects, and I will try to remember to call this "low transparency" so we are on the same page. And I also recognize the inverse proportion between transparency as you intend it and the feeling of immediacy/sense of reality.

It is similar to what the naïve realist does when saying the sensory spectrum must be the foundation of reality while human concepts and ideas must be epiphenomenal because the latter lacks the same sense of reality as the former. I know you don't hold to such a view, obviously, but you have curiously arrived at a similar way of thinking about it with respect to the "transparency" of the domains.

You knew I wouldn’t let you run with this
Let’s notice that your question was about the feeling elicited by 2 equally physical objects. In previous posts, I stated that tree, table, and hexagon are equally conceptually non-transparent. But here, when asked to focus specifically on feeling, I felt the most immediate, natural object to be the most transparent of all. The point is, I call most transparent what offers the most immediacy (feeling), while you call most transparent what offers most intuitive insight (thinking).

So if I spoke of transparency as I did, it’s not because I think of it with a naive-realist approach. Rather, I rely on feeling more than you do, in order to grasp reality, and you rely on thinking more than I do for the same purpose. So when I perceive a feeling of immediacy, outrightness, reality (as you call it), like when we are experiencing a beautiful natural landscape, I say “there’s transparency” and when I experience a hexagon of my creation, in which I have to pump in feeling, I would naturally say “this is less transparent”. For you it’s the opposite. You look first at the circular, self-referencing intent in the hexagon you have imagined, and say “that’s transparent”, while the immediately symbolic, outright real, natural scenery you call “less transparent” because it’s more difficult to intuit the intents underlying the perception.
It’s not a matter of being more or less like a naive-realist, it’s only that you are more driven by thinking, and I am more driven by feeling.

In my mind, without significant higher cognitive development, the sense of reality and the sense of insight/truth (transparency) are bifurcated and come at the expense of one another. That is really how we get the inner/outer experiential distinction to begin with.

Yes.

So we can contrast the sense of reality with the sense of truth which we find most clearly in logical and mathematical thinking. In this discussion, for ex., we feel the concepts employed are transparent enough to form a basis for arriving at truth because we can logically reason through them. There is some murkiness there, though. Pure logic and mathematics are practically the only domains where we can say to have proved something to be true with absolute certainty. We can say that because we have real intuitive insight into the way logical/mathematical thinking unfolds, since it is a direct reflection of our current thinking space. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to accept that as verified by our thinking experience, but when we move one layer further to man-made objects, you feel that these are actually less transparent than natural objects. But, again, the fact that you would experience more feeling of verticality with natural objects means that it must be less transparent to your thinking. At our current stage, these act mostly as polar opposites. What 'tugs' the most on our will and feeling is what we have the least intuitive insight into. We could simply ask, to what extent is it intuitively clear to me how a tree came into manifesting in my experience vs. a man-made object?

Exactly - less transparent to my thinking, but I called it more transparent, because I am more sensitive to how it allows a depth of feeling, a feeling of verticality, outrightness, a possibility to come to the rock bottom of its reality. The natural object signals to me a sort of symbolic/vertical highway, that calls forth a feeling-based understanding activity, more than a thinking-based. Probably because my thinking is still underdeveloped, but that’s what lays behind my use of “transparency”.

It is true that if we are simply populating a man-made object with concepts about its localized structure, then we are moving horizontally with our thinking, but as soon as we start inquiring into its temporally extended history of human intents, we are moving vertically. That is because we are moving into the collective spiritual forces and intents of human beings - corporations, communities, nations, etc. - and that is always a vertical direction.

Yes, I haven’t reflected enough on the collective aspect when writing my first answer. I understand that we start a vertical exploration when we quit the perception of the man-made object to dive into the larger, submerged collective curvatures that have shaped that particular manifestation. This corresponds to a symbolic cognitive effort, rather than a conceptual one.

Anyway, you seem to find a clear distinction between man-made and natural objects in your experience, which means we have at least 3 phenomenological categories of how objects interfere with our spiritual activity, but your conclusion is the opposite of what I would expect and of how I experience the distinction. Again, my sense right now is that you are using "transparency" to mean the feeling of reality while I am using it to mean the sense of insight/truth. What do you think?

I find a clear distinction in feeling. That was your question. Scaligero’s distinction is not about feeling, but thinking, and in this respect, as said in the post just above this one, I don’t see the real value of his 3 categories. And I have agreed with your very last sentence.

[AshvinP]

Federica,

I am confused by this. In what way are rocks, mountains, trees, plants, animals, and so forth man-made in the phenomenological sense?

In no way, of course. I was not suggesting that rock and plants and animals are somehow man-made, but only that supersensible objects like a hexagon are man-made in our experience (what you call transparency). The fact that 'man-made' and 'supersensible' intersect shows that Scaligero's distinction between natural, supersensible and man-made objects is weak on yet another account. Of course, one could add the further specification that with "man-made" one only intends offsprings of human cultural activity, but do you see how this weakens Scaligero's tripartite distinction even further? It further reveals its character of being artificial, as opposed to being experiential. So I was bringing this observation as an additional proof - on top of what I said earlier in this thread - that speaks against the 1) experiential character, 2) usefulness, 3) presence in Steiner or Cleric, of this supposed partition of experience (I have tried to use the word "distinction" but I have to come back to partition). This is a man-made (yes) partition, not a curvature of morphic space that we discover experientially.

When I was using "man-made", I was referring to anything that is the product of human cultural activity. I suppose that could include every thought form we can possibly imagine, since our cultural institutions give us the opportunity to realize those inner forces, but then I think we would have to distinguish between 2 different types of man-made objects, i.e. those which are mixed with objects of the natural world and those which are not and only exist in our imagination. Because our sense of the intuitive lawfulness, or the transparency of the object to our thinking, certainly changes between a car we perceive on the road and a buzzing fly or hexagon we imagine (it becomes more transparent with the latter).

Exactly! Our sense of intuitive lawfulness is different. And along which distinction does it change? Quite evidently, this has to be ascribed (as I already stated above) to whether our experience descends or does not descend into the lowest morphic space, the sensory spectrum. You are saying it yourself! Our sense of intuitive lawfulness - the experiential distinction we can make - depends on interference with the physical, not on what Scaligero says it depends on.

I will later come to the second part of your post.

Federica,

The reason I asked is that you said, "we have to admit that the man-made quality exists across the levels of morphic spaces", and I was confused by that. Now, I presume that means that we only become conscious of the morphic spaces to the extent we conceptualize them, and our concepts are 'man-made'. That is true, but it doesn't change that our concepts are interacting with real differentiated structures of spiritual activity. The differentiation between the domains of natural activity, cultural activity, and supersensible activity is not at all artificial and is found in every esoteric thinker. In some ways, it can be mapped to the Holy Trinity - the Father (natural), the Son (cultural), the Spirit (supersensible) - which is perhaps the most useful distinction ever conceived through humans and obviously utilized by every Christian esotericist.

Part of the confusion here may be as follows. Our normal sensory experience is not actually the lowest morphic space, but a superposition of all the morphic spaces (here I mean 'sensory experience' as it presents itself, i.e. not arbitrarily removing the meaningful aspect that comes through our thinking). Only the dead mineral element of our experience resides in the lowest morphic space. As we often mention, our spatial sensory cognition allows us to perceive all the Time-curvatures that these spaces represent simultaneously. To the extent that the processes of life and sentience come to expression in outer form, as they do with plants, animals, and human culture, we are also perceiving the higher morphic spaces in our conceptual thinking. To the extent that we can sense truth, beauty, and goodness in the workings of sensory experience - that sense being the foundation of science, aesthetics, and religion - we are also perceiving the even higher morphic spaces above the current thinking space.

I will leave it there and let you respond to the rest of the post.

[Federica]

Part of the confusion here may be as follows. Our normal sensory experience is not actually the lowest morphic space, but a superposition of all the morphic spaces (here I mean 'sensory experience' as it presents itself, i.e. not arbitrarily removing the meaningful aspect that comes through our thinking). Only the dead mineral element of our experience resides in the lowest morphic space. As we often mention, our spatial sensory cognition allows us to perceive all the Time-curvatures that these spaces represent simultaneously. To the extent that the processes of life and sentience come to expression in outer form, as they do with plants, animals, and human culture, we are also perceiving the higher morphic spaces in our conceptual thinking. To the extent that we can sense truth, beauty, and goodness in the workings of sensory experience - that sense being the foundation of science, aesthetics, and religion - we are also perceiving the even higher morphic spaces above the current thinking space.

I will leave it there and let you respond to the rest of the post.

Ashvin,
No, the confusion is not about that. That the morphic levels continually interfere is not only the clear big picture emerging from the cell intelligence essay, but also the number one insight in basically all other Cleric's essays, PoF, esoteric understanding of reality in general...

[AshvinP]

Thanks for this description of your experience and the example. It seems to me that you are calling "transparency" what I would call the sense of reality, i.e. outrightness, immediacy, etc., but that sense of reality actually exists with inverse proportion to the level of intuitive insight we have in relation to the object, which is what I would call transparency.

Yes, the level of intelligibility, or intuitive insight, is low with natural objects, and I will try to remember to call this "low transparency" so we are on the same page. And I also recognize the inverse proportion between transparency as you intend it and the feeling of immediacy/sense of reality.
...
So if I spoke of transparency as I did, it’s not because I think of it with a naive-realist approach. Rather, I rely on feeling more than you do, in order to grasp reality, and you rely on thinking more than I do for the same purpose. So when I perceive a feeling of immediacy, outrightness, reality (as you call it), like when we are experiencing a beautiful natural landscape, I say “there’s transparency” and when I experience a hexagon of my creation, in which I have to pump in feeling, I would naturally say “this is less transparent”. For you it’s the opposite. You look first at the circular, self-referencing intent in the hexagon you have imagined, and say “that’s transparent”, while the immediately symbolic, outright real, natural scenery you call “less transparent” because it’s more difficult to intuit the intents underlying the perception.
It’s not a matter of being more or less like a naive-realist, it’s only that you are more driven by thinking, and I am more driven by feeling.

Alright, that's good. Then let's also try to get on the same page that it isn't only 'transparency as I intend it', but also transparency as can only be possible through the objective structure of spiritual reality at our current stage of evolution. There is no grasping reality through feeling, only through the relative transparency of thinking. Any sense of transparency you have in the domain of feeling is first attained through thinking activity that you are more or less conscious of. It is the thinking activity that always gives us a sense of insight/truth into the various domains of experience and we shouldn't lose sight of that.

Our thinking is most transparent to us when it only reaches into its own current space, i.e. when it contemplates supersensible objects such as pure logic/mathematics. When it reaches into lower spaces, such as when perceiving the manifestations of cultural activity or natural activity, it becomes less transparent. Even though your personal inclination may be to understand these distinctions of transparency in terms of feeling, the distinction actually manifests at the level of your thinking. That is the reason why we start with the observation of our own thinking within its own space before we expand out into the spaces of feeling and will, or the emotional, life, and physical spaces. There is an actual and objective structural gradient that necessitates this movement.

I think, for that reason, people will also probably experience more immediate results in terms of strengthening their intuitive experience to begin with from meditating on supersensible object-themes, than from concentrating on man-made objects, which in turn will lead to more depth of intuitive experience than from practicing 'pure perception' of natural objects. I don't know if you have tried the latter, but I find it the most difficult to sustain for any significant length of time.

So we can contrast the sense of reality with the sense of truth which we find most clearly in logical and mathematical thinking. In this discussion, for ex., we feel the concepts employed are transparent enough to form a basis for arriving at truth because we can logically reason through them. There is some murkiness there, though. Pure logic and mathematics are practically the only domains where we can say to have proved something to be true with absolute certainty. We can say that because we have real intuitive insight into the way logical/mathematical thinking unfolds, since it is a direct reflection of our current thinking space. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, you seem to accept that as verified by our thinking experience, but when we move one layer further to man-made objects, you feel that these are actually less transparent than natural objects. But, again, the fact that you would experience more feeling of verticality with natural objects means that it must be less transparent to your thinking. At our current stage, these act mostly as polar opposites. What 'tugs' the most on our will and feeling is what we have the least intuitive insight into. We could simply ask, to what extent is it intuitively clear to me how a tree came into manifesting in my experience vs. a man-made object?

Exactly - less transparent to my thinking, but I called it more transparent, because I am more sensitive to how it allows a depth of feeling, a feeling of verticality, outrightness, a possibility to come to the rock bottom of its reality. The natural object signals to me a sort of symbolic/vertical highway, that calls forth a feeling-based understanding activity, more than a thinking-based. Probably because my thinking is still underdeveloped, but that’s what lays behind my use of “transparency”.

It is true that if we are simply populating a man-made object with concepts about its localized structure, then we are moving horizontally with our thinking, but as soon as we start inquiring into its temporally extended history of human intents, we are moving vertically. That is because we are moving into the collective spiritual forces and intents of human beings - corporations, communities, nations, etc. - and that is always a vertical direction.

Yes, I haven’t reflected enough on the collective aspect when writing my first answer. I understand that we start a vertical exploration when we quit the perception of the man-made object to dive into the larger, submerged collective curvatures that have shaped that particular manifestation. This corresponds to a symbolic cognitive effort, rather than a conceptual one.

Anyway, you seem to find a clear distinction between man-made and natural objects in your experience, which means we have at least 3 phenomenological categories of how objects interfere with our spiritual activity, but your conclusion is the opposite of what I would expect and of how I experience the distinction. Again, my sense right now is that you are using "transparency" to mean the feeling of reality while I am using it to mean the sense of insight/truth. What do you think?

I find a clear distinction in feeling. That was your question. Scaligero’s distinction is not about feeling, but thinking, and in this respect, as said in the post just above this one, I don’t see the real value of his 3 categories. And I have agreed with your very last sentence.

I hope it's clear at this point why the distinction is really in your thinking. Or put another way, there can't be a distinction in your feeling with relation to the 3 categories that isn't at the same a distinction in your thinking. Indeed the spiritual scientific distinctions made by Steiner, Scaligero, Kuhlewinde, et al. with respect to the experience of the Ideas standing behind phenomena, generally differentiated into at least 3 categories, is always with respect to our thinking i.e. intuitive sense of insight/truth. Our feeling doesn't comprehend these Ideas independently of thinking.

No, the confusion is not about that. That the morphic levels continually interfere is not only the clear big picture emerging from the cell intelligence essay, but also the number one insight in basically all other Cleric's essays, PoF, esoteric understanding of reality in general...

Then I don't understand why you collapse our perception of man-made objects and natural objects into the 'lowest morphic space', even though the former is clearly more attenuated to the sentient and thinking spaces than the life and physical spaces. When we descend into the sensory spectrum every morning to interact with the natural kingdoms in the world (including other humans), that is mediated by our cultural institutions/activity and the objects that are manifestations of that activity. There is a clear sentient and intentional purpose to the cultural activity-objects that is distinct from the natural activity-objects they are mediating in our intuitive experience.