Federica wrote: ↑Fri Sep 29, 2023 8:09 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 11:52 pmFederica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 28, 2023 10:41 pm
Ashvin, at this point of your exchange with Cleric, the following metaphor comes to mind.
Let’s suppose for a second that I am one incarnation of the Mona Lisa. And let’s imagine that I go to the Louvre Museum to see Leonardo’s masterpiece known by the same name. In that room, a student of fine arts is skillfully reproducing the painting. Let's also imagine that I unexpectedly meet a friend there, who has never heard of the Mona Lisa before. My friend looks at me, then looks at the student’s drawing, and asks: "The resemblance is so great, could it be that you are an earlier version of this drawing?”. "Well, no" - I reply - "I am a being, and that is a drawing." Now, if the friend insists: “But if we remember that the drawing pictures a being's appearance, could we now say that you are a prefiguration of the drawing, given that your face is so resemblant?”, how should I reply then?
Federica,
In the spirit of (2), I think the metaphor would work better if you had done something similar to what the student was doing, but you did it more imaginatively and therefore it presented quite differently. Because, in the context of that lecture, Steiner is trying to think along the lines of modern mathematicians who study and try to model the phenomenal world, but to do it in a way more aligned with the qualitative dimension of reality, i.e. more artistically/imaginatively. Now the question is whether Schrodinger can be considered the 'student', with his intuition of interfering phases captured in his complex wave function, or whether the 'student' is just the average mathematical scientist trying to model the phenomenal dynamics of heat, chemicals, and light. Is there some overlap between these two students?
...
Steiner wrote:That is to say, if you wish to deal with the relation of heat, chemical action and light working in the same phenomenological field at the same time, you have to use imaginary numbers — your calculation has to involve the mathematical relations expressed in imaginary numbers.
Ashvin,
In your objection in purple above, you are not considering that doing is the same as being and knowing, for someone who pierced the veil, like Steiner did. So, in the metaphor, I didn’t need to be drawing anything, because, in the metaphor, I am. I am living reality, experienced from within, through the depth of various members of being. In contrast, the drawing, no matter how skilfully executed, was the description of a third-person perspective on the portrait. And, in the metaphor as in truth, Schrödinger is indeed a student, he is a student of reality - as you admitted in (1) - just as other scientists are. In their drawings, some are more talented, some are less talented students. What they develop is, as Cleric called it, "a glorified math-painting algorithm". In contrast, Steiner IS, among other things, the timeless reality of the understanding of the three ethers referred to in the lecture. The students, even the most gifted ones, only model the precipitation of that reality into the physical perceptual spectrum.
So, that Steiner anticipated Schrödinger’s equation does not make sense to me, as a statement, or as a question. How can Steiner’s timeless consciousness of those etheric relations - even incarnated in intellectually intelligible formulas (metaphorically intended by Steiner as stimuli for the scientists' intuitive potential) - be said to anticipate a third-person drawing describing the transformation in time of systems on the physical-perceptual plane? That consciousness cannot anticipate anything, since it’s timeless, since it’s one with the flow of transformation itself in all its depth structure, and since it originally and intrinsically contains all possible mathematical descriptions of physical precipitations of phenomena?
Federica,
There is a tendency to mystical reduction here that we need to be careful of, especially if it leads us to feel that even asking the questions and thinking through their implications, as Cleric also suggested in his last post, is irrelevant or meaningless. That is actually the most important component for the strengthening and expanding of our inner soul forces, as Steiner makes clear in many places as well.
I will use a simple metaphor here. Let's say you stumbled across an unknown person's diary and started reading the entries.
"Today, on February 7, I intend to scale a very high mountain peak."
"Today, on March 14, I intend to visit my best friend John."
"Today, on April 1, I intend to go sailing with my friend Peter."
In our metaphor, we are now resonating with the archetypal intentions that structured the author's days, partly establishing the curvature through which his states of being unfolded. But does that in and of itself also communicate to us the details of his living experience when flowing through those curvatures of intent? Do we know exactly how his states of being will transform to accomplish those intents?
When Steiner or any esotericist, even a master, penetrates to the etheric and higher spaces of soul-spirit, there is still much groundwork that needs to be laid for the higher experiences to map onto transformations of the phenomenal (physical) world and for those results to be transduced into lucid conceptual frameworks. Do we imagine that such an esoteric master could, after exploring across the threshold in meditation, walk into a lab dedicated to quantum computing, for ex., and immediately make himself of utmost value to whatever projects they are trying to complete? In fact, Steiner may be one of the very few masters who could adapt his thinking-perception in such a fluid manner because of his early efforts to become intimately familiar with the progression and modes of thinking in natural science and mathematics.
The bold question above reminds me of a similar discussion we had, where you asked:
Federica wrote:Because the outer physiognomy constitutes a detour, an indirect course to the spiritual forces. The Will that plays out in limited space-time/in the perceptual world is more indirect than Thinking. So detours can be helpful in certain cases, for certain people, but how could they be helpful for those who have the ability to access the ideal landscape directly, intuitively? What could the perceptual experience teach them of the spiritual worlds that they don't already have direct access to, and knowledge of?
And to which Cleric responded here.
Cleric wrote:It's misleading if we imagine that we can gain access to the archetypal worlds and from there derive spiritually everything in the sensory spectrum. We should remember that there's a spectrum of reality and no part is fully reducible to the others. It is true that the archetypal beings have a much more encompassing effects (non-local) but it's not the case that from their perspective everything that happens on more local scales is fully determined. For this reason, higher cognition always develops as harmonization between the levels of being.
In that sense, without perceptual experience, it's like living in a completely theoretical ideal world, which could be anything. But the sensory, life and soul gradients are the actual structure that has to be transformed and musically attuned to higher order rhythms.
That is why this anticipation question has relevance and meaning. Steiner is probably one of the few spiritual thinkers who it could even be asked of, and most likely, Cleric is correct that, in this lecture, he was not exploring the same intuition in mathematics that Schrodinger would have 6 years later. Although clearly, I am still undecided on that question and think it is worth exploring. Most importantly, the value for our spiritual development doesn’t come from finding a simple affirmative or negative to the question, but energetically and thoroughly exploring all the various thought-avenues that open up from asking the question. In no case do we want to convince ourselves that it isn't even worth the effort.
Federica wrote:"Most physicists probably think of the 'many-worlds' above in a very externalized, physical, quantitative-mechanical way… But it seems to me they are still probing the etheric reality in their intuition, grasping at its qualities, except they don't realize what they are exploring is the true life of their very own thinking."
…”except”? That “except” is everything! I think they are probing physical precipitations, they are not probing etheric reality. You are basically asking: “if we forget for a moment that they don’t understand reality, can we say that they understand reality?”
That is really not the question. Human thinking has so far been in a constant process of expanding its conceptual activity into higher spaces, probing them in useful ways. The very concept of physical states existing in a 'superposition' before collapsing into observable dimensions is something unimaginable from the Newtonian, completely physical mode of thinking, where everything is 'side by side' and linear. The developments in GR and QM reflect to us concrete thought-movements into the more etheric life of thinking, just like certain developments in psychoanalysis reflect to us movements into the more astral life of feeling. Of course, these explorations remain flat, abstract, and dry until the proper first-person experiential thinking perspective is adopted.