Federica wrote: ↑Thu Nov 23, 2023 8:39 pm I would say, the words "embedded" and "one and the same" are not what I would choose, they can confuse. Anyhow, yes, Ashvin, I do understand the idea well. But it's not that I now understand it "given the clarifications that are available at this point". I understood that about one year ago. I don't have the direct experience of those higher layers, but as far as a post and explanation like yours can go, I certainly understand it well.
Yes, many different terms, characterizations, and metaphors can be used, depending on what we are trying to point attention to and from where that attention is being drawn. If I was speaking to a reductionist who felt like the perceptual structures already correspond to the foundational forces (material or mental) that structure them, except the latter are more subtle, mathematical, field-like, abstract floating equations, or something, then I probably wouldn't emphasize they are "one and the same". I would emphasize how orthogonal the ideational Time forces are to our normal intuition of sensory-spatial experience. But that is not the case here. What follows will certainly seem repetitive of various things discussed on this forum, but we should also approach it with the mindset that there is always deeper insight to be mined from the same principles we have 'understood' before. I have mentioned before that the most helpful thing for strengthening my intuitive orientation has been to revisit the old posts (mostly Cleric's) on this forum.
This topic of 'understanding it well' [at a conceptual level] vs. 'direct experience of higher layers' seems to be a recurring one, for very understandable reasons. I tried to address it briefly in the movie metaphor to show how the distinction may not be as sharp as we imagine it to be. Again, if I were speaking to a person who thought conceptual understanding of any spiritual topic is the equivalent of the highest possible insight into that topic during life, then I wouldn't try so much to emphasize the continuity between conceptual probing and higher cognitive insight. But that's not the issue for most people here, clearly. It is perfectly valid to make the distinction between conceptual probing and higher experience, but we also want to find the concrete state of overlap between them. All the talk of balancing the RB-LB or the 'head polarity' through spiritual exercises such as concentration symbolizes that state of overlap. That is basically the 'exceptional state' or 'firm point' from PoF.
Pof, Ch 3 wrote:I observe the table, and I carry out the thinking about the table, but I do not at the same moment observe this. I must first take up a standpoint outside my own activity if, in addition to observing the table, I want also to observe my thinking about the table. Whereas observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are everyday occurrences filling up the continuous current of my life, observation of the thinking itself is a kind of exceptional state. This fact must be properly taken into account when we come to determine the relationship of thinking to all other contents of observation. We must be quite clear about the fact that, in observing thinking, we are applying to it a procedure which constitutes the normal course of events for the study of the whole of the rest of the world-content, but which in this normal course of events is not applied to thinking itself.
...For everyone, however, who has the ability to observe thinking — and with good will every normal man has this ability — this observation is the most important one he can possibly make. For he observes something of which he himself is the creator; he finds himself confronted, not by an apparently foreign object, but by his own activity. He knows how the thing he is observing comes into being. He sees into its connections and relationships. A firm point has now been reached from which one can, with some hope of success, seek an explanation of all other phenomena of the world.
In this exceptional state, we live in the intuition of our spiritual activity as the driving force of concepts-perceptions. We should be clear that it is not the same as simply understanding the logic of the statement, "my spiritual activity is the driving force of concepts and perceptions" or whatever else we write here to describe it. As soon as we put the intuitive experience of our spiritual activity into the concepts of our inner voice, we have collapsed the superposition of that state with the highest Cosmic (intuitive) forces. In the exceptional state, our conscious experience truly spans the entire gradient from the lowest awakening of the "I" to its highest awakening, except the layers are still mostly merged together in a homogenous soup. Nevertheless, every duration we live in this state is turning our intuitive orientation to the World Content inside-out. We are now able to alternate more freely between our gaze fixed downwards in the torus to the manifest 'past' and our gaze searching out the still potential 'future' from above. The translation of this experience into concepts is necessary as well, but we also need to live in that exceptional state for as long as possible when we manage to reach it.
It could be as simple as doing the 'I think these words' exercise, not for any profound meditative results, but simply to spiral the poles of concentration together and live in the exceptional state. Practically any of the concentration exercises that have been shared on this forum lead to this same goal. Even if we don't spiral the poles together, the effort itself will make a world of difference. A consistent effort to live in that state should by itself solidify our intuitive orientation to spiritual reality, i.e. the consistent experience of the "I" within the rhythmically inverting torus throughout the events of our day. We don't even need to get to the point of experiencing vivid Imaginations, let alone our journey through the spheres or our previous incarnation (although such higher experiences obviously magnify the exceptional effect and are the eventual goals for all humans). The inverted orientation we attain through this state will gradually begin to radiate out into our normal sensory experience of life events in the domains of culture and nature, at the levels of soul experience and bodily-sensory experience. We will be able to retain something of the exceptional state even when our attention is tasked with daily functions and spread through the sensory spectrum.
Such radiation of the exceptional state into life experience should also help us inwardly orient towards otherwise seemingly complex occult scientific ideas (that we otherwise feel we are viewing from the outside, lacking any inner relation to them). For ex., we have spoken before about the 'delaminations' of the whole Intuitive potential through the planetary stages of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth (also recapitulated in the 'root races' of our 4th round and globe). We should consider what follows only to get a broad sense of the polarities that delaminated from the unified potential and are now nested within one another as Russian dolls - not in any outer spatial way, but entirely as inner temporal relations that are finally projected outwardly on Earth. Although this may be difficult, we can simply try to sense the inner meaning of such polarities. By consistently struggling to keep the connection to inner meaning, we are keeping something of the exceptional state within our intuitive context, since the inner meaning of outer perceptions and concepts always flows through our spiritual activity.
It should be much easier once we get to the Moon stage, where the 'inner life' in distinction to an 'outer world' as we know it begins.
(descriptions taken from Occult Science)
Saturn (physical): Let us try for once to look away from the warmth-effects that we receive from outside and fix out attention purely on the inner experience we have when we say the words: “I feel warm,” or “I feel cold.” It is this inner experience alone that can give an idea of what Saturn was in the above-described period of its evolution. We might have passed right through the part of space it occupied; there would have been no gas to exert pressure, no solid or liquid body from which impressions of light could be received. But at each point of space we should have felt, inwardly and without impressions from outside: “Here there is this or that degree of warmth.”
Sun (recapitulated physical + etheric): The life-body thus attains the faculty to carry out certain inner movements in the physical — movements that are comparable to those of the saps and fluids in a plant of the present day... If we want to maintain the suggested comparison with the plant of the present day, we must remember that we are not dealing with a compact plant but with a form consisting of air or gas, the movements of which are not unlike those of the sap in the present plant.
Moon (recapitulated physical-etheric + astral): Through the Spirits of Movement pouring into him the astral body, the human being acquires his first qualities of soul. The processes that take place in him by virtue of the life-body — which in Sun evolution were still of a plant-like character — these he now begins to follow with sensation, feeling pleasure in them or disliking them. But the sympathies and antipathies thus aroused remain in ever-changing ebb and flow, until the Spirits of Form come in and play their part. Thereupon the ever-changing feelings become so transformed that there emerges in the human being what we may regard as a first sign of wish and craving. He strives for a repetition of what gave enjoyment, and seeks to avoid what roused a feeling of antipathy.
...
Now as the breathing process was during Moon evolution nearly related to that of nutrition, so was the process of ideation — the forming of mental images — to the reproduction process. The things and begins in Moon man's environment exercised no immediate effect on any human senses. Man's mental life was rather of the following character. In this dim twilight consciousness, pictures were called up by the presence of these things and begins; and the pictures were far more intimately related to the real inner nature of the environment than are our sense-perceptions, which reveal — in colors, sounds, smells, etc. — merely its outer aspect. To gain a better idea of Moon man's consciousness we should imagine him steeped in the vapor-like environment above described. Manifold processes are taking place within it. Substances are combining, substances are separating; some parts grow more condensed, others thin out, become more tenuous. All this goes on in such a way that though the human beings do not directly see or hear it, it calls forth pictures in their consciousness. These may be likened to the pictures of our dream-consciousness today.
Earth (recapitulated physical-etheric-astral + ego): Formerly, man felt himself belonging to the Beings of soul and spirit with whom he was united when free of the body. His I was still sheltered within their womb. From now on, the I confronted him during physical incarnation, along with all the other things that were around him. Independent images of man's soul and spirit existed henceforth on Earth. Compared to the present human body they were fine and delicate in substance. For only in a very rarefied state did “earth” enter into their composition — rather as when the man of today receives into his organ of smell the finely distributed substances of some outer object....Stage by stage, while this configuration of the Earth is proceeding, the forces man has been acquiring during Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, begin gradually to partake in his further development. First, the astral body — still containing the life-body and the physical body dissolved within it — is kindled by the Earthly fire. Then it separates into a finer, specifically astral part — the sentient soul — and a coarser, etheric part which will from now on be touched also by the earth-element. The etheric of life-body, hitherto latent, makes its appearance. And while in the astral man the intellectual and the spiritual soul are developing, the coarser parts, receptive to sound and light, are separated out in the etheric body.
...
Man feels himself as an Ego; he has within him, as a part of his astral body, his intellectual soul, through which he experiences inwardly in pictures what is going on outside him, and with which he permeates his delicate nervous system. He feels himself as a descendant of forefathers, by virtue of the lie streaming through the generations. He breathes — and feels his breathing as brought about by the higher Beings who have been described as the Spirits of Form. To these he also feels beholden for all that through their impulses is brought to him from without, as nourishment.
...
The above descriptions have given a picture of the evolution of the Earth from its external aspect. Seen from the aspect of the Spirit, the following emerges. The spiritual Beings who drew the Moon away from the Earth and bound up their own existence with it — becoming in this way Beings of the Earth's Moon — sent down their forces from that heavenly body to Earth and thereby determined the form and structure of man's organization. Their influence was directed to the I or Ego which man had by then acquired; it made itself felt in the interplay of the I with the astral, etheric and physical bodies. It was due to these Beings that the possibility arose in man, consciously to mirror in himself the wisdom-filled configuration of the World, and to portray it, as by reflection, in an act of knowledge.
***
For the Earth aeon, we could also contemplate the Goethean color polarities that are very nicely demonstrated in the videos you shared. These color polarities are clearly unique to the Earth stage when the faculty of outer sensing via the brain was developed as the instrument of our Ego activity. The Ego activity begins to experience its entire environment - which is a reflection of its holistic 'shape' - as weaved of polarities, as Cleric mentioned. It is as if the entire progression of inner delamination characterized above has been compressed onto the screen of outer conceptual and perceptual experience - hearing-sight, smell-taste, hot-cold, light-dark, color polarities, wet-dry, sweet-bitter, north-south, subject-object, spirit-matter, ideal-real, etc. The brain-mediated ego activity discovers its state weaved of infinite polar relationships by which it can regain insight into the inner layers of its be-ing. When this is developed in intellectual thought to its most logical conclusion, we come to the philosophies of Goethe, Emerson, Coleridge, Hegel, and Steiner (who was the most self-conscious of what this really means for thinking and therefore took it much further than the intellect or basic imaginative thinking). To pass through the portal of concentration, the Ego activity must strike the balance of the head-polarity that bridges outer and inner attention.
I hope it is also clear how, with the proper orientation, when we meet with any polar relationships described through conceptual resesarch, we can have immediate and absolute confidence these observations are pointing back to the layers of spiritual activity that we are seeking to delaminate inwardly and become conscious through. It is using the outer perceptual-perceptual polarities (physical-etheric) to investigate our own inner nature (astral-ego). Why? Because we have something of the exceptional state and therefore remain aware that it is the very same spiritual activity we are trying to become more conscious of, that is perceiving the meaning of the research observations. Just as we can rather easily gain an intuitive orientation towards philosophical or religious ideas and their relations to inner realities - for ex. good and evil, heaven and hell, grace and karma, etc. - we can also do the same for scientific ideas. This is all a part of liberating our spiritual activity - we are no longer depending on the high priests, experts, and academics to give us theories of what scientific observations mean, but we ourselves are bringing the deeper meaning to those observations through our conscious participation in the archetypal ideational structure of reality. We are radiating out our intuitive insight from the exceptional state into 'all other phenomena of the world'.
None of this means that we are gaining the deepest and most precise insight into how the Spirit expresses itself in various domains of experience - which only comes through Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition - or that we are completely free from errors. We should be clear, though, about where the errors come from. A simple example is when we interact with another person and contemplate their gestures and speech, gaining a dim appreciation for their intents, thoughts, feelings, and impulses. Our thinking in this case clearly has not penetrated the person's inner life, so that we can experience the latter as we experience our own intents, feelings, etc., but we are still probing that inner reality with our concepts and the meaning we discern is not other than the meaning experienced from the person's inner perspective. It is only more partial and dim and colored by our personal situation. The only errors in our understanding of that meaning come in through our own assumptions, prejudices, preferences, lack of information, etc. which lead us to form conclusions that we impose on top of the ideas, gestures, and sounds we are perceiving in thinking. In other words, it is when we stop thinking dispassionately through experiential phenomena in order to make premature judgments that errors come in. The intuitive orientation of the exceptional state helps us also remain aware of this reality when thinking through the World Content.
