Esoteric knowledge for skeptics

[Cleric K]

Ashvin,

I have to disagree with that.
So you're saying that just studying occult science changes thinking (consciousness).
In most cases of people who call themselves anthroposophists I have not observed this.
Furthermore, it is of considerable difficulty to understand what you say in the last post.

Furthermore, your post does not explain how one can check whether esoteric statements, such as that before Earth there was another planetary state in which we breathed fire, are true. This must be believed in confidence until one has acquired the ability to see spiritual events.

I myself am fascinated by Steiner's work, but there is a separation between the phenomenology of thinking, which we can all understand when we observe our thinking, as Cleric shows in his essays, and the claim that we can know that esoteric statements are true without having the ability to see clairvoyantly.

Guney, maybe you can step back for a moment and take a more general view of the matter. As a whole, we all experience the movie of life. While the movie is running, everyone has some idea about its nature. In general, this idea has the form of scientific understanding or some religious myth of how reality came to be and where it is going.

In addition to that we can acknowledge the relatively new impulse to delaminate the movie and understand that our human consciousness spans the full depth of reality and as such we’re not separate but can intimately know the spiritual deeds of the Intelligences who support the envelope of the movie, who work out its rhythmic acts and so on. This is new because in the evolution of humanity so far, we have been like babies in the cradle of the Cosmos. Only now we are barely approaching the level of maturity of being able to consciously partake in the creative process that supports the dreamscape and its metamorphoses.

On these grounds, we should really see where we stand. Do we belong to the epoch where we’re fully satisfied with watching the movie pass by while holding some myth in our heart about the greater plot? Or we feel that we’re not yet fully human unless we begin to understand how our own conscious experience is embedded within the spiritual life of the Cosmos?

Today we need to have at least some position on that question. If we fall into the first category, then anything that can be said about reality will seem like a myth. Then we’ll look at Steiner’s cosmology and ask “How can I verify this? Why not believe in the myths of the Greeks or Hindus, or Christians, etc.?”

But if we consider ourselves belonging to the second category, then we really have to struggle with these questions. We can forget about Steiner and spiritual science for a while and start on our own. We can reflect and meditate, thinking from the most varied directions. Basically, all our questions would revolve around something like: “If the movie of life is only a flattened conscious experience, how can delaminate it? How can the knowing essence of my being extend into its depth. In what form can I expect the realities of this depth? What would be the laws of reality in that perspective?” and so on.

In other words, if we feel ourselves in the second category, or at least leaning towards it, such questions should arise in our soul. Then when we encounter the World, the things that hint something about the answers to these questions will stand out.

This can be considered a starting point. If we’re simply looking for the most plausible creation myth, then spiritual science will be perceived on equal footing with any other myth – ancient or modern. But things become different when we realize that spiritual science today doesn’t simply aim to provide another myth but give hints at the answers of these pressing questions. And I say ‘hints’ because the answers really come from our own experience. The hints can only help us assume the proper posture such that we can perceive the facts. And further, when I say ‘spiritual science’, I mean it in a much wider sense. It’s not simply a body of work by Steiner. Just as ‘history’ is not some trademarked endeavor of the human spirit, but it is a very specific experience of knowledge that connects the sensory facts of experience, so spiritual science is the endeavor of the human spirit to enter and intimately know the depth of the movie.

All this comes to say, that we have the proper stance in our age not when we feel that someone tries to advertise a modern creation myth (for which we can always ask “how do I know if it is true”) but when we already feel some pressing questions in our soul. The reason spiritual science (again in the wider sense) is ignored, hated, ridiculed and so on, is simply because most souls do not yet feel the gravity of such questions. Spiritual science gives them answers to questions that they do not ask and may not even realize that such questions can exist, let alone that they may have some relevance to the future of humanity. If we happen to be pressed by such questions, then we’ll very soon see that the vast majority of the so called spirituality of today simply reiterates ancients and modern myths in varying packages. If we seek answers to these questions, then it won’t take long before we begin to recognize the as of yet few places where such things are considered. Then we do not simply ask if the resulting creation myth is the true one but whether our intuitive orientation within the movie improves in face of the communicated facts.

We can ask "but how do I know if there's such thing as soul body, life body, etc.?" Again - this is something that must already be pressing in our consciousness. Think about it: if there are no such depth strata of being, then in what way do we expect this depth to manifest? You see, if we really yearn to be conscious of the movie depth, at some level we should already anticipate something like these strata of manifestation. If we have no such anticipation, then we're really not looking for deeper reality but only more floating stickers on top of the flattened movie.

So, if we are really interested in understanding how our consciousness is embedded within the Cosmic movie context, and how this can give us unsuspected direction in life, together with the strength and sacred joy of following it, then it will very soon be possible to see at a glance what the different philosophies offer in that respect.

[Federica]

Regarding claims such as the above, re mankind's history, there should be collaborating evidence from Science - this would demand a profound set of references in science literature - I mean folks would certainly be speaking about this.
Or if this lies outside the purview of conventional science, requires a specific kind of vision or consciousness, there would be collaboration from clairvoyants from various other schools, and collaboration from Steiners own followers.
I believe Steiner made claims about the constituent makeup of the planets . . . has his claims re the planet Mars held up to what the rovers have found?
---
Putting the above aside, and assuming Steiner is correct, you can then ask yourself: Why do I wish to pursue this knowledge?

The bold is a common objection and it's precisely what Cleric referred to at page 2 of this thread. People who pick up the hobby of spirituality say: "if it's not popular, if folks don't talk about it, the stuff is not legit".
You are forgetting that Steiner's "claims" about the planets are primarily about the non-local supersensible nature of the planet-beings, rather than about the physicality of the heavenly bodies that we call with those names.

Along these lines, its really interesting to consider how little we know about our own planet Earth, particularly its interior layers that embed past stages of evolution. We only have familiarity of the outermost crust, like we generally only have familiarity with the outermost skin and structures of our own organism. Its really humbling when we realize how little of what we imagine to exist "inside" is actually something we haven't perceived and investigated, only assumed and inferred from our normal intuitions of 'how things are and work'.

At astonishing depths within the Earth, researchers recently found endoliths (organisms that live inside rock or in the tiny pores between interlocking mineral grains), which eat rock. Thousands of different species have been found, including representatives of bacteria, archaea, and fungi. Endoliths have been found inhabiting the Earth’s crust at depths up to nearly two miles, far from sunlight. Owing to the costs of digging so deeply into the Earth, it is unknown whether they live at deeper levels. They appear to survive by feeding on traces of iron, potassium, or sulfur.
...
The magnificent gorge of the awe-inspiring Grand Canyon is but a mere scratch on the Earth’s surface; it may be compared to a fingernail scratch on glass. We have drilled gas and oil wells, but even the deepest are mere pinpricks in the Earth’s mantle. Near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, Russians attempted to drill a super-deep “Mohole,” a hole through the Mohorovic Discontinuity, the layer that separates the crust from the upper mantle. It is a ten-mile hole into the Earth’s crust in search of answers to conflicting questions. After nineteen years, Project Mohole was halted, having achieved a depth of only 7.5 miles. The data gathered are contrary to many longstanding assumptions by geologists. For example, temperature increased with depth more dramatically than anticipated; a body of ore was located at a depth where none was thought to exist; and fluids and gasses, including hydrocarbons, were found circulating through the rocks of the crust at depths where high pressure would hypothetically rule out cracks and fissures in the bedrock. Had the project been completed, the Mohole would have examined only one four-hundredth of the distance to the center of the Earth. Inevitably and clearly, our understanding of the Earth’s interior is far more a matter of conjecture than knowledge.

Much of what we “know” about the Earth’s interior has been inferred. The interior of the Earth is not a “solid” as we understand the term, but in a semi-plastic state that allows ions to migrate (more or less) at will.

- THE INNER LIFE OF THE EARTH: Exploring the Mysteries of Nature, Subnature & Supranature

Thank you, Ashvin - and also for the all very insightful most recent posts. Yes, the reminder really seems appropriate: we have familiarity with the outermost crust of Earth, like we generally only have familiarity with the outermost skin and structures of our own organism. This reminds me of what you wrote just a few posts above, to extend the parallel:

we also begin to realize here that we don't know our normal waking or dreaming experience. We should approach these domains of experience as a great set of interrelated mysteries. Where do our sense impressions and concepts come from?

which echoes our scarce familiarity with the non-local supersensible Earth-being. I am also reminded of this:

We know the occult descriptions of the interior of the Earth with its layers, which when taken literally become the confusions in our times like the hollow Earth theory. Even in our technologically advanced era, there are still such horizons of sensory perceptual knowledge. The present impossibility to cross these horizons still agitate the mythical imagination and are sometimes taken as the last vestiges where the portals to other worlds can be found, since we have ruled out most other candidates (like whatever lies above our heads in the sky).

So the mystery of our Earth - which is the mystery of how it became possible for man to exercise freedom, and what we will do with it - keeps agitating our imagination, pushing, at basic level, for geological exploration. It also keeps agitating our feelings and fears, like it's happening now, with the imminent threat of volcanic outbreak in Iceland.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

I have to disagree with that.
So you're saying that just studying occult science changes thinking (consciousness).
In most cases of people who call themselves anthroposophists I have not observed this.
Furthermore, it is of considerable difficulty to understand what you say in the last post.

Furthermore, your post does not explain how one can check whether esoteric statements, such as that before Earth there was another planetary state in which we breathed fire, are true. This must be believed in confidence until one has acquired the ability to see spiritual events.

I myself am fascinated by Steiner's work, but there is a separation between the phenomenology of thinking, which we can all understand when we observe our thinking, as Cleric shows in his essays, and the claim that we can know that esoteric statements are true without having the ability to see clairvoyantly.

Guney, maybe you can step back for a moment and take a more general view of the matter. As a whole, we all experience the movie of life. While the movie is running, everyone has some idea about its nature. In general, this idea has the form of scientific understanding or some religious myth of how reality came to be and where it is going.

In addition to that we can acknowledge the relatively new impulse to delaminate the movie and understand that our human consciousness spans the full depth of reality and as such we’re not separate but can intimately know the spiritual deeds of the Intelligences who support the envelope of the movie, who work out its rhythmic acts and so on. This is new because in the evolution of humanity so far, we have been like babies in the cradle of the Cosmos. Only now we are barely approaching the level of maturity of being able to consciously partake in the creative process that supports the dreamscape and its metamorphoses.

On these grounds, we should really see where we stand. Do we belong to the epoch where we’re fully satisfied with watching the movie pass by while holding some myth in our heart about the greater plot? Or we feel that we’re not yet fully human unless we begin to understand how our own conscious experience is embedded within the spiritual life of the Cosmos?

Today we need to have at least some position on that question. If we fall into the first category, then anything that can be said about reality will seem like a myth. Then we’ll look at Steiner’s cosmology and ask “How can I verify this? Why not believe in the myths of the Greeks or Hindus, or Christians, etc.?”

But if we consider ourselves belonging to the second category, then we really have to struggle with these questions. We can forget about Steiner and spiritual science for a while and start on our own. We can reflect and meditate, thinking from the most varied directions. Basically, all our questions would revolve around something like: “If the movie of life is only a flattened conscious experience, how can delaminate it? How can the knowing essence of my being extend into its depth. In what form can I expect the realities of this depth? What would be the laws of reality in that perspective?” and so on.

In other words, if we feel ourselves in the second category, or at least leaning towards it, such questions should arise in our soul. Then when we encounter the World, the things that hint something about the answers to these questions will stand out.

This can be considered a starting point. If we’re simply looking for the most plausible creation myth, then spiritual science will be perceived on equal footing with any other myth – ancient or modern. But things become different when we realize that spiritual science today doesn’t simply aim to provide another myth but give hints at the answers of these pressing questions. And I say ‘hints’ because the answers really come from our own experience. The hints can only help us assume the proper posture such that we can perceive the facts. And further, when I say ‘spiritual science’, I mean it in a much wider sense. It’s not simply a body of work by Steiner. Just as ‘history’ is not some trademarked endeavor of the human spirit, but it is a very specific experience of knowledge that connects the sensory facts of experience, so spiritual science is the endeavor of the human spirit to enter and intimately know the depth of the movie.

All this comes to say, that we have the proper stance in our age not when we feel that someone tries to advertise a modern creation myth (for which we can always ask “how do I know if it is true”) but when we already feel some pressing questions in our soul. The reason spiritual science (again in the wider sense) is ignored, hated, ridiculed and so on, is simply because most souls do not yet feel the gravity of such questions. Spiritual science gives them answers to questions that they do not ask and may not even realize that such questions can exist, let alone that they may have some relevance to the future of humanity. If we happen to be pressed by such questions, then we’ll very soon see that the vast majority of the so called spirituality of today simply reiterates ancients and modern myths in varying packages. If we seek answers to these questions, then it won’t take long before we begin to recognize the as of yet few places where such things are considered. Then we do not simply ask if the resulting creation myth is the true one but whether our intuitive orientation within the movie improves in face of the communicated facts.

We can ask "but how do I know if there's such thing as soul body, life body, etc.?" Again - this is something that must already be pressing in our consciousness. Think about it: if there are no such depth strata of being, then in what way do we expect this depth to manifest? You see, if we really yearn to be conscious of the movie depth, at some level we should already anticipate something like these strata of manifestation. If we have no such anticipation, then we're really not looking for deeper reality but only more floating stickers on top of the flattened movie.

So, if we are really interested in understanding how our consciousness is embedded within the Cosmic movie context, and how this can give us unsuspected direction in life, together with the strength and sacred joy of following it, then it will very soon be possible to see at a glance what the different philosophies offer in that respect.

If we want to stay within the given and follow your essay, then we can come to the conclusion that we live in an intuitive context that is there all the time.
You can observe and deduce this yourself.
This intuitive context is present all the time, but is unconscious to us until we begin to engage with our thinking phenomenologically.
Thus, it is a deeper aspect of us that co-constructs our everyday state of consciousness from the hidden.
Through our thinking we have certain intuitions, uniformities of our perception which our spiritual activity recognizes and imitates, and then consolidates into word forms.

This leaves one open to what else exists in the unconscious human being and constructs it, perhaps of a cosmic spiritual nature, i.e. the activity of spiritual beings.
However, this is not yet clear proof, but it broadens the perspective.


I find my efforts to read humanities writings have not changed me much, I am still not loving to all my people, I still have unwise character traits.
I think and hope that these will develop and transform through my meditation practice.

However, it is still not knowledge in the sense of conventional knowledge, such as the sciences of the sensory world.

What actually happens to our intuitive context when we close our senses and focus on our intentional thought activity?
Is it then gone, or will it be the resistance of our thought activity, which then expresses itself in imagination?

[Cleric K]

If we want to stay within the given and follow your essay, then we can come to the conclusion that we live in an intuitive context that is there all the time.
You can observe and deduce this yourself.
This intuitive context is present all the time, but is unconscious to us until we begin to engage with our thinking phenomenologically.
Thus, it is a deeper aspect of us that co-constructs our everyday state of consciousness from the hidden.
Through our thinking we have certain intuitions, uniformities of our perception which our spiritual activity recognizes and imitates, and then consolidates into word forms.

This leaves one open to what else exists in the unconscious human being and constructs it, perhaps of a cosmic spiritual nature, i.e. the activity of spiritual beings.
However, this is not yet clear proof, but it broadens the perspective.


I find my efforts to read humanities writings have not changed me much, I am still not loving to all my people, I still have unwise character traits.
I think and hope that these will develop and transform through my meditation practice.

However, it is still not knowledge in the sense of conventional knowledge, such as the sciences of the sensory world.

What actually happens to our intuitive context when we close our senses and focus on our intentional thought activity?
Is it then gone, or will it be the resistance of our thought activity, which then expresses itself in imagination?

Guney, your last few posts show that you are really entering livingly into these ideas. Hopefully we’ll soon have opportunity to add even more angles to these questions but for the time being I would say that what is most needed is patience and persistence. I think we have spoken about this before, but Time is a factor that we can’t bypass.

The fact that you are currently experiencing all these things in thought only, is not a sign that you are still lacking in some way. In fact, this is the best thing you can do!

Imagine a building where every floor is a labyrinth, and a spiral staircase that leads from one floor to another. This spiraling is as real as our spiraling around the Sun. Every year seems the same as the previous only as long as we let the movie of life pass before our spirit’s eye as something trivial that makes us say “Nothing new under the Sun!” But when we strive for the intense inner life, then Time is experienced like continuous emerging from cocoon after cocoon. Or seen from the other direction – as continuous incarnation of the higher intuitive being, which elucidates and transforms the Earthly state.

At every stage we’re within some kind of labyrinth. Now you are experiencing this labyrinth as more or less disconnected mental states. You arrange them in one succession or another, it feels logical but at the same time it is something that is there only while you support it. If you don’t think these mental states, there seems to be nothing of these ideas. This leads to the justified question: what if I’m simply fantasizing these things?

The answer can only come through Time. Quite soon you’ll be able to sense certain affinities between mental states that otherwise look completely independent. As a simple analogy, imagine that you think about something with your head facing the ground or facing the sky. The thoughts may be the same but there would be something in the periphery which provides different context of feeling. Most people have noticed how when we are weighed down by problems, our gaze goes down. It is as if all we can see is how our plans and dreams fall down and crumble. On the other hand, when we look slightly upwards to the sky, we tend to be more optimistic, having some faith that everything will turn out for the good.

Such soul contexts usually go completely unnoticed. We’re too busy to brood over the mental images of our misfortunes. Yet the context is always there. In an analogous way, when you meditate today, you go through certain mental and feeling states, yet only in the course of time you’ll begin to notice that this and that state have been experienced in a similar soul posture. Then we begin to gain some intuitive orientation of the labyrinths.

The consciousness of the soul geometry of these configurations only comes gradually in Time. But Time itself is not enough. There are many directions in which the tunnel of Time can lead us and if we are passive, we shouldn’t be surprised that nothing much happens. We still move through the floors of the labyrinth but we can’t gain higher intuition simply because we haven’t explored the states that belong to it.

This is the critical thing. These labyrinths are not something that we can simply climb above and see as some sensory panorama. These labyrinths are perceptible as far as we can encompass the states through which we have lived. We cannot encompass that which we have not lived through, in the same way that we can’t remember the place we have never made the effort to visit.

In this sense, the exploration of the mental states that you go through presently, is an investment that is probably hard to appreciate at this time. Yet everything that you explore through the movements of your inner life accumulates and forms a rich palette that can later be grasped more holistically. Some time ago a comparison was drawn with iterated function systems (IFS):



The image results by iteratively calculating: 
ax + by -> x 
cx + dy -> y 
In other words, for some constants a, b, c, d and from initial x and y of a pixel, we calculate new x, y and paint the pixel. Then from these values we calculate the next and so on. Initially it looks like we are painting quite random pixels but as they accumulate, it becomes clear that there’s certain pattern. There are places where the pixel is likely to land, while others are never visited.

In a similar way, as experiences of different states of being accumulate we begin to recognize certain patterns. But if we have never probed these states, then there’s nothing to encompass in our inner sight.

Note that even if someone tells us that there’s such a pattern which our states follow, this knowledge initially is only the next pixel, the next mental state. It remains abstract. We can’t shortcut this process. Higher intuition can be reached only through accumulation of experience, against which that intuition is experienced. Even the authors of games recognize that you level up only when the required experience points (XP) are acquired.

With all this in mind, don’t be discouraged that at this point things are experienced only in thoughts. Every mental state is a pixel. As Time spirals up and if you persist in your efforts as you presently do, it’s guaranteed that you’ll begin to grasp the higher order intuitive patterns. And this goes stage by stage. You probably know about the seven-year periods in life. For example, clear consciousness in the Saturn sphere becomes possible only towards the 63rd year. There are variations of course but the stages can’t be forced. Be aware that you are at an age where you are just beginning to emerge as an independent spirit, so your experience in thoughts is fully in place. You shouldn’t even for a moment think that you don’t grasp Imaginations yet because you are not clever enough or you don’t understand their nature enough. As I said, your last posts show that you understand quite well, in magnitudes better than many people thrice your age. So simply continue to probe the mental states while keeping the prayerful attitude and you’ll certainly reach a point like the animation above, where you’ll experience the plane of your mental states as living in a deeper soul space.

[Güney27]

Thanks to everybody who has made efforts to make this things understandable. I think it would be better to change the direction of this thread to make it more fruitful.
How should one read Spiritual scientific texts?
How can one cultivate the skill of meditative reading so to say?

As far as I'm understand, we can't think of spiritual scientific concepts like we think about information (knowledge in form of finished content of Consciousness).
One point of study is to reorient our intellectual
world conception.

Steiner speaks in a couple of lectures, that the study of Ss is the first step on the path of initiation.

[Federica]

How should one read Spiritual scientific texts?

What our young people are taught in so wretchedly abstract a form in the universities must everywhere turn into an artistic comprehension of the world. For nature around us creates artistically. Unless it is understood that nature around us is an artistic creation and can be grasped only with artistic concepts, no good will come of our world conceptions. The idea should take hold that the torture chambers in medieval castles, where people were locked into the “Iron Maiden,” for instance, and them pierced through with spears, remind us of a procedure that, though more physical and concrete, is the same as the one that occurs when young people today are introduced to anatomy and physiology and told that this will make them understand something of human nature. No, they comprehend nothing but what has been produced by a soul-spiritual element of torture: The human being torn limb from limb, the mineralized human being — that part of man that one day will be woven into the spider-cover of the earth.
...
However, by again acquiring an understanding of the artistic from within, human beings will be able to show understanding for what goes beyond the mineral and is expressed in the formation of the plant.
It is symptomatic that in the course of mankind's evolution it was Goethe who discovered the teaching of metamorphosis — Goethe, who was artistically inclined. All the pedants around him considered it to be dilettantism, and they think so even today. In Goethe, however, the artistic conception of the world and his clarity of mind in general combined with the power of vision that recognizes, even in nature herself, nature as the artist.
...
Yet, as art, this is at the same time true science, for all science that does not rise to the level of art is a deceptive science, a science casting humanity into cosmic misfortune. Thus, we see, on the one hand, that a true spiritual science shows us the way to an artistic grasp of things. Like a great hymn, I might say, this dwelled in Goethe's soul, when, as early as 1780, he wrote “Nature” his hymn in prose: “Nature, we are surrounded and encompassed by her ...” The whole hymn weaves a tapestry of thoughts such that one would like to say: It is like the unfolding of a mighty longing to receive spirit beings from the whole universe. Indeed, to pursue and develop further the thoughts living in Goethe's hymn "Nature" would be to provide a dwelling place for those beings who are seeking to descend from the cosmos to the earth. On the other hand, the torturous concepts developed in the nineteenth century concerning human physiology, biology, the system of plants, and so on, actually have nothing to do with the true being of the plants, something we had occasion to point out during our reflections on color. These inartistic concepts neither provide real insight nor do they penetrate to the human level. Therefore, what is held to be science today is essentially a product of Ahriman; it leads mankind to earthly doom and does not allow the human being to reach the sphere that, if I may say so, is brought toward him since the last third of the nineteenth century by beings from the cosmos.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/En ... 13p02.html

[Güney27]

How should one read Spiritual scientific texts?

What our young people are taught in so wretchedly abstract a form in the universities must everywhere turn into an artistic comprehension of the world. For nature around us creates artistically. Unless it is understood that nature around us is an artistic creation and can be grasped only with artistic concepts, no good will come of our world conceptions. The idea should take hold that the torture chambers in medieval castles, where people were locked into the “Iron Maiden,” for instance, and them pierced through with spears, remind us of a procedure that, though more physical and concrete, is the same as the one that occurs when young people today are introduced to anatomy and physiology and told that this will make them understand something of human nature. No, they comprehend nothing but what has been produced by a soul-spiritual element of torture: The human being torn limb from limb, the mineralized human being — that part of man that one day will be woven into the spider-cover of the earth.
...
However, by again acquiring an understanding of the artistic from within, human beings will be able to show understanding for what goes beyond the mineral and is expressed in the formation of the plant.
It is symptomatic that in the course of mankind's evolution it was Goethe who discovered the teaching of metamorphosis — Goethe, who was artistically inclined. All the pedants around him considered it to be dilettantism, and they think so even today. In Goethe, however, the artistic conception of the world and his clarity of mind in general combined with the power of vision that recognizes, even in nature herself, nature as the artist.
...
Yet, as art, this is at the same time true science, for all science that does not rise to the level of art is a deceptive science, a science casting humanity into cosmic misfortune. Thus, we see, on the one hand, that a true spiritual science shows us the way to an artistic grasp of things. Like a great hymn, I might say, this dwelled in Goethe's soul, when, as early as 1780, he wrote “Nature” his hymn in prose: “Nature, we are surrounded and encompassed by her ...” The whole hymn weaves a tapestry of thoughts such that one would like to say: It is like the unfolding of a mighty longing to receive spirit beings from the whole universe. Indeed, to pursue and develop further the thoughts living in Goethe's hymn "Nature" would be to provide a dwelling place for those beings who are seeking to descend from the cosmos to the earth. On the other hand, the torturous concepts developed in the nineteenth century concerning human physiology, biology, the system of plants, and so on, actually have nothing to do with the true being of the plants, something we had occasion to point out during our reflections on color. These inartistic concepts neither provide real insight nor do they penetrate to the human level. Therefore, what is held to be science today is essentially a product of Ahriman; it leads mankind to earthly doom and does not allow the human being to reach the sphere that, if I may say so, is brought toward him since the last third of the nineteenth century by beings from the cosmos.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA204/En ... 13p02.html

Federica,
I don't understand the point of the quote.
Could you explain it to me?

[Federica]

Federica,
I don't understand the point of the quote.
Could you explain it to me?

Sorry for not commenting - To comment on your question about reading SS, I was trying to signify with the quote that a spiritual scientific way to read texts and understand concepts is one that extends beyond the process of finding an ordered alignment of those concepts (like young people are taught to do in Universities, Steiner says).
It is necessary to expand the concepts with artistic impulse. Not that the concepts are there and we just pick them up, collect them and reorder their fixed shapes. Rather, we create them anew every time we 'enter' them by lending them our living 'thinking fiber' so that it can livingly interact with the rest of the living thinking forces and landscape - as Goethe did, when he was able to grasp the nature of plant, for example. So unless we attempt an expansion in a similar direction when we read those texts, when we read spiritual science in general, we will remain rudely stuck with our conceptual ruler and compass, rudely refusing to let those beings join us - the benevolent beings who are trying to join us from the Cosmos, to inspire us with the understanding of plant nature. We need to grasp plant nature (life) to be able to lift ourselves above our abstract thoughts before it's too late. As humanity, by nurturing them with so much momentum, we are preparing their unfortunate materialization in the form of a world-wide, spider-like prison-network, able to absorb us entirely in its tentacular fabric.

[Güney27]

Federica,
I don't understand the point of the quote.
Could you explain it to me?

Sorry for not commenting - To comment on your question about reading SS, I was trying to signify with the quote that a spiritual scientific way to read texts and understand concepts is one that extends beyond the process of finding an ordered alignment of those concepts (like young people are taught to do in Universities, Steiner says).
It is necessary to expand the concepts with artistic impulse. Not that the concepts are there and we just pick them up, collect them and reorder their fixed shapes. Rather, we create them anew every time we 'enter' them by lending them our living 'thinking fiber' so that it can livingly interact with the rest of the living thinking forces and landscape - as Goethe did, when he was able to grasp the nature of plant, for example. So unless we attempt an expansion in a similar direction when we read those texts, when we read spiritual science in general, we will remain rudely stuck with our conceptual ruler and compass, rudely refusing to let those beings join us - the benevolent beings who are trying to join us from the Cosmos, to inspire us with the understanding of plant nature. We need to grasp plant nature (life) to be able to lift ourselves above our abstract thoughts before it's too late. As humanity, by nurturing them with so much momentum, we are preparing their unfortunate materialization in the form of a world-wide, spider-like prison-network, able to absorb us entirely in its tentacular fabric.

Federica,

honestly I can't comprehend what you said.
I understand that we shouldn't treat Ss concepts like ordinary information, but the other statements aren't intelligible for me.

[Federica]

Unless it is understood that nature around us is an artistic creation and can be grasped only with artistic concepts, no good will come of our world conceptions.

By the way, speaking of the urgent need of approaching science as art, rather than torturing its inherent life and spirit by understanding living beings as if they were purely mineral matter, I have been pleasantly surprised when I recently visited a contemporary art exhibition, described as “a visionary research project investigating the interconnected movements across scales from the micro through the macrocosmos”.
It’s the result of a collaboration between art and science in a way that I wasn't aware existed (maybe just because I’m not used to visiting contemporary art exhibitions…) The participating artists worked with scientific-artistic institutions, such as “Arts at CERN”, the “DARK Cosmology Center” and the “The Interacting Minds Centre for the Study of Cognition, Communication and Choice”. I didn’t know that nowadays one could be a “PhD artistic research fellow” at universities, like Helene Nymann, who works with “embodied knowledge, memory-systems and future ancestry” and applies “mnemonic devices for image-making”.

Some of the artworks in particular have appeared to me as a strong attempt to ‘shake perception’ and try to rewire somehow our understanding of what perception has to say about cognition and memory.









What I find interesting in this sculpture just above by Nymann, is that the figure in movement seems to feature only limbs.

As another example, The Interactive Mind Center for the Study of Cognition, works among other things with the new concept of “micro-phenomenology”, “born out of the idea, advocated by the neurobiologist Francisco Varela in the context of his neurophenomenological program, that to understand the functioning of the mind, science cannot rely solely on the study of cerebral activity, but has to create a rigorous method to study human experience.”

To be completely honest, this micro-phenomenolgy, now taught as PhD course at Aahrus University, seems to be a double-edged conceptual sword. Nontheless, all in all, the artistic research expressed in this new ways seems to me a significant direction of inquiry that hopeful will gain prominence, and bear more fruits going forward. It looks promising today.