Güney27 wrote: ↑Mon Dec 11, 2023 12:27 am
Ashvin,
Thank you for the replies.
They are really helpfull to get out of the conception of a world made up of "things".
The world which we know is more like a state of consciousness (waking) which changes into different modes (sleeping, dreaming).
There is much to say and contemplate about.
I find it important to test how our thinking structures the world content.
There is the possibility of Pictures (like Cleric's last essay, the alien home).
One can use puzzle pictures.
But I want to have a more living example.
I was looking at my kitchen furniture 30 minutes ago,
and tried to observe how my thinking structures my perception in "live" so to say.
I couldn't observe much.
Is there anything you know of to get a better level of clarity to this process?
Guney,
It is indeed difficult to get clarity about these dynamics in our first-person experience right away because, as we have discussed, the layers of experience are all normally merged together, flattened into our sense-based concepts and myopic states of being. Our life of ideas, our life of emotions and desires, our life of temperament and disposition, our language and our gender, and even more transpersonal factors are all influencing our perception of the WC
simultaneously. We can't trace exactly what from our perceptual sphere is being influenced and how.
You may still be young enough to remember certain childhood ways of thinking-perceiving that you have outgrown in more recent years, which also reflects the shifting arrows of intuitive activity. For ex. you may remember the first time you perceived a computer as a kid - how did that compare to when you perceive a computer now? Perhaps such a comparison can shed some light on the evolving dynamic. Or, for a person who has gone through higher education, the same thing may be perceived quite differently before and after - a dam looks like something different to the average person than it does to a civil engineer.
An example that practically anyone can relate to is speech/writing. That is because speech, including our inner voice, resides at the threshold between inner activity and outer perception. That might be a good example to work with - how do we perceive our inner voice in comparison to our voice recorded? With the former, we are entirely merged with it and, if we notice it all, we perceive it in a quite idiosyncratic way, but with the latter, we have attained some degrees of separation and that greatly influences our perception of the sounds. Now the audial sounds seem much different than we imagined.
We can also compare two textual patterns we perceive which generally signify the same meaning, one in a language we don't understand and one in a language we do.
Yīqiè shìwù dōu shì tòuguò yányǔ chuàngzào de
All things were made through Speech.
We can certainly say we perceive the color shapes differently in one case than in the other, even though some of them present the same perceptual structures to our physical eyes. This may seem very trivial but it points to the core of how we experience spiritual evolution, through ever-more expansive insight into the perceptual content. That is an archetypal principle because
all perceptual content is of the same nature as Speech (the Word, Logos).
"
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made."
The most critical strategy is to repeatedly engage in the phenomenology of zooming out from the perceptual content into the intuitive context and zooming back in. We already do this habitually but we need to be more
present for the naturally occurring rhythms. Before we can begin tracing how the intuitive depth structure informs our perceptual experience, we need to get a more and more concrete experiential sense that this depth structure exists and is present in all of our experiences. That we do most intimately via concentration and living in the exceptional state. We can also do it more indirectly through exercises such as those presented in Cleric's latest essay. It is really important to practice such things.
The totality of perceptual phenomena is relatively easy to grasp. Here’s a simple exercise to exemplify this. We can observe the way we move our focus through the forms in our visual field. But we can also try to ‘zoom out’ from any particular form and try to expand our focus and include as much as possible also of our peripheral vision, such that our whole visual field feels like a holistic picture. Now we can try to zoom even further out, while trying to include all other senses in this perceptual panorama – hearing, touch, smell, taste, warmth and so on. Then we can also include our emotional state and finally we can include even the awareness that we’re doing this particular exercise. This is an easy and pleasant exercise and with little practice we’ll become so familiar with this expanded state of attention that we'll be able to move into it in one go, without having to build it up gradually.
Exploring the depth structure in our logical reasoning is also critical as a foundation. Cleric mentioned some reasons why in a post to Luke recently.
In a way, by thinking about these things, by wrestling with the descriptions of such experiences and trying to make them our own, it is as if we try to remember a first-person experience of something that has not yet happened. Just as there's qualitative difference between dreaming and reconstructing our dreams within our waking state, so there's difference between intuitive thinking within our waking state and the experiences within the higher flow of reality. But think about it: when you remember a dream you don't say that the memory fragments have nothing to do with what the actual dream state felt like. In many ways they are precisely what the dream state felt like, it's only that now the holistic state has broken down into memory fragments that we manipulate in our waking cognition.
One way to explore what has not yet happened is by studying the cultural transformations over the last few thousand years (which also recapitulate at a higher level in our future development). These transformations reflect the intuitive depth structure shifting in its configuration - the arrows or coefficients are modulated in the higher worlds and we experience this on the physical plane as the shift toward the blue range in the color spectrum, the development of perspectival painting, the Protestant reformers who perceive the sacred rites as oppressive and devoid of Spirit, the birth of modern calculus and astronomy, the birth of field theory (perceiving the World as ever-present energetic fields), the development of GR and QM (perceiving the World as spacetime curvatures, wavefunctions, and quantum superpositions), etc. There are infinitely more developments in philosophy, theology, science, and art that could be mentioned. All of these developments can be probed in much more detail, as Steiner does in many books and lectures. As Cleric mentioned, we should struggle to imagine how the ancients perceived the WC in comparison to how we do and try to make that entire gradient of experience our own as much as possible.
Another strategy is to run thought-experiments about how reality
could have been experienced if humanity had not fallen so deeply into mineralized cognition. Cleric gave a good example here:
In spiritual sense, the physical body can be thought of from the inner side, as the 'screen' of the senses and sensory-like imagination, as pure experiences, without looking for something 'behind' them. In another type of evolution, this physicality may have never reached the level of fragmentation that we witness. To use an analogy from the quantum world, it can probably be said that physical existence would live on the borderline, where it barely collapses to more complex particles, maybe just photons, physical light. I'm using these terms loosely. So the higher human parts - the etheric, astral and the "I" - would still experience the screen of imagination and senses but that screen would be more like a Cosmic mirror. Man would never succumb into the error that he's seeing external reality in that mirror (in the same sense that man today doesn't confuse the image in a mirror for some other world). Instead, he would slowly gain his own self-consciousness, by recognizing his own activity within the mirror - just as we now recognize ourselves in thoughts - and then he would be aware that everything he experiences in that mirror of physicality is reflecting the doings of all kinds of beings, just as he himself is one of these beings. The need for a picture of some external world would never emerge. The senses would not at all be used to look 'outside'. Actually we should think of the senses only through their inner experiences of tone, light, smell, taste, etc., without imagining some physical organs. These sensory experiences would reflect the spectrum of spiritual life. There's simply no 'outside' world - everything that explains reality is within the spiritual. The physical world is just a barely manifested inner experience of light and warmth, where Cosmic life projects its image.
...
Through the desires implanted in the hearts of people by the Luciferic beings, they were drawn more and more toward the images on the sensory mirror. This can be imagined as a process of continual decoherence - in the higher realm everything is fluid, adaptive, plastic, there's always a way to move through experiences without friction, as in superfluidity. But as the human being fixates on concrete things, other probabilities become filtered out and things become more and more rigid, things that one man wants begin to cause 'friction' with things that other man wants. In this way the world picture is gradually reduced more and more. The human light-body itself becomes more and more decoherent. The whole biological life emerges only at this stage. If it hasn't, the physical archetype would turn into 'dust', it would simply decohere and dissolve. Through the efforts of beings from on all stages of evolution, the complicated biological gradient has become possible which allows the Spirit to experience itself within the fragmented mirror while the mineral body isn't allowed to dissolute (this happens only after death). Only at this stage it becomes meaningful to speak of external world. This world can be thought as existing only as potential within the Heavenly condition but as men began to progressively decohere the spiritual world picture, the mineral body and its environment began to take shape. The mineral body as we see it today can be thought of as a lifeboat that takes shape as the Spirit is engulfed by the dissolution of the mirror.
In this sense, the process of 'delaminating' our inner life is really about expanding beyond our limited personality to discern how our experience is woven from the most diverse influences. Much of our normal individual experience unfolds in relation to our physical body - the latter makes us feel to be an observer 'here', with an 'inner life', looking at things 'out there'. It maintains our integrity in relation to the surrounding environment, yet by the same token makes us feel isolated. If some stranger comes up and starts groping our body, we will feel our individuality has been assaulted. Yet, at the same time, we also know our physical body is woven out of the whole World. We have genetic material from a whole line of ancestors that become increasingly wider in scope, more universal, the farther we go back. The food we eat is drawn from the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms. The air we inhale one moment was outside of us the moment before. All our sensory impressions and memories come from interactions with the outer world. So these two aspects - our sense of isolated individuality and our knowledge of how our body and soul life is woven out of the whole World exist in harmony. That harmony is a given fact of our experience.
Delaminating the inner life is simply awakening to
how and why this harmony is possible. Not as a mere intellectual theory, of course, but through direct first-person cognitive experience. When the core spirit begins to know itself at levels of coherence beyond the physical body, it likewise experiences itself as a harmony of individual integrity and diverse influences woven from the whole soul-spiritual atmosphere. Now we can view the given relations from a higher vantage point, with more encompassing insight into what it all means, why it is structured this way, and therefore how to make the relations between Self and World even more harmonious. To prepare for these experiences, we should explore with concepts how our inner experience is woven from the activity of other beings. For that, we need to really open up and see ourselves in relation to the people we know and interact with who influence our inner states, the beings who contribute to the environment that influences us, the beings who provide the food we eat, the beings who developed the technologies we use each day, etc. That doesn't mean we need to go to a library and collect factoids, but simply move our intuitive activity through such relations on a consistent basis.
