The basics again

[AshvinP]

Yes, thinking in the service of the worldview. It structures our perception. What form does this thinking take?
What does the activity look like that has structured our perception so that we now live in the world we are used to?
How does it differ from how we think in everyday life, for example when we think about objects?


,,It is important to remember that our reasoned thoughts are also part of the WC. We can also make these the subject of our thinking. In this sense, we are not trying to develop theoretical models from our current thoughts, but rather to explore the deeper layers of meaning in the thoughts we already have.

For example, a simple, well-founded thought we all have is that the text we perceive consists of straight and curved black lines. Now we can imagine that someone who does not understand English comes across this text. The chances are actually pretty high that even if that person doesn't understand the exact meaning of the squiggles, they will recognize it as a meaningful script. She will intuitively sense that it is the manifestation of another intelligence, especially when perceived in the context of a forum where ideas are exchanged.

So how can we gain deeper meaning from this well-founded thought? If we draw an analogy from this for all the natural objects and processes of the WC around us, where does that leave us? We can explore such questions in an imaginatively fluid way, without looking for rigid theoretical models about the “nature of reality.” In fact, I would invite you to ask these questions and share your answers, no matter how simple or speculative they may seem. This is the point: the state of emergency leads us to see, in ever finer resolution, how the principles of our own intuitive activity are the very process by which reality is structured and developed. The etheric, the astral, the ego, etc. are simply symbols of this experiential reality of multi-layered intuitive activity."


I don't understand exactly what you want to express with this example.
Are you saying that we should see the world as intentional because of this analogy?

What do you mean when you say that our thinking is what creates reality?
I understand how thought structures our reality, but thinking is not the reason (from a phenomenological perspective) or the cause of my perception.
I try to understand the environment by thinking.

I don't understand exactly what you want to say, I think it's because your intuitive orientation is more pronounced than mine, so I don't understand what you have condensed into text form here.

I realy want to understand what you say here.
Can you explain it again please?

You're right, Guney, I should take more time to flesh out the underlying points. My inner development is not so far that it is easy for me to condense the intuitive orientation into helpful metaphors and concrete examples. This is an ongoing artistic skill to work on and pray for. But, still, I should put more effort into the posts.

Previously you wrote - "If I try to stay fully in the given of my experience right now I must admit that I can't even speak of other beings that make up my intuitive context, let alone beings that make up the world."

The first thing to recognize here is that the conscious understanding that we feel isolated in our intuitive context is a great thing to begin with. Why? Because it means we are consciously participating in the archetypal stream of evolution, where higher spiritual forces have died into the isolated ego-consciousness so the latter could attain its freedom and freely pursue inner perfection. Most people feel this isolation but they are not conscious of the reasons why, so for them, it is simply a 'law of reality' that we are atomic souls and deserves no further reflection. Everything in life for such people is finding ways to negotiate with other atomic souls to get some happiness and meaning, but there is a clear sense that such efforts can't go too far and we must ultimately become complacent with the 'fact' that we are confined to our own current experience on this side of the threshold. We should really try to sense this soul mood and how it can subtly sneak into spiritual striving as well if we don't remain on guard for it.

On the inner path, we seek the reasons why we feel like atomic souls and this should first be explored in living concepts. Then we can explore ways of delaminating the layers of experience that have been compressed together into our sensory ego-consciousness. A simple example is the expanding/contracting rhythms we spoke of before. At the daily scale, the two poles are sleeping and awakening. When we sleep, our higher members expand out into deeper layers of intuitive activity (which usually remain unconscious because we can't resonate with its more fluid forms), and when we awaken, they contract back into the lower members and we experience that as normal sensory consciousness. We can also notice this rhythm occurring throughout the day as well. I have noticed, for example, that when I engage in rigorous physical activity, it is more difficult for me to orient toward holistic spiritual ideas. That is because my higher members have contracted tightly back into the physical body, which is necessary when engaged in such activity, especially if we are in the presence of other people. Even apart from physical activity, we can notice certain portions of our day where it is generally easier for us to orient to spiritual ideas and other parts where our thinking is dominated by sensory reality.

This all assumes we are not only paying attention to the content we encounter throughout the day but also to the very manner and quality of our spiritual activity. It doesn't take meditative states, only expanded attention in our normal state. Then we can notice how, through such daily rhythms, we are also participating in the overarching rhythms of human history. Every cultural age is marked by a phase of more materialistic thinking followed by more spiritual thinking and rhythmic succession and this pattern provides the basic context for the unfolding of cultural history over thousands of years. We can understand our own time in history as a critical period of transition between the materialistic thinking rhythm and the spiritual thinking rhythm. If we are able to make such connections, we have already gained a much deeper appreciation for how the facts of spiritual science play into our individual and collective existence.

So that is already a huge advantage to be grateful for because it means we have developed the basis for a living faith that there are concrete ways to radiate the ego-consciousness back out into the meaningful context that structures its existence. Before or once we arrive at this point, it seems to me an underlying idea that recurs is as follows - "I can see that there is a spiritual reality related to my current existence, and this reality can be known inwardly through my intuitive thinking, but the deeper understanding of that reality can only come from breakthrough higher cognitive experiences. Until then, I should avoid thinking too much about these deeper realities and only focus on my current state of being."

That can be a healthy idea to the extent it develops feelings of reverence for what stands above us and secretly structures our existence, so that we don't feel pressured to intellectually model spiritual reality from the side as a detached spectator. Instead, we know that the higher Spirit will incarnate into our conceptual life through Time as we continue to work on ourselves inwardly. To be clear, the life of prayer and concentration is critical for deepening our intuitive orientation. That's why I mentioned living in the exceptional state before and I am also in the process of compiling a summary of exercises for doing so. But the above idea can also subtly miss something - that the higher experiences can only incarnate into what is already there. Just as a candle flame needs wax to burn through, the higher Spirit needs a rich palette of spiritual ideas to meet on its descent. That is the main reason for working our thinking through spiritual science and struggling to understand the higher states from which it is speaking to us. Again, these higher states are not detached from normal experience but comprise the meaningful context for that experience.

Here is a concrete example we can work with, from Clerc in the earlier days of the forum.

Let's consider a little contrived example in order to throw some additional light on the matters. Let's imagine that we want to build a building. We have strong faith in idealism and think that we'll be assisting humanity's evolution if we build a hall where conferences can be held and ideas exchanged. Yet we are no construction engineer so don't know how to build it. Let's now consider a being living on a higher stage of consciousness than we. Such beings actually exist. The higher beings closest to man are called Angels in Christian Esoterism. The name is not that important. We can encounter these beings even if we don't know how they are called in different traditions. When we cross the threshold of higher cognition, we already find ourselves in the lowest of three higher stages of consciousness that are available to modern man through the appropriate training. This first stage is the normal state of consciousness for these beings, just as our ordinary intellectual consciousness is the normal state for contemporary man. The Angels don't have physical structure. Their 'coarsest' structure reaches to the life (etheric) processes in Nature. This doesn't mean that they feel limited or unaware of the physical world. On the contrary, they have more understanding of it but need not to be entangled in it and consider the details. As an analogy, we can say that they experience the 'quantum mechanical wave function' of the physical world without the need to decohere/collapse it. Human soul life is an open book for these beings. The soul (astral structure) of men is part of their environment, just as plants and animals are part of our environment. A noble thought, as our idea to build the hall, lives in our astral body and is perceptible to the Angel. We can speak only in metaphorical pictures here. Let's say that it looks like a luminous structure living in our soul. When the Angel investigates it it can trace as light rays its relations to other ideas and beings (for example the soul of BK which we enthusiastically expect to visit our hall). It can experience our idea in the context of the overall evolution of humanity. The Angel has its own idea of world development, it is conducting its life according to its ideal. If it considers that our idea aligns well with the overall evolution it may decide to help with its realization. When it investigates further our soul organism it can see that we're unable to build the hall ourselves. There're different ways it can know this but let's say that it simply perceives our own realization that we can't do it. It then expands its consciousness in search for solution. In the spiritual world geometric distances make no sense. It's like asking what's the distance between the concept of tree and the concept of light. The 'distance' in the spiritual world results from the degree of affinity between idea-beings. Beings that have common modes of 'vibration' recognize each other. Beings that are very dissimilar simply don't perceive each other. So when the Angel expands its consciousness in this way, it is searching for idea-being that will complement our idea-being. Then the perception of another soul stands out, which might happen to be of someone involved in construction and is Karmically suitable for the task. Then the Angel may begin to work directly or with the assistance of another Angel that might be more closely related with the constructor. In either case, the Angels begin to influence both ours and the constructor's soul life. They do that through gently inspiring certain ideas and feelings. In our ordinary state we simply have thoughts and impulses, just like we do all the time. One day we find ourselves in the company of the constructor, we get acquainted, we start talking, we share our idea, he becomes enthusiastic and offers his help. Now this meeting between us in the physical world seems the result of chance but through all the time our freedom has been slightly influenced such that it may be slightly more probable for us to decide to go in this way rather than that way, that we may travel somewhere on this date rather than that date and so on. All this was possible because of the constant work the higher beings were doing. This is only possible for them because they experience time in very different way. Their moment 'now' can encompass whole years of our life and they perceive the most various ways Karma may lay out for us.

This is a really made up example, intentionally made more human-like and accessible but higher perception reveals that things like this happen all the time. It should be noted that we, as humans investigating the higher realms, are only visitors there and we can't encompass the totality of consciousness of an Angel or any other higher being. Yet we can experience certain points where our consciousness and theirs intersect. Then we glimpse at the wonderous ways these beings constantly work. Such experiences are not only curiosities of higher existence but can become actual practical knowledge. We understand that we can do a lot to help these beings by taking conscious stance towards them. Not only that but it is actually our duty to enter into fully conscious relationships with them - if we want to work with them. The last part is very important. Because not all beings work for the same ideal. Just as the Angels where trying to inspire in us the correct idea that would lead to the acquaintance, so could beings of completely different character see the construction of such a hall as a threat for their own goals. Then these latter beings can try to inspire different ideas in us - for example, the can inspire the brilliant idea to go to the pub instead of the place where we might eventually meet the constructor. Traditionally, the beings that take as their ideal to dedicate all their activity in the direction of integration of consciousness are collectively called in occultism the White Lodge. It's not some 'club' based on metaphysical membership but it's a union in a common idea that beings pursue freely. Things work in such a way that we can't integrate our consciousness only for ourselves. The reason is that the contents of our consciousness are the imprint of the life of all other beings. Thus if we want to integrate our own experience we must also help actively for the integration of all other beings. This is the fundamental characteristic that brings these beings into a whole. It's the only path where self-interest or egoism is naturally transformed in altruism. We can only achieve our highest aspirations if we enter brotherly relations and are ready to make sacrifices in the name of the overall integration of experience. This is how Love becomes for us the fundamental essence of reality. Conversely, beings that follow their own goals, that can be achieved only by arresting the integration of some other beings, are collectively called the Black Lodge. As a rule, these beings have no idea of the overall integrative process of Cosmic consciousness and as such they are not trying to deviate other beings because of some pure evilness but simply because they need something from other beings in order to achieve their own goals - which the beings may actually conceive as noble and much more correct than the goals that the integrative beings are following. So these beings (not always but in many cases) sincerely follow what they believe to be the best but because of their limited perspective, they can't trace its full consequences for the general life. And of course, there are also such beings whose perspectives are so limited that they simply have no consideration whatsoever about anything else than their own impulses. These are the beings who in their self-indulgence are the inspirers of the most horrific acts. Man experiences a very fortunate position where he can find his own center amid the forces that inspire him in very different directions and he may choose in freedom with which idea-beings he would like to integrate his stream of experience.

There are a couple of things to orient to in such a post. We are not trying to build an intellectual model of ‘angelic nature’ or the 'white and black lodge', but move our spirit fluidly through the contours of meaning and deepen our intuitive orientation through that process.

- Spiritual science should never be understood as isolated claims about reality. In physical science, we get claims like "water is made of 2 parts hydrogen and 1 part oxygen", or "the Earth is 4 billion years old", and so forth, and we verify such claims through sensory observation (or, more often, phantom abstract thoughts that are extrapolated into the remote past and projected into future times). In contrast, SS claims should be understood more as 'scenes' of a holistic story that is always connected to our first-person stream of meaningful experience. We can't understand the scenes properly if they are plucked out from the overarching intuition of the story.

- When I first read the above, I probably thought "wow this is really interesting... I hope one day I can also verify these facts for myself". We all pass through such a phase on the inner path. However, now I realize that when I think through the destinies of human individuals in relation to the ideas and ideals they pursue, I am already living within the angelic perspective, only it's mediated heavily by my fragmented intellectual concepts. The more I can make these concepts "living", i.e. fluid, symbolic, imaginative, etc., the more I experience the angelic perspective shining through them. There is a whole gradient that can be developed between my current experience and the imaginative experience of the angelic perspective, and the latter will only manifest to the extent it intersects with my own ideal development.

- The latter also points to a principle of spiritual science as a whole. We will notice that, whenever Steiner mentions what the higher hierarchies did or are doing or will do, it is always in relation to humanity's stream of development. That is because all higher cognitive experience can be traced only so far as the deeds of the higher hierarchies structure our first-person state of being (which embeds past and future states). It is by enriching this first-person state of being with spiritual ideas and values that we make our soul-structure ripe for higher experiences to shine through it, like a finely-tuned instrument becomes ripe for the musical virtuoso to play.

- The default intuition is to consider the above post and think, 'sometimes the Angels come and work with our ideas and feelings to help us accomplish goals'. But I hope it is clear that what is being described is a limited metaphor for the entire stream of our experience. It is a 'metaphor' because we won't ascend to higher realms and observe angelic beings floating about in some subtle form, looking for luminous structures in human souls - these are symbols for entirely inner realities. Nevertheless, they point very concretely to how, whenever we are subtly inspired through our lofty impulses, feelings, ideas, and ideals, we are always in dialogue with higher beings. And, likewise, whenever we feel compelled by lower instincts, emotions, and thoughts, we are in a one-sided dialogue with quite other sorts of beings - they talk while we listen and carry out their commands with very little or no conscious participation.

-The fact that the Angelic perspective can encompass several years of our life in their 'now' moment is important, as it illustrates how the higher beings ideate the ‘field of potential’ in which our states of being unfold. Reality is only states of being – perceptual content (in the widest sense) and the invisible meaning that makes sense of that content. So when we say ‘our’ states of being, this is only a manner of speaking – we are a metamorphosing state of being, as are all higher beings. It is simply that their state of being encompasses what we experience as manifold states of being spread over time, and the goal of inner development is to resonate more and more with the higher holistic perspectives of our own stream of experience. We aim to make our 'now' state coincide more and more with the 'now' state of higher beings.





We could characterize it metaphorically as thickening out our ‘now’ state of being so its deeper layers of meaning are experienced within that ‘now’. The bowl is our current conceptual life, through which we experience all the WC, and we use our spiritual activity to rhythmically move through the batter of experiences and ideas and give it temporal thickness. Our ideal experience and intuitive orientation thus acquire a firmness, a reality that cannot be easily shaken. Practically, the temporal thickness is when we sense how our ‘now’ state could only be what it is through the layers of meaningful context that, from our current perspective, we experience as temporally extended over seasons, years, decades, lifetimes, epochs, etc., or we label abstractly as physiology, biology, and psychology, or geography, flora, and fauna, or family, nation, and species, etc. This context is the imaginative, inspired, and intuitive activity of higher beings that guide human destiny. Their activity 'filters' the field of potential states of being - according to karmic laws - into a contracted state of being that we experience as 'now'. This filtering of potential is always taking place from each 'now' state to the next. It can also help us orient towards how the successive planetary eons, rounds, globes, and epochs manifest.

The underlying theme here is that, by moving our spirit through these ideas and struggling to get a concrete sense of the higher layers of intuitive activity from which they are revealed, we are ripening our souls for the higher Spirit to gradually incarnate and deepen our intuitive orientation. The ‘struggle’ means we read patiently, multiples times if necessary, we engage the thought experiments, we inhabit the sorts of perspectives being described as much as possible, and we broadly relate it to the principles of spiritual reality we have already discerned with trust and confidence. We are thereby probing the deeper meaning of what is already implicit in all our thoughts, feelings, and deeds. That is the meaningful context that makes sense of our normal experience. Simply reading Cleric’s posts on this forum, or perhaps even this post, with energetic effort, is already participating in that process of inner development. Our ‘now’ state while reading these posts, lectures, books, etc. will gradually be experienced with more temporal thickness, i.e. more meaningful insight into how the higher worlds are already present within it. None of the posts and lectures will lead to such insight when considered in isolation. They are simply snapshots of a reality that needs to be viewed from as many angles as possible.

In the case of the ego everybody can understand it as a symbol, but in the case of etheric body, where is the experiential reality, of the force that structures the physical body, which is part of the WC?

As indicated above, we won't be able to get any quick or isolated answers to such questions in a way that deepens our intuitive orientation. We need to approach from many angles and struggle to make our thinking more flexible and fluid, more etheric-like. One such angle is to consider the widely differing form and behavior between stones and plants. They are both comprised of mineral elements, yet the mineral structure of the stone remains relatively stable, while that of the plant metamorphoses in a rhythmic way and takes very interesting structured forms as it strives towards the Sunlight. The etheric body is a symbol for the inspired forces that animate this mineral structure. In human beings, these forces have been become much more inwardized to structure the inner organs and life processes. The outer mineral structure of the human being is more shaped by soul and spirit forces, such as the countenance of the face.

[AshvinP]

In the case of the ego everybody can understand it as a symbol, but in the case of etheric body, where is the experiential reality, of the force that structures the physical body, which is part of the WC?

I would like to add a more experiential consideration for the symbol of the etheric body. When we enact our ego intents, the physical body brings us into relation with an 'outer world' of sensory impressions - colors, sounds, smells, textures, etc. However, we have to admit that experientially these impressions are quite fragmented and fixed - we perceive 'green' on an object here, 'yellow' on an object there, the sound of birds chirping, the smell of fresh plant life after it has rained (or smoke and smog on a polluted day), etc. Our thinking is normally sucked into the fragmented content of the physical sensory organism and this is simply 'reality' for us - a bunch of fragmented impressions that we dimly link together with our also fragmented concepts.

Yet, if we also pay more attention to the context of our perceptual experience when enacting intents, we pick up on deeper qualities. For ex. there is a spatial context as we move around, which allows us to survey impressions from one side, then from another, then from another, and so on. Similarly, there is a context of our visual field - when we approach certain objects, they occupy a larger portion of that field relative to other objects. There is the context of a color landscape that varies depending on our location, the time of day, atmospheric conditions, etc. All of these and additional contextual factors structure our interactive experience of the outer world. They become more evident to us when we attend to temporally extended states of being. This is related to the functions of our etheric body in spatial orientation and visual perception. So we have a pretty clear differentiation between the functions of the physical and etheric bodies in our normal stream of experience.

That is all still the perceptual pole, and as you know we have to also consider the meaningful pole that is present in all experience. We experience the latter as impulses, feelings, concepts and ideas arising within our 'inner life'. That is when we get to the experiential life of the astral body and ego. When we passively absorb sensory impressions, flow along with feelings, and let our concepts be entrained by them, that is our ego acting through the astral body (or sentient soul). When we start to more actively direct our concepts towards portions of the sensory spectrum for specific aims, like researching the plant life in a given region, or to tame our passions and redirect their energy towards more productive uses, then our ego acts through the intellectual soul. And when we actively direct our concepts towards the supersensible inner life, as we do in much philosophy, theology, certain sciences like psychology, certain artistic pursuits, and spiritual science, our ego acts through the consciousness (or spiritual) soul.

So we see, all these labels are symbols for first-person experiential functions of our ego when it interacts with the World (relations of spiritual beings). The crude summary above certainly doesn't exhaust their functions, not by any stretch. There is endless opportunity to explore those functions in our experience and certainly higher cognitive development will be necessary. The latter is most necessary for expanding the cognitive life of the ego into the deeper soul-life of the astral body, from which our normal concepts precipitate, and into the etheric-physical existence, from which our contextualized experience of the 'outer world' precipitates. Then we rediscover those normal domains of experience from their inner side, which is essentially the structured intents of beings who are involved in the flow of human destiny.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,
there is a lot to think about in your posts.
Thank you for taking the time and writing these insightful posts.

Before I can reply I have to meditate more about your posts.

But the core insight wich I got from your post is to try to relate spiritual scientific concept to our first person experience.
There we can find something of them.
We shouldn't try to find the etheric body as a flying colored body-like substance, but as something that constitute out current experience.

As you say, symbols for process that constitute our consciousness.


Why do initate talk about it as if it is body like?
Initiate see this things in a sensory like manner.
For example when they talk about the astral body.
It is described as a egg shaped colored form around the physical body.


There is a blog about Christianity in which the author speaks about antroposophical "events" in a more phenomenologic way.
She tries to connect concepts to our first person view.

She has written a couple books about esoteric
christianity (antroposophical understanding of it).

https://esotericconnection.com/2010/02/ ... erarchy-1/

I dont know if she doing it in the way you trying it here with these posts.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
there is a lot to think about in your posts.
Thank you for taking the time and writing these insightful posts.

Before I can reply I have to meditate more about your posts.

But the core insight wich I got from your post is to try to relate spiritual scientific concept to our first person experience.
There we can find something of them.
We shouldn't try to find the etheric body as a flying colored body-like substance, but as something that constitute out current experience.

As you say, symbols for process that constitute our consciousness.


Why do initate talk about it as if it is body like?
Initiate see this things in a sensory like manner.
For example when they talk about the astral body.
It is described as a egg shaped colored form around the physical body.

Guney,

I agree this can be very misleading if we don't approach it with the proper orientation, i.e. phenomenology of intuitive activity. The reason for speaking this way is quite justified and naturally flows from the PoF principles. You wrote:

"This would include the fact that these recognizable things are only structured through thinking and come into being with concepts or ideas."

So the basic principle is that we always live in the meaning of supersensible ideas first, which is then condensed into images, concepts, and sensory perceptions. The problem is that our normal thinking isn't strong enough to be awake in the deeper layers of intuitive activity, so it only awakens to the finished perceptions and concepts. The whole process of contracting the invisible intuitive potential doesn't seem to exist for normal thinking because it takes place within the liminal spaces of experience. Another problem is that the intellectual memory faculty is too weak to encompass its progression from infancy to later ages, during which time the senses were educated. If it could encompass this progression, it would be immediately apparent that our perceptual consciousness has not always been the same and has changed in direct relation to our mode of spiritual activity. Depending on the mode, quite varied perceptual landscapes can be condensed from the same invisible meaning that we live in. 

Perhaps the only place we are normally familiar with this is in our dreams. The fears, anxieties, concerns, emotions, ideas, etc. that structure our dreamscape are always with us while we are awake as well, but they have been condensed into our flattened concepts and the sensory spectrum. During our dreams, they are not condensed so far but remain as more fluid, interwoven images. When we approach the exceptional state at the tip of our thinking, it is much easier to discern the true relation of meaning to perception in full lucidity. This is where meaning and perception are fully 'in-phase'. We can live in the meaning of 'triangle' for ex. before condensing that into the image of a triangle within our head space. Instead of condensing it all at one time, we can try to slowly trace its edges so the relationship is experienced more clearly. Another example is when we live in a certain constellation of meaning but can't find the words to express it. Eventually our intuitive activity 'clicks' with our intellectual slots and we can condense appropriate verbal perceptions for the meaning.

Another less obvious example is optical illusions.





The upright white triangle manifests in the foreground of perception when we live in the meaning that the black spheres and the upside-down triangle are complete images. Then the white triangle appears as overlaid on top of the full black circles and the contiguous upside-down triangle. Although it is somewhat difficult after knowing this, we can try only to focus attention on the black 'pac-man' circle and see how the white triangle disappears or is flattened into the image. Then we live in the meaning that the circles and the upside-down triangle are missing pieces and our perception shifts. So this is another example of how we first live in certain patterns of meaning with our intuitive activity and then condense perceptual symbols from that meaning. 

Now it may seem like this condensation from meaning to perception is a terribly useless thing that only seems to hide reality and trick us, but that's not the case. As previously discussed, we finally awaken in our lucid thinking consciousness when all the layers of intuitive activity have been compressed onto the sensory screen. What is the benefit of this compression? It provides the possibility of an objective consciousness that can observe differentiated rhythms of spiritual activity simultaneously, 'side by side'. Steiner often mentions how, when we cross the threshold of death, our thinking-feeling-willing begins to split apart and each stream goes in 'different directions'. In a sense, we have to start managing them independently in a way that we are not at all accustomed to during normal sensory life. 

As a really simple metaphor, imagine a clock with the seconds, minute, and hour hand. Let's say you need to be somewhere at 12 PM and you aren't sure what time it is right now, but you know the time is approaching. Now imagine when you look towards the clock, all the hands separate out into three different clocks in three different rooms. Now you have to look at one clock for the hour, run to another room and look at another clock for the minutes, and run to the final room to look at a third clock for the seconds. You have to hold all these in your memory and put them together at the end. You can no longer capture the relational rhythms in a single image. Don't take this for any direct description of spiritual experience across the threshold, it's only a metaphor to show the usefulness of our objective spatial consciousness. 

The initiate can awaken in the deeper soul (astral) layers of intuitive activity and live in the rhythmic streams of meaning that structure a person's entire soul life, i.e. the desires, passions, feelings, and thoughts that embed the person's stream of incarnational experience, their entire karmic destiny that led them to a certain soul state. But, just as we saw with the example above, a different sort of insight can be gained by condensing those temporally extended rhythms into a unified image with shapes and colors. The most varying relationships within the soul-life can be expressed as the hues and movement of color forms and these can also serve as the basis for communication with others on the physical plane and therefore objective research. As Steiner discusses, however, we should be clear that this is not the same thing as mere physical perception except with more colorful details, but rather it is an expanded perception of meaningful activity. 

The exercises described in the preceding chapters, if practiced in the right way, involve certain changes in the organism of the soul (astral body). The latter is only perceptible to the clairvoyant, and may be compared to a cloud, psycho-spiritually luminous to a certain degree, in the center of which the physical body is discernible. (A description will be found in the author's book, Theosophy.) In this astral body desires, lusts, passions, and ideas become visible in a spiritual way. Sensual appetites, for instance, create the impression of a dark red radiance with a definite shape; a pure and noble thought finds its expression in a reddish-violet radiance; the clear-cut concept of the logical thinker is experienced as a yellowish figure with sharply defined outline; the confused thought of the muddled head appears as a figure with vague outline. The thoughts of a person with one-sided, queer views appear sharply outlined but immobile, while the thoughts of people accessible to the points of view of others are seen to have mobile, changeable outlines. (In all these and the following descriptions it must be noted that by seeing a color, spiritual seeing is meant. When the clairvoyant speaks of “seeing red,” he means: “I have an experience, in a psycho-spiritual way, which is equivalent to the physical experience when an impression of red is received.” This mode of expression is here used because it is perfectly natural to the clairvoyant. If this point is over-looked, a mere color-vision may easily be mistaken for a genuine clairvoyant experience.)

To be clear, I don't have this experience myself. I am only speaking in the broadest possible outlines from what I have reasoned within my current intuitive orientation. It goes to show that, when we think through the natural implications of our experience and reasoned PoF principles, our spirit is already moving through the layers of meaning in the higher worlds, condensing them into dim concepts that can be communicated with others. When we attain the proper intuitive orientation via living in the exceptional state, all these conceptual descriptions of spiritual realities become great tools for further strengthening that orientation. It gives us unshakeable faith that we are already participating consciously in the Spirit's evolution and the corresponding higher experiences will gradually be born from within when the time is ripe.
 

There is a blog about Christianity in which the author speaks about antroposophical "events" in a more phenomenologic way.
She tries to connect concepts to our first person view.

She has written a couple books about esoteric
christianity (antroposophical understanding of it).

https://esotericconnection.com/2010/02/ ... erarchy-1/

I dont know if she doing it in the way you trying it here with these posts.

Thanks, the blogs seem helpful from what I have read so far. They are short and simple, but sometimes that's a great way to build up our familiarity with esoteric topics.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,
Let us say that spiritual science does not talk about things that make up the world, like atoms make up matter, but like our thinking activity, is structured by layers.
I think that it prevents one from gaining an understanding of, for example, ether and astral, seeing them as different substances that interact and create the world.



What is in spiritual science, the nature of the material world.
Is it like a VR game or a dream?
How can humans understand the sensory world, including the body?

I just try to grasp it, not to bild a theoretical model.

[Jonathan Österman]

Can we replace the poet with his poems?

This is exactly what A.I. chat-bots do.

[Güney27]

Can we replace the poet with his poems?

This is exactly what A.I. chat-bots do.

In wich way ?
Can you please explain more of your statements

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
Let us say that spiritual science does not talk about things that make up the world, like atoms make up matter, but like our thinking activity, is structured by layers.
I think that it prevents one from gaining an understanding of, for example, ether and astral, seeing them as different substances that interact and create the world.

Guney, yes that is certainly true. We cannot import our atomistic intuitions about 'how the world works' into discussions of inner realities, like the etheric and astral spectrums of experience. This is why we are so fortunate to approach from the direction of phenomenology of spiritual activity, whereas many esotericists lack that foundation and begin thinking of the bodies, planes, etc. and various substances and realms that interact in a mechanical or spatial way.

What is in spiritual science, the nature of the material world.
Is it like a VR game or a dream?
How can humans understand the sensory world, including the body?

I just try to grasp it, not to bild a theoretical model.

Guney,

The VR and dream metaphors for the sensory world can be helpful or misleading, depending on how they are being used. I like the dream metaphor because it points to (a) how there is a lawful relationship between the worlds in which our higher spirit moves (waking) and the dreamscape, i.e. our waking ideas, emotions, desires, etc. that shape the curvature of the dreamscape in which our dream states of being unfold and (b) how we are rhythmically cycling through varying modes of consciousness on a gradient from dreaming to waking to even higher lucidity. On the other hand, people tend to associate dreams with something we personally conjure up, expressing our personal wishes to fashion the dream world, which has no broader significance for the destiny of other souls. That is not at all the case with the sensory world, which is more a cooperative effort that serves critical purposes of free moral development in the architecture of spiritual evolution. 

Here is an interesting way to think about it. We know that, at the local level, the way we perceive the outer world is quite dependent on our beliefs, our preferences, our temperament and disposition (whether we are introverted or extroverted, for ex.), the ideas and ideals we have integrated, the language we think in, and our mode of thinking more broadly. Beyond these, there are the much deeper layers of intuitive activity that relate to the flows of Earthly destiny. Every perceptual state of being could only be what it is because the deeper spiritual 'arrows' - the temporal layers of intuitive activity - are in a certain configuration that is always fluid, always evolving. We could use Cleric's recent gizmo to illustrate that. Instead of manipulating the L-shapes to modulate the fractal perceptual pattern, we could imagine manipulating the perceptual pattern and how that would require all the L-shapes (deeper arrows or coefficients) in a new configuration. It shows how manipulating any part of the sensory spectrum would necessarily mean modifying the entire depth structure of spiritual activity.

For our purposes, we can focus only on the most proximate soul arrows that modulate our thinking-perception. We could point to many examples. By perceive, we mean how we understand the meaningful relations we encounter through our willed intent, which can also influence the sorts of sensory qualities we condense and their interrelations, such as we discussed earlier in the context of perceiving the astral body. I also mentioned the example of synesthetics before, who can hear colors and perceive sounds in colors. This could practically provide them more insight into how to paint a scene or compose a song. Here is a clip of crudely animated sequences that are supposed to give a sense for the experiences of synesthetes - obviously we shouldn't mistake this for the actual reality. The girl around 2:25 makes an interesting point - she says the letter "A" still appears to her as a black letter on paper, but in her cognition, she also knows the A is associated with redness. 





Let's imagine that by tweaking some soul arrows, we became synesthetics. We are using a very mechanical analogy here to shed light on the nature of the sensory world. Now imagine such a change in the soul arrows suddenly radiated out to every human soul. Of course, this can't happen, but it is only a thought experiment to illustrate the underlying principle. In that scenario, the entire 'sensory world' would be instantaneously transformed and perceived much differently, in a much more sensory integrated way, where colors are associated with sounds, sounds with colors, letters with colors, tastes with visual shapes, etc. Remember, there is no 'other world' independent of our first-person thinking perspective. The 'sensory world' is only a 'world' in so far as it is the shared expression of human souls navigating meaningful relations and condensing those relations along the convolutions of arrows into outer impressions. So the 'sensory world' is what we call the cumulative first-person perspective of all souls who share a certain constellation of arrows that structure their perception. We could call it a community of souls whose conscious experience is 'in focus' at the very tip of intuitive activity that has reflected its whole depth structure into negative images of meaning (colors, sounds, smells, tastes, textures) that stimulate our cognition to seek out its own deeper layers of activity.  

As mentioned above, human souls don't only belong to the sensory world but rhythmically cycle through many other modes of consciousness that comprise other 'worlds', as we do during dreams and sleep. By that same logic, there are human souls whose lowest rhythmic stage is already more integrated than the average soul. These souls already experience their 'sensory world' as the wavefunctions of the etheric-astral spectrum before they decohere into the normal sensory spectrum. All the cultural transformations over the last several thousand years towards more spiritual ways of being. thinking, and perceiving are the outer expressions of such souls advancing into more integrated states of being in concert with beings of the 3rd hierarchy. The development of modern language, science, mathematics, and so forth isn't just new ideas that we use to explain the already existing sensory world, but the very arrows through which that sensory world is structured.  

Max once wrote a post on the original meaning of "theory" which is instructive here:

"...it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look...that is the highest of arts." - Thoreau

The common contemporary notion of theory is a derivative of its scientific usage, which in turn developed from the post-Nominalist notion of theory as an idea in the subjective mind. Originally, however, the English word theory meant “to see.” The English term was borrowed from the Greek word theoria (θεωρία, thea “a view, a sight” + horan “to see”). The Latin translation of theoria hints at the original power of the Greek word, since the term is not translated as coniectura, sententia, or hypothesi, but as contemplatio, from which we derive our English word “contemplation.” Theoria is the union of the seen with the act of seeing. That Theos (θεός) also means “God” in Greek, and that the Latin contemplatio shares the root of “temple,” together indicate the supra-empirical nature of theoria. The evolution of the Greek word idea (ιδέα) follows a similar trajectory, from Plato’s conception of the Ideas, sometimes rendered in the Latinate term “Forms,” as the transcendent principles of the cosmos, to Aristotle’s conception of ideas as the immanent principles of reality, to Aquinas’ conception of ideas as the formæ or species intelligibilis of entities, to the modern conception of an idea as a merely subjective notion.

We went from impressing our spiritual activity on clay, stones, papyrus, paper with ink, etc. to impressing it on airwaves and digital signals, from impressing data through cables and wires through Wi-Fi and 'bluetooth'. We can sense the concrete spiritualization being reflected in these changing mediums of transmission (not necessarily caused by those mediums). We have also mentioned before how the ancient Greeks did not perceive 'blueness' in the sensory spectrum like we do, which is generally a color quality associated with devotional feeling toward latent potential (blue ocean, blue sky, etc). When we can encompass a wider aperture of the Time-rhythms, it is easier to notice how the sensory world has been gradually transforming through spiritual activity. So we are always participating in many worlds through which spiritual evolution continues to unfold, but for most people, our consciousness is the most 'in focus' during an incarnation within the mineral-like thought element, and the cumulative effect of that is what we call the sensory world.

[AshvinP]

That is not at all the case with the sensory world, which is more a cooperative effort that serves critical purposes of free moral development in the architecture of spiritual evolution. 
...
As mentioned above, human souls don't only belong to the sensory world but rhythmically cycle through many other modes of consciousness that comprise other 'worlds', as we do during dreams and sleep.

I want to add here, if we are considering what purpose this rhythmic cycling through the modes of consciousness serves in our stream of experience, we could compare it to what I expressed to Lorenzo recently:

For ex. imagine you are stopped at a stop sign and need to turn left. For that, you need to cross two lanes of traffic going from your left to right and merge into another lane of traffic going from right to left. What do you do? First, you visually sense the oncoming cars in either direction, looking left and right. These visual sensations stimulate your thinking to expand into a broader intuitive context of principles that help you anticipate the future. In this case, you expand into the intuition of how distance and speed relate to the time it takes for moving objects to reach certain locations, both the other vehicles and your own. The whole time you are also rhythmically moving back to the sensations and allowing those to feed back into your expansive intuitive context that anctipates the future. All of this rhythmic activity takes place very quickly and smoothly without you needing to explore it in clear-cut concepts. Even without such concepts, we can know it is actually happening and we can later use our concepts to make this experience clearer to ourselves like we are doing now.

On a larger scale, our entire incarnation in the sensory world is like the visual sensations of cars above. We are 'looking back' to what our intuitive activity previously imploded into manifest structures - the elements, the natural kingdoms, cultural institutions - so as to stimulate our current activity and triangulate the most optimal course forward to fulfill Divine intents. The sensory spectrum experienced through the physical body kindles new intuitions that help us anticipate the remaining intuitive potential that has yet to be incarnated. We try our best to incarnate that intuitive potential and then continue our work within the higher modes of consciousness after death (the Cosmic spheres we expand into), where the experiences during incarnation can be worked on much more directly, from a higher vantage point, in concert with communities of living souls and the higher hierarchies. With this work, however, we cannot make perfect sense of the holistic Cosmic evolution - there are still capacities and qualities missing to fulfill the holistic intent - so we contract back into the sensory world to develop the missing elements. By cycling through the modes of consciousness, we are viewing the same spiritual relations from different temporal angles, bouncing between what we experience as 'past' and 'future', to triangulate the perfect Cosmic intent where all beings know themselves as One.

This dynamic was imaginatively captured as the 'temporal pincer movement' in the movie Tenet (not to say that Nolan knew the deeper meaning of the imagination).





Through higher development, our incarnate sensory self can grow into resonance with our future spiritual self flowing 'backward' through temporal experience so that each temporal stream can inform the other of the most optimal paths to fulfill the intent of 'saving the World'. Of course, the movie depiction can't be taken too literally, since it's a physicalized representation of inner realities. We just need to search for the inner meaning of these symbols as they relate to our concrete stream of becoming.

[A shy girl]

Hello everyone,
I wanted to post a little Essay wich I have written 2 days ago.
It is nothing new to many people in this forum, but I want to share it to get a clearer idea myself.
Maybe it will help somebody unfamiliar with this topic, to understand the direction of this things.

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When we look at human actions as expressed in art, science and religion, we should ask ourselves why people carry them out.

What is an essential attribute of man that gave rise to the tremendous scientific and philosophical history of man?
It is his desire for knowledge, for understanding the world, and his place and role in it.

Here I have only said what is already clear to everyone, and yet few people think about it.
Countless thinkers gave us different theories and explanatory models; there were many different attempts and approaches that were intended to make the world more understandable.

My goal with this text is not to think of further modeling of the world, but rather to deal with the question of what makes these attempts at explanation and how one actually recognizes anything.

Let's start with what needs to be explained, that is the world.
What is the world? What is it we want to explain?
A place made of matter, separate from us, which we perceive?
A dream dreamed by God?
To be free from speculation and premises, we must put aside all our supposed knowledge, our intuition about what the world is and how it works, and stick to the facts of our experience.

So what is the world we want to explain?
It is the totality of our perception, this means all conscious phenomena.
Colors, shapes, sounds, smells, sensations (e.g. feeling heat and cold), emotions, tastes, smells make up the world we know.
To say that this is not the world as it actually is is again a judgment about the world, i.e. an attempt at explanation, a theory, but my aim with this writing is
to go one step deeper.

We have classified the world as the entirety of our conscious content.
Does the world appear to us as something finished? Do we know the world through our perception?
To answer this question a simple example can be given.
Imagine that you are going for a walk at night.
During the walk, you notice pulsating lights in the sky that are unfamiliar to you.
Now imagine how you react to this perception.
What do you do?
One looks for a suitable explanation, a suitable term for the perception, because otherwise it is like a disharmonious tone in the otherwise harmonious symphony of our knowledge.
We have the drive to understand our perceptions, because they do not come as a finished perception, as in our everyday intuition, but only become the world we are used to through our own thought activity.


In order to be able to speak of something at all, our perceptions must be explained by our thinking.
Perception and thinking are the foundation of our journey of knowledge.
In order for any statement about the world to be true, for example that it consists of matter and is separate from us, thoughts about perception must have formed.
Every statement about the world requires thinking. Thinking is our activity, while perception is something given.
But what would perception be without thinking?
A picture full of shapes, colors and other impressions, but with no recognizable “things”.
This would include the fact that these recognizable things are only structured through thinking and come into being with concepts or ideas.

Here we come to an important point in our little investigation.
We can recognize that we are not mere observers of a finished world and create mere representations of it in our minds, but rather our own activity and mere perception bring the world into being.



If it is now objected that our activity is just a brain function, then we are rejecting our own inner experience for a theoretical explanation that emerges through our inner activity.

According to this perspective, our current material world view is nothing more than a story in which we are blind to see the narrator.

What is this activity that makes the world understandable?
Should we take a deeper look at our own activity, which is the reason we can speak about anything, to study the depth of our being, or should we replace our activity with its produced "products"?
Can we replace the poet with his poems?

I wrote a long reply to your last post to me, and someone has just deleted the entire topic! Let's start over in this topic: viewtopic.php?t=967