Toward a Phenomenology of the Etheric World

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

Does the path of Christianity ( in a spiritual sense, like the Russian orthodox pilgrims) lead to initiation?

Yes, it can lead to the development of higher faculties of inner perception. At some point, though, the logical thinking faculty also needs to be developed for the redemption of humanity, since it is through this faculty that the existing domains of culture - the philosophies, sciences, arts, etc. - will be spiritualized. That gradient needs to be formed between the conceptual intellect and the higher faculties so there is continuous interaction between them. I think it is likely that those who pursue an intense religious path in one incarnation will then have the basis for developing their thinking faculty in the next incarnation, and vice versa. The rhythms of incarnation generally make us more well-rounded beings as they provide the basis for integrating the capacities and qualities that are currently spread throughout humanity, assuming we take a self-conscious and devotional stance towards them. There is nothing that prevents us, in principle, from pursuing both paths within a single incarnation, especially when all thought becomes devotional and devotion becomes thought, and I would say Steiner is a great example of that, but for many people, it will be unrealistic at this stage. 

What do you think is the meaning of the Bible, why is there even a book like this, in which God becomes man and dies on a cross?

The very interesting thing is, that the Bible ( if we interpret it symbolically) has overlaps to PoF.
If the trend of symbolism succeed, then this would be a good milestone, because many people would recognize thinking activity.
And symbolic thinking helps to get from a third-person view, back to our real experience of the world.
I find its a very powerful thing, if we stay open to the possibility that there is much deeper meaning, that we can't understand right now, but which will be revealed trough time.

In a certain sense, all writings simply act as a bridge between the loss of ancient clairvoyance and the regaining of modern clairvoyance. Before the former, there was not much need for writing because clairvoyance into the spiritual fabric of reality necessarily entails remembrance of all that has happened to bring the current state about. For ex., after the "I" incarnated during the Atlantean epoch, it still knew itself in relation to its entire ancestry for some time. A person who said "I" was not only referring to his experiences over a few decades of life, but to the experiences of many ancestors as well. An echo of this is reflected in the first few chapters of Genesis when the genealogies are listed and a certain person is recorded as having lived for many hundreds of years - that person's name actually stands in for a whole line of ancestry that was woven into the "I" experience. We can sense how such a consciousness must remain instinctive and dim if the person is also to remain functional in society. In order for consciousness to grow intentional and lucid, it had to be narrowed down to fragmented states of being and limited memory. 

Every concept-perception, whether a natural object or cultural object such as text, can be understood as an anchor point, a point of balance, for a totality of ideal relations that are implicit in its presentment to consciousness. So yes, they are all symbols in that sense. For ex., if an alien came to Earth and carefully observed a single flowering plant over its life cycle, it would be able to infer many things about the surrounding environment - the soil quality, the atmospheric content, the light distribution, the fauna of the region, etc. In a sense, that surrounding context which eventually expands to encompass the entire Cosmos is the reality of the concept-perception of 'flowering plant'. Yet we can't encompass this totality in each act of conception, so most of it remains as an intuitive context while our thinking finds a resting place in the concept. From that point of rest, it can begin freely working back towards the ideal relations that comprise the total intuitive context. 

Eventually, once enough souls regain the clairvoyant capacity in a fully lucid form, there will no longer be any need for writing. There is still quite some way to go for this to come about, and even longer before verbal speech as we experience it today is no longer needed. 

The question of why the contents of the Bible arose, i.e. the story of God becoming man, dying, and resurrecting, is of course a much deeper one that is fundamental to our whole Earthly evolution. It is great that you connected the PoF principles to this fundamental story. Indeed, it is the story of how the most coherent Cosmic Idea penetrated the most fragmented Earthly perceptual context and rendered it a sensible Unity for the rest of our evolution. Our remaining evolution is the process of working out the stages of that coherence. The events of the 1st century provide a condensed image of our entire Earthly evolution. God prepared the soil into which his Divine seed could incarnate - the physical, etheric, and astral sheaths - and then purified those sheaths as an example for the rest of humanity to follow over the course of many centuries and millennia to come. He provides both the means to follow that example and the inspiration to freely adopt those means. We can illustrate this crudely with the following graph of wave functions:





The blue wave is our meaningful spiritual activity (not visible), the red wave is our reflected perceptions/experience, and the black wave is the "I" that mediates between them. It was Christ in his 'pre-earthly deeds' that graced us with the capacity to stand upright, speak, and think. He brought the physical, etheric, and astral bodies into a certain coherence so the "I" could use them as instruments for spiritual activity in the manifest world. We can represent that as when the blue and red waves are aligned from peak to trough and the black standing wave is in a line. At the MoG, the link of "I" was fully incarnated and now thinking can become active in each individual for bringing that work of coherence to completion. That is represented by the wave function curves overlapping and their peaks aligning. That is when the perceptual world will be a perfect reflection of our meaningful spiritual activity, like it is currently only within the domain of pure sense-free thinking, at the tip of our stream of becoming where unmanifest meaning implodes into manifest perception. 

In a sense, Christ is the one having this discussion, because neither you nor I would be able to direct our thinking at will (in freedom) towards supersensible realities and communicate them to each other without what he accomplished. Through the Divine "I", our thinking has been brought almost in-phase with perception. In our thought-forms, we have an almost perfect reflection of the meaningful Idea we live in, however it is not a perfect reflection because our thinking still unfolds within the deeper layers of our being that are not yet in-phase. The meaningful activity of archetypal feeling and willing, in which our thinking unfolds, still reflects itself as the 'outer world' mostly independent of our activity. So, as a general principle, through the faculty of Divine thinking, we first cohere the soul forms (processes) of the astral body (via imagination at the border of thinking and feeling), then the life forms of the etheric body (via inspiration at the border of feeling and willing), and then the physical forms (via intuition, pure willing). In this way, the coherence we currently find in our living thinking acts as a seed point that radiates out into all the layers of our intuitive context. It resurrects the deadened layers of our soul, organic, and physical life. Idea and Perception progressively become One, completely in-phase, across all domains - there is no remaining separation of 'inner' and 'outer', 'subjective' and 'objective'.  

Thank you Ashvin.

In a sense, Christ is the one having this discussion, because neither you nor I would be able to direct our thinking at will (in freedom) towards supersensible realities and communicate them to each other without what he accomplished. Through the Divine "I", our thinking has been brought almost in-phase with perception. In our thought-forms, we have an almost perfect reflection of the meaningful Idea we live in, however it is not a perfect reflection because our thinking still unfolds within the deeper layers of our being that are not yet in-phase. The meaningful activity of archetypal feeling and willing, in which our thinking unfolds, still reflects itself as the 'outer world' mostly independent of our activity. So, as a general principle, through the faculty of Divine thinking, we first cohere the soul forms (processes) of the astral body (via imagination at the border of thinking and feeling), then the life forms of the etheric body (via inspiration at the border of feeling and willing), and then the physical forms (via intuition, pure willing). In this way, the coherence we currently find in our living thinking acts as a seed point that radiates out into all the layers of our intuitive context. It resurrects the deadened layers of our soul, organic, and physical life. Idea and Perception progressively become One, completely in-phase, across all domains - there is no remaining separation of 'inner' and 'outer', 'subjective' and 'objective'.

Can you explain this last paragraph in more detail?

Remind yourself of the intuitive context you live in right now.
You may in a room, you know where you at and in what situation.
You know what you are doing in that room and know the objects you can interact with.
You now that you live in the U.S and that your a human being ........

That knowledge is implicit, but structure or stream of experience.
Your next thought is maybe something like:,, I should start the computer and work."
That thought comes because your are in your work room.

This is something everyone can experience, If one thinks in that direction.
It's perfectly understandable.

But what do you mean with:

The meaningful activity of archetypal feeling and willing, in which our thinking unfolds, still reflects itself as the 'outer world' mostly independent of our activity. So, as a general principle, through the faculty of Divine thinking, we first cohere the soul forms (processes) of the astral body (via imagination at the border of thinking and feeling), then the life forms of the etheric body (via inspiration at the border of feeling and willing), and then the physical forms (via intuition, pure willing). In this way, the coherence we currently find in our living thinking acts as a seed point that radiates out into all the layers of our intuitive context.

The MoG is the event which incarnated the "I" for all human beings?
Do you think there is only on "I"?


It's seems to me that you think of the outer world as a reflection of our inner being, is this right?
What does the sun reflect?
If I say our inner being, it would probably be wrong if we think of it, as we are some top level observer, there are probably many beings involved.
Is there only one "inner being"?


To come back to Christ.
What is the sense of God becoming man?
If one reads only the Bible, would that be enough, to evolve oneself?
It seems like that one need more like a understanding of esoteric knowledge, concentration and the intuitive context text.
Each post from you or Cleric you helps a lot, but gives me some more questions to wrestle with.
Thank you for the effort and time you spent in those post.
You really helped me a lot.

[AshvinP]

In a sense, Christ is the one having this discussion, because neither you nor I would be able to direct our thinking at will (in freedom) towards supersensible realities and communicate them to each other without what he accomplished. Through the Divine "I", our thinking has been brought almost in-phase with perception. In our thought-forms, we have an almost perfect reflection of the meaningful Idea we live in, however it is not a perfect reflection because our thinking still unfolds within the deeper layers of our being that are not yet in-phase. The meaningful activity of archetypal feeling and willing, in which our thinking unfolds, still reflects itself as the 'outer world' mostly independent of our activity. So, as a general principle, through the faculty of Divine thinking, we first cohere the soul forms (processes) of the astral body (via imagination at the border of thinking and feeling), then the life forms of the etheric body (via inspiration at the border of feeling and willing), and then the physical forms (via intuition, pure willing). In this way, the coherence we currently find in our living thinking acts as a seed point that radiates out into all the layers of our intuitive context. It resurrects the deadened layers of our soul, organic, and physical life. Idea and Perception progressively become One, completely in-phase, across all domains - there is no remaining separation of 'inner' and 'outer', 'subjective' and 'objective'.

Can you explain this last paragraph in more detail?

Remind yourself of the intuitive context you live in right now.
You may in a room, you know where you at and in what situation.
You know what you are doing in that room and know the objects you can interact with.
You now that you live in the U.S and that your a human being ........

That knowledge is implicit, but structure or stream of experience.
Your next thought is maybe something like:,, I should start the computer and work."
That thought comes because your are in your work room.

This is something everyone can experience, If one thinks in that direction.
It's perfectly understandable.

But what do you mean with:

The meaningful activity of archetypal feeling and willing, in which our thinking unfolds, still reflects itself as the 'outer world' mostly independent of our activity. So, as a general principle, through the faculty of Divine thinking, we first cohere the soul forms (processes) of the astral body (via imagination at the border of thinking and feeling), then the life forms of the etheric body (via inspiration at the border of feeling and willing), and then the physical forms (via intuition, pure willing). In this way, the coherence we currently find in our living thinking acts as a seed point that radiates out into all the layers of our intuitive context.

The MoG is the event which incarnated the "I" for all human beings?
Do you think there is only on "I"?


It's seems to me that you think of the outer world as a reflection of our inner being, is this right?
What does the sun reflect?
If I say our inner being, it would probably be wrong if we think of it, as we are some top level observer, there are probably many beings involved.
Is there only one "inner being"?

To put it simply, yes, there is only one 'inner being' or core "I" with temporal depth that, in turn, is comprised of manifold relative "I"-perspectives. We can imagine it as a vertical axis of "I"-activity.





So we see the Intuitive Context through which the Cosmic forces, which proceed from the spiritual activity of higher "I"-beings, are pressed down through the human "I" perspective onto the normal sensory screen. Everything we perceive as distributed in space, such as the kingdoms of Nature and processes of consciousness, life, and form, are compressed images/shadows of group "I" perspectives and the higher hierarchies that unfold their activity across temporal rhythms. The more we go up, the more encompassing these temporal rhythms become. 

Now let's return to the phenomenology of thinking. We can use the buzzing fly imagination:

Now take an imaginary fly and move it around in your imagination. Try to compare how it feels in relation to a real fly. Can the motions of your ray of attention that animate the imaginary fly ‘surprise’ you in the way a real fly can, even if you make it very erratic? Can you 'miss' your ray of attention? It is really a very simple thing to observe yet today’s science and philosophy don’t pay attention to such things because it is considered ‘subjective’ and it is dismissed that it may have something to do with reality as a whole. So basically science searches for the laws of time mirrored in our intellectual formulas. What is suggested here is that the actual laws that govern the transformation of the flow of experience are of thought-nature. 

Try this out for a few seconds and then open your eyes and try to imagine how it would be if everything in your space was known in the same way as you knew the imaginary fly movements. If you can look out a window, perhaps you see a bird flying and can imagine how it would be to be as unified - as causally responsible - with the bird's movements as you were with the imaginary fly. This vast difference is why we can speak of Idea and Perception only being in-phase at the tip of our thinking "I"-perspective where we imagine thought-forms like the fly. The bird's movements (soul processes), in contrast, are animated by Ideas from the imaginative plane that are still out-of-phase with our normal "I" perspective. This is indicated in the image with the curvy lines between the circular planes. It is even more starkly out-of-phase with the inspired and intuitive Ideas that animate the plant and mineral kingdoms, the life and physical processes. 

The higher we go, the more we have to encompass processes over long durations of Time with our human ideas to get a dim sense of the forces at work. The plant kingdom transforms over the seasons, for ex., and the mineral kingdom over longer geological timescales. All of this simply indicates that our normal thinking-perceiving unfolds within the Intuitive Context of archetypal forces (Thinking, Feeling ,and Willing) that our "I" perspective does not fully resonate with - the vertical "I"-axis that projects into the tip of our "I" perspective is not fully conscious - so we perceive those forces as the 'outer spatial world' of various inorganic, organic (living), and conscious forms.  We also experience this as our 'inner world' of desires and feelings, life processes (breathing, nourishment, digestion, etc.), and mineral processes of our body. Just as we animate the fly's movement at the tip of our thinking "I" perspective, the higher "I" perspectives animate all these inner-outer processes that make up our bodily organism and environment.

To come back to Christ.
What is the sense of God becoming man?
If one reads only the Bible, would that be enough, to evolve oneself?
It seems like that one need more like a understanding of esoteric knowledge, concentration and the intuitive context text.
Each post from you or Cleric you helps a lot, but gives me some more questions to wrestle with.
Thank you for the effort and time you spent in those post.
You really helped me a lot.

I would say it is most fruitful to concentrate efforts on building up the phenomenological foundation that has already taken root in your soul. Eventually, the truths of the Bible will be born from within you, independently of the text. Then the texts will be experienced in a much fuller richness that even the symbolic approach cannot produce out of itself. For ex., it's interesting to observe there are practically three different modes of scientific thinking depending on the domain of study (these facts are broadly taken from the last two chapters of the etheric phenomenology book, which you can consult for more detail):


1/ casual thinking - this is prevalent in fields such as physics and chemistry, where past phenomena are sought for the appearance of future phenomena in a linear chain of cause and effect; small building blocks form larger structures.

2/ reciprocal thinking - this is prevalent in biology where phenomena simultaneously determine each other in reciprocal behavior over rhythms of time (breathing, circulation, digestion, etc.); the causes for phenomena are to be sought in their present interactions; every part of the organism is necessary for the Whole and the Whole is necessary for the parts to be an 'organism'.

3/ teleological thinking - this is prevalent in psychology and cognitive science where phenomena are structured by a 'final cause' (a wish, desire, intent, etc.); the cause for states of phenomenal transformation are sought in the future, i.e. in the wish, goal, intent, etc. that overarches them.

So there is a threefold structure to our thinking that mirrors the natural spectrums of phenomena we observe - inorganic (physical), organic (etheric), and psychological (astral). Here we have a clear example of Three-in-One, since the domains of inorganic, organic, and psychological phenomena are all interwoven in the higher animals. We can't understand any single animal organism without considering the mutual interrelations of all three domains, which are not reducible to each other.

If we examine early Christian theology, we also find the following associations:

1/ Father - past, tradition, forces of nature, justice (eye for an eye), life of will (virtuous deeds)

2/ Son - present, rhythms of time, balancing, healing (early Christians were considered physicians and ran hospitals), life of feeling (love)

3/ Holy Spirit - future, consciousness, fulfillment of Son's work on Earth, life of thinking (luminous thoughts)

We could also note how the Son is considered the mediator between Father and Spirit, between Nature and Culture, Earth and Heaven ("I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life..."). In the organic domain, the life processes form a biological gradient that mediates between the inorganic (body) and psychological (soul). When we breathe, we take in something from the outer world and give it over to the body. When we reproduce, we take something from the body and give it to the outside world. Similar polarities can be perceived for the other life processes. The etheric processes continually renew the body from decohering into dust and continually support soul activity by bringing bodily processes into them.

When we focus on the meaningful dimension of the phenomenal spectrum, not only their quantitative properties and our theoretical 'explanations' of them, these mutually supporting relationships become evident. In that sense, we can 'read out' the core early theology of Christianity simply from meaningful observation of the interwoven inorganic, organic, and psychological domains of experience. Through such observation, even if we had never heard of the Gospels before, the idea of Three-in-One and the God-Man who incarnated to bridge Matter (Body) and Soul-Spirit and heal/renew the World would naturally arise in our consciousness.

[AshvinP]

By the way, Cleric provided an animated illustration of this same idea in the Deep MAL essay, which is probably much more helpful. It illustrates how the layers of the Intuitive Context delaminated through the iterations/eons. We can never survey these ideas from enough angles to concretize our intuitive orientation to them.

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[Güney27]

Ashvin,

Happy new year (:
I came across this "exercise" in the Archive

The second stage is Imaginative Knowledge, the knowledge which unites with what is given to the pupil in the study-stage. The study is the basis, it must be perfected through individual imaginative knowledge. If you think over various things that I have touched upon in the last lectures, you will find traces — in the echo for instance — of what were everyday occurrences on Saturn. It is possible to look on all around us as a physiognomy of an inner spiritual element. People walk over the earth and it is a conglomeration of rocks and stones to them, but men must learn to grasp that all surrounding them is the true physical expression for the Spirit of the Earth. Just as the body is ensouled, so is the earth planet the external expression for an indwelling spirit. When men look on the earth as possessing body and soul as man does, then only they have an idea of what Goethe meant when he said “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” When you see tears run down the human countenance you do not examine by the laws of physics how quickly or how slowly the tears roll down; they express to you the inner sadness of the soul, just as the smiling cheek is the expression for the soul's inner joy. The pupil must educate himself to see in each single flower in the meadow he crosses, the outer expression of a living being, the expression of the Spirit dwelling in the Earth. Some flowers seem to be tears, others are the joyful expression of the earth's Spirit. Every stone, every plant, every flower, all is for him the outer expression of the indwelling Earth Spirit, its physiognomy that speaks to him. And everything “corruptible” or transitory becomes a “semblance” of an eternal, expressing itself through it. Feelings like these had to be attained by the disciple of the Grail, and by the Rosicrucian.

Steiner seems to suggest to pupils that they should see the world as an symbolic revelation of the spirit.
The reason that I share this passage is because it connects with pagues symbolism. Isn't that wat of thinking strengthen one's capacity for imagination? Or why is there such a training in preparation for initiation?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Happy new year (:
I came across this "exercise" in the Archive

The second stage is Imaginative Knowledge, the knowledge which unites with what is given to the pupil in the study-stage. The study is the basis, it must be perfected through individual imaginative knowledge. If you think over various things that I have touched upon in the last lectures, you will find traces — in the echo for instance — of what were everyday occurrences on Saturn. It is possible to look on all around us as a physiognomy of an inner spiritual element. People walk over the earth and it is a conglomeration of rocks and stones to them, but men must learn to grasp that all surrounding them is the true physical expression for the Spirit of the Earth. Just as the body is ensouled, so is the earth planet the external expression for an indwelling spirit. When men look on the earth as possessing body and soul as man does, then only they have an idea of what Goethe meant when he said “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” When you see tears run down the human countenance you do not examine by the laws of physics how quickly or how slowly the tears roll down; they express to you the inner sadness of the soul, just as the smiling cheek is the expression for the soul's inner joy. The pupil must educate himself to see in each single flower in the meadow he crosses, the outer expression of a living being, the expression of the Spirit dwelling in the Earth. Some flowers seem to be tears, others are the joyful expression of the earth's Spirit. Every stone, every plant, every flower, all is for him the outer expression of the indwelling Earth Spirit, its physiognomy that speaks to him. And everything “corruptible” or transitory becomes a “semblance” of an eternal, expressing itself through it. Feelings like these had to be attained by the disciple of the Grail, and by the Rosicrucian.

Steiner seems to suggest to pupils that they should see the world as an symbolic revelation of the spirit.
The reason that I share this passage is because it connects with pagues symbolism. Isn't that wat of thinking strengthen one's capacity for imagination? Or why is there such a training in preparation for initiation?

Happy new year, Guney!

Sure, it is better to understand the World appearances as symbols for inner realities than to confuse them for 'things-themselves' or to declare they are thin dream images that evaporate when we die. In the former case, at least we realize they are the outer physiognomy of inner soul-spirit activity. It never hurts to decondition our thinking from materialistic and atomistic intuition, and one way to do that is through pursuits such as Pageau's symbolism.

We should remember, though, that neither the 'imaginative knowledge' of the ancients nor that attained through modern initiation is the same thing as the intellect matching up perceptual states or ancient 'concepts' with symbolic meanings. In a certain sense, the intellect is only forced to do that as a substitute for imaginative knowledge, because it is still interacting in an external manner with the soul-spirit forces that impress the appearances. Once our thinking organism penetrates to the inner dimension of these forces, we don't need to struggle to find symbolic meanings for the World Content. Instead, the symbolic meaning is embedded within the imaginative thinking gestures themselves.

Remember how we don't reflect on the meaning of our inner voice - the words we hear when we think are immediately united with their meaning. That is why we can use our conceptual voice to make sense of all other experiences. If we perceive the color red and say "this color is a symbol for aggressive inner activity", someone can rightly question our interpretation and say 'sure it might be, but it could also be a symbol for loving inner activity'. But if we perceive the sounds of our inner voice and report the meaning of the thoughts we hear, no one can question whether we are understanding the meaning correctly. If we had to reflect on the sounds and match them up with the proper meanings like we do with colors, we would never be able to think!

For imaginative cognition, we should try to sense how this same principle applies at a deeper, more holistic level of thinking-perception. It would make no sense for someone to question the meaning experienced together with these holistic images, for the same reason it makes no sense to question the meaning experienced together with the inner conceptual voice. Now that doesn't mean there is no room for error - once the imagistic meaning is condensed into concepts and we try to fit those concepts together to work out some deeper explanation, we may very well stray into error. But the meaning of the symbolic experience itself cannot be questioned any more than the words we hear when we think - we don't need to reflect on the imaginations and match them up with symbolic meanings.

So now one may ask, 'but what's the harm in doing the intellectual symbolic approach as preparation for imaginative knowledge?'. For one, there is always the risk of error sneaking in with the initial process of intellectually attaching symbolic meaning to perceptions. The intellect can only encompass so many perceptions at any given time, so it is generally prone to isolating a perception, like the color red, and attaching some symbolic meaning based on what seems to make the most sense at the time. That meaning may be more or less accurate a very broad level and at low resolution, but it is decontextualized from many other perceptual factors that would help us integrate the mere symbolic meaning with a deeper 'literal' meaning. The latter generally revolves around complex karmic streams of destiny which elucidate how the concrete spiritual became symbolic perceptual and how it will become concrete spiritual again, through our evolving consciousness.

The other risk is that we get so enamored with the symbolic approach that we forget it is only a stepping stone to the deeper experiential realities of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. One cannot help but notice this happens a lot. It is indicated by the simple fact that these symbolic thinkers don't actually speak about awakening deeper within the cognitive flow and, to a certain extent, actually look down upon any 'esoteric' suggestion to experience spiritual activity from the inner dimension. Similar to the person with nondual mystical experience, any suggestion to start afresh and take our humble beginnings from the seed point of concentrated thinking, where we have crystal clear intuition of the creative process of reality, and by which we make sense of all other experience, is seen as either nonsense or a step back to more trivial ideas about spiritual reality. It isn't even imagined why doing such a thing would lead to any deeper insight into the objective structure of reality.

In connection with etheric phenomenology, I can give the example of a book on process philosophy-science that I have been reading.

Our argument in this essay has been that process ontology is far more concordant with the understanding of the living world provided by contemporary biology than its substantialist rival. The more we learn about life, the more necessary a process perspective becomes. This is particularly the case with regard to the increasing realization of the omnipresence of symbiosis, which directly challenges deeply entrenched substantialist assumptions about the living world. Thus the empirical findings of biology are inexorably driving us towards processualism, even if it is less intuitive than substantialism. It is interesting to observe that physics, which has traditionally been regarded as the more advanced science, was pushed towards process ontology about a century ago (as was argued by Whitehead and others), and now biology—if we and the other contributors to this volume are correct—is following suit. Might this perhaps be an indication that the shift from substantialism to processualism is just something that all sciences go through as they develop?

Nicholson, Daniel J.; Dupré, John. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (p. 39). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

So process philosophers recognize that reality cannot be properly understood as thing-like in nature but we must investigate phenomena as temporally extended and organic processes, each phenomenal frame serving an organic function within the Whole. In a certain sense, this is a much more symbolic and imaginative understanding of the living World Content. It is definitely an advance from old substance metaphysics and corresponding theories of natural science. But the last question above already hints that the most obvious place to look for answers to developing processual science further remains in the blind spot. The author is more inclined to believe this shift just happens as a matter of course than to understand it as the expression of spiritual intents that drive the evolution of consciousness. The latter can only be experientially realized when we retrace our own intents into their deeper layers through the portal of concentration and related exercises for purifying the will.

What is it that connects discrete perceptual frames into meaningful wholes to begin with and thereby conceives temporal unities? In other words, what is it that conceives process philosophy, theology, science, etc.? We know that is our thinking activity and it rarely occurs for even the insightful process philosophers to search for the true 'laws' of reality in the dynamics of thinking itself. Perhaps the deeper explanations for why humanity is now able to philosophically, scientifically, and theologically conceive reality as processual in nature are to be found in the processual activity that is doing the conceiving. But such a suggestion is still considered 'unscientific' in nature and met with the greatest prejudice in all quarters. The intellect has a found a new and undoubtedly enlivening and helpful tool for thinking about biological processes, so it will run with that for as long as possible (this is related to what Cleric is discussing with Cosmin here). But it won't realize the true fruits of this living thinking until it also realizes the greater Cosmic tasks to which it is pointing, concealed within the movements of our intimate spiritual activity. It is here where the symbolic and the literal are truly integrated.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

Happy new year (:
I came across this "exercise" in the Archive

The second stage is Imaginative Knowledge, the knowledge which unites with what is given to the pupil in the study-stage. The study is the basis, it must be perfected through individual imaginative knowledge. If you think over various things that I have touched upon in the last lectures, you will find traces — in the echo for instance — of what were everyday occurrences on Saturn. It is possible to look on all around us as a physiognomy of an inner spiritual element. People walk over the earth and it is a conglomeration of rocks and stones to them, but men must learn to grasp that all surrounding them is the true physical expression for the Spirit of the Earth. Just as the body is ensouled, so is the earth planet the external expression for an indwelling spirit. When men look on the earth as possessing body and soul as man does, then only they have an idea of what Goethe meant when he said “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” When you see tears run down the human countenance you do not examine by the laws of physics how quickly or how slowly the tears roll down; they express to you the inner sadness of the soul, just as the smiling cheek is the expression for the soul's inner joy. The pupil must educate himself to see in each single flower in the meadow he crosses, the outer expression of a living being, the expression of the Spirit dwelling in the Earth. Some flowers seem to be tears, others are the joyful expression of the earth's Spirit. Every stone, every plant, every flower, all is for him the outer expression of the indwelling Earth Spirit, its physiognomy that speaks to him. And everything “corruptible” or transitory becomes a “semblance” of an eternal, expressing itself through it. Feelings like these had to be attained by the disciple of the Grail, and by the Rosicrucian.

Steiner seems to suggest to pupils that they should see the world as an symbolic revelation of the spirit.
The reason that I share this passage is because it connects with pagues symbolism. Isn't that wat of thinking strengthen one's capacity for imagination? Or why is there such a training in preparation for initiation?

Happy new year, Guney!

Sure, it is better to understand the World appearances as symbols for inner realities than to confuse them for 'things-themselves' or to declare they are thin dream images that evaporate when we die. In the former case, at least we realize they are the outer physiognomy of inner soul-spirit activity. It never hurts to decondition our thinking from materialistic and atomistic intuition, and one way to do that is through pursuits such as Pageau's symbolism.

We should remember, though, that neither the 'imaginative knowledge' of the ancients nor that attained through modern initiation is the same thing as the intellect matching up perceptual states or ancient 'concepts' with symbolic meanings. In a certain sense, the intellect is only forced to do that as a substitute for imaginative knowledge, because it is still interacting in an external manner with the soul-spirit forces that impress the appearances. Once our thinking organism penetrates to the inner dimension of these forces, we don't need to struggle to find symbolic meanings for the World Content. Instead, the symbolic meaning is embedded within the imaginative thinking gestures themselves.

Remember how we don't reflect on the meaning of our inner voice - the words we hear when we think are immediately united with their meaning. That is why we can use our conceptual voice to make sense of all other experiences. If we perceive the color red and say "this color is a symbol for aggressive inner activity", someone can rightly question our interpretation and say 'sure it might be, but it could also be a symbol for loving inner activity'. But if we perceive the sounds of our inner voice and report the meaning of the thoughts we hear, no one can question whether we are understanding the meaning correctly. If we had to reflect on the sounds and match them up with the proper meanings like we do with colors, we would never be able to think!

For imaginative cognition, we should try to sense how this same principle applies at a deeper, more holistic level of thinking-perception. It would make no sense for someone to question the meaning experienced together with these holistic images, for the same reason it makes no sense to question the meaning experienced together with the inner conceptual voice. Now that doesn't mean there is no room for error - once the imagistic meaning is condensed into concepts and we try to fit those concepts together to work out some deeper explanation, we may very well stray into error. But the meaning of the symbolic experience itself cannot be questioned any more than the words we hear when we think - we don't need to reflect on the imaginations and match them up with symbolic meanings.

So now one may ask, 'but what's the harm in doing the intellectual symbolic approach as preparation for imaginative knowledge?'. For one, there is always the risk of error sneaking in with the initial process of intellectually attaching symbolic meaning to perceptions. The intellect can only encompass so many perceptions at any given time, so it is generally prone to isolating a perception, like the color red, and attaching some symbolic meaning based on what seems to make the most sense at the time. That meaning may be more or less accurate a very broad level and at low resolution, but it is decontextualized from many other perceptual factors that would help us integrate the mere symbolic meaning with a deeper 'literal' meaning. The latter generally revolves around complex karmic streams of destiny which elucidate how the concrete spiritual became symbolic perceptual and how it will become concrete spiritual again, through our evolving consciousness.

The other risk is that we get so enamored with the symbolic approach that we forget it is only a stepping stone to the deeper experiential realities of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. One cannot help but notice this happens a lot. It is indicated by the simple fact that these symbolic thinkers don't actually speak about awakening deeper within the cognitive flow and, to a certain extent, actually look down upon any 'esoteric' suggestion to experience spiritual activity from the inner dimension. Similar to the person with nondual mystical experience, any suggestion to start afresh and take our humble beginnings from the seed point of concentrated thinking, where we have crystal clear intuition of the creative process of reality, and by which we make sense of all other experience, is seen as either nonsense or a step back to more trivial ideas about spiritual reality. It isn't even imagined why doing such a thing would lead to any deeper insight into the objective structure of reality.

In connection with etheric phenomenology, I can give the example of a book on process philosophy-science that I have been reading.

Our argument in this essay has been that process ontology is far more concordant with the understanding of the living world provided by contemporary biology than its substantialist rival. The more we learn about life, the more necessary a process perspective becomes. This is particularly the case with regard to the increasing realization of the omnipresence of symbiosis, which directly challenges deeply entrenched substantialist assumptions about the living world. Thus the empirical findings of biology are inexorably driving us towards processualism, even if it is less intuitive than substantialism. It is interesting to observe that physics, which has traditionally been regarded as the more advanced science, was pushed towards process ontology about a century ago (as was argued by Whitehead and others), and now biology—if we and the other contributors to this volume are correct—is following suit. Might this perhaps be an indication that the shift from substantialism to processualism is just something that all sciences go through as they develop?

Nicholson, Daniel J.; Dupré, John. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (p. 39). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

So process philosophers recognize that reality cannot be properly understood as thing-like in nature but we must investigate phenomena as temporally extended and organic processes, each phenomenal frame serving an organic function within the Whole. In a certain sense, this is a much more symbolic and imaginative understanding of the living World Content. It is definitely an advance from old substance metaphysics and corresponding theories of natural science. But the last question above already hints that the most obvious place to look for answers to developing processual science further remains in the blind spot. The author is more inclined to believe this shift just happens as a matter of course than to understand it as the expression of spiritual intents that drive the evolution of consciousness. The latter can only be experientially realized when we retrace our own intents into their deeper layers through the portal of concentration and related exercises for purifying the will.

What is it that connects discrete perceptual frames into meaningful wholes to begin with and thereby conceives temporal unities? In other words, what is it that conceives process philosophy, theology, science, etc.? We know that is our thinking activity and it rarely occurs for even the insightful process philosophers to search for the true 'laws' of reality in the dynamics of thinking itself. Perhaps the deeper explanations for why humanity is now able to philosophically, scientifically, and theologically conceive reality as processual in nature are to be found in the processual activity that is doing the conceiving. But such a suggestion is still considered 'unscientific' in nature and met with the greatest prejudice in all quarters. The intellect has a found a new and undoubtedly enlivening and helpful tool for thinking about biological processes, so it will run with that for as long as possible (this is related to what Cleric is discussing with Cosmin here). But it won't realize the true fruits of this living thinking until it also realizes the greater Cosmic tasks to which it is pointing, concealed within the movements of our intimate spiritual activity. It is here where the symbolic and the literal are truly integrated.

By the way, just to be clear, none of what I wrote about 'intellectual symbolic thinking' above should be applied to metaphorical thinking that is used to navigate our direct experience of spiritual activity and phenomena. The metaphorical approach is a critical bridge to higher cognition, and lkkewise our ability to discuss higher insights, because spiritual activity cannot behold itself as some perceptual object, like we perceive colors around us. With the latter, I can simply describe the colors and how they transform when I mix them together or when I turn my attention from one part of the perceptual field to another and so forth. But as soon as I try to describe my spiritual activity and inner experience in this way, it morphs and eludes me. I cant stand comfortably apart from the activity and describe it in normal trains of sense based concepts. That is where imaginative metaphors become invaluable for pointing to the inner dynamics in a way that is quite experiential, if we work through the metaphors energetically and persistently. This is quite different than taking sensory perceptions-concepts and simply attaching symbolic significance to them as representing psychic or spiritual states of being. Again that can be helpful for limited uses, but can also become misleading or an obstacle to further inner development.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

Happy new year (:
I came across this "exercise" in the Archive



Steiner seems to suggest to pupils that they should see the world as an symbolic revelation of the spirit.
The reason that I share this passage is because it connects with pagues symbolism. Isn't that wat of thinking strengthen one's capacity for imagination? Or why is there such a training in preparation for initiation?

Happy new year, Guney!

Sure, it is better to understand the World appearances as symbols for inner realities than to confuse them for 'things-themselves' or to declare they are thin dream images that evaporate when we die. In the former case, at least we realize they are the outer physiognomy of inner soul-spirit activity. It never hurts to decondition our thinking from materialistic and atomistic intuition, and one way to do that is through pursuits such as Pageau's symbolism.

We should remember, though, that neither the 'imaginative knowledge' of the ancients nor that attained through modern initiation is the same thing as the intellect matching up perceptual states or ancient 'concepts' with symbolic meanings. In a certain sense, the intellect is only forced to do that as a substitute for imaginative knowledge, because it is still interacting in an external manner with the soul-spirit forces that impress the appearances. Once our thinking organism penetrates to the inner dimension of these forces, we don't need to struggle to find symbolic meanings for the World Content. Instead, the symbolic meaning is embedded within the imaginative thinking gestures themselves.

Remember how we don't reflect on the meaning of our inner voice - the words we hear when we think are immediately united with their meaning. That is why we can use our conceptual voice to make sense of all other experiences. If we perceive the color red and say "this color is a symbol for aggressive inner activity", someone can rightly question our interpretation and say 'sure it might be, but it could also be a symbol for loving inner activity'. But if we perceive the sounds of our inner voice and report the meaning of the thoughts we hear, no one can question whether we are understanding the meaning correctly. If we had to reflect on the sounds and match them up with the proper meanings like we do with colors, we would never be able to think!

For imaginative cognition, we should try to sense how this same principle applies at a deeper, more holistic level of thinking-perception. It would make no sense for someone to question the meaning experienced together with these holistic images, for the same reason it makes no sense to question the meaning experienced together with the inner conceptual voice. Now that doesn't mean there is no room for error - once the imagistic meaning is condensed into concepts and we try to fit those concepts together to work out some deeper explanation, we may very well stray into error. But the meaning of the symbolic experience itself cannot be questioned any more than the words we hear when we think - we don't need to reflect on the imaginations and match them up with symbolic meanings.

So now one may ask, 'but what's the harm in doing the intellectual symbolic approach as preparation for imaginative knowledge?'. For one, there is always the risk of error sneaking in with the initial process of intellectually attaching symbolic meaning to perceptions. The intellect can only encompass so many perceptions at any given time, so it is generally prone to isolating a perception, like the color red, and attaching some symbolic meaning based on what seems to make the most sense at the time. That meaning may be more or less accurate a very broad level and at low resolution, but it is decontextualized from many other perceptual factors that would help us integrate the mere symbolic meaning with a deeper 'literal' meaning. The latter generally revolves around complex karmic streams of destiny which elucidate how the concrete spiritual became symbolic perceptual and how it will become concrete spiritual again, through our evolving consciousness.

The other risk is that we get so enamored with the symbolic approach that we forget it is only a stepping stone to the deeper experiential realities of imaginative, inspired, and intuitive knowledge. One cannot help but notice this happens a lot. It is indicated by the simple fact that these symbolic thinkers don't actually speak about awakening deeper within the cognitive flow and, to a certain extent, actually look down upon any 'esoteric' suggestion to experience spiritual activity from the inner dimension. Similar to the person with nondual mystical experience, any suggestion to start afresh and take our humble beginnings from the seed point of concentrated thinking, where we have crystal clear intuition of the creative process of reality, and by which we make sense of all other experience, is seen as either nonsense or a step back to more trivial ideas about spiritual reality. It isn't even imagined why doing such a thing would lead to any deeper insight into the objective structure of reality.

In connection with etheric phenomenology, I can give the example of a book on process philosophy-science that I have been reading.

Our argument in this essay has been that process ontology is far more concordant with the understanding of the living world provided by contemporary biology than its substantialist rival. The more we learn about life, the more necessary a process perspective becomes. This is particularly the case with regard to the increasing realization of the omnipresence of symbiosis, which directly challenges deeply entrenched substantialist assumptions about the living world. Thus the empirical findings of biology are inexorably driving us towards processualism, even if it is less intuitive than substantialism. It is interesting to observe that physics, which has traditionally been regarded as the more advanced science, was pushed towards process ontology about a century ago (as was argued by Whitehead and others), and now biology—if we and the other contributors to this volume are correct—is following suit. Might this perhaps be an indication that the shift from substantialism to processualism is just something that all sciences go through as they develop?

Nicholson, Daniel J.; Dupré, John. Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology (p. 39). OUP Oxford. Kindle Edition.

So process philosophers recognize that reality cannot be properly understood as thing-like in nature but we must investigate phenomena as temporally extended and organic processes, each phenomenal frame serving an organic function within the Whole. In a certain sense, this is a much more symbolic and imaginative understanding of the living World Content. It is definitely an advance from old substance metaphysics and corresponding theories of natural science. But the last question above already hints that the most obvious place to look for answers to developing processual science further remains in the blind spot. The author is more inclined to believe this shift just happens as a matter of course than to understand it as the expression of spiritual intents that drive the evolution of consciousness. The latter can only be experientially realized when we retrace our own intents into their deeper layers through the portal of concentration and related exercises for purifying the will.

What is it that connects discrete perceptual frames into meaningful wholes to begin with and thereby conceives temporal unities? In other words, what is it that conceives process philosophy, theology, science, etc.? We know that is our thinking activity and it rarely occurs for even the insightful process philosophers to search for the true 'laws' of reality in the dynamics of thinking itself. Perhaps the deeper explanations for why humanity is now able to philosophically, scientifically, and theologically conceive reality as processual in nature are to be found in the processual activity that is doing the conceiving. But such a suggestion is still considered 'unscientific' in nature and met with the greatest prejudice in all quarters. The intellect has a found a new and undoubtedly enlivening and helpful tool for thinking about biological processes, so it will run with that for as long as possible (this is related to what Cleric is discussing with Cosmin here). But it won't realize the true fruits of this living thinking until it also realizes the greater Cosmic tasks to which it is pointing, concealed within the movements of our intimate spiritual activity. It is here where the symbolic and the literal are truly integrated.

By the way, just to be clear, none of what I wrote about 'intellectual symbolic thinking' above should be applied to metaphorical thinking that is used to navigate our direct experience of spiritual activity and phenomena. The metaphorical approach is a critical bridge to higher cognition, and lkkewise our ability to discuss higher insights, because spiritual activity cannot behold itself as some perceptual object, like we perceive colors around us. With the latter, I can simply describe the colors and how they transform when I mix them together or when I turn my attention from one part of the perceptual field to another and so forth. But as soon as I try to describe my spiritual activity and inner experience in this way, it morphs and eludes me. I cant stand comfortably apart from the activity and describe it in normal trains of sense based concepts. That is where imaginative metaphors become invaluable for pointing to the inner dynamics in a way that is quite experiential, if we work through the metaphors energetically and persistently. This is quite different than taking sensory perceptions-concepts and simply attaching symbolic significance to them as representing psychic or spiritual states of being. Again that can be helpful for limited uses, but can also become misleading or an obstacle to further inner development.

Ashvin,

do you think that for example the sin of lust, ,is a living being, or is it illustrated as one symbolically in order to be grasped?

I know a woman who shares her personal experience with visualization (meditation), and talks about OBE type experiences. They really sound like lucid dreams, but she claims that these experience are on another state of consciousness. She say its on the Astral (lower) plane. The thing that strikes me is that these experience Sound like sensory like phenomena. The entities are the same often times, but the appear in a sensory manner.

Would you say that these experiences are just phantasy, or experiences of real entities?
I didn't find something from Steiner on this topic.

Would you recommend the process biology book?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

do you think that for example the sin of lust, ,is a living being, or is it illustrated as one symbolically in order to be grasped?

I know a woman who shares her personal experience with visualization (meditation), and talks about OBE type experiences. They really sound like lucid dreams, but she claims that these experience are on another state of consciousness. She say its on the Astral (lower) plane. The thing that strikes me is that these experience Sound like sensory like phenomena. The entities are the same often times, but the appear in a sensory manner.

Would you say that these experiences are just phantasy, or experiences of real entities?
I didn't find something from Steiner on this topic.

Guney,

This is a core part of the issue with the usual 'symbolic approach' when pursued as a standalone framework. We can easily lose sight of the otherwise obvious reality (obvious to phenomenological thinking) that we are always and only dealing with living idea-beings. Remember the TC spectrum. All we know phenomenally is (a) perceptual states that are correlated with one another in various complicated yet lawful ways, and (b) the cognitively willed intent (idea) that brings all these separate perceptual states into a lawful harmony. Some of these ideas I feel creatively responsible for, like the idea of 'grabbing the cup on the table' or 'going to turn the light on' or 'going to the grocery store', and others I only passively reflect on, like the ideas of cycling through 'day/night, seasons, epochs and platonic years, etc.' So we are always flowing within a nested context of Ideas - ever-expansive rhythms - that bring meaningful unity to the 'frames' of our experiential flow.

What could this ever-expansive meaningful temporal context be? If we say it is something of a different nature than our idea of 'going to the store' that contributes to uniting the perceptual frames of our walk or drive, then we have an irreconcilable dualism. Even if we call it "consciousness", "will", "formlessness", etc. we have a hard problem that divides the meaningful context from our intimate experience of cognitively willed intent (idea). So if our idea of 'going to the store', experienced from our first-person perspective, is what structures (in part) our lawful perceptual flow from our house to the store, then there is no reason to think the higher-order Ideas are any different. And if we pursue the phenomenology of spiritual activity deeper and deeper through the portal of concentration, we can indeed experience something of the first-person perspectives responsible for those overarching Earthly and Cosmic rhythms.

What we call species, gender, race, nation, etc., which is basically a way of abstractly referring to temporally thick perceptual states of being at various scales of existence, are already enacted Ideas that, from our current perspective, still have a certain momentum in structuring our current perceptual flow. That same principles applies to the domain of our soul-life, where we experience the flow of impulses and feelings. These involve somewhat more recently enacted Ideas than those structuring the natural domain, yet still past. Again, we cannot realistically speak of Ideas apart from first-person living perspective of beings. It is only through the descent into convoluted sensory consciousness that we could begin fragmenting the living relations of beings into mineral concepts and perceptual objects. When we forget about this process, we start believing the concepts/symbols are more real or 'fundamental' than the living relations they were extracted from. Although this problem is quite evident when we talk about materialists who conceive of abstract particles, energy, spacetime, quantum fields, etc. as the ground of existence, we often lose sight when the problem extends itself into spiritual thinking.

So that's what happens with the lady you reference. She is experiencing real entities, living relations of beings, because that's all there can possibly be to experience. But she is experiencing those relations through the lens of extracted sense-based concepts, like we all normally do, and has probably forgotten that the lens exists, because she arrived at the experience through somewhat unconventional means. This is a common occurrence that Cleric has pointed to and elucidated in relation to psychedelics, NDEs, OBEs, etc. Steiner also points to this danger in various places. Even if such people realize the Maya of normal sensory existence, they forget that they are carrying this same Maya with them into the astral experiences. We can never arrive at a proper understanding of our relation to the living constellation of Idea-beings in this way.

Would you recommend the process biology book?

Sure, it is a very interesting book with a lot of helpful scientific details and philosophical considerations. I use it mostly as a reference tool and to read snippets on certain topics as I am inspired to. Here is a list of the contents:

Table of Contents:

Introduction.
A manifesto for a processual philosophy of biology / John Dupré and Daniel J. Nicholson
Metaphysics.
Processes and precipitates / Peter Simons
Dispositionalism: a dynamic theory of causation / Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford
Biological processes: criteria of identity and persistence / James DiFrisco
Genidentity and biological processes / Thomas Pradeu
Ontological tools for the process turn in biology: some basic notions of general process theory / Johanna Seibt
Organisms.
Reconceptualizing the organism: from complex machine to flowing stream / Daniel J. Nicholson
Objectcy and agency: towards a methodological vitalism / Denis M. Walsh
Symbiosis, transient biological individuality, and evolutionary processes / Frédéric Bouchard
From organizations of processes to organisms and other biological individuals / Argyris Arnellos
Development and evolution. Developmental systems theory as a process theory / Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz
Waddington's processual epigenetics and the debate over cryptic variability / Flavia Fabris
Capturing processes: the interplay of modelling strategies and conceptual understanding in developmental biology / Laura Nuño de la Rosa
Intersecting processes are necessary explanantia for evolutionary biology, but challenge retrodiction / Eric Bapteste and Gemma Anderson
Implications and applications.
A process ontology for macromolecular biology / Stephan Guttinger
A processual perspective on cancer / Marta Bertolaso and John Dupré
Measuring the world: olfaction as a process model of perception / Ann-Sophie Barwich
Persona as biological processes: a bio-processual way out of the personal identity dilemma / Anne Sophie Meincke.