Symphony

[AshvinP]

I suppose it depends what we mean by 'concept'. If we mean that as synonymous with all forms of higher ideation, then yes. But usually we differentiate between intuition, inspiration, imagination, and intellect, and 'concepts' are the aliased forms of ideation familiar to the intellect. We experience these concepts as point-like entities that serve a balancing function for the higher ideal relations. These are critical because, without them, we would be flowing in ever-morphing currents of meaning that we simply can't stop to grasp and freely orient toward, i.e. we would become infantile or animalistic. But the concepts are like pieces of bone, mineral extracts, that belong to a living organism, which is the language as a whole, the genius of language. And our whole experience of atomized perceptions that have become spatially fixed is related to this conceptual life.

We could say that, in general, we are always trying to recover holistic intuition of the Cosmic evolutionary process. Quite literally everything we do, apart from blindly following lower impulses, is a means to that end (and even blindly following impulses was a means to that end when the impulses were managed for us by higher beings, such as during early childhood). We first awaken to our own being in our life of imaginations, but only in a very dreamy way, where we cannot be said to have an individual will - there is no "I" who thinks. Then we further awaken in more lucid consciousness through dim mental pictures and intellectual concepts, the encoded imaginations. Even at this stage, for the ancient Greeks for example, thinking was still flowing mostly in the etheric space. They experienced their thoughts as harmoniously ordered for them by the Logos. The "I" who thinks was nascent but not fully blossomed. It is only much later that thoughts became merged with the mineral-physical element of the brain, which allows for individual thinkers who feel causally responsible for ordering thoughts. 

What an effective summary of modern cognition you have given here, Ashvin, thanks! So, about language, are you saying that the genius of language is one for the whole of humanity - not differentiated for the various cultures - and that what is differentiated are only our decohered worldly idioms? Basically you are equalling language with Logos, right? Language, in this take, is the same as spiritual-ideal flow, and our vocabularies in culturally differentiated idioms are simply the decoheared reverberation, or fragmentation, of the former through the aliasing filter of intellect, brain, and individuated consciousness. In this sense, there is the Logos in the spiritual world, and human language is nothing other than the modus operandi of the intellect as it attempts a processing of the Logos (encoding), further colored - as it precipitates into the sensory spectrum - by the various soul-specific hues characterizing the many human cultural streams, if I’m getting this right.

I think that's generally correct. There are certainly differentiated geniuses of language whose centers of coherence and interfering ideational activity are expressed in the differentiated linguistic cultures. Yet all these linguistic cultures also resolve into a higher organic Unity that we could associate with the Logos (just as all genders, races, temperaments, etc. resolve into a higher Unity). All of these are now differentiated streams of evolution, beings at different stages of development, existing 'side by side' in space. 

It's interesting to note how each language has its own life cycle, as Barfield expresses below. In that sense, what we abstractly conceive as language and its transformations over time (studied by philology) is the evolving life of archetypal beings. Similar to how the individual's thinking crystallizes from flowing imagination to its densest state around age 28-35, the language as a whole crystallizes after some many hundreds of years. This doesn't mean the consciousness of the archetypal being becomes abstract and externalized like ours, but simply that its further awakening becomes the grounds of our thinking freedom. As their life withdraws from the linguistic space, a 'vacuum' is created which human consciousness must freely fill with living ideas and ideals. That freedom in thought can be expanded insofar as we become conscious of how such beings intimately structure our soul life, i.e. we become their disciples, so to speak, and learn to become creatively and ethically responsible for those domains of soul life. 

What the memory is to the human word the Creator himself, God the Father, is to the Divine Word. If I venture to reflect on the problem of meaning in language in terms of this kind of psychology, I find myself led on into a number of consequential reflections. Thus memory differs from its Creator in the fact that it is not permanent. It fades with time. In the same way, and no doubt for that reason, language fades.

As has often been pointed out, words meanings in them fade with the repeated use that they undergo with the lapse of time. Many philologists, for instance, have drawn attention to the fact that, if we look into their history, most words present the appearance of "fossilized metaphors". That is one of the reasons why poetry is needed as well as prose. The languages of all civilized peoples, it has been pointed out, have undergone a process of "sedimentation". It is not so much meaning that they present us with now as the husks of meaning. There is, however, a means by which the faded words, the fossilized metaphors, can be revivified, so that meaning again shines through them, so that language once again begins to reveal something behind or beyond its merely sensuous references. And that something is, precisely, the act of using language and the faculty of apprehending it as a tissue of symbols. In the case of religion, it is in much the same way and, indeed, it is in close association with that very process of sedimentation - that what began as revelation fades into tradition. And here again the only known remedy for sedimentation appears to be the way of symbol. For tradition to re-acquire the pristine energy, so to speak, of revelation, it needs to be apprehended not only as historical record but also as a symbol.

From a more metaphysical angle, all is Cosmic Speech (of the same logical essence as human language) that convolutes into more densified states of aggregation, or narrowed temporal curvatures, until reaching the perceptual manifestations we are familiar with, the mental pictures and verbal concepts. These perceptual manifestations encode all the higher forces (streams of destiny) so that the latter are, in a very real sense, still present in the former. But since they are all flattened and merged together, we normally experience this as a dualized experience between the mysterious forces that make our thinking-perception possible, on the one hand (the active gestures from Cleric's post), and the content of that thinking-perception, on the other (the imaginative auditory or visual aspect). Eventually we even lose sight of the former, or experience it only as homogenous 'inwardness', and that allows us to conceive of the perceptual contents as 'realities-in-themselves', without any corresponding inwardness of their own, instead of symbolic testimonies for the active depth of our intuitive being.

The higher forces are then present entirely within the perceptual content, which is the same 'within' as our soul space, as that which gives the content meaningful coherence, vitality, and concrete beingness. Ironically, it is that presence of the higher forces within the content that gives modern thinkers a basis to deny the higher forces altogether, since the content now feels so 'concrete' in comparison to our ideas about the content, which feel insubstantial, as long as the real-time thinking which animates the content remains in the blind spot. The meaning we experience during every state of thought-perception is like a constricted aperture of the totality of Cosmic 'storylines' that make the state possible. It is because all the higher forces are compressed into our thinking-perception that, through concentration, the thought-image can delaminate into the expansive peripheral background of our meditative environment as Cleric described. As Steiner put it, during normal life we experience ourselves as a center looking out toward a periphery, but after death we invert to feel that we are the periphery looking inwards toward a center.

Once we get to this stage, though, the holistic intuition is very 'chopped up', temporally decohered. This whole process has a direct influence on how the perceptual landscape is experienced. The latter takes on clearer outlines, especially in vision and hearing, yet it is also more fragmented, atomistic, fixed in space. Speech and writing becomes prosaic, seemingly devoid of the imaginatively flowing spiritual element that reverberated in the ancient consciousness.

Yes, it’s easy to think here about the poetic verses of Homer's Odyssey and other examples of Greek literature. An interesting reflection in this respect would probably be: how to understand as non-prosaic and imaginative a Greek text of the more scientific type? Quoting here a random passage from Ptolemy’s Almagest (slightly later than ancient Greece, but still close in time). Granted that one problem is, we are considering a translation, and granted that the inner process is just that, inner, and not necessarily appearing at the level of sounded out words, for me it’s impossible to detect, in expressions of this kind, the signs of a different inner process, compared to modern, fully decohered brain-generated language.

Now if this motion of the planets too took place along circles parallel to the equator, that is, about the poles which produce the first kind of revolution, it would be sufficient to assign a single kind of revolution to all alike, analogous to the first. For in that case it would have seemed plausible that the movements which they undergo are caused by various retardations, and not by a motion in the opposite direction. But as it is, in addition to their movement towards the east, they are seen to deviate continuously to the north and south [of the equator]. Moreover the amount of this deviation cannot be explained as the result of a uniformly-acting force pushing them to the side: from that point of view it is irregular, but it is regular if considered as the result of [motion on] a circle inclined to the equator.

Right, by the time of Plato and especially Aristotle, it is already very difficult to trace the inner differences in how thought is experienced. After the time of Christ incarnate, it is even more difficult since that thinking becomes increasingly more like ours, which I think is reflected in your Ptolemy quote. That is especially the case since we are practically forced to project our current thinking experience back onto the ancient text until we have delaminated more of our own inner space. Until then, there simply isn't anything to compare it to that gives us a good sense of where the differences may reside. That is why, with mere intellectual reasoning, the only safe way to try and understand what was being conveyed back then is a phenomenology of transformations in the archetypal patterns of thinking over large durations of time where certain body and soul members were more 'in focus' than others, as outlined by Steiner in various places. That at least gives us a sense of what aspects of thinking experience were prominent and emphasized over others. If nothing else, it is most helpful to keep the fulcrum of the Christ events in sight, when the thinking-perceptual flow sort of 'dammed up' and reversed.