Symphony

[AshvinP]

I think that, even if this path is accessible in principle to anyone, there might be degrees of ability to open up to the phenomenological approach. In my case I feel both resistance and a lack a spiritual fit, so to say. But I'm sure there's still something I can do, even if I can't make progress at a fast pace like you and Ashvin did. Maybe this is relatable for someone else reading here.

I also have a question here, Federica. Is there something particular in the recent phenomenological essays that you are struggling with at a conceptual level, or is it just that the harmonious conceptual framework which you grasp seems to remain floating from your direct experience of spiritual activity in relation to the layered constraints of the World groove? Perhaps not only your direct experience, but it remains floating from the understanding of human historical development as well?

Ashvin, It seems to me that you have already asked me this ‘question’ at least two times in this thread.
I tried to answer it thoroughly each time, but apparently the responses do not satisfy you?
To repeat: I don’t have conceptual issues either with the essays, or with Cleric’s additional elaborations above.
What exactly are you trying to say?

Can you just remind me what we are concretely discussing at this point?

When you say, "how perceptions can be experienced as resonant with our soul currents and gestures", I'm trying to understand what is still missing for you.
...is it that, somewhere between here and the sensory experience of music, or between there and animal behavior, you feel the soul volume must exhaust itself and no longer coincide with the outer physiognomy in a way that can be realistically reached in an experiential way?

Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly either you or I am saying

When you said "open up to the phenomenological approach", I wasn't sure if that meant you were having difficulty with specific ideas/illustrations in the essays.

Anyway, I'm not sure I would call my own development 'fast pace', as I still struggle with many of the same concentration issues that you are expressing here. One thing that I did was to continually revisit Steiner's lectures and get a holistic sense of the Cosmic evolutionary process which is conveyed from the most varied angles. It has been really illuminating to connect various phenomenological principles from the Cleric's forum posts, which are now being consolidated, summarized, and enhanced through the recent essays, to the various descriptions of supersensible research, or vice versa.

It is helpful to connect the illustrated principles with as many concrete examples as possible from individual experience and collective history. We can get a sense that there is nothing particularly exotic about spiritual reality, since it's present in everything we do, feel, think, and sense. Eventually we may find that we don't need much external stimulation to start thinking phenomenologically anymore, because practically every topic of thought reminds us of those principles in some way. Here is a quote that I came across recently in the lecture series on 'eternity and the passing moment' and found particularly inspiring.

On the other hand, in what concerns the understanding of these other worlds, you would not be judging correctly if you affirmed that, in order to comprehend, grasp and receive what can be given by those who have taken the first or further steps toward initiation, you had necessarily to experience it yourself. On the contrary, it must be emphasised repeatedly that any man who devotes himself without prejudice to what is vouched for by actual spiritual investigators in super-sensible worlds, any man who will accept their descriptions, experiences and communications without prejudice, letting his unbiased judgement and active understanding hold the field, will really be able to grasp all that he is offered. In the life of the senses it is quite different. We are perfectly justified in saying that there is hardly anyone who could glean an idea of the Sistine Madonna, or of an unknown, distant landscape simply from a description. If you have a lively imagination, you may be able to form some sort of picture from a description, but it is still true to say that only he who can see for himself, can grasp things in sensory existence. So that in this existence understanding must come after seeing. That is by no means the case in higher worlds. Those who seek there, can draw out that for which they seek, put it into the forms and concepts of human ideas, and thus give it to the world. Of course, men may be entangled in materialistic or other dogmas, or they may have no will whatever to give themselves open-mindedly to what is being imparted; in that case it will not be understood. Or it may not be a man's own fault that he cannot understand it because his life and education may not hitherto have given him the facility for open-mindedly receiving these things. But anyone who is in a position to devote himself to these things without prejudice and can gather up all that comes to him by way of sound understanding and sound judgement will at length say, “However incredible these things at first appear, it is just this healthy, comprehensive, all-round thinking that leads to the understanding of them, even though one is quite incapable of seeing anything of the higher worlds.”

[Federica]

Yeah, I'm not sure what exactly either you or I am saying

When you said "open up to the phenomenological approach", I wasn't sure if that meant you were having difficulty with specific ideas/illustrations in the essays.

Anyway, I'm not sure I would call my own development 'fast pace', as I still struggle with many of the same concentration issues that you are expressing here. One thing that I did was to continually revisit Steiner's lectures and get a holistic sense of the Cosmic evolutionary process which is conveyed from the most varied angles. It has been really illuminating to connect various phenomenological principles from the Cleric's forum posts, which are now being consolidated, summarized, and enhanced through the recent essays, to the various descriptions of supersensible research, or vice versa.

It is helpful to connect the illustrated principles with as many concrete examples as possible from individual experience and collective history. We can get a sense that there is nothing particularly exotic about spiritual reality, since it's present in everything we do, feel, think, and sense. Eventually we may find that we don't need much external stimulation to start thinking phenomenologically anymore, because practically every topic of thought reminds us of those principles in some way. Here is a quote that I came across recently in the lecture series on 'eternity and the passing moment' and found particularly inspiring.

But anyone who is in a position to devote himself to these things without prejudice and can gather up all that comes to him by way of sound understanding and sound judgement will at length say, “However incredible these things at first appear, it is just this healthy, comprehensive, all-round thinking that leads to the understanding of them, even though one is quite incapable of seeing anything of the higher worlds.”

Yes, what Steiner describes in the quote I do all the time
It's the reasoned faith we have spoken of many times.

I agree that it helps a lot to contextualize the essays and the principles through reading the lectures again and again.
I have to say, quite trivially, that I don't always have the time or the energy to do that as I would like. I think your reading pace and continuity also are particularly fast.

[Federica]

Yes, our verbal thinking mediates between the imaginative space and the sensory space. Here I am speaking of the form that sensory experience takes through the physical organism. We could think of the article Cleric recently posted about the Himbas possibly perceiving the color spectrum differently through the mediation of linguistic space. This clearly doesn't' mean the linguistic space solely governs the objective and lawful transformation of sensations in relation to our will activity. Even if I liberate my thinking from the conceptual space and enter the imaginative state, I won't be able to walk through a wall or fall through the floor. It's only that the sensory qualities will be released from their constricted form and will become the ideal background of existence, which still orients all spiritual activity as a standing 'gravity wave' but experienced 'from the same side' as that activity, unlike normal sensory experience (especially colors and sounds) that seem to confront us from the 'other side' of thinking consciousness.

I think the statement in that article is a presupposition (that language shapes perception) and not at all an evidence emerging from the study (by the way, the linked study does not report any of the visual tests given in the article). To state that they don't see the one blue tile among the series of green ones because they don't have a specific word for the color is like saying that a baby doesn't feel any difference between a soft summer breeze and a cold strong wind since it doesn't yet have the words to tell them apart. For the Himba, the other possibility is that - since percepts of colors and percepts in general are never perceived in isolation, their human organization and environment lead them to experience color in frames that are very different to the ones we may be used to . So their ideas that comprise the color concepts are different from the usual Western ones, and their language reflects that, it follows the shape of their visual flow as it combines with their ethnic soul configuration.

That could be right, but I think it's basically the same thing - the linguistic space is the living idea that structures their ethnic soul configuration. The words of the language are simply a dim reflection of that space. In any case, it is important that we keep sight of how our perceptual experience is mediated through the structure of our language and concepts, which again is not the sole factor for the lawful transformation of that experience, but still an important one.

I don't clearly see how it can be basically the same thing. In one understanding, language shapes soul space and perceptions. In the other, the soul space shapes language, once percepts are understood in their interplay with concepts and ideas.
In this connection, I've found interesting the characterization given by Tommaso d'Aquino, as reported in theoria-press' Substack “calendar moment: the death of The Angelic Doctor”:

One of my favorite passages from Aquinas treats a topic introduced by Augustine on the spoken word and its unspoken essence. Here is Aquinas on the “outer word” and “the word of the heart”:

Consequently, just as we consider three things in the case of a craftsman, namely, the purpose of his work, its model, and the work now produced, so also do we find a threefold word in one who is speaking. There is the word conceived by the intellect, which, in turn, is signified by an exterior vocal word. The former is called the word of the heart, uttered but not vocalized. Then there is that upon which the exterior word is modeled; and this is called the interior word which has an image of the vocal word. Finally, there is the word expressed exteriorly, and this is called the vocal word. Now, just as a craftsman first intends his end, then thinks out the form of his product, and finally brings it into existence, so also, in one who is speaking, the word of the heart comes first, then the word which has an image of the oral word, and, finally, he utters the vocal word."

So for d'Aquino - an older embodiment of Steiner's individuality - the "vocal word" is a latter step, preceded by "the interior word", that is, an image of the word upon which the linguistic word is modeled. And, in its turn, the interior word expresses an intellectual conception, "the word of the heart".


PS. I'm not sure why we should call him "Thomas Aquinas" instead of Tommaso d'Aquino. At this rate, one could also imagine and use all sorts of transliterations, such as for example Clerico, Ashvino, Luigi, Antonio and Eugenio
Lorenzo is lucky, his already Latin name won't suffer

[AshvinP]

I think the statement in that article is a presupposition (that language shapes perception) and not at all an evidence emerging from the study (by the way, the linked study does not report any of the visual tests given in the article). To state that they don't see the one blue tile among the series of green ones because they don't have a specific word for the color is like saying that a baby doesn't feel any difference between a soft summer breeze and a cold strong wind since it doesn't yet have the words to tell them apart. For the Himba, the other possibility is that - since percepts of colors and percepts in general are never perceived in isolation, their human organization and environment lead them to experience color in frames that are very different to the ones we may be used to . So their ideas that comprise the color concepts are different from the usual Western ones, and their language reflects that, it follows the shape of their visual flow as it combines with their ethnic soul configuration.

That could be right, but I think it's basically the same thing - the linguistic space is the living idea that structures their ethnic soul configuration. The words of the language are simply a dim reflection of that space. In any case, it is important that we keep sight of how our perceptual experience is mediated through the structure of our language and concepts, which again is not the sole factor for the lawful transformation of that experience, but still an important one.

I don't clearly see how it can be basically the same thing. In one understanding, language shapes soul space and perceptions. In the other, the soul space shapes language, once percepts are understood in their interplay with concepts and ideas.
In this connection, I've found interesting the characterization given by Tommaso d'Acquino, as reported in theoria-press' Substack “calendar moment: the death of The Angelic Doctor”:

One of my favorite passages from Aquinas treats a topic introduced by Augustine on the spoken word and its unspoken essence. Here is Aquinas on the “outer word” and “the word of the heart”:

Consequently, just as we consider three things in the case of a craftsman, namely, the purpose of his work, its model, and the work now produced, so also do we find a threefold word in one who is speaking. There is the word conceived by the intellect, which, in turn, is signified by an exterior vocal word. The former is called the word of the heart, uttered but not vocalized. Then there is that upon which the exterior word is modeled; and this is called the interior word which has an image of the vocal word. Finally, there is the word expressed exteriorly, and this is called the vocal word. Now, just as a craftsman first intends his end, then thinks out the form of his product, and finally brings it into existence, so also, in one who is speaking, the word of the heart comes first, then the word which has an image of the oral word, and, finally, he utters the vocal word."

So for d'Aquino - an older embodiment of Steiner's individuality - the "vocal word" is a latter step, preceded by "the interior word", that is, an image of the word upon which the linguistic word is modeled. And, in its turn, the interior word expresses an intellectual conception, "the word of the heart".


PS. I'm not sure why we should call him "Thomas Aquinas" instead of Tommaso d'Acquino. At this rate, one could also imagine and use all sorts of transliterations, such as for example Clerico, Ashvino, Luigi, Antonio and Eugenio
Lorenzo is lucky, his already Latin name won't suffer

Probably we should first be clear what is meant by 'language'. We are not necessarily speaking of the visual and audial perception of isolated words (which also have spiritual significance), but the living idea that gives logical structure to the language as a temporally extended organism. Basically, the meaningful and holistic patterns of inspired ('word of the heart') and imagistic thinking that have encoded themselves in linguistic forms. In our time, a great 'phase-gap' has developed between these living ideal patterns and their outer expression through words in speech and writing, so the latter do not closely modulate the former as they did in ancient times (which you also referenced on the other thread). As Cleric mentioned before, it is very difficult for us to imagine how the linguistic conceptual slots may influence color experience. Yet you responded:

It's not so difficult, I believe. On the one hand it's really easy to see the non objectivity of (color) perceptions. I can think about the videos about Goethe's color theory, or even about the optical illusion illustration in Bernardo's last essay. On the other hand, one has to recall that perceptions are nested within thinking, not on the other side if it. 

Of course, simply thinking about the relationship is not the same as experiencing its reality, but nevertheless it helps give us a reasoned intuitive orientation to how that experience unfolds. We also know, by reasoning through supersensible research, that the path of evolution is one where the outer physiognomy will be progressively spiritualized from within human thinking consciousness, beginning with cultural and linguistic forms, and the living power of these forms will gradually be restored. We will lucidly awaken to the creative 'genius of language' that was experienced more dreamily by our ancestors. In a certain sense, we will simply be condensing the creative activity into a shorter duration through the etheric element, whereas now the perceptual landscape transforms by way of our communicated ideas over much larger durations when mediated by the mineral element. 

Here is an interesting phenomenological lecture on that topic:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA299/En ... 03d01.html

I have shown you a few characteristic examples of language development and believe that now you should be able to visualize the inner journeying of the language-forming genius. If you hope to find your way through the phenomena of language and its evolution, you will have to understand the guidelines such phenomena reveal. 

...One more thing I should like to call to your attention. As you know, lively mental images were the source of the consonantal forming of language in earlier times, and much of what was felt in the soul of ancient peoples flowed into this language forming; it can still be studied in what has been retained in primitive minds and feelings today. These perceptions, filled with an immense vitality at that time, were not only alive to the outer world through the senses but were also completely bound up with a kind of primitive clairvoyance. Otherwise there would not be all our sturdy, image-filled words that are happily still in existence. 

So when we conceive of an 'ethnic soul space' concretely, i.e. as an archangelic being, this vital linguistic element is like a major organ of its system. What we experience as 'language' is simply our temporally decohered perception of this being and its inspired activity that flows through our soul life. It is certainly interesting how, even as late as Aquinas, something of the old instinctive wisdom was living in his intellectual reasoning so he could perceive this depth of the linguistic space. It is this depth that structures our perceptual experience and which is finally impressed as images and verbal speech (including the inner voice through which we continuously think). We can notice how whenever we want to focus some meaning within our intuitive context, for ex. when forming some idea about the objects in our room, we form mental pictures and 'name' the objects of our thinking. This process has a lot of influence on the way we experience our perceptual environment. It has simply become difficult to identify this influence because the depth of linguistic space is now so merged together within our thinking-perceiving experience. 

Apart from our own inner development that delaminates the depth layers, it helps to survey the linguistic experience of the ancients and how it has transformed throughout the epochs. This is still a sort of phenomenology, since we are reasoning through the historical facts that testify to the archetypal transformations of language, consciousness, and perceptual experience, and which ultimately help make intuitive and practical sense of how we arrived at our current state of thinking-perceptual experience. Barfield writes about this relationship in many places. In the following, he points out how even secular linguistic and consciousness studies have dimly awakened to the tight and inextricable relationship between them.

And here there is something I find very interesting. Just as it was among those who had studied language from within, notably Max Müller, that the most convincing, however ineffective, opposition to the Darwinian assumption itself arose, so, now that the assumption has become ingrained, it is from within the same discipline that it is being most dangerously undermined. Historical penetration into language and its roots in consciousness, of which Müller, with his combined interest in language and mythology was a conspicuous pioneer, has been carried much farther since his day, with the help of subsequent advances in anthropology and archaeology as well as in philology itself. For some time now a number of thinkers, of whom Ernst Cassirer is probably the best known, have been pointing out that there is really no question of speech having originated in the responses of tool-using organisms to an already established environment, an environment which we should recognize as our own if we could be spirited into it. On the contrary, the world about us - the only world we can perceive and know - came into being along with language, of which it is at least as much the effect as it has ever been the cause. And an important development here has been an increasing realization that we must look for the source of language in myth, in the mythic consciousness, and not, as Müller rather crudely speculated in his observations on metaphor, for the source of myth in language.

[Federica]

So when we conceive of an 'ethnic soul space' concretely, i.e. as an archangelic being, this vital linguistic element is like a major organ of its system.

I yet have to read your post carefully, Ashvin, but I have a basic question here. Something I have wondered since a long time, by the way. There are only seven Archangels (if I'm not wrong, I googled it), but many more language families and/or ethnicities. Have you read about any details about this "pairing"? (I would like to know which Archangel is the spirit of which culture)

[Federica]

Probably we should first be clear what is meant by 'language'. We are not necessarily speaking of the visual and audial perception of isolated words (which also have spiritual significance), but the living idea that gives logical structure to the language as a temporally extended organism. Basically, the meaningful and holistic patterns of inspired ('word of the heart') and imagistic thinking that have encoded themselves in linguistic forms. In our time, a great 'phase-gap' has developed between these living ideal patterns and their outer expression through words in speech and writing, so the latter do not closely modulate the former as they did in ancient times.

But these are nothing else than the concepts, right? These are universal patterns of inspired thinking. In this sense, I would call genius of language a being who lives as a further differentiation, so that the inspired patterns become language between “the word of the heart” and “the internal word”.

We will lucidly awaken to the creative 'genius of language' that was experienced more dreamily by our ancestors. In a certain sense, we will simply be condensing the creative activity into a shorter duration through the etheric element, whereas now the perceptual landscape transforms by way of our communicated ideas over much larger durations when mediated by the mineral element.

I am not sure I get this correctly. Is it in essence another reference to the modern habit to encode thinking (creative activity) in verbal form? And are you saying that language will express more and more the etheric realm and less and less the mineral-physical reality?

We can notice how whenever we want to focus some meaning within our intuitive context, for ex. when forming some idea about the objects in our room, we form mental pictures and 'name' the objects of our thinking. This process has a lot of influence on the way we experience our perceptual environment. It has simply become difficult to identify this influence because the depth of linguistic space is now so merged together within our thinking-perceiving experience.

As I said before, I don't recognize such strong association in my experience. Naming the objects in the room is only optional for me, I'm sure it's also the experience of many many others. By the way, when it happens that we temporarily lack the word to designate a particular object, this becomes evident: we have the clear picture of the object in mind, only the word does not come in the desired language. This is a typical experience (and an annoying one): certain words, as I have noticed, always come first in a certain language, and I have to struggle to revive them in another one. Also (I know it sounds strange, but it's true) as a strong preference, I speak in a language mix, if I know that the recipient(s) of the communication will understand (and that it's not inappropriate). It's actually not uncommon in my social environment, even work environment.

So I definitely don't have this sense that there's a constant process of naming that "has a lot of influence on the way I experience the perceptual environment". This feels very optional to me, thus I don't feel the linguistic space merged together within the thinking-perceiving experience. Rather, I typically have quite differently working and sounding options if I want to name things, and what option would feel more natural is contextual, and very variable.


(i will now read the Barfield part)

[AshvinP]

Probably we should first be clear what is meant by 'language'. We are not necessarily speaking of the visual and audial perception of isolated words (which also have spiritual significance), but the living idea that gives logical structure to the language as a temporally extended organism. Basically, the meaningful and holistic patterns of inspired ('word of the heart') and imagistic thinking that have encoded themselves in linguistic forms. In our time, a great 'phase-gap' has developed between these living ideal patterns and their outer expression through words in speech and writing, so the latter do not closely modulate the former as they did in ancient times.

But these are nothing else than the concepts, right? These are universal patterns of inspired thinking. In this sense, I would call genius of language a being who lives as a further differentiation, so that the inspired patterns become language between “the word of the heart” and “the internal word”.

We will lucidly awaken to the creative 'genius of language' that was experienced more dreamily by our ancestors. In a certain sense, we will simply be condensing the creative activity into a shorter duration through the etheric element, whereas now the perceptual landscape transforms by way of our communicated ideas over much larger durations when mediated by the mineral element.

I am not sure I get this correctly. Is it in essence another reference to the modern habit to encode thinking (creative activity) in verbal form? And are you saying that language will express more and more the etheric realm and less and less the mineral-physical reality?

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. 

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. This is the basis for all modern philosophy, science, etc. which clearly has influenced how we experience the Cosmos - much more as a blind mechanism than a living organism. Yet we know that the spiritual element has now withdrawn into human thinking and, over many iterations, that thinking gradually restores some of the holistic intuition for reality - the ideas of archetypes, principles, laws of nature, and so forth. But as long as thinking remains mediated by the mineral element, only the outer quantitative relations of the sensory spectrum can be clearly grasped while the inner qualitative relations remain nebulous and dim. At best, we end up with the ideas of GR, QM, 'morphogenetic fields', depth psychology, certain forms of astrology, and such. 

Practically that means the potential of thinking-speech is capped at rearranging mineral forces, conceiving the higher forces abstractly, and the perceptual landscape transforms from this effort at a snail's pace. For example an innovative idea for new technology is developed in one place, communicated to another, worked over some more by other people, experimented with, tested out, patented, marketed, and so forth before it can have any significant influence on transforming the perceptual environment. This is all a result of the bureaucratic inner relations that emerge from thinking that is forced to flow through the brain-bound mineral element (which fundamentally relates to selfish inner tendencies that lead to disharmonious intents). If thinking were to be liberated from this element through moral development, many of these intermediary relations may become unnecessary. We could imagine that the perceptual landscape may transform much more organically and directly through this etheric thinking which is more 'in-phase' with the sensory spectrum than our current thinking.

Steiner gave the following example:

It has to be clearly understood that Western culture is in its initial stages. We can see that this is most immediately apparent at the point where economic processes sprout from technological processes, if I may put it like this. A very typical example is the ideal once conceived by an American, an ideal that is bound to come to realization in the West one day. It is a purely ahrimanic ideal but one of high ideality. It consists of using the vibrations generated in the human organism, studying them in great detail and applying them to machines to the effect that if someone stood by a machine even his smallest vibrations would be intensified in that machine. The vibrations of human nerves would be transferred to the machine. Think of the Keely engine. 67 It did not succeed at the first attempt because it had been largely developed from instinct, but it is something that will certainly be realized one day. Here something arises from the crude mechanistic material world that points to what is to come — material mechanics linking up with immaterial, spiritual elements.

We can notice how whenever we want to focus some meaning within our intuitive context, for ex. when forming some idea about the objects in our room, we form mental pictures and 'name' the objects of our thinking. This process has a lot of influence on the way we experience our perceptual environment. It has simply become difficult to identify this influence because the depth of linguistic space is now so merged together within our thinking-perceiving experience.

As I said before, I don't recognize such strong association in my experience. Naming the objects in the room is only optional for me, I'm sure it's also the experience of many many others. By the way, when it happens that we temporarily lack the word to designate a particular object, this becomes evident: we have the clear picture of the object in mind, only the word does not come in the desired language. This is a typical experience (and an annoying one): certain words, as I have noticed, always come first in a certain language, and I have to struggle to revive them in another one. Also (I know it sounds strange, but it's true) as a strong preference, I speak in a language mix, if I know that the recipient(s) of the communication will understand (and that it's not inappropriate). It's actually not uncommon in my social environment, even work environment.

So I definitely don't have this sense that there's a constant process of naming that "has a lot of influence on the way I experience the perceptual environment". This feels very optional to me, thus I don't feel the linguistic space merged together within the thinking-perceiving experience. Rather, I typically have quite differently working and sounding options if I want to name things, and what option would feel more natural is contextual, and very variable.


(i will now read the Barfield part)

I probably should have elaborated - the 'naming' comes in when we try to understand the relations of objects (or processes) in our perceptual experience, beyond the nebulous intuition that there are objects and processes. We simply can't do this without the aid of the inner voice. Every individual basically recapitulates the development of humanity as a whole. Just as the birth of modern conceptual thinking drastically changed the way humanity experienced their environment, so it does for each individual. The problem is that the transition process remains shrouded in darkness for normal intellectual thinking-memory, individually and collectively. For example, if you could grasp in clear consciousness how you experienced the perceptual environment as a child before you learned the various languages, it would be much easier to trace their influences and discern how each one modulated your perceptual experience in various significant ways. That's what I mean when I say they are 'merged together' for modern thinkers - they are flattened out into a homogenous experience of 'consciousness' or 'thinking-perception' and we simply can't trace the detailed influences anymore. Yet the more we delaminate the inner thought-life, the more the depth of the manifold influences become intuitively apparent.

By the way, on Aquinas' distinction of the 'inner word', 'word of the heart' and the spoken word, here is a great discussion in one of Barfield's essays. The quote from Coleridge is great and really sums up the phenomenological approach - when thinking becomes the object of its own perception, the perceptual and thinking poles of unified Intuition come into contact with one another.

*** (Barfield)

What I do want to do. if I can manage it, is to present some of that unfamiliar psychology in summary form, so that you can reflect further on it if you are minded to do so. You find the substance of it in a good many places: St. Augustine's treatise on The Trinity is one of them, and there is a good deal of it in Aquinas's Summa, especially in the early Questions. A particularly memorable moment for me was the moment when I discovered that Aquinas had also taken the trouble to produce a separate short treatise entitled The Difference between the Divine Word and the Human (De Differentia Divini Verbi et Humani).

The psychology in question differs from modern linguistics in the sense that it begins its investigation into the word at a much earlier stage in its life, or even just before its birth. The spoken or uttered word is seen as the conclusion of an interior process, during which it first took form as an "inner" word (verbum interius), an entity not yet belonging or clothed in any sound, real or imagined. The exponents of this psychology speak of a "memory word", of a verbum cordis or "heart word", and finally of the "intellect word" that finds vent in actual utterance vox, the voice or sounded word. The reasoning is close, elaborate, conscientious. In fact, one gets the impression that the will or the ability to think really strenuously is something that we have since rather lost hold of. I can only sketch inadequately the general picture that is left in the mind after studying it to the best of one's ability. It is a picture of the memory as a sort of womb in the human psyche. Impressions from the senses are received into that womb, and the mere fact that it retains them instead of letting them go as soon as they appear allows the first embryonic appearance of a word or name, the memory-word. Received further into the light of the intellect, this memory-word becomes the heart-word, but it is only when the intellect acts on it acts formatively on or in it- that it opens into the intellect-word, and is ready to be born into physical existence as a voiced or uttered word.

Of course, to get the full force of it, you have to realize that all this is not conceived as a purely subjective process. Psychology in those days had not yet become the physiology in disguise that it mostly is today. The form or species of an object, which in the active intelligence makes possible its naming, was identical to the form or species of the object itself in what we should call the "outer" world. "There is one principle which produces the object of perception and the same principle at the other pole produces the contemplation of that object." That was how Coleridge was to put it many years later; but earlier thinkers did not need a Coleridge to preach it to them, because they took it for granted.

The point I want to draw attention to is the circumstance that the context in which you find this psychology expounded so carefully and in such detail whether it is St. Augustine on the Trinity or Aquinas distinguishing between the divine Word and the human, or some other is usually a sustained endeavour to help the reader grasp by analogy the existential relation between the Father and the Son in Christian theology. St. Thomas Aquinas is not content simply to produce the first two lines of his wonderful Corpus Christi hymn:

Verbum supernum prodiens
Nec Patris linquens dexteram...
The supernal Word proceeding
And yet not leaving the right hand of the Father...

He must find some way, as a philosopher, of helping his readers grasp in their imaginations the appallingly difficult notion difficult because it flouts the fundamental law of contradiction on which all strictly logical thought is based - the notion of a thing or being proceeding or going out and yet remaining where it was. And this he does by saying in effect: Look, you find this an impossible notion to accept about your Creator. But think carefully, look very carefully into yourselves, and you will see how it is something that happens every time an ordinary human word is engendered.

[Cleric K]

In connection with this discussion, I would like to add the following illustration. The first one we have seen before:



Now this:



In our ordinary consciousness, we feel ourselves mostly in the head area. This is because the most relevant sensory organs and the organ of thought reflection are in this area. For example, when we think about whether something is above or below us, left or right, we normally reference it from our visual perspective. If we have to look down, it is below. So in that sense, the head area feels like the ship’s bridge where all the relevant dashboard information is integrated and commands are issued.

When we consider thoughts, however, besides their imaginative auditory or visual aspect, they also have the active aspect. This is most easily discerned through something like the vowels exercise. The thinking gestures we perform cannot be said to be of the same nature as the finished perceptions. They feel as if they flow from a certain direction and impress forms in our head-imaginative substance (cymatics-like).

In the first case we can focus our attention on a given thought-image but we wouldn’t say that we feel ourselves to be within the point of focus. It rather feels as if we focus somewhat from a mysterious background. The sense of what we are is smeared out.

Through concentration, as we relax the periphery and peel the layers of being, we gain a much more intimate experience of our thinking ray through which we impress our thoughts. This at the same time transforms our sense of what we are, or rather, brings it into crisper focus by unveiling our inner core. Now we feel like an active thinking spiritual force.

Yet even this force still flows through mysterious grooves. When concentration and the delamination process are continued further, we begin to feel ourselves as a soul center that radiates its life (the same life that animates our inner voice). Here things assume much more existential character. The ‘stuff’ of reality at this level is the streams of destiny. At focus is what we are as a human being in the World flow, how our character, qualities, and skills flow into it, how we work to transform these inner outflows such that they can impress beneficially in the World flow.

When we concentrate in the head area, our inner being – even though still diffused in the background – assumes a certain inner stance. The delamination of the layers of our inner being unveils that hidden inner stance and we feel more and more as a radiating center of being. We don’t feel like a background being that looks and focuses into that center (as we do when we concentrate on a thought-image) but our very sense of what we are coincides with this laser-like focal point of existence. This doesn’t mean that we have found the ultimate grounds of our being. This center can be delaminated infinitely. At infinity, it is the infinitesimal Divine singularity, which however radiates the eternal and limitless potential for all that existence could be.

We don’t go through these regions of our being as through train stations, where we reach one and then leave it behind. This is depicted as the fact that the previous spheres of existence, as they are relaxed and let go, expand and become the background of our environment. We behold our existence from within deeper curvatures of the World flow.

It is from such a perspective that we see how existence is willed through Love (not only through our center but countless other centers of Cosmic minds). This is the domain of the heart word. As these existential intents radiate they ‘condense’ through the layers as they encounter their constraints.

It’s very important to understand that this is not a unidirectional process. It’s very tempting to imagine that we, human beings, create the World in this way, but this would be an error. The outer the spheres are (in the sense of from within our heart center back toward the sensory), the higher the minds that support them. The more concentric these spheres become, the more we intuit the nature of these higher minds that support the ‘lattice’ of the dreamscape. Yet it is also true that through the unorganized activity of soul beings of various degrees, these peripheral spheres are beheld through decoherence (elimination of possibilities), and our existence is forced to flow in lock-step through a complicated web of entanglement.

Needless to say, all the above should be considered from the first-person perspective. What expands is not some imagined human figure as seen from the side, but the inner spectrum of our sensory experiences.

[Federica]

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.

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.

Practically that means the potential of thinking-speech is capped at rearranging mineral forces, conceiving the higher forces abstractly, and the perceptual landscape transforms from this effort at a snail's pace. For example an innovative idea for new technology is developed in one place, communicated to another, worked over some more by other people, experimented with, tested out, patented, marketed, and so forth before it can have any significant influence on transforming the perceptual environment. This is all a result of the bureaucratic inner relations that emerge from thinking that is forced to flow through the brain-bound mineral element (which fundamentally relates to selfish inner tendencies that lead to disharmonious intents). If thinking were to be liberated from this element through moral development, many of these intermediary relations may become unnecessary. We could imagine that the perceptual landscape may transform much more organically and directly through this etheric thinking which is more 'in-phase' with the sensory spectrum than our current thinking.

Yes, I had never thought about modern thinking in terms of the bureaucracy of the brain, as you put it, and the subsequent snail’s pace of transformation of the world content, that has to continually take the 'mineral detour', instead of the 'etheric fast track'. I think this is a fruitful way to connect the various layers of spiritual activity, from intents to sensory spectrum, in evolutionary perspective: the bureaucracy of the physical brain's convolutions, similar to a convoluted road with countless hairpin turns going up through a mountain pass, compared to the fast-tracked, straight tunnel highway that goes underneath, cutting through the mountain.

…the 'naming' comes in when we try to understand the relations of objects (or processes) in our perceptual experience, beyond the nebulous intuition that there are objects and processes. We simply can't do this without the aid of the inner voice. Every individual basically recapitulates the development of humanity as a whole. Just as the birth of modern conceptual thinking drastically changed the way humanity experienced their environment, so it does for each individual. The problem is that the transition process remains shrouded in darkness for normal intellectual thinking-memory, individually and collectively. For example, if you could grasp in clear consciousness how you experienced the perceptual environment as a child before you learned the various languages, it would be much easier to trace their influences and discern how each one modulated your perceptual experience in various significant ways. That's what I mean when I say they are 'merged together' for modern thinkers - they are flattened out into a homogenous experience of 'consciousness' or 'thinking-perception' and we simply can't trace the detailed influences anymore. Yet the more we delaminate the inner thought-life, the more the depth of the manifold influences become intuitively apparent.


By the way, on Aquinas' distinction of the 'inner word', 'word of the heart' and the spoken word, here is a great discussion in one of Barfield's essays. The quote from Coleridge is great and really sums up the phenomenological approach - when thinking becomes the object of its own perception, the perceptual and thinking poles of unified Intuition come into contact with one another.

In this sense, we are looking at precisely the bureaucracy of the brain that forces the passage through the bottleneck of concepts, and here we can understand intellectual concepts and decohered language manifestations practically as synonyms - merged, at the very least. I’m finally getting what you mean, hopefully I have now tried to ‘remember’ some of my sensory perceptions before they were influenced by language, as in your example, since I pretend I have few memory pictures from that time. But I can’t get much out of the effort. At most, I can say I was an expert in tile-knee transformations in temperature, form and color I also remember a few things about language learning, but I can’t trace any of those details to how they affected sensory perceptions, so as to come to a before and after.


(so from Barfield’s explanation, the word of the heart is the fluid concept, the understanding at a unified stage, living in unison with its spiritual source, whose embryonic phase is the memory-word; the inner word is the human concept in the process of falling by means of intellectualization; and the spoken word is the sounded out, decohered precipitation 'left-over'. In our times, these phases are neatly separated, with the result that only the spoken words are fully conscious, and get identified with sense perceptions, while they were more a unitary fire ball of meaning at the origin of human languages.)

.

[Federica]

In connection with this discussion, I would like to add the following illustration. The first one we have seen before:



Now this:



In our ordinary consciousness, we feel ourselves mostly in the head area. This is because the most relevant sensory organs and the organ of thought reflection are in this area. For example, when we think about whether something is above or below us, left or right, we normally reference it from our visual perspective. If we have to look down, it is below. So in that sense, the head area feels like the ship’s bridge where all the relevant dashboard information is integrated and commands are issued.

When we consider thoughts, however, besides their imaginative auditory or visual aspect, they also have the active aspect. This is most easily discerned through something like the vowels exercise. The thinking gestures we perform cannot be said to be of the same nature as the finished perceptions. They feel as if they flow from a certain direction and impress forms in our head-imaginative substance (cymatics-like).

In the first case we can focus our attention on a given thought-image but we wouldn’t say that we feel ourselves to be within the point of focus. It rather feels as if we focus somewhat from a mysterious background. The sense of what we are is smeared out.

Through concentration, as we relax the periphery and peel the layers of being, we gain a much more intimate experience of our thinking ray through which we impress our thoughts. This at the same time transforms our sense of what we are, or rather, brings it into crisper focus by unveiling our inner core. Now we feel like an active thinking spiritual force.

Yet even this force still flows through mysterious grooves. When concentration and the delamination process are continued further, we begin to feel ourselves as a soul center that radiates its life (the same life that animates our inner voice). Here things assume much more existential character. The ‘stuff’ of reality at this level is the streams of destiny. At focus is what we are as a human being in the World flow, how our character, qualities, and skills flow into it, how we work to transform these inner outflows such that they can impress beneficially in the World flow.

When we concentrate in the head area, our inner being – even though still diffused in the background – assumes a certain inner stance. The delamination of the layers of our inner being unveils that hidden inner stance and we feel more and more as a radiating center of being. We don’t feel like a background being that looks and focuses into that center (as we do when we concentrate on a thought-image) but our very sense of what we are coincides with this laser-like focal point of existence. This doesn’t mean that we have found the ultimate grounds of our being. This center can be delaminated infinitely. At infinity, it is the infinitesimal Divine singularity, which however radiates the eternal and limitless potential for all that existence could be.

We don’t go through these regions of our being as through train stations, where we reach one and then leave it behind. This is depicted as the fact that the previous spheres of existence, as they are relaxed and let go, expand and become the background of our environment. We behold our existence from within deeper curvatures of the World flow.

It is from such a perspective that we see how existence is willed through Love (not only through our center but countless other centers of Cosmic minds). This is the domain of the heart word. As these existential intents radiate they ‘condense’ through the layers as they encounter their constraints.

It’s very important to understand that this is not a unidirectional process. It’s very tempting to imagine that we, human beings, create the World in this way, but this would be an error. The outer the spheres are (in the sense of from within our heart center back toward the sensory), the higher the minds that support them. The more concentric these spheres become, the more we intuit the nature of these higher minds that support the ‘lattice’ of the dreamscape. Yet it is also true that through the unorganized activity of soul beings of various degrees, these peripheral spheres are beheld through decoherence (elimination of possibilities), and our existence is forced to flow in lock-step through a complicated web of entanglement.

Needless to say, all the above should be considered from the first-person perspective. What expands is not some imagined human figure as seen from the side, but the inner spectrum of our sensory experiences.

Thank you Cleric. I am following, to the extent possible at my level of understanding. So the only way to recover the heart words, is by finding their concentric relationships with the other layers, in meditation. I see that the two illustrations represent the same process, but the second one emphasizes the non-sequential but expansive and concentric nature of the process. It also emphasizes the deepening sense of self that gains definition through the flowing shapes provided by the mysterious grooves, progressively brought into consciousness by delamination.

.