Pictorial Thinking

[Güney27]

Ok, let's go trough the lecture I currently read

We come now to the third member of man's being, to the astral body — the “Soul Body” in Rosicrucian terminology. Man has the astral body in common only with the animals. The astral body is the bearer of feeling, of happiness and suffering, joy and pain, emotions and passions; wishes and desires, too, are anchored in the astral body. The astral body must be characterised by saying that there is within it that which is also present in the animal world. The animal world, too, has consciousness. The astral being of man and of the animal is held together by forces which have their seat in the Imaginative world or the “Elemental” world in Rosicrucian parlance. The forces which hold the astral body together and give it the form it has, are to be perceived in their true form, in the astral world. The ego-consciousness of the animal is also within this astral world. Just as in the case of a human being we speak of an individual soul, in the case of an animal we speak of a group-soul which is to be found on the astral plane. We must not think here of the single animal living on the physical plane but a whole species of animals — all lions, all tigers — have an ego in common, a group-soul to be found on the astral plane. So that the animal is really only comprehensible when it can be followed upwards to the astral plane. “Strands,” as it were, go forth from the lions, for example, and in the astral world unite into the group-soul that is common to the individual lions living on the earth. Just as the human being has an individual ego, so in every astral body there lives something of a group-ego; this animal-ego lives in the human astral body and the human being does not become independent of this animal-ego until he develops astral sight and becomes a companion of astral beings, when the group-souls of the animals confront him on the astral plane as individual animals confront him here. In the astral world there are beings who can only come down in fragments, as it were, to the physical plane as so-and-so many animals. When the life of these animals comes to an end they unite in the astral world with the rest of this astral being. A whole species of animals is a being on the astral plane, a being with whom converse can be held as with an individual here on earth. Although there is not exact similarity the group-souls are not incorrectly characterised in the second seal of the Apocalypse where they are divided into four classes: Lion, Eagle, Bull, Man (i.e., man who has not yet descended to the physical plane). These four Apocalyptic animals are the four classes of the group-souls which live in the astral world by the side of the human being with his individual soul.

I think this part here is good, because it realy is talking about the basics.

So how would you study-meditate this?

How does studying this, gives you a explanation of the currents of your metamorphosis?

And how do you can be sure if it's reality, without being clairvoyant (I understand that this is logical and understandable, but so are fairy tales too)?

I know that this isn't working like in normal science, but how do you work or study-meditate with these lectures?

Guney, you did the easy part of quoting a lecture and asking questions... now comes the more difficult part of using your focused concepts to express the intuitive context you experience when reading through the quote. You should try to imagine how this context might relate to the currents of your metamorphosis, from first-person experience. Again, it doesn't need to be very vivid or precise, just share a few thoughts that naturally arise.

I know the first reaction will be, 'if I knew how to imagine that, I wouldn't be asking the question!' This is the attitude we need to overcome if we are going to make any progress with the study-meditate approach. The latter can't be imparted as stepwise instructions for building furniture but has to be lived through in our thinking. We should learn to trust that these supersensible ideas can only be related to the depth flow of our own thinking experience, so we already know the relevant answers to our questions at some level. Now it is a matter of using our active thinking to probe around and seek out the 'future-memories', i.e. a more lucid and encompassing intuitive orientation to our flow of existence.

We should be clear that we are not seeking some logical 'proof' for the existence of animal group-souls, like we would ask someone to prove that there are lions in Africa with written records, photos, statistical data, or something like that. The only proof we need is that, when thinking through these ideas, they help us make better sense of our totality of experience - they harmonize the facts of that experience. If we feel like we simply don't have enough facts of experience to harmonize, then this limitation our thinking bumps into is also feedback on where to focus our efforts. By no means should we expect that by applying some magical trick on the quote we will unlock the secrets of the astral body, astral plane, group-souls, and so on. When we study-meditate properly, we are led to more questions that help steer and focus our efforts. Ideally, these are questions that we didn't suspect to ask before.

Your thoughts can certainly be in the form of more questions, as long as these questions have some specificity and are actively exploring the ideal relations that may have relevance to how group-based animal consciousness also lives within our thinking, feeling, and willing life. There are no 'right' or 'wrong' thoughts or questions here. Deeper knowledge always comes from the very process of actively exploring ideal relations and therefore resonating with higher-order perspectives that are the very essence of activity and creativity (and the moral virtues cultivated through them).

Ashvin,

The astral body is 'that' which we have in common with animals, this means it must be something which differentiate us and animals from plants. Somehow that comes with the ability to move trough space, and having sense organs.

If you want to stay in the given, wouldn't it be right for you to say that you experience emotions, like animals, and stop there?

Because if you say astral body this means that there is (I don't argue against it) another 'substance', from which your body is extracted.
And this certainly isn't in the given of our experience.

I can even acknowledge that these emotions, steer my thinking and willing.
But how would postulating an astral body, differentiating me from materialist, which postulates neurophysiological activity, as the body of emotions?

I explain the given trough my thinking in both cases.

That's my position right now, I'm see the biggest lesson in steiners (or any person which writes about the topic)study of our thinking activity, because it is really the means by which we can make any statement, so it is right to study this activity, but if I go too deep in esoteric scripture, Its feel like im postulating abstract things, to understand my perception.
I don't know if you are clairvoyant, but I am not, so it wouldn't be truthful if I would say that I know that Steiner is right, and I don't want to believe in anything.
It's logical yes, but that is another thing.

[Güney27]

Ps:
I'm very open and sympathetic to steiners esoteric work, if I wasn't I wouldn't try to figure it out for the last 2 years.

Don't take this as criticism.

But sometimes I start believing what steiners says because it feels right, but this shouldn't be the basis of knowledge

[Federica]

Thank you, Federica, for this excellent overview of our participatory spiritual activity with very helpful examples and metaphors. I think we can all appreciate how, in the very act of intending the expression of your intuitive orientation in this post, you have opened previously unsuspected eventlines for your thinking activity that concretely influence your perspective and orientation toward the curvatures of destiny. This is where we must all start and focus our efforts to gradually awaken to our participation in the unfolding symphony of existence. This vision board metaphor is especially helpful and reminds me of a metaphor I was also thinking about using.

One major obstacle to developing a proper intuition for our participatory spiritual activity is that we imagine that the vision board, for ex., is some parallel process of structuring the flow of reality that we engage in once we know it's possible. In other words, we normally go about interacting with reality according to its regular 'laws' but then, when we learn about the power of visualizing our goals, we can tweak those laws or add new laws into the mix. This either leads to understandable skepticism of 'miraculous powers' or new age-style fantasies about such powers. That is all born from our failure to pay attention and investigate the ways in which we always interact with the World in our 'trivial' activities that we take for granted, such as in the example that you gave of pouring a glass of water. 

Instead, we should imagine that, through visualization and similar techniques, we are simply awakening to the one and only process by which our state of being, across all scales of existence (individual to collective), has always evolved as something whole from primordial times to present day. Most of the time we navigate life by moving through memory images that embed feelings of pleasure and pain, sympathy and antipathy. The pleasurable-sympathetic images orient us toward a certain course of action that will make our sensory experience coincide with the image, while the painful-antipathetic ones orient us toward a course of action that avoids the corresponding sensory experience. We are rarely aware of the images themselves but mostly of the intellectual voice that has encoded the holistic imagistic experience into a linear stream of commentary.  This is what Cleric illustrated here.

However, there are also future-memory images that we unconsciously navigate. We dimly sense these as the curvatures that constrain our activity and only make certain transformations of our current state possible, such as our temperament, character, habits, and so on. When we explicitly codify these intuitions of the constraints into clear concepts that reflect natural or psychic 'laws', we are generally extrapolating based on past memory images of our states and how they transformed. In reality, however, this is a one-sided approach, and the constraints are also shaped by unknown potential - what our character, for ex., could transform into by cultivating virtues. This is why scientific understanding of the constraints, for ex. in physics, biology, and psychology, continues to evolve as we ask new questions, make new observations, and actively think through them, i.e. as we ourselves inwardly transform through that process. We aren't discovering brand new 'laws' that suddenly came into existence but unveiling more of the ideal topography through which our states flow. 

Here I will use a movie scene as a really loose metaphor:





Whenever we creatively think through something, as we sometimes do in philosophy, science, art, and spirituality, it is like we are solving a 'crime' that hasn't yet happened. We quite literally move through images of future potential and organize them in such a way that they help us chart a course to the solution we are seeking. The 'pre-cogs' in the movie are simply symbols for own imaginative soul-life. Instead of extrapolating the known laws of past states into a future state as we do with passive sensory thinking, we anticipate how so far unknown forces can open degrees of freedom for reaching future states. We normally sleep through this whole process and only dimly register it as a mysterious train of thoughts, proceeding from equally mysterious intuition, that led us into the vicinity of our solution.

Yes, I’m following. I understand your post as providing hints into the larger intuitive context, once the idea of connectedness/contextuality is integrated. And thanks for making this crystal clear - how to intend the vision board metaphor for pictorial thinking. If we take it as in “The Secret”, we will either love or hate the idea, which are equally ‘bad’ attitudes - subjective and unverified through direct inner experience (despite the surface-level explanations one might pack up for loving it or hating it). That’s also why I thought it would help to place the metaphor in the pragmatic business world context, where it’s widespread and it works, rather than in a “law of attraction” context. It’s the same practice. Actually your Minority Report illustration does the same. Then, to connect with the primordial insight of why it works, we have to recall the interconnectedness playing out above the level of mere sense perceptions, and realize, as you say, that “we are simply awakening to the one and only process by which our state of being, across all scales of existence (individual to collective), has always evolved as something whole from primordial times to present day”. So the exceptional state, little by little, will descend in the normal experiential flow and become less and less exceptional.

... But she will never run out into the streets or the woods behind my apartment, or drink milk and eat chocolate, or many similar things, because that is not part of the structured potential that I have intended for her states of being to unfold through. Of course, I am a flawed human being who may be intending things that are not necessarily best for her potential development, but we are only trying to approach the underlying principle here.

Yes, but never say never - maybe one day, on a larger curvature, she’ll find her way to some milk somehow

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

The astral body is 'that' which we have in common with animals, this means it must be something which differentiate us and animals from plants. Somehow that comes with the ability to move trough space, and having sense organs.

If you want to stay in the given, wouldn't it be right for you to say that you experience emotions, like animals, and stop there?

Because if you say astral body this means that there is (I don't argue against it) another 'substance', from which your body is extracted.
And this certainly isn't in the given of our experience.

I can even acknowledge that these emotions, steer my thinking and willing.
But how would postulating an astral body, differentiating me from materialist, which postulates neurophysiological activity, as the body of emotions?

I explain the given trough my thinking in both cases.

That's my position right now, I'm see the biggest lesson in steiners (or any person which writes about the topic)study of our thinking activity, because it is really the means by which we can make any statement, so it is right to study this activity, but if I go too deep in esoteric scripture, Its feel like im postulating abstract things, to understand my perception.
I don't know if you are clairvoyant, but I am not, so it wouldn't be truthful if I would say that I know that Steiner is right, and I don't want to believe in anything.
It's logical yes, but that is another thing.

Guney,

These are productive efforts and thoughts because they at least help you discern where your thinking is bumping into obstacles in this domain of study. Notice how, if you simply didn't make any such efforts, you wouldn't have any feedback for the factors steering your thinking this way or that way. This is why all deeper understanding begins with active thinking, probing the contours of meaning with our thoughts. Before we even get to the factors of temperament, emotions, and such, we have the factors of beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thinking based on those.

The bold comments suggest you are assuming the 'astral body' must be referring to some substantial object, similar to a brain with neural activity, that is responsible for the life of feelings. If we approach esoteric science with such an unwarranted conception, it is no wonder that we will remain perplexed and feel it is speaking of mysterious things that are simply beyond our ability to perceive and grasp.

At this point, it is probably helpful to shift focus from Steiner and his terminology to first-person phenomenological experience completely independent of terminology. You have been making progress with this approach before.

For ex., reconsider what Cleric wrote here:

As a whole, the difficulty with these 'bodies' comes from the fact that our conceptions are dominated by the visual sense. When we think of a physical body we imagine space and human figure inside it. But in phenomenological sense the physical body is the totality of our sensory experiences. Thus knowing the physical body is really its experience from within. If we keep this firmly in mind then when we speak of other bodies we won't be tempted to fantasize the bodies from the side. We easily forget that if we knew the physical body only as a third-person picture, then all talks about smell, sound, sensation for bodily space and so on, would sound completely 'occult'. Thus what makes body a body is the inner experience. It's the same with the etheric. We only know it if we approach the corresponding inner experiences and not when we expect to see something.

As an example, imagine how by moving your arms in all possible ways you can sweep the volume of space reachable by your fingers. It would look something like a half-sphere in front of you and as something squished behind, since we can't reach much of the space behind our back. We have intuition of space only because we can sweep it in this way. Analogously, we can sweep the 'volume' of all thoughts and memories that we can reach. Just like our intuition of space serves as the intuitive context that integrates our spatial sensations together, so the inner experience of the etheric body manifests as the intuition that glues together the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity (mainly thinking and remembering).

So you see, we first have to decondition from our assumptions of what it means 'to know' something. What does it mean to know the physical body, which we generally feel is the most obvious part of our experience? It is not to simply see it in our visual field such as in a mirror, or to think about legs, arms, hands, feet, head, and so forth. Rather, it is the very inner experience of sensations that transform in a lawful way in response to our spiritual activity. Get a good feel for this - walk around your room and notice how colors, sounds, textures, perhaps even smells, transform in response to your intended activity and feedback on that activity. If the color experience with the meaning of 'wall' manifests in response to your activity, then this provides a basis to steer your walking in another direction (unless you intend to bump into it). The totality of such lawful sensory experiences, the constraints and possibilities we intuit from them, is what we abstractly label the 'physical body'.

Once we orient to this way of 'knowing' our physical body, we can see how the same thing applies to all other bodies. We don't even need to call them 'bodies', they could just as easily be called A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4 or sensory constellation, thinking-memory constellation, feeling constellation, and willing constellation. The point is that, no matter how we conceive or label our lawful transformation of experience, it will always differentiate into at least this fourfold structure. Our thinking-memory feeds back on our spiritual activity in a different way than our sensory experience. Regardless of my intent, it will remain daytime or nighttime in my visual field outside. On the other hand, I can remember the experience of nighttime during daytime and vice versa. I find even more degrees of freedom if my imagination is not tied to the constraints of memory and simply explores feelings and thoughts related to day or night.

We can go much further with these sorts of considerations that stay entirely within the givens of our temporally extended flow of experience, but I will pause here. Does this make sense for you and perhaps elucidate a way to think more phenomenologically (inwardly) about the fourfold human organization?

[Cleric K]

This thought could come from a physicalist, an analytic idealist, and from anyone else who considers reality monolithically external to oneself. It may sound like a common-sense objection at first, but on the way to a living understanding of reality, one comes to realize how we may get misled to thoughts of this sort. This may have to do with sneaky mind habits present in our environment. If we don’t pay attention, they influence our thoughts, even in opposition with one’s own idealist conception. Based on my personal slow-pace journey of understanding, I have imagined a slow-pace reply to the objection. Boring and incomplete, for sure, but possibly interesting for those who find some of the higher-level posts difficult to decipher (everyone else would get bored).

Federica, thank you for putting this together! You may have thought that this would be boring for those who more or less understand these things but in fact it was very interesting to me. On the path of development, even if things may not give us some cardinally new understanding, they can nevertheless always be experienced in completely novel ways. So we should never think "These are things that I've already graduated from." This is also why the science of the future will be so interesting. Everything that we now investigate scientifically is gone through with very diminished consciousness. For example, we speak of the anatomical parts but they remain as dim sensory pictures of fleshy organs. In the possibly not too distant future, when we open an anatomical book from, say, the 19th century, it will act for us as a shortcut for clairvoyant experiences. We'll look at the drawing of some bone and say "Hmm, let me see". Then we surf through the etheric forces, find the bone within ourselves and its story in the Cosmic evolutionary process. This is a contrived example but it comes to show that the cognitive evolution of humanity doesn't simply eject us into another world but we over and over again revisit the perceptual content with ever-increasing density of meaning. This is also why future epochs can be seen as mirroring past epochs. In a sense, through the future consciousness, we'll be able to understand what has happened in the past and how it has prepared everything that we then experience.

Also thank you for giving a test ride of the visual cues . I think this has potential. While I was reading, the encounter of the symbol felt like protein structure:



Necessarily, our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word. The speaker assumes certain ideal form with their "I" which is then sequenced into words. Those reading can reconstruct the ideal form if the string of letters is folded in the proper way.

When I encountered the symbol it felt to me like the hydrogen bond in the image above. Even though the words are far apart in their primary (sequential) form, in their folded ideal form, they are closely related.

This is another area which will be so interesting for our future (and we can even now glimpse something of it). Our thinking and speech become much more volumetric. This is really the result of the expanded etheric space that we develop through inner organization. When our spiritual activity begins to scientifically and artistically weave in this space, we indeed feel like in the Minority Report scene. Our inner auric volume becomes the most incredible interface to reality.

[Güney27]

I think this part here is good, because it realy is talking about the basics.

So how would you study-meditate this?

How does studying this, gives you a explanation of the currents of your metamorphosis?

And how do you can be sure if it's reality, without being clairvoyant (I understand that this is logical and understandable, but so are fairy tales too)?

I know that this isn't working like in normal science, but how do you work or study-meditate with these lectures?

Guney, let me add a concrete example that may help you start with what Ashvin suggests.

I say upfront that this should not be taken as some suggestion or criticism. I'm using it only because you have shared it previously and I know that it is something you can intimately relate to - nothing more.

I'm speaking about your passion for MMA. Here you have a perfect hands-on example through which you can understand more about the soul (astral) body, not through abstractions but in full concreteness.

For example, you can try examining more deeply why you are drawn to this sport. What do you feel when you land a good hit? What motivates you to perfect your skills? What goal do you imagine you can achieve? For example, if you become the UFC champion, how would that make you feel?

I repeat and I want to be crystal clear about this - none of this is said as hidden criticism of what you are doing. Any insights about these things should come entirely from within yourself!

The thing is, that if you wrestle with these very intimate things, you'll have a quite real experience of what the soul body is. Not as an external picture but as how it feels from within. Quite different from what you may have expected, isn't it? Surely not something that lights up before your inner eye in beautiful colors and for which you can say "Aaah, I finally see it - magnificent!" It's quite different. Seeing the soul body starts with seeing the way in which our Earthly character flows through its curvatures. Here someone may say "But that's not a body, this is what I am! My passions, my interests for this or that, are the expressions of my free spiritual essence!" And this is really why true self-knowledge is so difficult. It's not because it is technically so difficult but because the last thing we want to realize is that in order to see and understand the soul and spiritual worlds, we need to dismantle our own being. If we're not willing to decompose our being and see how certain interests and passions shape our flow of becoming, we simply unspokenly declare that we don't want to know reality. Because to know the soul world in its reality, is to know the reality of the manifold world of sympathies and antipathies. Not theoretically, but by examining how they manifest first and foremost within ourselves.

When you start to notice the secret ways in which you feel satisfied when you land a hit (or anything else that you find satisfying) then you have uncovered a 'pixel' of the inner labyrinth of the soul body, so to speak.

I can guarantee you that without examining these things within yourself, the mere words about soul bodies and worlds will remain as abstract as ever. The success in approaching these soul realities depends on being clear that we're working with powerful forces. Our thinking ego flows within the rhythmic curvatures of the soul body. It feels like something of a deeper nature, something which defines us. That's why in our ordinary consciousness we say "That's my character, that's what I am." It takes time to first know these curvatures and then to gradually begin transforming them according to insights in our high ideal.

Cleric,

That's a good point.

I don't do this sports anymore, but I can understand your point.

The tricky thing is to answer this question.

Let's say I love it to win fights like in sparring or video games.
I can answer this question like "it's normal to feel that way, because everyone feels pleasure when they dominate somebody"

Then I can go deeper and say it's evolutionary ect.
This is how many people would answer this, but I don't think that this is practical.
And I could come up with other explanations for the same fact.

What would you consider as real knowledge of one's own emotions?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

That's a good point.

I don't do this sports anymore, but I can understand your point.

The tricky thing is to answer this question.

Let's say I love it to win fights like in sparring or video games.
I can answer this question like "it's normal to feel that way, because everyone feels pleasure when they dominate somebody"

Then I can go deeper and say it's evolutionary ect.
This is how many people would answer this, but I don't think that this is practical.
And I could come up with other explanations for the same fact.

What would you consider as real knowledge of one's own emotions?

Guney, it's not simply a matter of getting some intellectual understanding of what these emotions mean and how they came to be. These feelings should be grasped as something dynamic, as paths of experience. For example, you can return to some time ago, when you still practiced the sport, while you were still very passionate about it, and imagine that you had to think about these things. Try to feel the inner division, how you would have to get into an argument with yourself. Part of you would give one kind of logical arguments, the other will defend itself with others. The key here is to notice how there's something deeper in your soul that wants to fight. The thoughts are ways to justify that desire. BTW this is something very symptomatic for humanity as a whole. Even though there's much talking about reason and logic, in the end, most people use that thinking only to justify the desires that are already there. The deeper reasons for the desires can be indeed deep. Sometimes they can lend themselves to psychoanalytical reasoning, for example, we may have had experience with being bullied as a kid and on some level we felt the desire to never allow this happen again. But the reasons could also lie in previous lives.

The important thing is that the actual deep reasons are not that important. What is important is to be vigilant and be able to see how certain desires, interests, passions, shape the flow of our becoming. Why they are in our soul is a secondary question. What's primary is to see how they fit in the intuitive panorama that takes form as we strive towards the high ideal.

I think this is not difficult to understand. Imagine that you somehow understand in some magical and fully authoritative way, the reason that you have been drawn to this sport. Let's say it turns out to be something in a past life. OK, good. Now what? You have some intellectual label that says "This passion is there because so and so." But this doesn't benefit you much. As said, what counts is to see how this passion aligns or clashes with your high ideal and whether your spirit has the inner strength to give direction to the feelings.

Steiner has said that we should rather think of the astral body as a kind of comet with a long tail. Imagine how you now circle the Sun together with the Earth. Imagine that your inner life leaves a trace in space. This would look like a spiral:



Of course, with this I don't want to reduce the soul body to pure spatiality, but such an image can be of value. Try to think how this spiral would have one kind of colors and inner content if you proceed with fighting. Try to imagine the point of space where you took the decision to stop. Imagine how the spiral now traces different color, now different thoughts and feelings fill your soul, your interests may have shifted a little.

This is a fruitful way of thinking about the soul/astral body. When we speak of it, we should always remember one key word - destiny. When we're speaking of the soul body we're speaking of existential matters. This doesn't mean that this spiral is completely fixed, although many of the things are indeed already intended. Yet there are many junction points in life where it is possible to switch orbits.

So with all this in mind, I hope you see that to think of the astral body, you have to focus not simply on the momentary feelings and emotions but see everything in the context of paths of experience. Picture the soul spiral and ask how the colors of my destiny change when I give way to this or that desire, or when I resist another. Try to feel how one orbit draws you to certain experiences, it brings certain people in your life, another orbit - quite different.

I repeat what I said in the previous post - we need certain humility when meditating on these things. These soul trajectories are far greater than whatever our ego feels to be at any point in time. We're floating through the curvatures of these soul paths. We can steer, yet this also depends on catching the right junction points. Sometimes we miss a junction and we deviate through a path of experiences - we get in some company, we do certain things which suck us within its curvature. Sometimes it may take years until destiny presents us with a junction point through which we can switch orbits again.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

The astral body is 'that' which we have in common with animals, this means it must be something which differentiate us and animals from plants. Somehow that comes with the ability to move trough space, and having sense organs.

If you want to stay in the given, wouldn't it be right for you to say that you experience emotions, like animals, and stop there?

Because if you say astral body this means that there is (I don't argue against it) another 'substance', from which your body is extracted.
And this certainly isn't in the given of our experience.

I can even acknowledge that these emotions, steer my thinking and willing.
But how would postulating an astral body, differentiating me from materialist, which postulates neurophysiological activity, as the body of emotions?

I explain the given trough my thinking in both cases.

That's my position right now, I'm see the biggest lesson in steiners (or any person which writes about the topic)study of our thinking activity, because it is really the means by which we can make any statement, so it is right to study this activity, but if I go too deep in esoteric scripture, Its feel like im postulating abstract things, to understand my perception.
I don't know if you are clairvoyant, but I am not, so it wouldn't be truthful if I would say that I know that Steiner is right, and I don't want to believe in anything.
It's logical yes, but that is another thing.

Guney,

These are productive efforts and thoughts because they at least help you discern where your thinking is bumping into obstacles in this domain of study. Notice how, if you simply didn't make any such efforts, you wouldn't have any feedback for the factors steering your thinking this way or that way. This is why all deeper understanding begins with active thinking, probing the contours of meaning with our thoughts. Before we even get to the factors of temperament, emotions, and such, we have the factors of beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thinking based on those.

The bold comments suggest you are assuming the 'astral body' must be referring to some substantial object, similar to a brain with neural activity, that is responsible for the life of feelings. If we approach esoteric science with such an unwarranted conception, it is no wonder that we will remain perplexed and feel it is speaking of mysterious things that are simply beyond our ability to perceive and grasp.

At this point, it is probably helpful to shift focus from Steiner and his terminology to first-person phenomenological experience completely independent of terminology. You have been making progress with this approach before.

For ex., reconsider what Cleric wrote here:

As a whole, the difficulty with these 'bodies' comes from the fact that our conceptions are dominated by the visual sense. When we think of a physical body we imagine space and human figure inside it. But in phenomenological sense the physical body is the totality of our sensory experiences. Thus knowing the physical body is really its experience from within. If we keep this firmly in mind then when we speak of other bodies we won't be tempted to fantasize the bodies from the side. We easily forget that if we knew the physical body only as a third-person picture, then all talks about smell, sound, sensation for bodily space and so on, would sound completely 'occult'. Thus what makes body a body is the inner experience. It's the same with the etheric. We only know it if we approach the corresponding inner experiences and not when we expect to see something.

As an example, imagine how by moving your arms in all possible ways you can sweep the volume of space reachable by your fingers. It would look something like a half-sphere in front of you and as something squished behind, since we can't reach much of the space behind our back. We have intuition of space only because we can sweep it in this way. Analogously, we can sweep the 'volume' of all thoughts and memories that we can reach. Just like our intuition of space serves as the intuitive context that integrates our spatial sensations together, so the inner experience of the etheric body manifests as the intuition that glues together the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity (mainly thinking and remembering).

So you see, we first have to decondition from our assumptions of what it means 'to know' something. What does it mean to know the physical body, which we generally feel is the most obvious part of our experience? It is not to simply see it in our visual field such as in a mirror, or to think about legs, arms, hands, feet, head, and so forth. Rather, it is the very inner experience of sensations that transform in a lawful way in response to our spiritual activity. Get a good feel for this - walk around your room and notice how colors, sounds, textures, perhaps even smells, transform in response to your intended activity and feedback on that activity. If the color experience with the meaning of 'wall' manifests in response to your activity, then this provides a basis to steer your walking in another direction (unless you intend to bump into it). The totality of such lawful sensory experiences, the constraints and possibilities we intuit from them, is what we abstractly label the 'physical body'.

Once we orient to this way of 'knowing' our physical body, we can see how the same thing applies to all other bodies. We don't even need to call them 'bodies', they could just as easily be called A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4 or sensory constellation, thinking-memory constellation, feeling constellation, and willing constellation. The point is that, no matter how we conceive or label our lawful transformation of experience, it will always differentiate into at least this fourfold structure. Our thinking-memory feeds back on our spiritual activity in a different way than our sensory experience. Regardless of my intent, it will remain daytime or nighttime in my visual field outside. On the other hand, I can remember the experience of nighttime during daytime and vice versa. I find even more degrees of freedom if my imagination is not tied to the constraints of memory and simply explores feelings and thoughts related to day or night.

We can go much further with these sorts of considerations that stay entirely within the givens of our temporally extended flow of experience, but I will pause here. Does this make sense for you and perhaps elucidate a way to think more phenomenologically (inwardly) about the fourfold human organization?

Wow.

I never thought about my body in a phenomenological way like this.

But I would say that emotions, memory's or spiritual activity are feel like the take place in my body.

So it feels like emotions are felt in the stomach and breast area.
Thinking in the head (brain).
Willing is harder to say.

So this activities are the causes for bodily activities.

But why would I say that there is a 'Emotion world'
with beings in it, which don't have a physical body.

There are leaps of faith in steiners work, coupled with phenomenological thinking.

Ss speaks about how the current state we live in came into being.
It talks about the mineral which we can see trough our sense organs, which fills a phantom, about reincarnation, about the Christ-being acting trough hirachies of non physical beings..........

Spiritual science should be grounded in spiritual experiences, I don't had experiences now which confirm what steiners says.
May you had them, but if you haven't, then you should at least be open to the possibility, that there can be error in these view.

[Güney27]

Ps

When we think about Ss concept our generally about concepts likes love or harmony, which aren't sense perceptible, aren't we meditating when we do this?

We think thoughts which are free from sympathetic, ideological, sensory currents.
And we are active in some way when we do this (most of the day time our thoughts are very passive and are like a commentary on our conscious states).

What do you exactly mean with

 

This is why all deeper understanding begins with active thinking, probing the contours of meaning with our thoughts.

Are you saying that the concept of Ss aren't 'made up' by humans, but are discovered trough focusing them (intuition, meaning) into words (anchors)?
Or what do you mean with the quoted ?

[AshvinP]

Guney,

These are productive efforts and thoughts because they at least help you discern where your thinking is bumping into obstacles in this domain of study. Notice how, if you simply didn't make any such efforts, you wouldn't have any feedback for the factors steering your thinking this way or that way. This is why all deeper understanding begins with active thinking, probing the contours of meaning with our thoughts. Before we even get to the factors of temperament, emotions, and such, we have the factors of beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thinking based on those.

The bold comments suggest you are assuming the 'astral body' must be referring to some substantial object, similar to a brain with neural activity, that is responsible for the life of feelings. If we approach esoteric science with such an unwarranted conception, it is no wonder that we will remain perplexed and feel it is speaking of mysterious things that are simply beyond our ability to perceive and grasp.

At this point, it is probably helpful to shift focus from Steiner and his terminology to first-person phenomenological experience completely independent of terminology. You have been making progress with this approach before.

For ex., reconsider what Cleric wrote here:

As a whole, the difficulty with these 'bodies' comes from the fact that our conceptions are dominated by the visual sense. When we think of a physical body we imagine space and human figure inside it. But in phenomenological sense the physical body is the totality of our sensory experiences. Thus knowing the physical body is really its experience from within. If we keep this firmly in mind then when we speak of other bodies we won't be tempted to fantasize the bodies from the side. We easily forget that if we knew the physical body only as a third-person picture, then all talks about smell, sound, sensation for bodily space and so on, would sound completely 'occult'. Thus what makes body a body is the inner experience. It's the same with the etheric. We only know it if we approach the corresponding inner experiences and not when we expect to see something.

As an example, imagine how by moving your arms in all possible ways you can sweep the volume of space reachable by your fingers. It would look something like a half-sphere in front of you and as something squished behind, since we can't reach much of the space behind our back. We have intuition of space only because we can sweep it in this way. Analogously, we can sweep the 'volume' of all thoughts and memories that we can reach. Just like our intuition of space serves as the intuitive context that integrates our spatial sensations together, so the inner experience of the etheric body manifests as the intuition that glues together the degrees of freedom of our spiritual activity (mainly thinking and remembering).

So you see, we first have to decondition from our assumptions of what it means 'to know' something. What does it mean to know the physical body, which we generally feel is the most obvious part of our experience? It is not to simply see it in our visual field such as in a mirror, or to think about legs, arms, hands, feet, head, and so forth. Rather, it is the very inner experience of sensations that transform in a lawful way in response to our spiritual activity. Get a good feel for this - walk around your room and notice how colors, sounds, textures, perhaps even smells, transform in response to your intended activity and feedback on that activity. If the color experience with the meaning of 'wall' manifests in response to your activity, then this provides a basis to steer your walking in another direction (unless you intend to bump into it). The totality of such lawful sensory experiences, the constraints and possibilities we intuit from them, is what we abstractly label the 'physical body'.

Once we orient to this way of 'knowing' our physical body, we can see how the same thing applies to all other bodies. We don't even need to call them 'bodies', they could just as easily be called A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4 or sensory constellation, thinking-memory constellation, feeling constellation, and willing constellation. The point is that, no matter how we conceive or label our lawful transformation of experience, it will always differentiate into at least this fourfold structure. Our thinking-memory feeds back on our spiritual activity in a different way than our sensory experience. Regardless of my intent, it will remain daytime or nighttime in my visual field outside. On the other hand, I can remember the experience of nighttime during daytime and vice versa. I find even more degrees of freedom if my imagination is not tied to the constraints of memory and simply explores feelings and thoughts related to day or night.

We can go much further with these sorts of considerations that stay entirely within the givens of our temporally extended flow of experience, but I will pause here. Does this make sense for you and perhaps elucidate a way to think more phenomenologically (inwardly) about the fourfold human organization?

Wow.

I never thought about my body in a phenomenological way like this.

But I would say that emotions, memory's or spiritual activity are feel like the take place in my body.

So it feels like emotions are felt in the stomach and breast area.
Thinking in the head (brain).
Willing is harder to say.

So this activities are the causes for bodily activities.

But why would I say that there is a 'Emotion world'
with beings in it, which don't have a physical body.

There are leaps of faith in steiners work, coupled with phenomenological thinking.

Ss speaks about how the current state we live in came into being.
It talks about the mineral which we can see trough our sense organs, which fills a phantom, about reincarnation, about the Christ-being acting trough hirachies of non physical beings..........

Spiritual science should be grounded in spiritual experiences, I don't had experiences now which confirm what steiners says.
May you had them, but if you haven't, then you should at least be open to the possibility, that there can be error in these view.

Guney,

I think it would be helpful to pause and consider the state of your spiritual activity when moving through these posts. When you considered the inner experience of the physical body, or the paths of experience that Cleric mentioned in relation to the astral body, perhaps you had an experience that could be represented by this image, even for just a moment or two.





Your inner space was cloudy concerning all these terms, it felt like they were all just floating concepts and pictures. Then, for at least a moment, the inner sun breaks through and there is a flash of illumination, a feeling that everything becomes a bit more clear and more intimate to your stream of first-person experience. You feel your spiritual activity moving in completely novel directions, not simply conjuring up fantastical explanations for your experience, but probing the very grooves through which that experience flows.

But then you continue to think about these concepts and it's like your inner train has switched tracks - you are now remembering various things you encountered in Steiner's lectures and these are experienced as floating concepts and pictures again, everything becomes cloudy. You can't connect these pictures to your phenomenological experience and you start to wonder what relevance any of it has for practical life. Perhaps you start to feel like Lorenzo where the concepts about 'archetypal beings' and so forth are just nonsense and any attempt to explain how they can be sensibly related to is only further nonsense. (I'm sure it's not that bad for you, but still somewhere on the gradient of that underlying mood).

Now the state of your spiritual activity could be represented as such:





We should stop and reflect on how this whole progression is exactly the phenomenological experience of spiritual activity and its constraints that we are speaking of. Instead of simply flowing our activity through these states, oscillating from brief moments of clarity to labyrinthian paths of confusion, we can try to distance our activity from the rhythm and reflect on it, as we are doing now. Then we begin to realize more and more that the maze-like obstacles are things we consistently put in our own way. We start to probe the soul space that we were secretly desiring to keep in the dark.

"And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light."

How is it that we love the darkness? Well, every time we try to meditate we experience this up close. We can hardly focus our attention for a minute before we are distracted in a million different directions. Yet this doesn't only happen when we meditate. It also happens when we are thinking through spiritual ideas, gaining ground and clarity with the phenomenological approach, and then suddenly distract ourselves with all sorts of doubts and fears and second-guessing. It is one thing to be attentive to and questioning of the ideas presented to us, seeking a better orientation to them, but another to positively throw ourselves off the course that's working and into a maze of irresolvable conundrums.

I am not saying this is at all unique to you. I can only speak of these things because I have come into intimate contact with my own inner tendency to self-sabotage in various ways. It is very characteristic on a spiritual path to feel torn between our upper luminous nature and our lower clouded nature. Yet when we are fortunate enough to experience the former, we need to warmly embrace it and not take it for granted. It is when we truly love the Light more than the darkness that the flashes of intuition and inspiration become more and more, deeper and deeper. Things that we felt were completely beyond the purview of our experience start to feel much more intimate and even obvious, as if, even if we had never come across the characterizations of esoteric science, we would still know them inwardly at some level.

So I would ask you to reflect on these inner states. See whether you feel the burning desire to experience more of the luminous flashes which will gradually deepen your intuitive orientation and clarity. We don't need to seek immediate confirmation of the deepest spiritual secrets. And when we feel that need, we should at least remain conscious that it is our love of the darkness acting up, not the Light.