Pictorial Thinking

[Federica]

What is meant by "ordinary, healthy human understanding" may be confusing. It reminds me of a recent discussion about "practical thinking", what Steiner meant by it. Here again, ordinary human understanding could be interpreted as the intellect, but it's not so, right? Maybe it could be said that one can practice concentration, phenomenology, study-meditation, and so realize the shape of one's soul nature and entanglements, learn how to exist consciously independent of the physical body, meet the Guardian, and be largely non clairvoyant in the sense Steiner uses the word here. Is this correct?

Yes, it all boils down to not confusing "ordinary, healthy human understanding" with "abstract mental modeling". For example, when we speak of Saturn warmth, it would be abstract if we think "This warmth is something that can only be known by clairvoyant consciousness. Until then, I'll use an abstract placeholder in my mind, something that I'll expect to find the corresponding reality for, only in the future." This is not what "ordinary, healthy human understanding" implies. There's nothing preventing us from focusing on the same warmth that the clairvoyant speaks of, in our ordinary consciousness. The difference is only that the latter experiences this element in greater purity, without being overlaid with continuously collapsing (in QM sense) thoughts. Yes, this doesn't mean that focusing on this inner element can happen without at least a little effort. It certainly isn't something that outer life has prepared us for. Yet there's nothing preventing us from doing so without losing the ground beneath our feet - that is, the support of our bodily environment. This holds true even when we read about the various beings. For example, when we read about Spirits of Form, instead of picturing some abstract mental images of the supposed beings, we can try to feel the forces of Intelligence that support the structure of the inner Cosmos. Just like our ideal intent to picture a cube, acts like lines of force around which our imagination coalesces, so we should conceive of non-local ideal intents that act like lines of force along which the inner dreamscape stabilizes. Of course, from a secular perspective there's nothing 'ordinary' in trying to conceive of such things. They even sound extraordinary, fantastic. Yet the fact remains that if we approach these ideas with open mind, there's nothing preventing us from aligning our normal thinking being with them. We may not have the sensitivity to discern the inner ideal life that manifests as such lines of force, but our thinking being can surely align with its intuitive curvatures. If we say that we can't understand it, and we are honest, we'll have to admit that we don't understand it simply because we don't allow ourselves to. We may have the most varied excuses for this: more data is needed, we doubt, it is not confirmed by the leading scientists, and so on. Yet none of this is a principle impossibility. These are only excuses to justify holding the communications as ghostly and abstract mental images. If we allow ourselves to, we can perfectly well understand what would it mean for a higher-order Intelligence to support the structure of the dreamscape. Not abstractly but in the same way the clairvoyant understands it. This understanding will need to be purified and refined, it will have to be cleansed from many anthropomorphic admixtures, but the fact remains that we can perfectly well comprehend it while still in the bodily context.

"Ordinary, healthy human understanding" shouldn't be mistaken for understanding that is grounded entirely in sensory concepts. The healthy human being is a spiritual being. As such, understanding the spiritual depth of reality is our innate capability. Thinking in concepts about the spiritual depth is just as natural as conceptualizing the contents of the senses.

Yes, it’s an inner ‘click’ in thinking mode that initially sounds mysterious, feels veiled. I believe those optical illusions in which two distinct images are concealed make for a good metaphor for that ‘click’. Most people naturally see one image, struggle to see the other, but can work it out, with effort. Maybe the thinking efforts, or gestures, that realizes what Steiner calls “healthy and ordinary human thinking” are comparable to the inner tentative stretches in unknown directions we have to engage to find the second image in such optical illusions. There, it’s very clear how our preferences and habits are challenged in an initially mysterious way. Still, it’s doable, and we know what it means when we suddenly break into the other mode, the one that’s required to discern the concealed image. There’s a sort of small ‘breakthrough’ into the world of the concealed image and we can feel how the effort literally consists in trying to put the thinking intention in various tentative shapes, literal ideal shapes. Eventually, we put our cognition in a form that matches the ‘data’, and feel the inner click. 'Data' can be the elusive image in an optical illusion, or the description of Old Saturn, to be comprehended through a similar thinking gymnastic.

[Cleric K]

Yes, it’s an inner ‘click’ in thinking mode that initially sounds mysterious, feels veiled. I believe those optical illusions in which two distinct images are concealed make for a good metaphor for that ‘click’. Most people naturally see one image, struggle to see the other, but can work it out, with effort. Maybe the thinking efforts, or gestures, that realizes what Steiner calls “healthy and ordinary human thinking” are comparable to the inner tentative stretches in unknown directions we have to engage to find the second image in such optical illusions. There, it’s very clear how our preferences and habits are challenged in an initially mysterious way. Still, it’s doable, and we know what it means when we suddenly break into the other mode, the one that’s required to discern the concealed image. There’s a sort of small ‘breakthrough’ into the world of the concealed image and we can feel how the effort literally consists in trying to put the thinking intention in various tentative shapes, literal ideal shapes. Eventually, we put our cognition in a form that matches the ‘data’, and feel the inner click. 'Data' can be the elusive image in an optical illusion, or the description of Old Saturn, to be comprehended through a similar thinking gymnastic.

Right. As said, the tricky part is not to imagine that "ordinary thinking" means something everyone possesses as a given. This is what I tried to imply in FoHC, where it was said that phenomenology is not an investigation of the obvious. Just because it is ordinary thinking (in the sense that we don't need to loosen the bodily context) doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be developed, new concepts acquired, and so on. In the same sense, adding numbers also requires nothing but ordinary cognitive capabilities, yet this doesn't mean that the math illiterate will find that thinking as a given. Most difficulties in studying spiritual science come from trying to stuff the ideas in our preexisting intellectual slots. This is not what 'ordinary' implies.

[AshvinP]

Here is also an interesting lecture passage from Steiner to contemplate:

Today's thought of the day also speaks of this:

As the physical eye must be acquired in the pre-earthly life, so must the eye, for the perception of the spiritual world, be acquired here on earth through spiritual science, active spiritual knowledge. I do not mean through clairvoyance — that is an individual affair — but through the understanding, with healthy intelligence, of what is discovered by clairvoyant research. It is simply untrue to say that one must see into the spiritual world oneself in order to believe what the clairvoyants see. It is not so. […]

We need only be prepared to think the thing out, and feel it through and through. It is this recognition by healthy human understanding, of what is given out of the spiritual world — it is not the clairvoyance, but the activity of knowledge — which provides us with spiritual eyes after death. The clairvoyant has to acquire this spiritual eye just the same as other men. For what we gain by Imaginative Cognition, what we perceive in seership, falls away and vanishes after a few days. It only does not do so if we bring it down to the standpoint of ordinary understanding, and in that case we are obliged to understand it in the very same way in which it is understood by those to whom we communicate it.

In effect, clairvoyance as such is not the essential task of man on earth. Clairvoyance must only be there in order that the supersensible truths may be found. But the task of man on earth is to understand the supersensible truths with ordinary, healthy human understanding.

What is meant by "ordinary, healthy human understanding" may be confusing. It reminds me of a recent discussion about "practical thinking", what Steiner meant by it. Here again, ordinary human understanding could be interpreted as the intellect, but it's not so, right? Maybe it could be said that one can practice concentration, phenomenology, study-meditation, and so realize the shape of one's soul nature and entanglements, learn how to exist consciously independent of the physical body, meet the Guardian, and be largely non clairvoyant in the sense Steiner uses the word here. Is this correct?

I would offer here that the simple distinction between planar and vertical thinking, as illustrated in Part 2 (and elsewhere), is a very helpful tool to kindle our intuition between the difference between abstract intellectual modeling (planar) and 'ordinary, healthy understanding' (vertical). Simply visualizing the puzzle piece illustration may be enough to kindle that intuitive sense for the difference after we work with it for a while, applying it to concrete examples we meet in life (for ex. the abstract historian v. the experience our own remembering activity).

In planar thinking, we try to click the concepts of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so forth only between themselves, to figure out some abstract system in which they seem to all make sense quite independently of our own inner ideal context. This approach will necessarily lead to frustrations, struggles, seeming contradictions (because a description from one angle is in tension with that from another angle), and a feeling that it all remains as an abstract picture of remote supersensible realities. In vertical thinking, we continuously try to relate the supersensible realities described to that inner ideal (intuitive) context, sensing how the latter structures our current state of being and its metamorphoses.

In the final analysis, there is only the spiritual activity of the 10 hierarchies (humanity is the 10th). All phenomenal relations from the primordial past to the present and the distant future (including the phenomena of time-experience and time-flow themselves) can be traced to evolving relations within the depth of this spiritual activity. Together they comprise what we currently experience to be our intuitive context through which we continuously make sense of the experiential flow, whether in normal daily thinking about life experience or in rigorous philosophical, scientific, theological, etc. thinking, or even across the threshold in higher modes of cognition. So we just need to keep this intuitive context in sight and allow all supersensible facts to be experienced as living testimonies to its mysterious yet archetypally patterned relations.

[Federica]

Yes, it’s an inner ‘click’ in thinking mode that initially sounds mysterious, feels veiled. I believe those optical illusions in which two distinct images are concealed make for a good metaphor for that ‘click’. Most people naturally see one image, struggle to see the other, but can work it out, with effort. Maybe the thinking efforts, or gestures, that realizes what Steiner calls “healthy and ordinary human thinking” are comparable to the inner tentative stretches in unknown directions we have to engage to find the second image in such optical illusions. There, it’s very clear how our preferences and habits are challenged in an initially mysterious way. Still, it’s doable, and we know what it means when we suddenly break into the other mode, the one that’s required to discern the concealed image. There’s a sort of small ‘breakthrough’ into the world of the concealed image and we can feel how the effort literally consists in trying to put the thinking intention in various tentative shapes, literal ideal shapes. Eventually, we put our cognition in a form that matches the ‘data’, and feel the inner click. 'Data' can be the elusive image in an optical illusion, or the description of Old Saturn, to be comprehended through a similar thinking gymnastic.

Right. As said, the tricky part is not to imagine that "ordinary thinking" means something everyone possesses as a given. This is what I tried to imply in FoHC, where it was said that phenomenology is not an investigation of the obvious. Just because it is ordinary thinking (in the sense that we don't need to loosen the bodily context) doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be developed, new concepts acquired, and so on. In the same sense, adding numbers also requires nothing but ordinary cognitive capabilities, yet this doesn't mean that the math illiterate will find that thinking as a given. Most difficulties in studying spiritual science come from trying to stuff the ideas in our preexisting intellectual slots. This is not what 'ordinary' implies.

When we think in this way, about, say, Old Saturn as a spiritual fact, in flexible, spiritual concepts, we are not loosening the bodily context, we are not concentrating, but we are still liberating our thinking-will from the limits of the physical brain, right? This work aligns the cognitive layers - the thinking layer in this case, to the illustrations we are given, just as we are aligning it to the sensory layer when striving to remain present in the experience of, say, folding clothes. Without higher cognition and clairvoyance, one isn't able to draw by oneself the curvatures of the unfolding collective experiential flow, but one is able to recognize (remember) a part of that flow as true, when presented with it, and to align one's being to it. Similar to the way we can often identify with certainty the right answer in a multiple choice test, because our memory is stimulated, while we wouldn't have been able to come up with the same answer solely by our efforts, without the help of the multiple choices. Does this work as an analogy?

[Federica]

I would offer here that the simple distinction between planar and vertical thinking, as illustrated in Part 2 (and elsewhere), is a very helpful tool to kindle our intuition between the difference between abstract intellectual modeling (planar) and 'ordinary, healthy understanding' (vertical). Simply visualizing the puzzle piece illustration may be enough to kindle that intuitive sense for the difference after we work with it for a while, applying it to concrete examples we meet in life (for ex. the abstract historian v. the experience our own remembering activity).

In planar thinking, we try to click the concepts of Saturn, Sun, Moon, and so forth only between themselves, to figure out some abstract system in which they seem to all make sense quite independently of our own inner ideal context. This approach will necessarily lead to frustrations, struggles, seeming contradictions (because a description from one angle is in tension with that from another angle), and a feeling that it all remains as an abstract picture of remote supersensible realities. In vertical thinking, we continuously try to relate the supersensible realities described to that inner ideal (intuitive) context, sensing how the latter structures our current state of being and its metamorphoses.

In the final analysis, there is only the spiritual activity of the 10 hierarchies (humanity is the 10th). All phenomenal relations from the primordial past to the present and the distant future (including the phenomena of time-experience and time-flow themselves) can be traced to evolving relations within the depth of this spiritual activity. Together they comprise what we currently experience to be our intuitive context through which we continuously make sense of the experiential flow, whether in normal daily thinking about life experience or in rigorous philosophical, scientific, theological, etc. thinking, or even across the threshold in higher modes of cognition. So we just need to keep this intuitive context in sight and allow all supersensible facts to be experienced as living testimonies to its mysterious yet archetypally patterned relations.

Yes, thanks Ashvin. I am glad that these ideas are being more and more precisely sketched (at least for me). I guess I have often been using the word 'intellect' to roughly signify something that encompasses not only planar, model thinking, but also what you describe in terms of vertical thinking - practical, ordinary thinking, in Steiner. I realize I haven’t been entirely clear until recently, about these differentiations. We could also say that vertical thinking is what we have recently started to call study-meditation, and yet I think it’s become clearer now. There is no meditation-proper in that way of reading about supersensible realities. There is ordinary, vertical thinking that doesn’t hide in the blind spot, but is still, to a noticeable extent, conceptual.

[Cleric K]

When we think in this way, about, say, Old Saturn as a spiritual fact, in flexible, spiritual concepts, we are not loosening the bodily context, we are not concentrating, but we are still liberating our thinking-will from the limits of the physical brain, right?

Yes, and that's why I believe even split-second conjunctions are of great benefit. As an analogy, when we jump in place, at the moment we separate from the ground, for a moment we experience weightlessness, just like an astronaut does. This moment, however, is so short that we can't make many observations. In that sense, initiatic development is like inner organization that allows us to maintain the weightlessness for longer, such that we can explore in greater purity the laws of existence.

Similar to the way we can often identify with certainty the right answer in a multiple choice test, because our memory is stimulated, while we wouldn't have been able to come up with the same answer solely by our efforts, without the help of the multiple choices. Does this work as an analogy?

Yes, that's right. And it also comes to remind us that clairvoyant consciousness doesn't simply give us the answers readymade. Steiner was reading non-stop. Using the analogy, it can be said that in this way he was becoming acquainted with many many checkboxes. It is through the inner attunement, however, that they could be elucidated by higher insight. Without these checkboxes (our ordinary conceptual life) higher Intuition has no body to incarnate into.