Re: Pictorial Thinking
Posted: Thu Feb 29, 2024 11:44 pm
Hi Cleric,Cleric K wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 5:13 pmIt occurred to me that probably we can get a good idea of the purpose of meditation by thinking about a letter . We can imagine this very vividly. We can write down on a sheet of paper certain ideas, even some intimate things from our feeling life. Then we put the paper in an envelope and seal it. Now we can place this letter somewhere and anytime our gaze glances over it, it acts as a rich symbol that anchors everything that we have expressed there. We should really try to feel how practically nothing of these things can be seen by just staring at the sealed letter. This is precisely the healthy mood in meditation.Federica wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 3:58 pmAshvinP wrote: ↑Wed Feb 28, 2024 6:02 pm
This expectation for the image itself to be the source of more exoteric perceptions and deeper insights could be heightened if we have a rich visualization capacity to begin with. In that case, we may more easily lose sight of the intuitive gestures that are made in the process of concentration, the delicate sensitivity of our concentrated activity to the nudges of the various soul grooves in which it flows. In that way, 'visualize' is more about intuitively sensing the ideas and feelings associated with our concentrated state than it is about focusing on vivid perceptual details. If we start out with a weak visualization capacity to begin with, the etheric layer of holistic imaginations we eventually reach may be all the more richer and meaningful since we have grown sensitive to the fine intuitive gestures of our soul life.
I'm surprised by this take, since for concentration it's nonetheless necessary to be able to create and hold a mental image. Even more so for the first of Steiner's subsidiary exercises, or the ones in the Seer's Handbook. If the inability is as stated - that is a complete impossibility to create or recreate a picture in one's mind's eye - I would see it as a definitive obstacle to spiritual development. (As I said, I know that people tend to be sentimentally attached to their diagnoses, and I am skeptical that the impossibility to visualize is really as categorical as described).
We can really use this symbol in meditation. We can imagine how we put there everything we have read here or in all books. This is a tremendous amount of text but we can magically fit it in the envelope. Yet all this text only serves a purpose if it connects with our living experience, just like the words through which we have laid down our feelings, connect to our soul life. Then we can go even further and imagine that there's much more text that takes form inside the letter as our consciousness expands into the Cosmos.
From this perspective it should be easier to see how the vividness in which we imagine the envelope in meditation is completely secondary. Even if we can visualize it in photorealistic vividness, we still can't see anything of what is written inside. What's inside comes from the opposite direction, so to speak.
For example, we may struggle with some deep question. We can imagine that the answer is already in the envelope but it will become apparent to us only if it descends from the periphery, through us, toward the center where the image is (Inspiration). In this sense, the answers arrive in a way similar to the way we know the ideas that are expressed in the sealed letter that we wrote. In Imagination this process is still not that direct. Here the images still meet us as envelopes that we behold mainly in their imaginative content without much awareness of the intuitive intents that inspire the forms (actually in much of what we behold in Imagination our Angel is the creative force).
The key is that the vividness of imagination will come naturally in time. This is the same topic as the 'three kinds of clairvoyance'. If we set it as our goal, we can most easily achieve gut clairvoyance, which is astonishingly vivid and colorful. It's the same with psychedelics. Yet all these experiences are sealed envelopes. And as explained, the intuition of the hidden text doesn't come by imaginatively opening the letters (crack opening the visions) and reading there, but by aligning with the Inspired intuitions that give meaning to the sealed letters, even though they are not opened (just like we know the meaning of our sealed letter).
Our whole phenomenological experience is one such envelope. The secrets of the living Universe are concealed in it. They are written and continue to be written by all the hierarchies. Thus when we concentrate on it can become the center of the Cosmic Mandala that will receive its meaning from the opposite direction, by Inspiration and Intuition, by resonating with the meaningful ideal ensembles of the hierarchies.
would you say that when I take the concept, let's say the concept of freedom, and try to get from the
word-perception into the meaning which is anchored, it can be called meditation too?
Maybe the concept can be experienced in vivid pictures which embodies the meaning.