Phenomenological inquiry into the ether

[Güney27]

How can we phenomenologically understand the 4 ethers that make up the physical world?
Cleric's answer in the other thread makes it easier to understand the astral body because we become aware of emotions easily.
But I can't do it with the ether.
How do you connect the etheric powers with your phenomenological experience?

Basically the question is how can we connect the description of this force which is forming everything and connect it to our metamorphosis ?

[AshvinP]

How can we phenomenologically understand the 4 ethers that make up the physical world?
Cleric's answer in the other thread makes it easier to understand the astral body because we become aware of emotions easily.
But I can't do it with the ether.
How do you connect the etheric powers with your phenomenological experience?

Basically the question is how can we connect the description of this force which is forming everything and connect it to our metamorphosis ?

Guney,

I don't really have a coherent answer to share on this topic right now. But I was wondering if you started reading 'Toward a Phenomenology of the Etheric World'? I was sent a PDF copy that I can share with you by email, if you want.

Of course, this is still an outer probing of the etheric space with our thinking. The physical-etheric bodies can generally be thought to comprise our experience of an 'outer world', while the ego-astral organism comprises our experience of an 'inner world'. If we want to engage phenomenology in a more inner sense, we need to start from within and expand outwards. That means we should focus on our thinking movements and our deeper soul tendencies that 'bend' those movements. We aren't doing ourselves any favors by jumping straight for the processes that shape the living and physical structures of the outer world.

Also, we should keep in mind that neither the 'etheric body' nor the '4 ethers' nor any other supersensible reality can be understood as something in isolation. We need to get in the habit of thinking of all spiritual processes as an interwoven totality, with often complicated relations and functions that vary depending on the perspective from and purpose for which we are inquiring into them. Some part of the etheric body in humans has been liberated from the physical functions and is devoted to our thinking-remembering activity for ex. I will share a passage from the book on that:

Focussing on a single part of the human being, such as the etheric body, is always problematic because each part interacts with others. Thus, we cannot strictly limit ourselves to our theme, but must to some extent also include the neighboring parts.

Even in the plant, which anthroposophically oriented spiritual science describes as twofold (consisting of a physical and an etheric body), it is not possible to describe the etheric body in isolation. One must elucidate how its activities counteract those of the physical body, how it raises the substance of the plant out of the context of the inorganic and keeps it from sinking back into the realm of the purely physical until the moment of death.

One must also, however, relate the etheric body of the plant to a higher realm. Those forces which Rudolf Steiner describes as "astral" (see below, p. 233) which come from the periphery and transform mere vitality into sentience - they too express themselves within the etheric body of the plant. They modify and direct the phases of its activity, and they specialize its forms.

In man the etheric body is similarly impinged upon, except that the astral is not present as forces from the periphery, but as part of man's being, his astral body. Furthermore, the physical, etheric and astral bodies are infused with an ego, or "I," which again is quite different from the other three members of man's being. Rudolf Steiner once contrasted the etheric body and the astral body as the "func- tional" and the "functioning," and then defined the ego as the "pulsating" within the "functioning."2 Descriptions of anything "functional" must always be incomplete because they omit the functioning agent. For this reason, descriptions of the etheric body in isolation suffer from a kind of anonymity. To be really complete, a spiritual scientific account must always be pursued to the agent whose activity underlies the phenomenon. This must be kept in mind in the following sections.

[Federica]

How can we phenomenologically understand the 4 ethers that make up the physical world?

Güney,

If Ashvin does not have a coherent answer to your question, one can rightfully wonder how in-coherent my thoughts around this question may be But I have been reflecting on this question a little, and I would like to share a few basic thoughts, as possible starting points, like a warmup for the phenomenology of ether. And I am confident that any misleading ideas would be rectified anyway.

A preliminary note.The folded nature of reality (that Cleric and Ashvin often speak of) makes features of reality increase in one direction, in some sense, but also decrease in the same direction, in some other sense. For example, we say that our sense-perceptible physical body is the grossest of our four sheaths, the most dense, while the ether body, the soul/astral body, and the true self (“I”) are more and more spiritual. However, in another sense, our physical body is the one that has required the most powerful and encompassing intelligences to ideate and evolve - intelligences able to 'scoop' (create), shape, infuse and sustain the hard layers of matter. So the physical body is the most basic, in a sense, but also the least basic in another sense.

Another example: we understand that the purest spiritual world (higher Devachan) is the farest away, the last world one can enter along the path of developing clairvoyance - after the ether and the soul/astral worlds have been attained - but, in another sense, the type of activity we are more in control of is thinking (pure spirit) while feeling (soul) is less under our conscious control, and the bodily will (ether + matter) is even less under our control, since we can normally move our body at will, but we are entirely unaware of how our intention transforms into movement. So, in a sense, the pure spiritual world is the highest and most difficult to experience clairvoyantly, but in another sense our purest spiritual activity (sense-free thinking, not mixed up with feeling and/or bodily will and matter) is the activity that we have better control over.

This general principle could be important to remember in the context of your question, because ether is still very connected to matter. Indeed, ether is part of the material world, therefore one may think that it’s the easiest to reach, when developing supersensible perception. (For myself, I have no conscious perception of ether, but I think it is the easiest in some sense, because Steiner says that it’s in the ether that mediums and people with a constitutional predisposition end up perceiving super-sensibly, although without really understanding what’s going on). So, in a way, ether is the most accessible supersensible world. Some people stumble upon it almost spontaneously, or through drugs. Yet, in another way, the etheric body is directly connected with the life and processes of our physical body, so it’s the most mysterious for us, and easy to misinterpret. In this sense, a phenomenological discovery of our soul body seems more proximate and appropriate, since we have a slightly better grasp on our life of feeling in comparison.

In this connection, I would not say that the phenomenological approach to our soul body is easy, Güney The task is not only to recognize our emotions. It’s also to find out where and how those emotions are rooted, how deep and how branched these roots are - an inquiry that extends well beyond our individuality. Not only that. It’s then a matter of pulling these rooted features out, with the entire root attached! Our being has to be dismantled, as Cleric said, to be purified and reforged. In a sense, this work on our soul body is more laborious and tough, and less easily accessible, but in another sense, it’s more accessible - because we are somehow conscious of how our feeling life comes about. Probably it's a more urgent work, too, if we want to stick our head out of the sea of subjective opinions and impulses that obscure reality and prevent objective perceptions.


This being said, here come a few basic thoughts about the etheric body.

❄ ️ First,knowing that our ether body is close to the physical - it even has some spatial character - one could try to become more intensely aware of the sense-perceptible physical body, to begin with. Can we sharpen our normal senses, be more present in them, more attentive to the transformation in time of our flow of sensory becoming? If we infuse it with more attention, we will become less clumsy, break less objects, etcetera. That would probably create a more solid foundation to extend our perceptual flow into the etheric. Also, what are the 12 senses Steiner speaks of? Is it possible to get a feel for some of them?

❄ ️ Second,I would work with the thought that the chemical elements that compose our body (the periodic table gives an insightful overview of their qualities, almost like a semi-finished puzzle game) would fall apart and be taken over by a variety of laws, if the ether body was not there to continually hold them all together as organism, by means of its various functions. If it was for them alone - the chemical elements - they would do what they do in a corpse. That’s their intrinsic nature. But luckily ether is there, to continually oppose those laws. And the less we are conscious, like in sleep, the easiest it is for the etheric body to keep the dynamic functions flowing properly in the physical body. It means that its ability to maintain and repair the physical body is expressed through time, through flow, through maintaining the functionalities that allow the physical body to transform its states and still remain a unity. We can try to feel, in the physiology of our body, in our intuition of its various internal flows, how these flows make the difference from a piece of dead tissue and a living tissue, that is vivified and enabled to remain a part of an organic whole, through timeful transformation. Maybe some rather macabre thought experiments could help (if one is not disturbed in this way). I can shake my hand in the air. What happens? What would happen if I did the same with a cut-off hand? Or even just that: if I bump into an object with my hand and hurt myself by mistake, I may get a hematoma and a bruise. The living flows are altered. The blood is stuck and the elements try to take over. They want to live by their own separate material laws. They want to defect. Luckily, I can rest, move, sleep, and I can let the ether repair the area. It will reestablish the flows, and the bruise will go away.

❄ ️ Third,is it possible to concretize more this general idea of ether as the means by which flowing life infuses the picture of our physical body as a static compound of chemical elements?
We can ask: what are the various ways in which my body expresses life? Maybe we can do better than just saying: life comes from transformation, it’s what allows the static picture of the physical body to remain integral through transformation in time. This is true, but not enough. A stone also has a flow of becoming, a corpse also transforms, but they are not alive. Maybe we can get more insights if we look closer at the becoming of a body through time. We want to switch the mode of our attention from static to timeful. That requires effort. It's clear from all the discussions on the process of perception-cognition.

The idea that our bodily life manifests dynamically, through the unfolding of time, has to be maintained in the foreground. We may be used to perceiving a human body as a monolithic unit. We walk down the street, and every person we come across seems so self-contained, so separate from their environment. As that body walks down the street, we don't expect its arms to leak and melt into the pavement, or its head to dissolve in a cloud of rarefied substance. We expect it to remain pretty much integral within its skin-container. However, if we allow even a short time span to really complement that sequence of visual perceptions, we necessarily come to a much more mitigated understanding of that walking body. What really happens to that body through time is a continuous interaction with its environment. Elements continually trespass from the outside in: for example light, water, air, food. Similarly, chemical elements from inside the body continually trespass its supposed borders. These flows of assimilation and elimination are many, and follow various rhythms. The outside comes in and the inside comes out in complex ways, at various paces. Maybe you can imagine that you are an experimental filmmaker. You make an avantgarde short film, or VR, to make the bodily rhythms of assimilation and elimination more perceptible and conscious. You want to show how the apparent no-trespassing nature of the body is illusory. Maybe you accelerate all the rhythms, similar to those plant growth time lapses, but for a human body. And you wrap up all these flows in a continuous loop ( )

In this way, trying to picture and feel this reality as phenomena of our own body, striving to seek a timeful perspective, maybe we can get a sense of the first type of ether, the chemical ether. Chemical ether is the vehicle through which the forces that insure nutrition (assimilation) and elimination can circulate through the chemical elements of the physical body and keep them respectful of the laws of life, against their own intrinsic material laws the elements would otherwise comply with. Nutrition and its circulation, as ideas, as powerful transforming intentions, can’t just run over the bodily elements as is. In order to think these processes into form, these intelligences need a carrier medium to mediate their superior ideal nature, and make it ‘intakable’ by our body. That's what chemical ether does.

[AshvinP]

❄ ️ Third,is it possible to concretize more this general idea of ether as the means by which flowing life infuses the picture of our physical body as a static compound of chemical elements?
We can ask: what are the various ways in which my body expresses life? Maybe we can do better than just saying: life comes from transformation, it’s what allows the static picture of the physical body to remain integral through transformation in time. This is true, but not enough. A stone also has a flow of becoming, a corpse also transforms, but they are not alive. Maybe we can get more insights if we look closer at the becoming of a body through time. We want to switch the mode of our attention from static to timeful. That requires effort. It's clear from all the discussions on the process of perception-cognition.

The idea that our bodily life manifests dynamically, through the unfolding of time, has to be maintained in the foreground. We may be used to perceiving a human body as a monolithic unit. We walk down the street, and every person we come across seems so self-contained, so separate from their environment. As that body walks down the street, we don't expect its arms to leak and melt into the pavement, or its head to dissolve in a cloud of rarefied substance. We expect it to remain pretty much integral within its skin-container. However, if we allow even a short time span to really complement that sequence of visual perceptions, we necessarily come to a much more mitigated understanding of that walking body. What really happens to that body through time is a continuous interaction with its environment. Elements continually trespass from the outside in: for example light, water, air, food. Similarly, chemical elements from inside the body continually trespass its supposed borders. These flows of assimilation and elimination are many, and follow various rhythms. The outside comes in and the inside comes out in complex ways, at various paces. Maybe you can imagine that you are an experimental filmmaker. You make an avantgarde short film, or VR, to make the bodily rhythms of assimilation and elimination more perceptible and conscious. You want to show how the apparent no-trespassing nature of the body is illusory. Maybe you accelerate all the rhythms, similar to those plant growth time lapses, but for a human body. And you wrap up all these flows in a continuous loop ( )

In this way, trying to picture and feel this reality as phenomena of our own body, striving to seek a timeful perspective, maybe we can get a sense of the first type of ether, the chemical ether. Chemical ether is the vehicle through which the forces that insure nutrition (assimilation) and elimination can circulate through the chemical elements of the physical body and keep them respectful of the laws of life, against their own intrinsic material laws the elements would otherwise comply with. Nutrition and its circulation, as ideas, as powerful transforming intentions, can’t just run over the bodily elements as is. In order to think these processes into form, these intelligences need a carrier medium to mediate their superior ideal nature, and make it ‘intakable’ by our body. That's what chemical ether does.

Thanks for sharing these helpful points and examples, Federica. This one stimulated an idea that I had been loosely pondering before.

It is quite fascinating how the basic PoF principle of our intuition-thinking-perception rhythm can shed light on all sorts of seemingly complicated phenomenal processes as well. At a broad level, we can say that we incarnate from the spiritual worlds and 'project' all the intuitive forces we were working with pre-birth into our new bodily organization, our new physical, biological, and psychic structure. These forces condense from more expansive curvatures of potential and reflect themselves into our psycho-physical organization, which then provides the matrix of support for our spiritual activity during life. With this spiritual activity, we are in a sense attempting to re-member our pre-birth (and early childhood) intuitive movements from two polar opposite directions - 1/ through sense impressions and thinking through them, and 2/ through consumption of substances from the natural kingdoms. Basically, we consume the 'outer' spiritual relations through our senses (thinking) and our digestive system (will), seeking to gradually reintegrate them as lucid knowledge of our native spiritual existence. This process also gives rise to new creative soul capacities.

We are familiar with what happens when we consume sensory impressions and attach intuitions to make coherent sense of them (concepts being the outermost circumference of this intuitive life). We could say that we involute the sense perceptions in so far as our intuitive activity penetrates them with meaning. Then the sense-perceptible properties themselves are no longer interesting to us, as they have been understood to some extent. Yet what happens through the will forces in our inner digestive process is more shrouded in experiential mystery. It is known that our salivary glands begin to liquefy the solid substances. Through both secular and supersensible research, it is also known that there is a whole 'Cosmic rain' of glandular secretions that completely dissolve every trace of the substances as they traverse the digestive tract, reducing them to 'chaos'. Through this Cosmic process, once the former substances are entirely dissolved, new substances are built up for our bodily and psychic life. Something comes from nothing. This Cosmic rain that dissolves the external substances and then organizes new coherent structures is the very same intuitive force that we use to cognize the meaning of sense perceptions by reducing the latter to chaos. 

We know a similar thing also happens with the reproductive process - the egg is reduced to chaos so that the Cosmic forces can enter into the embryo and organize new living structures. So the intuitive-thinking-perception rhythm that we can directly trace in our sensory experience is also working at broader contextual levels to maintain and reproduce organic and physical structures through processes of nutrition and reproduction. 

I was going to start a new thread to share this quote from Prokofieff, but I suppose it can now be worked in here as well. 

As we have seen, the human will by its very nature is related to Intuition, for the latter arises in man when his will turns into a new organ of perception through spiritual development. One can therefore say: In the process of the Resurrection, out of the pure force of cosmic Intuition that originates from the heights of the World Midnight Hour, the Christ with His Cosmic 'I' has taken hold of the inner will-substance of His physical body all the way into its material content in order completely to transform this part of the perceptual world out of the spirit (transition from 7 to 1). With that, for the first time in human evolution, a part of the perceptual world has originated (the Resurrection-body) that is both physical and at the same time purely spiritual, meaning where the contrast between spirit and matter or 'I' and world no longer exists. Thus, this fully spiritualized part of the perceptual world could become a seed for the gradual spiritualization of man and all of nature.

What signifies the exceptional state in human cognition (on the microcosmic level) as transition from thought-intuitions to imaginative perception of the spiritual world, to that (as an archetype) corresponds macrocosmically the absolutely exceptional state of the Death and Resurrection of the Christ on the Place of the Skull on earth. After all, never before has an entity of the divine-spiritual worlds passed through death in the earthly body so as to bring the message of its overcoming to the gods.

What was said could be formulated moreover as follows. The highest concept, as defined by Plato, the highest idea that encompasses and generates all the other ideas (for Plato they were spiritual entities) is the Logos. It unites at the Turning Point of Time with a human body that is the loftiest object of perception in the physical-sensory world. For it bears in itself as microcosm all the forces of the universe. 12 This essential living union of the highest concept with the most perfect perception then takes place at the Turning Point of Time as a 'mystical fact', quite in accordance with Aristotle's 'mental pictures', so that in Christ Jesus the divine (the highest idea or using Aristotelian verbal practice-the form) submerges into matter and becomes inseparable from it: 'And the Word became flesh' (John 1:14). In this unique world event the Logos Itself inhabited and took hold of the physical body all the way into its material components, in order then to lead it to resurrection.

Just as on the cognitive path of The Philosophy of Freedom a new reality comes into being on the microcosmic level through the union of the percept with the corresponding concept, not merely something formal, so in the Resurrection a new cosmic reality was created on the macrocosmic level as a foundation for the origination of a future cosmos. 13

Rudolf Steiner points to this connection in the lecture of 8 May 1910 in which he designates the cognitive theory of The Philosophy of Freedom as being one that has arisen 'in the sense of Paul' or 'on the Pauline basis (GA 116). For prior to uniting percept and concept in the process of cognition, the world appears to man merely as a divided, imperfect half-reality, a kind of double illusion or maya. Out of this, through its own activity, the soul must now create a new reality that transforms world maya into higher truth....The most important result that comes from the methodical starting point of cognition in anthroposophy, as Diagram 3 symbolizes, consists in the central importance of the 'I' for the whole of human and Earth evolution (point 4). This is located in the centre of the lemniscate and links its lower and upper segment, the physical-sensory and the spiritual world, in an inseparable unity. Likewise the two directions, defined in the drawing by two arrows, pass through the 'I' as their centre and therefore cannot be entered upon outside of the 'I'. The first direction arises from intuitive thinking to the fully conscious and thought-pervaded perceptions of the spiritual world and thus to the experiencing and unfolding of the resurrection forces in human consciousness, first on the imaginative and then the succeeding stages. The second direction moves from the highest realm of Intuition directly back into the earthly world of perceptions during this transition, in order to exercise the forces of resurrection as fount of the spiritualization of all physical existence.15

Eventually, through the Christ impulse, the "I" should expand its consciousness so far that the will forces are spiritualized to the point where nutrition is experienced no differently than cognitive perception, and the latter is likewise experienced with the concrete reality of nutrition. These two polar opposite methods of 'consuming' the spiritual world will be progressively united as we transition toward creatively producing a new planetary foundation from out of the spiritual. It is the etheric body that mediates between the physical and the soul life, devoting its energy to both nutritional and thinking functions. These are very deep mysteries, of course, and it is being presented quite schematically. Nevertheless, if we hold fast to our phenomenological orientation to the PoF principles, these will even help us orient to the much deeper aspects of spiritual evolution, such as the foundational, central, and ongoing Christ events by which our bodies and the World will be spiritualized. The more we can work on purifying the astral nature from within outwards, the more these deeper etheric and physical constraints on our transforming state of being can be explored from within as well. It is really only our disorderly soul life, conditioned to abstract habits of thinking, that makes them seem so 'unintuitive' and so far out of reach from experience. 

[Güney27]

❄ ️ Third,is it possible to concretize more this general idea of ether as the means by which flowing life infuses the picture of our physical body as a static compound of chemical elements?
We can ask: what are the various ways in which my body expresses life? Maybe we can do better than just saying: life comes from transformation, it’s what allows the static picture of the physical body to remain integral through transformation in time. This is true, but not enough. A stone also has a flow of becoming, a corpse also transforms, but they are not alive. Maybe we can get more insights if we look closer at the becoming of a body through time. We want to switch the mode of our attention from static to timeful. That requires effort. It's clear from all the discussions on the process of perception-cognition.

The idea that our bodily life manifests dynamically, through the unfolding of time, has to be maintained in the foreground. We may be used to perceiving a human body as a monolithic unit. We walk down the street, and every person we come across seems so self-contained, so separate from their environment. As that body walks down the street, we don't expect its arms to leak and melt into the pavement, or its head to dissolve in a cloud of rarefied substance. We expect it to remain pretty much integral within its skin-container. However, if we allow even a short time span to really complement that sequence of visual perceptions, we necessarily come to a much more mitigated understanding of that walking body. What really happens to that body through time is a continuous interaction with its environment. Elements continually trespass from the outside in: for example light, water, air, food. Similarly, chemical elements from inside the body continually trespass its supposed borders. These flows of assimilation and elimination are many, and follow various rhythms. The outside comes in and the inside comes out in complex ways, at various paces. Maybe you can imagine that you are an experimental filmmaker. You make an avantgarde short film, or VR, to make the bodily rhythms of assimilation and elimination more perceptible and conscious. You want to show how the apparent no-trespassing nature of the body is illusory. Maybe you accelerate all the rhythms, similar to those plant growth time lapses, but for a human body. And you wrap up all these flows in a continuous loop ( )

In this way, trying to picture and feel this reality as phenomena of our own body, striving to seek a timeful perspective, maybe we can get a sense of the first type of ether, the chemical ether. Chemical ether is the vehicle through which the forces that insure nutrition (assimilation) and elimination can circulate through the chemical elements of the physical body and keep them respectful of the laws of life, against their own intrinsic material laws the elements would otherwise comply with. Nutrition and its circulation, as ideas, as powerful transforming intentions, can’t just run over the bodily elements as is. In order to think these processes into form, these intelligences need a carrier medium to mediate their superior ideal nature, and make it ‘intakable’ by our body. That's what chemical ether does.

Thanks for sharing these helpful points and examples, Federica. This one stimulated an idea that I had been loosely pondering before.

It is quite fascinating how the basic PoF principle of our intuition-thinking-perception rhythm can shed light on all sorts of seemingly complicated phenomenal processes as well. At a broad level, we can say that we incarnate from the spiritual worlds and 'project' all the intuitive forces we were working with pre-birth into our new bodily organization, our new physical, biological, and psychic structure. These forces condense from more expansive curvatures of potential and reflect themselves into our psycho-physical organization, which then provides the matrix of support for our spiritual activity during life. With this spiritual activity, we are in a sense attempting to re-member our pre-birth (and early childhood) intuitive movements from two polar opposite directions - 1/ through sense impressions and thinking through them, and 2/ through consumption of substances from the natural kingdoms. Basically, we consume the 'outer' spiritual relations through our senses (thinking) and our digestive system (will), seeking to gradually reintegrate them as lucid knowledge of our native spiritual existence. This process also gives rise to new creative soul capacities.

We are familiar with what happens when we consume sensory impressions and attach intuitions to make coherent sense of them (concepts being the outermost circumference of this intuitive life). We could say that we involute the sense perceptions in so far as our intuitive activity penetrates them with meaning. Then the sense-perceptible properties themselves are no longer interesting to us, as they have been understood to some extent. Yet what happens through the will forces in our inner digestive process is more shrouded in experiential mystery. It is known that our salivary glands begin to liquefy the solid substances. Through both secular and supersensible research, it is also known that there is a whole 'Cosmic rain' of glandular secretions that completely dissolve every trace of the substances as they traverse the digestive tract, reducing them to 'chaos'. Through this Cosmic process, once the former substances are entirely dissolved, new substances are built up for our bodily and psychic life. Something comes from nothing. This Cosmic rain that dissolves the external substances and then organizes new coherent structures is the very same intuitive force that we use to cognize the meaning of sense perceptions by reducing the latter to chaos. 

We know a similar thing also happens with the reproductive process - the egg is reduced to chaos so that the Cosmic forces can enter into the embryo and organize new living structures. So the intuitive-thinking-perception rhythm that we can directly trace in our sensory experience is also working at broader contextual levels to maintain and reproduce organic and physical structures through processes of nutrition and reproduction. 

I was going to start a new thread to share this quote from Prokofieff, but I suppose it can now be worked in here as well. 

As we have seen, the human will by its very nature is related to Intuition, for the latter arises in man when his will turns into a new organ of perception through spiritual development. One can therefore say: In the process of the Resurrection, out of the pure force of cosmic Intuition that originates from the heights of the World Midnight Hour, the Christ with His Cosmic 'I' has taken hold of the inner will-substance of His physical body all the way into its material content in order completely to transform this part of the perceptual world out of the spirit (transition from 7 to 1). With that, for the first time in human evolution, a part of the perceptual world has originated (the Resurrection-body) that is both physical and at the same time purely spiritual, meaning where the contrast between spirit and matter or 'I' and world no longer exists. Thus, this fully spiritualized part of the perceptual world could become a seed for the gradual spiritualization of man and all of nature.

What signifies the exceptional state in human cognition (on the microcosmic level) as transition from thought-intuitions to imaginative perception of the spiritual world, to that (as an archetype) corresponds macrocosmically the absolutely exceptional state of the Death and Resurrection of the Christ on the Place of the Skull on earth. After all, never before has an entity of the divine-spiritual worlds passed through death in the earthly body so as to bring the message of its overcoming to the gods.

What was said could be formulated moreover as follows. The highest concept, as defined by Plato, the highest idea that encompasses and generates all the other ideas (for Plato they were spiritual entities) is the Logos. It unites at the Turning Point of Time with a human body that is the loftiest object of perception in the physical-sensory world. For it bears in itself as microcosm all the forces of the universe. 12 This essential living union of the highest concept with the most perfect perception then takes place at the Turning Point of Time as a 'mystical fact', quite in accordance with Aristotle's 'mental pictures', so that in Christ Jesus the divine (the highest idea or using Aristotelian verbal practice-the form) submerges into matter and becomes inseparable from it: 'And the Word became flesh' (John 1:14). In this unique world event the Logos Itself inhabited and took hold of the physical body all the way into its material components, in order then to lead it to resurrection.

Just as on the cognitive path of The Philosophy of Freedom a new reality comes into being on the microcosmic level through the union of the percept with the corresponding concept, not merely something formal, so in the Resurrection a new cosmic reality was created on the macrocosmic level as a foundation for the origination of a future cosmos. 13

Rudolf Steiner points to this connection in the lecture of 8 May 1910 in which he designates the cognitive theory of The Philosophy of Freedom as being one that has arisen 'in the sense of Paul' or 'on the Pauline basis (GA 116). For prior to uniting percept and concept in the process of cognition, the world appears to man merely as a divided, imperfect half-reality, a kind of double illusion or maya. Out of this, through its own activity, the soul must now create a new reality that transforms world maya into higher truth....The most important result that comes from the methodical starting point of cognition in anthroposophy, as Diagram 3 symbolizes, consists in the central importance of the 'I' for the whole of human and Earth evolution (point 4). This is located in the centre of the lemniscate and links its lower and upper segment, the physical-sensory and the spiritual world, in an inseparable unity. Likewise the two directions, defined in the drawing by two arrows, pass through the 'I' as their centre and therefore cannot be entered upon outside of the 'I'. The first direction arises from intuitive thinking to the fully conscious and thought-pervaded perceptions of the spiritual world and thus to the experiencing and unfolding of the resurrection forces in human consciousness, first on the imaginative and then the succeeding stages. The second direction moves from the highest realm of Intuition directly back into the earthly world of perceptions during this transition, in order to exercise the forces of resurrection as fount of the spiritualization of all physical existence.15

Eventually, through the Christ impulse, the "I" should expand its consciousness so far that the will forces are spiritualized to the point where nutrition is experienced no differently than cognitive perception, and the latter is likewise experienced with the concrete reality of nutrition. These two polar opposite methods of 'consuming' the spiritual world will be progressively united as we transition toward creatively producing a new planetary foundation from out of the spiritual. It is the etheric body that mediates between the physical and the soul life, devoting its energy to both nutritional and thinking functions. These are very deep mysteries, of course, and it is being presented quite schematically. Nevertheless, if we hold fast to our phenomenological orientation to the PoF principles, these will even help us orient to the much deeper aspects of spiritual evolution, such as the foundational, central, and ongoing Christ events by which our bodies and the World will be spiritualized. The more we can work on purifying the astral nature from within outwards, the more these deeper etheric and physical constraints on our transforming state of being can be explored from within as well. It is really only our disorderly soul life, conditioned to abstract habits of thinking, that makes them seem so 'unintuitive' and so far out of reach from experience. 

Ashvin,
would you recommend this book from prokofieff to me?

I came across it a couple months ago but didn't buy it.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
would you recommend this book from prokofieff to me?

I came across it a couple months ago but didn't buy it.

Guney,

I probably wouldn't recommend it at this point. It starts off simple enough but then it starts to take a good amount of spiritual scientific knowledge and orientation for granted. Of course, there is no harm in getting the book and seeing for yourself - if it feels too difficult to orient toward, you can put it aside and return to it at a later time. I am sure it will be of some value for you eventually.

[Güney27]

Ashvin,
would you recommend this book from prokofieff to me?

I came across it a couple months ago but didn't buy it.

Guney,

I probably wouldn't recommend it at this point. It starts off simple enough but then it starts to take a good amount of spiritual scientific knowledge and orientation for granted. Of course, there is no harm in getting the book and seeing for yourself - if it feels too difficult to orient toward, you can put it aside and return to it at a later time. I am sure it will be of some value for you eventually.

I today started to reading this book and I don't understand very much, but a couple things said there are worth of thinking for me.

It seems that Steiner really thought that his phenomenology of thinking was his most important work for humanity.

Do you have a clue why he thought that, when most of his writings go into more archetypal themes, like the evolution of humanity or the hirachies?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,
would you recommend this book from prokofieff to me?

I came across it a couple months ago but didn't buy it.

Guney,

I probably wouldn't recommend it at this point. It starts off simple enough but then it starts to take a good amount of spiritual scientific knowledge and orientation for granted. Of course, there is no harm in getting the book and seeing for yourself - if it feels too difficult to orient toward, you can put it aside and return to it at a later time. I am sure it will be of some value for you eventually.

I today started to reading this book and I don't understand very much, but a couple things said there are worth of thinking for me.

It seems that Steiner really thought that his phenomenology of thinking was his most important work for humanity.

Do you have a clue why he thought that, when most of his writings go into more archetypal themes, like the evolution of humanity or the hirachies?

Guney,

Working through the phenomenology of spiritual activity will naturally elucidate these questions for us. So I think it will be of immense value for you to work through Cleric's recent essay. I would first direct your attention to this quote from the essay I recently posted.

The TFS layers of the intuitive cone are, in a sense, personalized reflections or shadows of these Cosmic intents. By centering our local intents within the Cosmic intents and gaining intuitive insight into the latter, we also become more intimately familiar with the personal life of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. We become aware of more creative opportunities to harmonize the latter with the former. When our intentional life expands its sphere of interest to such Cosmic level goals, the balance of power begins to shift from the sensory and impulsive life to the purely ideal and moral life. We begin to live more in currents of pure ideality.

That is primarily because our thought patterns start to become living symbols and testimonies for the ideal potential, the higher-order intents, from which they have condensed and crystallized, just as the words on these pages are testimonies for my local intent to write an essay. When our thoughts are consciously understood as such testimonies, we gain exponentially more opportunities to extract Cosmic-level insight from them. At the same time, our feelings are continually inspired by these expansive Cosmic intents. We may even start to notice our sensations shift - colors and sounds begin to thicken out, so to speak, so they are experienced as not only flattened perceptual qualities, but also imbued with soul and spiritual qualities. They are the outer manifestations of living minds and their activity. In this way, the feeling and sensory layers are gradually depersonalized and relocated within their truthful Cosmic context.

In that sense, the forces that structure our thinking, and which we attempt to become more conscious of through the phenomenological method (including concentration), are the very same forces that are discussed in the archetypal themes, such as the higher hierarchies and the evolution of Earthly humanity. The latter is truly a Cosmic-level story of how our thinking-perception faculty came to exist in its current constellation. The evolutionary story speaks to us of the intuitive movements of our higher Self that ideates the curvatures in which our normal thinking unfolds, as it tries to gradually triangulate the meaning of its true nature and its true purpose in the Cosmic drama. Let's try to make this more clear.

Right now, I have an intuitive intent to express an idea to you, i.e. the idea of 'how the archetypal spiritual themes elucidate the depth structure of our thinking'. This intuitive intent explains the sequence of words in my post (from my perspective) - they are all concentric to that intuitive idea from which they precipitated. For someone else reading the post, why the words are sequenced in a particular way would not be as readily transparent as it is to me. In a sense, the reader has to try and recover the intuitive intent, something of the fullness of its meaning, by moving their thinking through the word sequence and resonating with its logical structure. All intuitive intents encode their meaning into forms through the structure of logic, although often that logic is not readily apparent to us in the domains beyond our own local thinking.  

Similarly, the activity of the higher hierarchies, from their perspective, explains the concentric contextual layers in which my local intent to express this idea is unfolding. These are the layers of soul, biological, and physical processes that constrain my ability to express the idea. For ex., I could theoretically have four hands typing on two keyboards at the same time, and this would give me certain additional degrees of freedom to express the idea. However, the biological and physical curvatures constrain this possibility at my current stage of evolution. Notice how, by thinking through such an example, we are like readers of the 'words' (perceptions and concepts) that precipitate from our experience of these constraining curvatures. We are trying to reconstruct the intuitive intents that sequenced these words by moving through them experientially and logically, and thereby resonate with the curvatures at a more inner level. 

If we simply stared at the physical body in an anatomy textbook and passively absorbed dim concepts about its structure, we would be like a person reading an ancient script with no idea of its meaning. It is through active phenomenology that we learn to resonate more with the meaningful language of the various curvatures that constrain the transformation of our thinking state. These curvatures also provide our thinking state feedback on how to more effectively fulfill our local intents in harmony with the intuitive intents that structure them - in that process, we gradually gain cognitive distance on and loosen some of the constraints, particularly the soul constraints. Then our thinking state experiences its transformation unfolding in new ways, moving its activity in new directions, yet remaining lucid and coherent and breathing fresh revitalizing air through its normally suffocating intellectual mask.

If it feels sort of uncomfortable and straining to think this way, then that is a good sign - it means we are starting to build thinking 'muscles' that were otherwise atrophied and dormant. It is by consistently repeating these phenomenological exercises that we gain tolerance and sensitivity for new thinking degrees of freedom. Of course, all such exercises revolve around the skill of concentration. It is how we learn to stabilize our thinking activity in the face of all the sensory and soul currents that continually try to drag it away, distract it into a million different channels, and thereby diffuse its energy into the general environment. So it is always important to keep up with concentration exercises as much as possible, which could include simply reading through posts on the forum in a concentrated and methodical way.

When you work through phenomenology, such as we find in Cleric's posts/essays, try to notice how your orientation is greatly solidified and enriched through the use of concrete examples and details. It is the same thing when you try to apply these phenomenological principles to the concrete experiences you have throughout the day - the physical (sensory), biological, and soul constraints your intuitive intents meet along the way. This is the same principle with supersensible research of Cosmic evolutionary stages, the role of the hierarchies, the subtle organization of man, the cultural epochs of evolution, etc. Without these examples and details, we would simply be floating in a nebulous intuition of 'constraining curvatures of my spiritual activity'. We need the archetypal themes and details to enrich and refine this intuition so we have a much deeper orientation to how our current thinking state can transform effectively toward its high ideals. 

[Federica]

It is quite fascinating how the basic PoF principle of our intuition-thinking-perception rhythm can shed light on all sorts of seemingly complicated phenomenal processes as well. At a broad level, we can say that we incarnate from the spiritual worlds and 'project' all the intuitive forces we were working with pre-birth into our new bodily organization, our new physical, biological, and psychic structure. These forces condense from more expansive curvatures of potential and reflect themselves into our psycho-physical organization, which then provides the matrix of support for our spiritual activity during life. With this spiritual activity, we are in a sense attempting to re-member our pre-birth (and early childhood) intuitive movements from two polar opposite directions - 1/ through sense impressions and thinking through them, and 2/ through consumption of substances from the natural kingdoms. Basically, we consume the 'outer' spiritual relations through our senses (thinking) and our digestive system (will), seeking to gradually reintegrate them as lucid knowledge of our native spiritual existence. This process also gives rise to new creative soul capacities.

We are familiar with what happens when we consume sensory impressions and attach intuitions to make coherent sense of them (concepts being the outermost circumference of this intuitive life). We could say that we involute the sense perceptions in so far as our intuitive activity penetrates them with meaning. Then the sense-perceptible properties themselves are no longer interesting to us, as they have been understood to some extent. Yet what happens through the will forces in our inner digestive process is more shrouded in experiential mystery. It is known that our salivary glands begin to liquefy the solid substances. Through both secular and supersensible research, it is also known that there is a whole 'Cosmic rain' of glandular secretions that completely dissolve every trace of the substances as they traverse the digestive tract, reducing them to 'chaos'. Through this Cosmic process, once the former substances are entirely dissolved, new substances are built up for our bodily and psychic life. Something comes from nothing. This Cosmic rain that dissolves the external substances and then organizes new coherent structures is the very same intuitive force that we use to cognize the meaning of sense perceptions by reducing the latter to chaos. 

We know a similar thing also happens with the reproductive process - the egg is reduced to chaos so that the Cosmic forces can enter into the embryo and organize new living structures. So the intuitive-thinking-perception rhythm that we can directly trace in our sensory experience is also working at broader contextual levels to maintain and reproduce organic and physical structures through processes of nutrition and reproduction. 

I was going to start a new thread to share this quote from Prokofieff, but I suppose it can now be worked in here as well. 

...

Eventually, through the Christ impulse, the "I" should expand its consciousness so far that the will forces are spiritualized to the point where nutrition is experienced no differently than cognitive perception, and the latter is likewise experienced with the concrete reality of nutrition. These two polar opposite methods of 'consuming' the spiritual world will be progressively united as we transition toward creatively producing a new planetary foundation from out of the spiritual. It is the etheric body that mediates between the physical and the soul life, devoting its energy to both nutritional and thinking functions. These are very deep mysteries, of course, and it is being presented quite schematically. Nevertheless, if we hold fast to our phenomenological orientation to the PoF principles, these will even help us orient to the much deeper aspects of spiritual evolution, such as the foundational, central, and ongoing Christ events by which our bodies and the World will be spiritualized. The more we can work on purifying the astral nature from within outwards, the more these deeper etheric and physical constraints on our transforming state of being can be explored from within as well. It is really only our disorderly soul life, conditioned to abstract habits of thinking, that makes them seem so 'unintuitive' and so far out of reach from experience. 

Yes, I understand that we consume the world, by perceiving it, and also eating and drinking it, as an attempt to reintegrate it in full consciousness. I would add that we consume ourselves too in this process, we lose our physical integrity, we trade it off, by getting older and older in our body, at least in parallel (if not way more) to our attempt to reappropriate our spiritual kernel. I mean that our thoughts consume our body no matter what. They consume it as sunk capital, in case we waste the thoughts in futile and instinctive directions, or, it’s the price that we both pay and earn, when we strive for virtuous thinking.

This Cosmic rain that dissolves the external substances and then organizes new coherent structures is the very same intuitive force that we use to cognize the meaning of sense perceptions by reducing the latter to chaos.

Therefore, we have in cognition our only chance to awaken to these forces, while in digestion we can’t, at this moment.
So chemical ether (digestion) and life ether (reproduction) are among the most unconscious ways of reintegration of spirit. The more we move towards higher etheric realms, and beyond, the more we have a chance to apply our higher intents and affect karma.

These two polar opposite methods of 'consuming' the spiritual world will be progressively united as we transition toward creatively producing a new planetary foundation from out of the spiritual.

In parallel, we will digest less and less. Already today there exist some exceptional humans who have transformed that way of consuming. I wonder if that means that the forfold constitution will implode, with a reabsorption of the etheric body too, once its mediating function will not be needed anymore.