Understanding Steiner's Philosophy

[AshvinP]

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

Why is JW's claim only an assumption?

What is meant by the term "higher cognition", which I read a couple times in the forum?

I think the assumption issue was answered in last post. I forgot to address your question re: Logic.

Let's define "Logic" as the inner force which allows meaningful connection between outer forms. The latter also include our meaningful concepts, like "ATP/energy", "consciousness", "idea", "will", "matter", etc. That is how Logic functions in math, philosophy, science and reasoning in general. If I connect the concept of "consciousness" with the concept of "banana", as in "consciousness looks like a banana", we will say this is nonsense because the inner logic which makes it a meaningful connection is mostly missing. The concepts don't cohere into more meaningful idea, i.e. they are incoherent in that form. The point here is that there can be no coherent meaning in any string of concepts without that inner force of Logic which meaningfully unites them, even ones that sound somewhat valid like "ATP/energy must be prior to consciousness".

Higher cognition is faculty which can perceive the higher order Logic which unites perceptions of the World Content, including concepts and ideas. For example, it can become conscious of the logical structure underlying a musical symphony, just like intellectual reason can generally become conscious of the logical structure underlying a sentence of words or an entire human language. Actually even we can become conscious of the logical structure in musical symphony, but higher cognition would perceive this more effortlessly and also perceive the logical structure between domains of experience, like language, music, dance, painting, etc.

I realized my quick bootleg attempt to define "higher cognition" is not at all helpful here, so just disregard it. Maybe Cleric will jump in with a more helpful illustration. It's very important to understand it is "higher" because it can understand lower cognition, not the other way around. The lower never really understands the higher until it evolves into the higher. We don't attain higher understanding through the lens of the reflections, dreams, and shadows, but only when we awaken and look up. These are both images for bringing our higher reasoning into motion. The reflecting doesn't understand the reflected; the shadow doesn't understand its source; the dreaming doesn't understand the awakened. Lower cognition is a reflection, shadow, dream, etc. of higher cognition.

[Cleric]

Cleric,

Thank you for your time and effort in making these things easier to understand for me.
I read your posts and find them very instructive, especially the trilogy "the center of the central topic".

Kind regards

Thank you Guney for your positive feedback. You're really at an age where learning to think properly can make a great difference in what you'll be able to contribute to the Whole in this lifetime. It is the new wave of souls like you which will really further human evolution.

Everyone knows about the gaps between the generations. Why are there such gaps? It's completely natural that interests differ at different ages but the fact that the older generations can't even understand the new, only shows how cognition is completely rigid and shaped by the natural and social environment of a particular strip of time. We can see it also here in the forum, we can see it with Jeffrey. The particular context of the life situation imprints in the individual and forms the rigid channels, ducts, valves, through which consciousness flows (or the shape of the river bed from the previous metaphor). In most people who never awaken to their creative spiritual activity which weaves in thoughts, these rigid forms become the templating patterns for all their thinking, feeling and willing. A silicon chip is a metaphor for this. The layers etched on the dye are an example of how the environment imprints itself in the organism. From then on, electricity (the spirit) flows only through predefined channels. In time you'll quickly learn to recognize people whose thinking flows in such a templated way. We could see it with Jeffrey. Even though he's highly learned, his academic experience has led him to a point where certain way of thinking was etched into his organization and now it's even impossible to point to him that his spirit is still alive and can modify the ducts and channels, the river bed.

Note that this is not at all said to be judgmental about people. It's the opposite - we must learn to understand them. We must always remember that everyone goes through unique life experiences. We shouldn't be criticizing because maybe if we were at their place we would fare even worse!

Let me add once again an illustration to what Ashvin said about higher cognition. It connects naturally with the above. Consider the fact that our state of being is continually metamorphosing (the game state, if you have followed the VG metaphor). Today we should move away from trying to make a mental model of reality that should map to the way perceptions metamorphose. This is what Ashvin speaks of with the 'view from nowhere'. The intellect, half-consciously, tries to swirl eddies in the time stream of consciousness (for example, the thoughts about matter, quantum fields, energies, MAL, etc.) and expects that these eddies can be overlaid on top of other shapes of the stream which we seemingly don't influence directly (those that we call sensory perceptions and thus feel to us as outer world). This has been the whole scientific and philosophical endeavor in the last 500 years or so.

The paradigm shift in scientific and philosophical thinking today demands that we recognize that our thought eddies are just as part of the stream of reality as everything else. As long as we're blind about the fact that we think and impress these eddies in the stream, we'll always feel as some thinker/observer standing outside of reality and time, and seeking the perfect intellectual model (constellation and dynamics of eddies) which correlate/match the eddies of sensory perceptions.

Now, assuming that we understand that our thinking is an active force which not only produces thought-eddies but through them also influences the river bed and thus the future flow, the goal of the new science is to have real time understanding of how our spiritual activity (thinking, feeling, willing) modifies the time stream of reality. Obviously this requires new ways of thinking. We need the ability to will our spiritual activity and at the same time be as closely conscious as possible to the way this will affects the stream (which we perceive). That's why we need to learn to observe thinking. This is exactly where our willing nature encounters in the most immediate way the effects that the same that will imprints in the stream. This is very uncomfortable for people indoctrinated in the dual mode of thinking so widespread today. It feels as a dog chasing its own tail. Today's science wants to stabilize its objects of investigation. It wants to have stable readings of the instruments, stable graphs, stable mathematical models and so on. This completely breaks down when we try to employ the same habits to our own thinking because we're observing what we think. We're continually changing the object of observation! That's why the cognitive sciences of today have so little success - the intellect simply doesn't want to confront itself because this requires new skills. Instead it wants to observe stable perceptions EEG scans, MRI scans, etc. because they give the comfortable distance between thinking (in the blind spot) and completely independent perceptions.

I tried to illustrate this through the hysteresis process and its spiraling into unity. Imagine we're looking at a real time EEG or other kind of reading which displays our current brain activity. Let's say we think about "dog". This will draw some spikes on the EEG. But then we see the EEG and our inner state becomes "This is how my activity looks like when I was thinking about 'dog'". But then the new EEG prints out, which corresponds to the last quoted thought. When we see that EEG our inner state becomes "This is how my activity looks when I was thinking about "This is how my activity looks like when I was thinking about 'dog'"". And so on. We don't really need EEG for this because the observation of our own thinking already provides us with the same experience.

This is very uncomfortable for the intellect that is used to feel as invisible subject thinking about objective reality (independent of the subject). This simply doesn't work when we observe our thinking process. Thus we need new skills which we'll hardly receive from mainstream academia.

The solution is simple. And no, it is not the mystical solution "Just let go and observe thoughts as you watch leaves blown by the wind". We must simply learn to swim with our spiritual activity. We must realize that we're continually navigating a time-stream of consciousness. We're willing the navigation and continually receiving perceptual feedback (first and foremost as thoughts and imagination). Things become difficult only when we insist to objectify the perceptual stream and conceptualize it as something independent of the thinking process which does the conceptualizing.

Now let's look at the metaphor. Imagine that the continual transformation of our inner state is like movement through a labyrinth, a maze (of course it's not a 3D spatial maze, yet it follows some lawful patterns - see the examples with non-Euclidean geometry). We move from frame to frame in this maze and try to build an intellectual map. In spatial sense we can say something like this: "If I will a step forwards, the visual perceptions in front of my face grow larger, while those behind my head grow smaller". This is one of the lawfulnesses. For those adventurous it might be interesting to see how this is not necessarily the case in spherical projection. The point is that our state of existence transforms from 'frame to frame' and we're quite used to many of the lawfulnesses but still we try to understand them only through intellectual maps. Logic is a general intuition about the laws through which our thought-states progress from frame to frame. To think logically means to transform from frame to frame such that every thought-state feels as proper advancement through the invisible maze. If we hit walls all the time, this means that we don't grasp the logic, the lawfulness of the state flow. If we grasp this, then we should really understand logic as a kind of perception of our transition from state to state. It's not something that we abstract from reality and then use it to think logically about the reality out there. It is the very perception of the walls, turns, traps, obstacles of the maze, as we crawl through it.

Imagine that we didn't have a feeling for the continuity of 3D space. Imagine that we're just presented with visual snapshots but we can't grasp their inner logic. Eventually we build completely intellectual ruleset, not different from what was said above. Such human beings, without a feel for 3D spatiality would have some common wisdom about how to operate in the world. For example, elders would pass down knowledge to the young, saying "We have no idea what this reality is all about but we know that if you want perceptions to grow larger you need to move your feet thus and thus. If you want them to grow smaller, you need to move them in the opposite way".

Sounds strange? Well it is actually what modern humanity currently does, not in respect to space but in respect to Time. Our intellect has managed to completely merge with the spatial lawfulness of the sensory spectrum. We have very good intuition about how to operate our will in order to enlarge the perceptions that we need (like food) or make the perceptions we dislike smaller (like some dangerous threat).

Unfortunately, we don't yet know how to do that properly in respect to Time. Ultimately, there's continuous metamorphosis of stream of inner being. Space is only a subset of lawful relations which we grasp intuitively and which seem to bring coherence to sensory perceptions. But what about all the other perceptions? For example, let's look at the current tragic events. Most people would certainly declare that they would like to experience such a stream of being, so that the sensory, emotional, ideal perceptions of war should grow smaller and smaller. But the facts show that we, collectively, don't yet understand the geometry of Time. It seems we want to avoid war, we take some steps but similarly to the linked video above, the spectrum of war grows larger and larger instead of smaller.

The reason is because we have completely mechanical understanding of the stream of becoming. The maze that we move through is not spatial in the 3D sense. It is like phase space. We don't really move anywhere (we are always where our "I" is) but the 'pixels' of our state continuously transform around and in us. The question is how to grasp the lawfulness through which they transform and even more importantly - how our spiritual activity contributes to that transformation. As said, currently we have quite mechanical and heuristic understanding of time. We don't perceive time's lawful flow but based on previous experience we say "If you want to fare well in life, get your degree, get a job so that you can get your pension at old age." I'm not saying that we shouldn't do that but it's nevertheless an example of thinking that mechanically extrapolates past experience into the future. Today more than ever we see how fragile the human economic and political world is and how it can easily turn out that the perceptions of our pension instead of growing larger as we age, may actually diminish.

So what do we do? We need to begin investigating the lawful structure of the phase-maze as it extends in time. We should start small. We should start from our most immediate time flow - our own cognitive flow. The more we perceive how our emotions, desires, beliefs, convictions, etc. (which represent the river bed) determine our current flow, the more we'll be able to transform them. The more we understand how our own spiritual flow is shaped in time, the more we understand it also for the whole World. Because our flow is an aperture of the first-person perspective of the World flow.

Once again we see how different our whole scientific mood should become. Most importantly, we should overcome the automatic thinking which presents the outer world as a temporary sandbox, from which it is enough to step back. The idea that the flow of the world today is different from our own flow is the most paralyzing idea for modern man. It makes us completely satisfied with the general feeling of blissful one consciousness and we imagine that as long as we're relatively good, we don't do too much harm, and pass our life with the least resistance, we're all good for the 'real' life after death. The primary realization that modern man should make is that the life after death is the time-lawfulness of life here and now. It's the same World flow but at a different 'zoom level', until we rhythmically enter again the finer details of the flow in our next life. Only through such realization we can awaken to the responsibility each one of us bears. It is up to us to grow into the time-lawfulness of reality such that we can guide our common life in a wise and loving way. This can only happen if we begin to recognize the river bed of our soul life, how it shapes our default thoughts, judgments, emotional responses, and how with our spiritual activity we can reshape that soul life such that it is musically attuned and as a result consciousness extends in time.

In short, logic is the immediate perception of our thinking-flow through the time-maze - whether we hit walls or move freely. Higher cognition is the gradual expansion of that perception such that it grasps intuitively the geometry of the flow in time. The intellect is like blindfolded higher cognition, which can perceive the logic only of what it immediately touches. When thinking grows towards the past and future in the living spiritual organism of time (as if our cognitive feelers spread as water can fill a labyrinth), it's called in the most general sense 'higher cognition' (because our spirit lives in the higher order topology of time).

[Güney27]

Thank you very much for that Cleric.
very interesting thoughts.
In other texts of yours, you present exercises that help us, through metamorphosis of thoughts (vowels), to show how we generate our thoughts.
So we are not the thoughts, but the thoughts emerge from our activity, which is our true, essential self.
During your exercise (with the vocal ones), I noticed that when I consciously transform my thoughts(aeiou), I don't know exactly how I do it, it just happens through my intention or will.
I couldn't find out more.
I cannot describe this will.
If we are our activity, then what is our consciousness? A feature of our activity? After all, activity cannot exist without consciousness, otherwise it would be an inexperiential abstraction from the intellect or am I lying wrong?

Are cognitions through traditional (eastern) meditation wrong? recognizing how it is all one, consciousness is timeless and infinite etc. If you are an extreme state of the y axis, are you conditionally right or wrong?

[Cleric]

During your exercise (with the vocal ones), I noticed that when I consciously transform my thoughts(aeiou), I don't know exactly how I do it, it just happens through my intention or will.
I couldn't find out more.
I cannot describe this will.

This is perfectly normal. Our spiritual activity is always at the center, at the middle between the conscious (the thoughts that become perceptible, like the vowels) and the subconscious (we can think of this as the hidden processes which shape the context within which we manifest our thoughts, the one which you say you can't grasp).

For example, if I tell you to pick a random world city, you'll certainly pick one. But we're never fully aware why we selected exactly that (that's why we feel it's random). Nevertheless, it is within our physical and soul organization where the factors are which shape our possible choices. As the most obvious example - we'll never select a city which we have never heard if. So if we use QM metaphor, it can be said that there's a palette of possibilities, a 'wavefunction' of our continuous becoming. We are to transition into a state where we think a name of a city. Our memories, sympathies, antipathies, ideas, etc. shape that palette. Our becoming is like navigating through the maze of possibilities, we constantly steer. Yet this steering is not fully free. The junctions that we can steer through are shaped by our river bed.

So the takeaway is that we need to get used to the fact that we're always at the middle between the known and the unknown. It is possible to get more and more deeper insight but this is already the path of spiritual development. This is a slow and gradual process and it is completely normal that it seems inaccessible.

If you take that experience seriously, it will become your guiding light towards spiritual development. Think about the possibility that your thoughts become perceptible only at the event horizon of consciousness and that beneath that horizon there's a whole world - spiritual world. A world of thought-like processes of higher order which shape not only your personal soul processes but also the collective soul, life and physical processes.

If we are our activity, then what is our consciousness? A feature of our activity? After all, activity cannot exist without consciousness, otherwise it would be an inexperiential abstraction from the intellect or am I lying wrong?

Imagine that I give you the answer - consciousness is X, where X is some very clever explanation. You think about it and it seems very interesting and logical. Let's say I tell you that consciousness is the Cosmic field of pure conscious energy. But in what way does this really help you, besides giving you a toy for your intellect to play with? True knowledge doesn't lie in definitions. These thinking habits are the heritage of the materialistic age. Today we should embrace the obvious fact that at least half of reality is always behind our eye of consciousness (beneath the event horizon). Even if we have some abstract definition of this hidden reality, this will not in itself reveal it. We'll simply have some thoughts which are still in front of our eye. These thoughts are not the same with what lives behind the eye.

Are cognitions through traditional (eastern) meditation wrong? recognizing how it is all one, consciousness is timeless and infinite etc. If you are an extreme state of the y axis, are you conditionally right or wrong?

First, all these traditional methods have appeared at certain point of evolution when they were the best possible. I won't use the terms right and wrong here because it depends on one's ideal. For a citizen war is bad, for a dictator is good.

Yes, consciousness is one, it is timeless, it is infinite. These are general truths known for millennia. They look like shocking news today only because of the centuries long materialistic sleep that we've passed through. But now we're at the danger that those who rediscover these ancient truths, simply stop there. It's like you're dreaming and in the dream someone tells you that it's all a dream. Then imagine that you believe this fully, you take it to heart and even feel it very powerfully but it simply remains at that level. You're completely satisfied within the feeling that it is all a dream and that's all. You think that there's nothing more to do. But why not go further? Why not make the dream lucid? To make the dream lucid we need to become conscious of forces that until recently worked completely beneath the event horizon.

So you see, I can not tell you what is wrong and what is right because it depends on what you yearn for deep in your soul. Are you satisfied with the general truth that consciousness is one, timeless, infinite and simply repeat that as a mantra until death? Or you feel the need to turn this dream reality into lucid reality, by understanding more and more the forces that weave behind your eye?

I won't say which choice is right because the choice must be made out of Love, in complete freedom. I'll only say that it is wrong to believe that by embracing the idea of one consciousness, we become a top-level observer and we're completely free from the dream. This is a simple factual error and that's why I can point it out.

I often attach this image:



This is the perspective of one believing that by experiencing the mystical state, he becomes an eye at the periphery of all reality, and thus there's nothing more behind the eye (a spiritual world).



This is the perspective which at every level realizes that our current eye is manifesting within a complicated spiritual context. With gradual development we can attain to a deeper perspective from which we see our current self. It's like seeing the maze of our soul life and saying "Ahaa, now I see what I've been going through. So these were my desires to do this and that, then as I navigated through them, in the interference such and such thoughts were formed" and so on. This is not a one time process. It is continuous turning inside out. It's like continuous undressing of a cocoon. Our current thoughts, feelings, actions, memories, perceptions are this cocoon. When we work consciously, we gradually grow out of it. Yet even our higher consciousness is still a cocoon in respect to the next level and so on. It's a gradient.

The real art (what elsewhere I've called 'the missing science of prayer') is how to relate to these levels of our being, which are still behind our current eye. From our future eye we can always see and understand our current (which will seem as past), as a shell that we have undressed. But our current consciousness can't comprehend the future in quite the same way a toddler's consciousness can't comprehend its own future adult consciousness which understands the sciences, politics, spiritual things and so on. Yet in certain sense this future consciousness is present there around the baby as a living being which attracts the development. It's similar for us today. There's always a higher self, future self from whose perspective our current consciousness is like one of a toddler. How to relate to that higher being, is the most important task in front of humanity.

[Güney27]

Guney,

Yes, I remember JW and our dialogue here

We don't need to explain that fact, because it isn't a fact. It's a pure abstract materialist assumption. JW started arguing that for a few pages before finally clarifying that "ATP is necessary for consciousness" was his interpretation of BK's arguments, not his own position, and it's not even a valid interpretation of BK. JW's position is something like, "matter and consciousness are 'entangled' with each other and we cannot actually know anything about either of them via human reason". In short, JW's is the most abstract metaphysical thinker I have ever come across, even though he claims to be criticizing abstract metaphysics. If you have any other specific arguments from him you want to run by me, I am happy to explain why they are the result of pure abstract thinking without any living connection to first-person conscious activity, including Thinking activity. Logic always has the upper hand, because its living power is perpetually presupposed and present within all the attempts to ground the World in some concept supposedly beyond it and immune to it. Whether that something is called "God", "Will", "Matter", "ATP", "Emptiness", etc. makes no difference, because its essential meaning is always imbued by the Logic through which it is formed. Without that meaning, it simply doesn't exist.

re: deaf and dumb - see Cleric's illustration above. "They cannot think" is an assumption which identifies a person's essential spiritual activity with any given thought-eddy within the living flow. There is no warrant for that naive realistic assumption.

re: Gravity - we must seek the inner meaning of these outer word-forms and concepts like "space-time curvature". The latter without that inner meaning are simply dead snake skins, mere husks of meaning disconnected from their life-source. The inner meaning is always found in relation to our own first-person experiential activity in the world. Ancient people perceived that inner meaning more than we do because their inner activity was more united with the World Processes, whereas ours is completely alienated and isolated. That was necessary for human freedom. When we felt ourselves as entirely undifferentiated within collectives, flowing along with the natural rhythms of the Cosmos without any agency, we may have been more at peace, but we were not more free. Now, despite our anxiety from the extreme atomization which has occurred, we are more free. The question is, how are we going to use that freedom? Are we going to atomize further by endlessly creating new symbols via idle speculation? The symbolic world we perceive now is about as complex as it could possibly get. That complexification is precisely what makes us feel lost at sea without a living connection with other humans, other living organisms, Nature as a whole, and the Cosmos as a whole. Reintegration of the symbols through our own reentry into the living thinking-flow which produces them maintains all the benefits born from the spiritual descent into form while also alleviating the atomization and fragmentation.

Ashvin,

I think jeffrey williams is an intelligent man.
He studied physics and philosophy and has a remarkable knowledge.
He is over 60 and has been dealing with these topics for decades and I am 18 and have only been doing it for 4 years (he speaks good German to him, which is good because German is my mother tongue).
I was able to take something away from the conversation, especially about Heidegger, who also overcame the subject-object dichotomy.
My objection was that being physicalism runs into known problems (hard problems etc).
He then said that he works without assumptions and that he deduces from perception that if the brain is damaged, for example, consciousness is lost, this is evidence for him.
He said that everything is made up of compositions of energy. This is the fundamental level that we know about. We still talked about near-death experiences, which he takes for stories and doesn't pay much attention to.
He's a supporter of carlo rovelli (whom I don't think appreciate after his interview at theories of everything). I would like to say that I am not really familiar with physics. It is him considering whether there will be a second interview.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by your statements about logic, because I didn't fully understand them.

Kind regards

Yes, I can elaborate. First let me preface as follows - I have not overcome dualistic and abstract thinking, of the negative sort we are conveying here, by any stretch. The only reason I can perceive it within my own thinking and others is because I have allowed myself to approach something unfamiliar with open heart and mind. Without that, not only can we not overcome abstract thinking, we won't know there is anything to overcome. If we remain only familiar with this thinking mode, the only option is to project it onto every person, worldview, philosophy, religon, etc. we encounter. That is because we are social beings who desire to express our views with others. The more intelligent we are, the more we want to express that intelligence with as minimal effort as possible.

IMO this is what JW did - he had shut himself down completely to any new experience of thinking, so he couldn't fathom any argument which was pointing to such a new way of thinking. He assumed it must be the same old way of purely abstract thinking about "thinking" or "idea" as the Ground of existence. You are here asking questions, so that by itself shows some openness. JW did not ask a single question for clarification here. He responded with short phrases, a couple sentences at most. These are telltale signs of ideological thinking. Everything is chopped up into sound bites, and it is assumed this is sufficient for conveying meaning. That is only sufficient for conveying the most abstract, superficial husks of meaning. It also indicates he is only here to teach and assumes he has nothing to possibly learn.

So intelligence has no bearing. The politicians, bankers, corporate execs, etc. who run the developed world are highly educated and intelligent, but they are also the most abstract thinkers, creating supremely generalized one size fits all policies with no relation to living experience of individuals and communities. With that said, the simple answer here is that "ATP prior to consciousness" is impossible to experience, in principle. All genuine knowledge must be rooted in experience. An easy way to test this is to ask, "what perspective would I need to have experiences which could build confidence in this assertion." If the answer is a 3rd person "view from nowhere", which stands apart from first person consciousness and somehow perceives mindless ATP existing prior, then it is pure abstraction.

This view from nowhere only arose in philosophy and science in the modern age, mostly after Cartesian subject/object dualism. Then the subject who was inquiring into phenomena was abstracted from the inquiry altogether, as if the thinking inquiry has no influence on the phenomena being observed. We know now with modern science, more than ever, this is quite absurd approach with no relation to real dynamics of existence. JW knows this as well, which is why he speaks of "entanglement" between mind-matter, but he still adopts the view from nowhere in all of his arguments! Again, that's because he knows no other way to approach philosophy, but he also doesn't want to remain silent. We don't have to remain silent if we simply approach with humility, sincerity, patience, and effort towards what is currently unfamiliar to us.

Hello Ashvin,


You're right, atp is prior to consciousness, is not an experienceable statement.
But if you were on a team of scientists studying, say, human brain physiology, you would experience through your cognition that when you manipulate the brain, the participant's cognition changes drastically.
If manipulated in arial x, he would report that he no longer perceived any colors, in arial y he would no longer taste anything, and after stimulation in arial z he would become unconscious.

For the scientist it can be experienced that if he changes the organization of the brain, the mental life of the participant changes as well.
From this he concludes that soul states emerge from brain states and that there is no invisible soul. After all, it is also his job to find explanations.
While ATP in the brain can only be experienced through brain research, is it then from a nowhere perspective for the scientist in the lab?
Where is his causal error that leads him to assume: brain = soul?

PS: Which books about occultism and research into the life of the soul can you recommend other than those by Steiner? I am currently reading "an outline of occult science".
Kind regards

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I think jeffrey williams is an intelligent man.
He studied physics and philosophy and has a remarkable knowledge.
He is over 60 and has been dealing with these topics for decades and I am 18 and have only been doing it for 4 years (he speaks good German to him, which is good because German is my mother tongue).
I was able to take something away from the conversation, especially about Heidegger, who also overcame the subject-object dichotomy.
My objection was that being physicalism runs into known problems (hard problems etc).
He then said that he works without assumptions and that he deduces from perception that if the brain is damaged, for example, consciousness is lost, this is evidence for him.
He said that everything is made up of compositions of energy. This is the fundamental level that we know about. We still talked about near-death experiences, which he takes for stories and doesn't pay much attention to.
He's a supporter of carlo rovelli (whom I don't think appreciate after his interview at theories of everything). I would like to say that I am not really familiar with physics. It is him considering whether there will be a second interview.

Can you elaborate on what you meant by your statements about logic, because I didn't fully understand them.

Kind regards

Yes, I can elaborate. First let me preface as follows - I have not overcome dualistic and abstract thinking, of the negative sort we are conveying here, by any stretch. The only reason I can perceive it within my own thinking and others is because I have allowed myself to approach something unfamiliar with open heart and mind. Without that, not only can we not overcome abstract thinking, we won't know there is anything to overcome. If we remain only familiar with this thinking mode, the only option is to project it onto every person, worldview, philosophy, religon, etc. we encounter. That is because we are social beings who desire to express our views with others. The more intelligent we are, the more we want to express that intelligence with as minimal effort as possible.

IMO this is what JW did - he had shut himself down completely to any new experience of thinking, so he couldn't fathom any argument which was pointing to such a new way of thinking. He assumed it must be the same old way of purely abstract thinking about "thinking" or "idea" as the Ground of existence. You are here asking questions, so that by itself shows some openness. JW did not ask a single question for clarification here. He responded with short phrases, a couple sentences at most. These are telltale signs of ideological thinking. Everything is chopped up into sound bites, and it is assumed this is sufficient for conveying meaning. That is only sufficient for conveying the most abstract, superficial husks of meaning. It also indicates he is only here to teach and assumes he has nothing to possibly learn.

So intelligence has no bearing. The politicians, bankers, corporate execs, etc. who run the developed world are highly educated and intelligent, but they are also the most abstract thinkers, creating supremely generalized one size fits all policies with no relation to living experience of individuals and communities. With that said, the simple answer here is that "ATP prior to consciousness" is impossible to experience, in principle. All genuine knowledge must be rooted in experience. An easy way to test this is to ask, "what perspective would I need to have experiences which could build confidence in this assertion." If the answer is a 3rd person "view from nowhere", which stands apart from first person consciousness and somehow perceives mindless ATP existing prior, then it is pure abstraction.

This view from nowhere only arose in philosophy and science in the modern age, mostly after Cartesian subject/object dualism. Then the subject who was inquiring into phenomena was abstracted from the inquiry altogether, as if the thinking inquiry has no influence on the phenomena being observed. We know now with modern science, more than ever, this is quite absurd approach with no relation to real dynamics of existence. JW knows this as well, which is why he speaks of "entanglement" between mind-matter, but he still adopts the view from nowhere in all of his arguments! Again, that's because he knows no other way to approach philosophy, but he also doesn't want to remain silent. We don't have to remain silent if we simply approach with humility, sincerity, patience, and effort towards what is currently unfamiliar to us.

Hello Ashvin,


You're right, atp is prior to consciousness, is not an experienceable statement.
But if you were on a team of scientists studying, say, human brain physiology, you would experience through your cognition that when you manipulate the brain, the participant's cognition changes drastically.
If manipulated in arial x, he would report that he no longer perceived any colors, in arial y he would no longer taste anything, and after stimulation in arial z he would become unconscious.

For the scientist it can be experienced that if he changes the organization of the brain, the mental life of the participant changes as well.
From this he concludes that soul states emerge from brain states and that there is no invisible soul. After all, it is also his job to find explanations.
While ATP in the brain can only be experienced through brain research, is it then from a nowhere perspective for the scientist in the lab?
Where is his causal error that leads him to assume: brain = soul?

PS: Which books about occultism and research into the life of the soul can you recommend other than those by Steiner? I am currently reading "an outline of occult science".
Kind regards

Guney,

The causal error is that he assumes himself out of the experiment and attributes what comes forth from his activity working upon the perceptions, entirely to the isolated perceptions/concepts external to himself. This is what happened in Newton's color theory, for ex. He inserted a prism into a stream of light, so that light was perceived by him through darkness from one angle (red) and darkness through light from another (blue), with gradient of five colors manifesting to his vision in between (seven colors of the rainbow). Newton explained this dynamic by saying all the colors are contained within the essence of "light" (i.e. his percept-concept of light external to himself) and he has simply brought out what was already existing there, completely independent of his own perceptual and conceptual activity.

First notice how easy that makes things for the intellect. It simply locates the reasons for everything within whatever it is observing and says "this is the essence of what I am observing". There is no need for any further reasoning through the dynamics of the phenomena in relation to the active agency of the observer. The same applies to the conscious manipulation of brain which feeds back into perceptions of changing soul states. We need to perceive our own active agency which brings about the phenomena and their transformations, and also discerns the overarching ideal principles which unite the perceptual states. This requires more careful, expansive observation and more careful reasoning through these observations in relation to ourselves. In regards to inner phenomena, especially, we will really need to expand our sphere of perceptions which are currently super-sensible to the intellect. That is the process of developing higher cognition.

Consider the following:

Our studies of the last few days will have made it clear to you that it is altogether impossible to look upon the configuration of the spatial Universe and its movements in the way that is adopted by modern science. For not only is the Universe regarded as entirely separate from Man, but even the separate celestial bodies, which appear to our sight as disconnected from each other, are each treated as being isolated, and then in their isolation their effects upon each other are observed. It comes to the same thing as if, for example, we were to study the human organism by examining first an arm and then a leg, in order afterwards to understand the complete organism from the way in which the single members work together. But the fact is, it is not possible to comprehend the human organism by studying its individual members; but all investigation of the body of man must have its starting point in the whole, from which we can then proceed to the separate parts.

The same applies to the solar system, and also to the solar system in its relation to the whole visible stellar Universe. For the Sun, Moon, Earth and other planets are only parts of the whole system. Why should the Sun, for instance, be considered as an isolated body? There is absolutely no reason why we should imagine the Sun to be merely just where we see it, limited by the boundaries within which our eyes perceive it. In this connection the philosopher Schelling was quite correct when he declined to ask the question, ‘Where is the Sun?’ with any other meaning than ‘Where is his influence felt?’ If the Sun acts upon the Earth, the effects of such activity must belong of necessity to the sphere of the Sun; and it is very wrong to extract a part from a whole and study that part by itself. But this is the very thing the modern materialistic conception of the Universe has set out to do, and its influence has grown stronger and stronger ever since the middle of the fifteenth century. This it is against which Goethe always fought, when he was alive, in his labours in the realm of natural science, and against which all true followers of his science must also fight. Goethe found himself compelled to draw attention to the fact that we must not study Nature without Man, without keeping in mind the relation of Nature to Man. The study of natural phenomena outside Man must have its basis in the understanding of the nature of Man.

re: occultism - I am so little down the spiritual path that I cannot recommend any such resources. As usual, the goal is not to understand "occult spirituality" or spiritual science as an intellectual theory, but first-person reality. I don't think there will be any greater conceptual resource for this than Steiner himself. He continually makes sure to connect everything he is writing/speaking about with our first-person spiritual activity and conscious experience of that activity. I think too often modern takes on esoteric spirituality treat it as intellectual theory to only behold in vague concepts which are quite disconnected from one another, and/or from our own spiritual thinking activity. One book I would recommend, however, is called "Jung and Steiner". I found this helpful to conceptually ground many things Steiner was writing about, on the one hand, and to bring to life many psychological (soul) dynamics Jung wrote about, on the other.

Looking at this basic premise, it is understandable that Jung unashamedly confessed that he had no knowledge of what “spirit” really is, what “life” really is. One must not overlook, however, that his confessed ignorance relates only to the solving of life's problems by way of thinking. It cannot be denied that in Jung's confessed ignorance there hides a docta ignorantia, a wisdom of not knowing. “He strives beyond intellectually attainable knowledge to a state of soul in which knowledge ceases, and in which the soul meets its God in ‘knowing ignorance,’ in docta ignorantia,” says Steiner of Nicholas of Cusa. Something similar could be said about Jung's assessment of thinking. For “we do not need to know what truth is, but to experience it. We do not need an intellectual viewpoint, but what we need is to find the way to an inner, perhaps wordless, perhaps irrational experience. That is the great goal.” This we read in the foreword to Jung's collection of essays Modern Man in Search of the Soul. At this point our comparison with Rudolf Steiner leads us to the following conclusions: Jung and Steiner see eye to eye on the point that mere knowledge, mere rationality, does not lead to a genuine solution of inner problems. “When we are thinking is precisely when we ‘are’ not—for thoughts are only pictures of reality.... We must become conscious of the reflective, mirror-image nature of mental activity, of our thought life.”

Wehr, Gerhard. Jung and Steiner (p. 169). SteinerBooks. Kindle Edition.

[AshvinP]

Hello Ashvin,


You're right, atp is prior to consciousness, is not an experienceable statement.
But if you were on a team of scientists studying, say, human brain physiology, you would experience through your cognition that when you manipulate the brain, the participant's cognition changes drastically.
If manipulated in arial x, he would report that he no longer perceived any colors, in arial y he would no longer taste anything, and after stimulation in arial z he would become unconscious.

For the scientist it can be experienced that if he changes the organization of the brain, the mental life of the participant changes as well.
From this he concludes that soul states emerge from brain states and that there is no invisible soul. After all, it is also his job to find explanations.
While ATP in the brain can only be experienced through brain research, is it then from a nowhere perspective for the scientist in the lab?
Where is his causal error that leads him to assume: brain = soul?

PS: Which books about occultism and research into the life of the soul can you recommend other than those by Steiner? I am currently reading "an outline of occult science".
Kind regards

Let me also add, these studies on correlations between brain states and soul states rely on the participant's self-reporting on the latter. So, even with a little reasoning, we can conclude that the observation of these correlations tell us nothing about whether the sensory experience is actually taking place, but only what is conscious to the participant. This makes great sense when we understand the bodily organism, including the brain, is what reflects the soul's experience to itself and makes it self-aware. If a mirror is clouded or broken, then the person standing in front of it will not perceive himself or be aware of himself (assuming he only knows himself through the images in the mirror), but he has not vanished from existence. The same applies here. So it's really no mystery why that happens and the scientist's "explanation" here amounts to little more than saying, "I broke the person's inner mirror, so they are no longer conscious of sensory experience".

[Güney27]

Ashvin,

You wrote:
"They provide useful ontology only to the person who knows to treat them as mineralized symbols for living ideal processes which can never be derived from physicalist scientific method"

I read couple mineralized. What you mean by that.

What is your opinion about Mark Vernon?

Kind regards

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

You wrote:
"They provide useful ontology only to the person who knows to treat them as mineralized symbols for living ideal processes which can never be derived from physicalist scientific method"

I read couple mineralized. What you mean by that.

What is your opinion about Mark Vernon?

Kind regards

Guney,

"Mineralized" is another way of saying what Cleric also refers to as "decoherence", "aliased", "fourier transformed", etc. of higher cognitions into the feelings and thought-forms we currently perceive at the 'event horizon' of our waking cognition, i.e. in front of our spiritual "I". These feelings and thought-forms then also translate into mineralized perception of outer objects and processes (mostly we don't even recognize everything around us as continual processes, i.e. beings in process of becoming more than what they are at any given moment, because of the mineralizaton). Practically anything involving fluid processes becoming more fixed and rigid (another one is "precipitation") can be a symbol for this same inner meaning. It is fundamentally referring to the way we perceive-cognize the outer and inner worlds depending on our cognitive evolutionary stage (which can vary between individuals).

re: Mark Vernon - I like him and his book on Barfield and Christianity. The usual issues apply, though. Is it moving towards first-person experience of the evolution of consciousness that Barfield speaks of, or only intellectual theory of it? All too often it is the latter for modern commentators. That being said, what Vernon does via philosophy talks and his psychology practice is of immense value to others and should be applauded.

The greater part of this book consists . . . of a rudimentary attempt to remedy the omission [of the man-nature relationship]. But this involves . . . challenging the assumption [that the relationship has remained static]. . . . The result--and really the substance of the book--is a sort of outline sketch . . . for a history of human consciousness; particularly the consciousness of western humanity during the last three thousand years or so.

Finally, the consequences which flow from abandoning the assumption are found to be very far-reaching; and the last three chapters are concerned, theologically, with the bearing of "participation"--viewed now as an historical process--upon the origin, the predicament, and the destiny of man.

[Güney27]

I am currently watching anthroposophical introductory videos on YouTube, there is a lot of talk about spiritual evolution, e.g.
The Egyptians considered clairvoyance to be normal because in their time it was common to perceive things which are supernatural. however, I wonder how one can access the states of consciousness of previous humans it is a statement that can never really be verified by our own experience, because how are we supposed to know what humans perceived thousands of years ago, we can at most from literature try to trace back the state of consciousness of the people through language, but we will never be able to know with full conscience what people perceived at that time.
In addition, it is said that we get the theoretical basis for clairvoyant abilities, the initiate knows what the clairvoyant sees. however, we are not again in a realm of abstraction when it comes to a theoretical foundation. It is also said that people who deal with anthroposophy in this life will probably have clairvoyant abilities in the next life. We thus receive a science which is intended to provide us with knowledge about the life of the soul or spirituality. However, if the initiate relies on the perceptions of clairvoyance, then it is no more than a belief, only through direct and personal experience can knowledge of the spiritual come about. what is your opinion on Carl Gustav Jung and his idea of the collective subconscious and archetypes? To what extent are Rudolf Steiner's teachings compatible with Jung's teachers? What does Rudolf Steiner say about the active imagination as described and implemented by Jung or Goethe?
Kind regards