“In speaking of human things, we say that it is necessary to know them before we can love them.... the saints on the contrary say in speaking of divine things that it is necessary to love them in order to know them, and that we only enter truth through caritas.”(1)
The Center is the Heart of the Living Cosmos; it is pure Love that holds all perspectives and forms together in a harmoniously functioning Unity. What exists at the Center can only be freely incepted within human souls in its mirror image at the sensory Periphery, when these souls are in seeming isolation from one another. It is when our thoughts and feelings are not already experienced as united with the thoughts and feelings of others that we are invited to make a sacrificial cognitive effort to harmonize them through intimate inquiries and dialogue. We have to make an effort to render our respective soul ‘bubbles’ more porous and transparent to the inner experiences of others. At the Periphery, we dimly experience this highest Love when we have an enthusiastic interest in and empathy for the inner lives of our fellow beings - what pains them, what hinders them, and what might foster their higher potential.
“If you feel pain, you’re alive, if you feel other people’s pain, you’re a human being.”(2)
Love likewise views the inner joys, successes, and flourishing of others, not with frustration or envy, but as integral to its own flourishing over many iterations of rhythmic development. That means it asks us to renounce a myopic knowing perspective, i.e. thinking only about “my life” over hours, days, and years, and become receptive to a more holistic perspective that tracks the ‘footprints’ of many beings over multiple lifetimes. Love asks that we expand our interests beyond our personal destiny to coincide with the destinies of nations, civilizations, and kingdoms. We don’t worry only about what may befall us after death, but what Earthly tasks we have set out from before birth to accomplish for the benefit of humanity. Moreover, Love does not ask these wider spheres of beings to intellectually prove that they are worthy of our interest. The loving Center cannot be modeled, formulated, proven, etc. but can only be intuitively lived into and, only after that, artistically expressed through the imaginative conceptual life as the poets with their love poems.(3)
"I see you in a thousand pictures
Mary, to put it sweetly,
But none of them can describe you
How my soul beholds you.
I only know that the world is a tumult
Since gone away like a dream
And an unspeakably sweet sky
is in my mind forever.
I see you in a thousand pictures,
Maria, lovingly expressed,
But none of them can describe you
As my soul sees you.
I only know that since then it seems
the tumult of the world is blown away like dreams
And a heaven too sweet to name
Lives forever in my heart."
Mary, to put it sweetly,
But none of them can describe you
How my soul beholds you.
I only know that the world is a tumult
Since gone away like a dream
And an unspeakably sweet sky
is in my mind forever.
I see you in a thousand pictures,
Maria, lovingly expressed,
But none of them can describe you
As my soul sees you.
I only know that since then it seems
the tumult of the world is blown away like dreams
And a heaven too sweet to name
Lives forever in my heart."
In ordinary life, it is felt like we need to see and conceptualize phenomena in clear outlines, i.e. encompass them with our mental pictures within the mind container, before we can understand and transform them. The surgeon needs to peer into the patient and see the heart before he can effectively operate on it. That inner disposition is habitually carried into the domain of ‘Divine things’ as well. Yet the situation is quite different for the moral organs of the superconscious organism. To cognitively perceive the moral constellation of creative forces that reside at the foundation of our spiritual, psychic, and physical capacities, we must imaginatively participate in them. We should try to conduct our spiritual activity artistically, honestly, courageously, and with charity, forgiveness, and love, no matter how little we know about the superconscious or how imperfect our initial attempts are to work with those virtues. Working intimately with these soul forces in our daily lives also sensitizes our consciousness to how they function in our individual and collective streams of experience.
Contemplate the following passage and try to intuitively feel how the rhythmic patterns of destiny through which our ordinary knowing capacity arises can be known by living into the virtues.
(4)The golden rule is this, “Live your life as if reincarnation and karma were truths and they will become truths for you.” It appears as if this is to be achieved by a form of self-suggestion but this is not the case. The mystic symbol of the snake that bites its own tail is a familiar one. This symbol has several profound meanings but among the many interpretations it contains is the one expressed here in the golden rule.
It is evident that the supposition inherent in this golden rule negates itself in a sense in like manner as the snake that curls up around itself. How are we to understand this? If reincarnation is a fact, then certain efforts made by man that have an effect on his soul cannot be made in vain, but should become the soul's nature later on. One of the great laws of man that must be intimately tried out on his own self, is expressed in an ancient Indian text, “What you think today you will be tomorrow.” He who believes in reincarnation must realize that a quality that he develops within himself, a thought that he imprints in himself by constantly holding it in his mind, becomes something permanent in his soul that will emerge ever again. Therefore, a person seeking mystical development must first of all make the attempt to give up certain formerly held inclinations. Then, new inclinations must be acquired by constantly holding the thought of such inclinations, virtues or characteristics in one's mind. They must be so incorporated into one's being that a person becomes enabled to alter his soul by his own will-power. This must be tried as objectively as a chemical might be tested in an experiment. A person who has never endeavored to change his soul, who has never made the initial decision to develop the qualities of endurance, steadfastness and calm logical thinking, or a person who has such decisions but has given up because he did not succeed in a week, a month, a year or a decade, will never determine anything within himself about these truths.
What Steiner expresses above is also the case with sensory knowing, only the relationship between living into the soul forces and attaining knowledge of sensory relationships becomes evident over longer timeframes. The surgeon may be able to perform heart surgery on any given patient once he observes the heart, but if he stubbornly decides to perform the operations in a completely mechanical way, without paying attention to subtle intuitions that feedback on his efforts, he will never learn anything new about the best way to perform heart surgery. Likewise, if he doesn’t attend conferences, pay attention to research from diverse fields, work cooperatively with colleagues, etc., he won’t learn anything new about heart function. Eventually, only those surgeons who were simultaneously living into the virtues of humility, attentiveness, open-mindedness, cooperation with others, etc. will remain viable in the developing field of heart operations. That same principle can be applied across all domains of natural science and intellectual life in general. No advancement in knowledge has ever been made independently of its overarching virtuous context.
At the collective scale, the ability to know what is happening across the World through our thought-out technology only developed once thinking became more sensitive, at a very instinctive level, with the interests of broader spheres of beings. At the dawn of modernity, there was still a sense that philosophy and science should only be pursued for the collective welfare of a nation or kingdom and these broader spheres of interest should become the central locus of concern rather than the community or tribe. This also coincided with social, political, and economic ideals that fostered the dignity, equality, and freedom of human souls regardless of narrow natural or cultural characteristics. Our knowing perception extended its technological reach based on moral impulses that seeded scientific-mathematical methods of thinking many centuries before they bore their most mature fruits. That these impulses took a long time to manifest more fully only reinforces the point. Since this burgeoning state of global resonance is mediated through the mechanical element, it unfolds through a linear sequence of events over relatively long timeframes. That obscures its existence since our attention is continually diverted into indulging in our technological creations rather than truly understanding how they came about.
(5)The spiritual influences which lead humanity need not work in such a way that man is always conscious of them. For example, they put Galileo in the cathedral of Pisa. Thousands had seen the old church lamp there, but they had not seen it as did Galileo. He saw the church lamp swinging; compared the time of its oscillation with the beat of his own pulse; found that the church lamp swung in a regular rhythm resembling his pulse-beat; and from this discovered the laws of the pendulum in the sense of modern physics. Anyone acquainted with contemporary physics knows that this science would not be possible without Galileo's principle. In this way the force was then working which is now appearing as spiritual science; Galileo was placed in the cathedral of Pisa before the oscillating church lamp, and modern physics gained its principles. In such a mysterious way do the guiding spiritual forces of humanity perform their work.
Thus, it is only our myopic temporal perspective that convinces us that a deeper understanding of sensory relationships can be gained in any other way than through the portal of moral virtues that guide our spiritual activity to look at the World in new ways. Imagine how we may rack our brains throughout the day with intellectual problems and then take a break to relax, walk through and contemplate nature, listen to music, engage in devotional activity, quietly meditate on the problems, listen to other souls about their problems and try to help them, prepare for a good night’s sleep, and so forth. Then a few days later we arrive at the creative solution we were seeking but fail to notice, or even suspect, that these aesthetic and moral activities in the meantime had anything to contribute. We take a snapshot of intellectual thinking experience and conclude that it alone must explain how the knowledge was attained. Again, it is a lack of careful attentiveness that obscured this reality.
As another example, consider the tragic story of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis:
Postpartum infection, also known as puerperal fever or childbed fever, consists of any bacterial infection of the reproductive tract following birth and in the 19th century was common and often fatal. Semmelweis discovered that the incidence of infection could be drastically reduced by requiring healthcare workers in obstetrical clinics to disinfect their hands. In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital's First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards.[3] The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.
Despite his research, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.[4]
His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, giving Semmelweis' observations a theoretical explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.
In this case, it was the absence of the virtues of humility, open-mindedness, generosity, and so forth that blocked the path to critical knowledge of sensory relationships for many years. “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”(6) The new only appears when the old habits and contents of thinking die away and make room for the former. Artistically exploring and engaging the virtues is a means of attuning to what we are always doing in the process of knowing, thereby creating the possibility that we can advance new knowledge without waiting for all the old knowers to die. By becoming conscious of these deeper knowing movements that span temporally extended rhythms, we establish a recursive feedback process that continuously inspires more heartfelt virtuous activity, transforms old habits of thinking, and opens new unsuspected domains of cognitive experience.
The virtues, unlike isolated ‘facts’, always express themselves as temporally extended processes, as ongoing movements of experience. We can easily imagine the natural fact of gravity by picturing an apple falling from a tree, focusing only on the perceptual content, but to imagine the moral virtues of charity and forgiveness, for example, would require a more elaborate narrative sequence of emotionally valenced images. In this domain, our spiritual activity can no longer rest passively on static pictures drawn from easily accessible memory. For that reason, when our spiritual activity engages the virtues, it remains in a more fluid state and continually adapts to evolving inner conditions, becoming something different and something new as it interacts with recursively symbolic content. That fluidly adaptive process is the characteristic quality of superconscious-supersensible realities. Consider how children are practically in a state of flux for the first 3 years of life, remaining plastic and highly receptive to environmental influences. They are instinctively imbued with the virtues of reverence, awe, wonder, and admiration of their surroundings.
It is of vital importance, for this reason, that the adults surrounding young children conduct their activity with moral uprightness. It is not so much the content of their speech but the whole manner of their conduct that influences the child. Similarly, the reason why the flowing narratives of myth, art, literature, etc. speak to us so meaningfully is because they remind of us the fluid, airy, and fiery superconscious movements we directly participated in during childhood at an instinctive level. We are still participating in these movements at a deeply subconscious level, i.e. they still modulate our knowing perspective, but we are rarely selflessly attentive enough to raise them into the clear light of consciousness. Rather, they are merged into the the background of our knowing perspective. How many readers noticed the double use of “the” in the last sentence? If we didn’t notice it, we can use this fact, not as an example of some external “trick” of the brain, but to recursively point attention to our inattentive thinking movements. Moreover, we can intuitively feel how we are reorienting our perspective on the content by utilizing it as a symbolic pointer. What is the moral valence of this shift? We don’t need to clearly verbalize that valence but live into it, feeling its presence working deeply within us.
Imagine you have a single sheet of paper in front of you. On the surface, it looks like a 2D plane, although you know there is also a paper-thin depth to the sheet that is difficult to perceive. To make that depth more noticeable, what do you do? You can repeatedly stack many more sheets of paper on top of one another, ending up with a thick three-dimensional rectangle. Now the depth of each particular sheet has also become evident in light of the overall thickness that has resulted from stacking them. Similarly, by repeatedly moving our spiritual activity in virtuous ways, we are stacking up instances of inner experience, rendering the ‘four-dimensional’ temporal depth of our inner movements more noticeable. The latter begins to shine through our knowing perspective and becomes evident in each piece of factual content we encounter, whereas otherwise, this content had remained paper-thin and difficult to notice, i.e. externalized and seemingly unrelated to our knowing perspective.
Every piece of perceptual content only comes into our knowing vicinity through various contextual factors that led us to be at a certain place, at a certain time, with a certain worldview, with certain interests, with certain knowledge, with certain preferences, and many more similar inner conditions. All such factors influence where we direct our attention and how we understand what our attention is directed to. After reading that last sentence, focus your vision on the letter - “a” - for a few seconds while simultaneously holding the meaning of that sentence in consciousness, without diverting your eyes. The superposition of the meaningful memory image on your perceptual state “a” is the inner contextual depth that we are trying to become more attentive to. The meaningful depth tinges this perceptual state with a background feeling and intuition that gives us an orientation to why our perceptual state is the way it is, but that intuition is entirely unlike the perceptual state of “a” and could never be derived from it alone.
It must be stressed that we will never become conscious of this inner depth in the same way as sensory events or concepts that we can encompass and easily survey in our mind’s eye, like the words on this page. Instead, they are the ‘riverbeds’ of meaningful experience through which all of our sensory perceptions and thoughts flow. Thus we can only intuit, from within, the way they shape, morph, constrain, and generally influence our perceptible thoughts, feelings, and sensory impressions. Living into the virtues thickens our intuitive sensitivity to these riverbeds of experience. The following discussion will briefly explore only three key virtues as living examples of these inner functions. A similar exploration would reveal the same functions underlying all the other virtues, such as patience, prudence, reverence, courage, hope, and so on. All such virtues are imbued with their deepest meaning through the Center of selfless Love weaving within our spiritual activity.
HUMILITY & GRATITUDE
(Michelangelo, Pieta)
“An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotised by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.” (7)
The virtues can’t be ranked in any simple way from least to most important, but nevertheless, without radical humility in our time, there is simply no chance of becoming receptive to higher cognitive perspectives that lift us beyond the sphere of our personal experience and knowledge. To put it simply, we can never experience what we think we have already experienced (or concluded it is impossible to experience) or learn what we think we already know. Our mind container perspective needs to shrink itself down to an infinitesimal point, which is its truthful size in relation to the superconscious media that contextualize its knowing experience. In that sense, our normal experience of being tiny physical beings surrounded by a sprawling civilization, vast kingdoms of Nature, and even vaster Cosmic expanses gives us an accurate picture of the inner situation. Our willed stream of thinking is all that we can truthfully claim responsibility for and this stream flows through the riverbeds of mostly autonomous psychic factors, biological factors, and physical factors.
As we touched on before, the ‘freedom’ of ordinary thoughts to modulate even the most proximate psychic constraints of beliefs, preferences, emotions, etc., is practically non-existent. At best, our thoughts can help us gain some cognitive distance from those constraints and ward off their influence for a few moments when engaging in disciplined intellectual activity. As soon as we return to the stream of normal sensory life, however, they are once again steering our thinking hither and thither, like a dog on a leash. When this reality is inwardly confessed, we don’t fall for the trap of using those same ineffectual thoughts to investigate the mysteries of existence. Becoming ‘poor in spirit’ is a precondition for understanding, at an intimate experiential level, how our modern thinking has only reached the starting point of acquiring true knowledge about ‘how reality works’.
Modern philosophy and natural science (now practically synonymous with mathematical thinking) have essentially been an exercise in deconditioning from personalized feelings and impulses that influence thinking. It has aided souls in deepening their cognitive experience of sensory relationships while also developing the strength and precision of logical thinking for the pursuit of ethical ideals. It has not, however, discovered the secrets of biology and psychology, the evolution of the Earth’s geological ages, the progression of human history, the impulses driving socio-economic life, the harmonic relationships of the Cosmic bodies, or anything related to those questions at either the individual or collective scales of existence. It’s not that modern thinking is slowly working its way to the answers, but it has been positively looking away from the only direction where all answers could possibly be found, its own real-time intuitive movements.
As we have seen from the spiritual Catch-22, modern thinking cannot even tell us how we put one foot in front of the other, combine one thought with another, distinguish one color from another, learn new skills, and so on. Consider the following split-brain experiment:
(8)Cognitive neuroscience is still at an early stage in some ways, but emerging studies reveal that our brains are hard wired for storytelling. Michael Gazzaniga, a pioneer in this field, has studied people with ‘split brains,’ in which the right and left hemispheres can no longer communicate with each other, so normal sense-making is impaired. Taking advantage of the fact that information can only be fed to one side of the brain at a a time, Gazzaniga discerned that if the left brain is deprived of all of the information required to understand a situation, it will invent an explanation.
In his studies, people who have not seen an object placed in their hand, such as a coffee cup, will make up a reason even if they do not know. “Oh yes, I have not had coffee today and was going to get a cup.”
As we also saw in the example of a quantum mechanical experiment, the split-brain situation simply provides us an opportunity to ask new kinds of questions, develop new experimental setups, and thus heighten attention to what is always taking place. Our ‘left brain’ is always rationalizing its flow of experience after the fact, pretending that the flow is well understood. The content of modern intellectual theories and models is comparable to the imagery of dream life. Upon awakening, we realize that this imagery held some objective relationship to bodily or psychic experiences but we also know that there was no chance of figuring out those relations from within the dream itself. Our bodily and psychic processes don’t perceptually resemble the dream imagery whatsoever. Humility is when we become sensitive to how all our ordinary thoughts about the World state and its metamorphoses, within the frameworks of science, history, religion, etc., are in practically the same position as the dream imagery. They are mostly a means of rationalizing the state we have ended up in after the fact, like the person who awakens holding the coffee cup.
This analogy is simply another way of expressing the fundamental spiritual Catch-22 and how hopeless the prospect of awakening is from within the mind container perspective. We should feel, at a deep level, how little we already know about the sensory dreamscape and how much we need the Grace of more integrated perspectives beyond the dreamscape to fertilize our ignorant souls with their Knowing spirit. This cannot be any mere verbal statement but must become an inner disposition that we live with day in and day out. We should begin to feel the corpse-like nature of our thoughts and perceptions, along with our modern philosophical, scientific, and theological concepts by which we try to construct models of the World. That is like punching holes in a piece of paper with an image on it and trying to rebuild the image, not even with the round pieces of paper, but only with the empty holes. Or, again, like trying to reach the reality of the waking self through ever-more complex arrangments of dream images.
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”(9)
In robotics research, for example, it was quickly discovered that simulating purely logical activities, like playing chess, was much easier than simulating basic human activities like cooking dinner. In other words, we are only intuitively familiar with the movements of our intellectual concepts, i.e. how they harmonize or clash with each other, while deeper movements of psychic and natural phenomena completely elude our normal intuition. Needless to say, nowhere in Nature do we find organisms playing chess or ‘go’. Only recently has mainstream science begun to realize, through recursive cognitive-perceptual research, that the Spirit concealed in Nature educates the human soul in ways that were previously unimaginable and certainly outside the comprehension of normal intellectual logic. What takes place for the human child to stand upright, speak, and think is born of profound Wisdom and cannot be replicated through any existing or even conceivable technology. Every time we engage in thoughtful activity in the World and communicate with others, we are drawing upon that mysterious Wisdom.
With growing sensitivity to this reality of our utter dependence on the superconscious in every act of movement, whether bodily movements or purely mental ones, we naturally find degrees of freedom to transform our emotional state from that of apathy, indifference, or a puffed-up sense of understanding into one of gratitude for all those experiences we normally feel to encompass within our mind container and take for granted. Such a grateful state naturally imbues us with childlike reverence, awe, and wonder, which in turn enhances our attentiveness to outer and inner phenomena and helps us notice aspects of experience that otherwise escape awareness. We become more intuitively receptive to the subtle movements of spiritual activity within sensory life that normally elude our attention. As a generalization of the title of Pierre Hadot’s high school thesis on Henri Bergson, “Knowing is not the construction of a system, but the resolution once made to look naively at the world in and around oneself…” Or as revealed through scripture, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” (10)
Children cannot but help feel that when they observe phenomena they are looking at them for the first time because in many cases they are. Spiritual seekers should freely and consciously cultivate that same feeling to perceive the World phenomena, including our own thoughts and world outlooks, even though we have experienced them millions of times before. Unlike children, we should approach the not-yet-known domain of potential experience as humble visitors and guests without any presumption that what we experience there belongs to us or can be forced into our familiar templates of experience. We leave the superconscious, as our gracious host, in its native supersensible element and wait patiently for the insights that it deems are most helpful for our further development in coordination with the Whole. The superconscious is comprised of holistic perspectives that already know what we are seeking to know and have already become what we are seeking to be. Our task is to humbly and gratefully attune our intuitive consciousness to this reality.
FAITH
(J.W. Turner, Angel Standing in the Sun)
“I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also.”(11)
Try to vividly imagine a scenario in which you are participating in the above exercise. We can even go to the edge of a couch or a bed, close our eyes, and fall backward, imagining as much as possible that there is nothing behind us but other living souls. Faith is when this profoundly meaningful gesture of trust can be translated into the cognitive life, where our thinking-gestures are entrusted to the Other-centered souls that are always ‘behind’ our cognitive perspective, modulating its becoming. We develop trust that what we seek to know is already known by these more integrated cognitive perspectives. These perspectives are always interested in helping us share in their holistic Wisdom, and in fact, their entire existence is in many ways centered around that noble task. They freely transduce their holistic knowing gestures into our conceptual life provided we align our personal will with the Divine Will, i.e. the Good of the Whole.
It is not a passive belief in external entities or forces, but an active display of trust that the Spirit of Truth can lead us into ever-new realms of supersensible experience from within. (12)
(13)We have shown that intellect has detached itself from a vastly wider reality but that there has never been a clean cut between the two; all around conceptual thought there remains an indistinct fringe which recalls its origin. And further we compared the intellect to a solid nucleus formed by means of condensation. This nucleus does not differ radically from the fluid surrounding it. It can only be reabsorbed in it because it is made of the same substance. He who throws himself into the water, having known only the resistance of the solid earth, will immediately be drowned if he does not struggle against the fluidity of the new environment: he must perforce still cling to that solidity, so to speak, which even water presents. Only on this condition can he get used to the fluid’s fluidity. So of our thought, when it has decided to make the leap.
But leap it must, that is, leave its own environment. Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them, though the extension would not appear at all unreasonable once it were accomplished. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking. Swimming is an extension of walking, but walking would never have pushed you on to swimming. So you may speculate as intelligently as you will on the mechanism of intelligence; you will never, by this method, succeed in going beyond it. You may get something more complex, but not something higher nor even something different. You must take things by storm: you must thrust intelligence outside itself by an act of will.
Faith is what extends reason beyond the content-level (walking) to the process-level (swimming) of its reasoning activity. It sensitizes us to how we reason, the inner movements we make to swim with our spiritual activity. Any good father or mother desires to help their child learn how to swim, not by getting in the pool and moving their arms and legs for them, micromanaging every little aspect of the swimming process, but by providing overarching guidelines and encouraging and inspiring the child’s efforts. Likewise, the Spirit of Truth desires to encourage and inspire humanity to learn how to creatively manage and employ the knowing movements that were previously managed for us. Because we don’t find these knowing movements as ready-made perceptual content within the mind container, we must live into the virtue of faith and, once we become more sensitive to those deeper movements, we will intuitively understand how they are the natural extension of our previous reasoning activity.
“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”(14)
(15)With your left eye closed, focus your right eye on the mouth of the cat in the above sketch. As you adjust your distance to the page, the mouse at the right will disappear at a certain point. To achieve this effect, you may also have to adjust the angle of vision by inclining your head to one side. The blind spot remains hidden until some detail in our field of vision loses itself within it.
This is a visual metaphor for the blind spot of our thinking consciousness where the deeper inner movements that structure our knowing perspective live and weave. First, we can notice it takes a certain level of faith to even engage in this exercise, trusting that it has some as-of-yet unknown relationship to elucidating the nature of our inner activity. We don’t know exactly why we are doing it or where it will lead us, but we also see there is no way to gain that knowledge except by taking the imaginative leap. Once we have leaped into the exercise, the imaginative effort makes us more inwardly sensitive to the very structure of our knowing perspective. We realize there is a visual blind spot, which was always there, but required some modulation of our perspective before we could become aware of it through the disappearance of the mouse.
Through visual experiments of this kind, our relationship to our own body changes. Our bodily organization becomes an external object. The more we come to see it as part of the world, the less we identify ourselves with it. Usually, we forget about our sense organs while we are using them. We remain unconscious of the very things which we identify ourselves with. It is a very unpleasant experience for some people when their unconscious identification with their own body is put in question.
We become conscious of our body by penetrating our bodily experience with our thinking. Each discovery that we make with our thinking presents us with an opportunity to realize that our thinking engages itself in the external world and not within the interior of our own self. Thus, step-by-step, the self - that with which we identify ourselves - retreats as more and more of what we initially and unconsciously considered to be part of that self is discovered to be part of the external world. To the extent that this occurs, however, we can focus more clearly on the center of our own initiative.
This exercise also ties in with the virtue of humility and the principle of ‘shrinking’ our knowing self down to its truthful size so that we can experience its willed movements in greater purity. Indeed, all the virtues overlap with one another and complement one another’s functions in various ways, just as the living and sentient processes of our biological organism. In the same exact manner as our sense organs, and as we discussed in previous parts, we usually forget about our thinking activity while we are directing its energy and attention to various aspects of the World. Moreover, we can’t directly catch hold of that activity by directing it back at its own movements, as is attempted by various forms of modern recursive research. That fact is at the core of the spiritual Catch-22. Faith, as we have intimated above, provides an imaginative avenue to intuit the movements from within, thereby transcending the Catch-22. We trust our thinking movements to the superconscious Spirit concealed within those movements and, before we know it, we are swimming with our spiritual activity.
CITATIONS:
(1) Blaise Pascal, ‘The Art of Persuasion’
(2) Leo Tolstoy
(3) Novalis, ‘I see you in a thousand pictures’
(4) Rudolf Steiner, GA 53
(5) Rudolf Steiner, GA 15 (III)
(6) Max Planck
(7) Carl Jung
(8) The Neuroscience Behind Strategic Narrative
https://prescient2050.com/the-neuroscie ... narrative/
(9) Richard Feynman (on his blackboard at the time of death)
(10) Matthew 18:3
(11) John 14:18
(12) John 14:26
”But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.”
(13) Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution; trsl. A. Mitchell, London, 1964, pp. 202-204
(14) Hebrews 11:1
(15) George Maier, An Optics of Visual Experience (“The Blind Spot”, p.7)
