On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

[findingblanks]

Regarding the projection of 'overly intellectual'. Absolutely, it happened to Steiner. But he was as clear as most other great phenomenologists that he needed to write in a modality that was as exact as possible, rather than evoking experience, the reader has to bring there's into it. From there, any 'criticism' is always at least an acknowledgement that both people are genuinely having experiences. Sure, maybe they will deepen/widen/expand their experience, but it is still experience.

It seems to me that different groups genuinely appreciate the way their methods and the linguistic frames in which they understand/grasp them allow a very real and special change in experience; mostly these changes go in the direction of more fixed forms to more flowing, more finished to more open, more passive to more active. It seems that people feel more alive via these practices, more resonance with a deeper 'self', more open to how the cosmos can reveal itself to them. If each has built in blind-spots, I wouldn't see this as mark against them. Obviously, it depends upon the degree to which a blind-spot could block experience in other contexts or other experiences in the same context. But, in my experience, most healthy communities are at the very least engaging in practices that open and refine and deepen experience.

The exercises you've been sharing are more familiar to me than other communities and traditions, but there are always differences that I find super valuable.

The 'curvature' metaphor is crossing in a really lovely way with how Gendlin tracks the role past experience plays in the formation of present experience. In fact, one of the symbols he chooses to visually represent this is a series of interesting curvatures (a fractal looping of sorts) that feedback into themselves as they carry forward. Much appreciated.

[AshvinP]

Regarding the projection of 'overly intellectual'. Absolutely, it happened to Steiner. But he was as clear as most other great phenomenologists that he needed to write in a modality that was as exact as possible, rather than evoking experience, the reader has to bring there's into it. From there, any 'criticism' is always at least an acknowledgement that both people are genuinely having experiences. Sure, maybe they will deepen/widen/expand their experience, but it is still experience.

It seems to me that different groups genuinely appreciate the way their methods and the linguistic frames in which they understand/grasp them allow a very real and special change in experience; mostly these changes go in the direction of more fixed forms to more flowing, more finished to more open, more passive to more active. It seems that people feel more alive via these practices, more resonance with a deeper 'self', more open to how the cosmos can reveal itself to them. If each has built in blind-spots, I wouldn't see this as mark against them. Obviously, it depends upon the degree to which a blind-spot could block experience in other contexts or other experiences in the same context. But, in my experience, most healthy communities are at the very least engaging in practices that open and refine and deepen experience.

The exercises you've been sharing are more familiar to me than other communities and traditions, but there are always differences that I find super valuable.

The 'curvature' metaphor is crossing in a really lovely way with how Gendlin tracks the role past experience plays in the formation of present experience. In fact, one of the symbols he chooses to visually represent this is a series of interesting curvatures (a fractal looping of sorts) that feedback into themselves as they carry forward. Much appreciated.

Thanks, I will need to look into Gendlin more, I am only vaguely familiar. In which work does he use the fractal looping symbol?

The way I look at it, if we didn't have 'blind spots' in attentional consciousness, we would practically be the Absolute. The human+ intelligences also have blind spots i.e. aspects of attentional experience that remain as a relatively unknown background intuitive context, structuring their knowing perspective. The uniquely human problem is that we habitually forget about the existence of the blind spots or we only pay them lip service, thinking and acting as if they don't exist. We often refer to this uniquely modern human condition as the 'mind container perspective'.





Normally we conceive that the explanations for reality (including ourselves) should be contained within combinations of thoughts about spatial sensations and more temporally fluid inner perceptions (desires, emotions, thoughts, etc.) that we encompass ‘in front’ of our mind’s eye. The thoughts themselves may refer to Cosmic-scale realities, but we experience them as point-like entities in our heads that can be easily surveyed, manipulated, and rearranged in various ways. For example, we can perform a mathematical calculation and notice how the symbols we use, whether pictorial or verbal, are located somewhere around the forehead and are manipulated as point-like entities. Then we can notice how it is through these same pointy thoughts that we ordinarily cognize the meaning of our feelings and sensations, our interactions and relationships with other souls.

As we have discussed, however, this perspective cannot be translated to the intuitive curvatures along which the conceptual-perceptual states unfold. Instead, we need to intuitively feel our way into resonance with the corresponding inner movements. This is an inversion of perspective through which we intuitively experience how the sources of phenomenal reality exist ‘behind’ our mind’s eye and creatively structure our first-person perspective on all phenomenal content. We no longer try to rigidly lay hold of and freeze the inner movements as we do with the pointy thoughts, but we start to intuitively feel our knowing gestures modulated by a more open-ended domain of mysterious potential. I have tried to loosely symbolize it like this:





This inversion takes a lot of persistent imaginative effort, continually kindling the insights we have attained anew since we can't simply memorize those insights like factual information as we do in the mind container. It also becomes very uncomfortable because we are first venturing to make our own inner life more objective, the constellation of etched constraints we know as 'my personality' and which lead us to sympathize with certain approaches, think in certain ways, entertain certain ideas, form certain opinions and judgments, etc. For many people, the prospect of encountering this inner 'guardian' is a huge disincentivizing factor, although probably not a very conscious one (which is part of the overall Catch-22, since one must be willing to encounter this guardian to make the fear of doing so more transparent to consciousness). Yet once that inner commitment is made, we can quickly start to experience how many more degrees of freedom our attentional activity has attained and can potentially attain, and the fear of approaching the inner guardian becomes more like enthusiasm to do so.

[findingblanks]

What would be a couple good examples for you of somebody who is doing deep and diligent phenomenological work in this vein, who has never read esoteric texts priming them for encounters with beings (especially one called The Gaurdian), but who is now experiencing this disincentivizing factor?

In other words, I'd appreciate it if you would make up/describe an example of somebody making the observations we are talking about and then having this experience of pulling away. I think I know of versions of what you are talking about but I don't want to poison the well. Thanks.

[AshvinP]

What would be a couple good examples for you of somebody who is doing deep and diligent phenomenological work in this vein, who has never read esoteric texts priming them for encounters with beings (especially one called The Gaurdian), but who is now experiencing this disincentivizing factor?

In other words, I'd appreciate it if you would make up/describe an example of somebody making the observations we are talking about and then having this experience of pulling away. I think I know of versions of what you are talking about but I don't want to poison the well. Thanks.

The example would be someone who simply stops doing the phenomenological work and instead becomes satisfied with a conception of the inner realities. I think it's best to put it directly - if someone works through the artistic expressions of Steiner's early work, which is essentially the same as what we are doing now, and grasps that the concepts like 'intuitive curvatures', 'condensation', etc. are symbolic anchors pointing to entirely verifiable first-person inner experience (through persistent imaginative effort, of course), but then cannot translate this into the equally symbolic pointers of the bodies, planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, the descriptions of 'beings' and their activity, etc., then I would conclude they are experiencing being pulled away from the inner phenomenological method. Not that we should have a crystal clear orientation to all those things right off the bat, but we should at least have some sense of the inner depth axis along which those artistic concepts can be found as inner realities.

Because even with a little bit of intuitive penetration into the inner experiences prompted by Cleric's essays here, for example, we should start to have no problem seeing the overlap with spiritual scientific communications. The Guardian, for ex., is nothing other than the etched curvatures of our psychic life that constrain our attentional activity from exploring novel intuitive and perceptual states (not necessarily visual, but 'perceptions' in the same way we perceive our thoughts united with intuitive insight). We don't see any physical-like curvatures with elastic bands constraining our activity, of course, in the same way we don't see thoughts crystallizing out of some substance when we 'condense' our intuition of a story into verbal forms. The reality is our invisible intuitive movements and that's why we are more faithful when we speak of the more integrated realities as be-ings. It's only because of our mineralized human perspective that we have started conceiving of reality as 'made of substances' while ideas and inner movements are felt as ghostly byproducts of some perceptual reality.

Cleric has provided a nice little essay that outlines some of the major considerations in this respect. The Guardian really manifests in how seriously we can take these artistic concepts for inner realities, whether we continue tracing them to their most logical conclusions and work with those conclusions as a means for deepening intuitive resonance further, or whether, on the other hand, we treat the phenomenological work as some form of end-itself.

Now one can say: “This makes a good metaphor for our inner psychic life but it gets us nowhere near to understanding how the universal state at large metamorphoses.” Such an objection, however, rests on a very deep, yet unjustified prejudice. It’s the idea that our soul state is somehow distinct from the universal. But we’ve seen that our inner flow can’t be taken in isolation from the universal without postulating some form of irreconcilable dualism. If we loosen that prejudice then we should see no principal limit to how deeply the intuitive curvatures of the existential movie can be known. The main obstacle here is that we habitually take intuition/meaning to have only personal existence. Yet nothing in the given necessitates such a limitation. The strictly bodily experiences are indeed specific to my perspective but what about other aspects of the existential movie? When I intuit that the movie flow is constrained by something which I can call the ‘Earthly context’, does my friend intuit a different Earth when she meditates on her flow? The thought-forms through which we explicate these intuitions are certainly personal to our perspectives, but we surely feel that we’re speaking of the same Earthly context.
...
Difficulties arise only if we imagine that the intuitive curvatures end at some outer boundary of our personal sphere and beyond that we’re dealing with some other form of reality, completely opaque to our cognitive life. If we heal ourselves from this unwarranted prejudice, our meditations lead us into stages of consciousness where we grasp the unfolding of the existential movie as flowing not only through the psychic intuitive curvatures but also curvatures that we can call archetypal and universal. It is as if different levels of mind are responsible for a whole contextual hierarchy of meaning, along whose curvatures the total existential state metamorphoses. The highest-order minds bend the curvatures through which the potential of the general evolutionary plot of the movie unfolds. From our embodied standpoint we may say the intuitive life of these highest orders of mind, constitutes the constraints within which the movie ‘lattice’ of potential – from the Cosmic to the elementary – metamorphoses. Other minds creatively work out more and more specific details, which have their sensory shadows in the kingdoms of Nature, until we reach the human level where we find ourselves within a complicated interference of intents, storylines, characters, bodily sheaths, and so on. These contextual minds are not on some ‘other side’ of our inner world, just like we do not consider our conscience or subconscious mind to be on another side. The higher-order minds can be considered as even deeper levels of our inner being, which, however, are not our own personal possessions but encompass greater and greater holistic and transpersonal aspects of the universal process. Even though highly interrelated and interdependent, these minds are practically autonomous, having their own level of development and individual intuitive intents.

[AshvinP]

I think it's best to put it directly - if someone works through the artistic expressions of Steiner's early work, which is essentially the same as what we are doing now, and grasps that the concepts like 'intuitive curvatures', 'condensation', etc. are symbolic anchors pointing to entirely verifiable first-person inner experience (through persistent imaginative effort, of course), but then cannot translate this into the equally symbolic pointers of the bodies, planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, the descriptions of 'beings' and their activity, etc., then I would conclude they are experiencing being pulled away from the inner phenomenological method. Not that we should have a crystal clear orientation to all those things right off the bat, but we should at least have some sense of the inner depth axis along which those artistic concepts can be found as inner realities.

I came across a nice passage from Steiner that also speaks to the above.

On the one hand people take it amiss to-day if the anthroposophical spiritual investigator speaks of the spiritual world as I have taken upon myself to do in this lecture; from many sides this is viewed as pure fantasy, and although many people believe that it is well-meant ... they nevertheless look upon it as something visionary and fanciful.

Those who become acquainted to some extent with what I have described, those who at least try to understand it, will see that the preparations and preliminary conditions for it are just as serious as, for instance, the preparations for the study of mathematics, so that it is out of the question to speak of sailing into some sort of fanciful domain.
...
By penetrating into the inner art of Nature's creative process, we learn to distinguish the human form from the animal form; we recognise this by entering into the artistic creative process of the cosmos. And we penetrate into the development of the world by rising from otherwise abstract constructive thoughts to thoughts which are inwardly filled with life, which form themselves artistically in the spirit.

The important thing to be borne in mind is that when it seeks to know the development of the world, anthroposophical spiritual research changes from the abstract understanding ordinarily described—and justly so—as dry, prosaic, systematic thought, or combining thought, into more concrete, real thought. Not for the higher spiritual world, in which concepts must penetrate by the methods described, but for the physical world, the forms in world-development should first be grasped through a kind of artistic comprehension, which in addition develops upon the foundation of super-sensible knowledge.

By thus indicating how science should change into art, we must of course encounter the objection raised by those who are accustomed to think in accordance with modern ideas: “But science must not become an art!” Now this can always be said, as a human requirement. People can say: Now I forbid the logic of the universe to become an art, for we only learn to know reality by linking up thought with thought and by thus approaching reality. Yes, if the world were as people imagine it to be, one could refuse to ascend to art, to an artistic comprehension of forms; but if the world is formed in such a way that it can only be comprehended through an artistic comprehension, it is necessary to advance to such an artistic comprehension. This is how matters stand. That is why those people who were earnestly seeking to grasp the organic in the world-development really came to an inner development of the thinking ordinarily looked upon as scientific thinking, they came to an artistic comprehension of the world. And as soon as we observe with an artistic-intuitive eye the development of the world, beginning with the point where the ordinary Darwinistic theory comes to a standstill, we perceive that man, grasped as a whole, cannot simply be looked upon by saying that once there were lower animals in the world, from which higher animals developed, that then still higher animals developed out of these, and so forth, until finally man arose.

[AshvinP]

What would be a couple good examples for you of somebody who is doing deep and diligent phenomenological work in this vein, who has never read esoteric texts priming them for encounters with beings (especially one called The Gaurdian), but who is now experiencing this disincentivizing factor?

In other words, I'd appreciate it if you would make up/describe an example of somebody making the observations we are talking about and then having this experience of pulling away. I think I know of versions of what you are talking about but I don't want to poison the well. Thanks.

Jeff,

I came across a good example. Perhaps this person isn't doing 'deep and diligent phenomenological work', although they would certainly claim that the following is born from direct experience - a direct experience that just so happens to obviate the need for any further phenomenological work. We have come across similar attitudes on this forum as well (it is quite common within analytic idealism). I am curious about your thoughts on it - would you describe this as a 'pulling away' from the feeling of being creatively active within ever-deeper curvatures of Be-ing?

***

"Somewhere near the end of the day on September 23rd 2024 is where the solid center from which decisions are made was seen to be illusory. Before that point I had conceptually understood no-self and nonduality or idealism for a while, but I still felt during that time that I needed to conceptualize how to make the “right” decisions. There was still a center—however refined—that was trying to “figure it out” and control life in accordance with its own limited definitions about what is right and wrong. I felt that if my decision making was not properly validated by the authority of a well thought out conceptualization about how to act, then I’d potentially be living chaotically and/or egoically. Even if there was chaos I at least needed to know that I was doing the “right” thing. But my conceptualizations were thoroughly frustrated and I could not know for sure what the right thing to do was. So essentially what I did was pay attention to the basic mechanism of action, I conceptualized it as consisting of attention and desire, then I stuck to that as the final conceptualization. So whenever thoughts of uncertainty/worry/confusion about what to do showed up, I returned to that basic conceptualization. I paid great attention to my thoughts, and the underlying question of that attention was “what do I want?”

Because I was able to stick to that final basic conceptualization despite all my worries, my attention stabilized and then suddenly I realized that I had no idea where any of my movements/non-movements/thoughts were coming from. I realized that there was no center who could “decide” what the “right” thing to do is, because what was being done was already coming from a complete place of mystery. This did not mean that “I” was being controlled against my will by some mysterious force of spontaneity that might lead me to do things that I don’t want to do. It meant that there was no identifiable “I” who was controlling anything to begin with, only spontaneous movement or thought which cannot be understood externally.

Isn’t it a marvel that we pursue things like enlightenment or happiness or freedom or safety? But where is that pursuit even coming from? Where are the thoughts coming from? Where are the words coming from? Where are the movements coming from?"
...
This is an interesting concept you’ve got here, but it’s still only a concept. There is no question of maintaining the sense of a center because when it is seen that there is none, one cannot just pretend that it’s still there. Life goes on. A center is not necessary for creative contribution. A center is only concerned with its own limited interests, however refined and supposedly noble those interests appear to be. There is no effort that is needed to “act as if” there is still a center. There is only observation of what is taking place. And only when there is that observation can the activity be called “creative.” Otherwise there is just a repetition of old patterns. You say there is a “path forward” but there cannot be any particular path when it is seen that there is no center.

[findingblanks]

Hi there,

The placement and non-placement of quotation marks somewhat confused me in trying to track the thoughts of the person you were quoting. But I think I got it.

In reading those words, I was left with more questions than anything else. This is typical for me. Well, as I get older. Earlier, I would have felt very confident that I understand what they were expressing and would have had a fairly clear sense of what I thought was healthy and/or unhealthy about it.

Now, I'd just need to ask a shit ton of questions before I'd get my bearings on what they actually mean by many of their words and phrases and implications.

All that said, I did build my own little hallucination of what they could mean. If we pretend that my hallucination is correct, and to answer your question, I'd say that I feel this person is in the middle of their journey and has found really good tools to dig into their experience, but also might be overrelying on those tools and sort of digging themselves into some kind of trench. It could be that the spot they are stopping in is exactly where they will eventually make a big self-discovery. I think that is typically the case. Or we don't. We stay in that spot, often feeling very cozy and impressed that we've found the 'key' or the true ground-floor from which all the rest must follow.

That's my hallucination. Like I said, I'd need to really ask about quite a few terms and phrases before I could even begin to understand what they really mean.

...................

Regarding your prior message:

"...but then cannot translate this into the equally symbolic pointers of the bodies, planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, the descriptions of 'beings' and their activity, etc., then I would conclude they are experiencing being pulled away from the inner phenomenological method."

Okay, so this would be a person practicing the kind of exercises you've shared in the context of studying the core texts of spiritual science. So this person has gotten to where they can share in the basic forms of experiencing that you have pointed to in these practices, but, then, they can't translate this kind of direct experiencing into the other content/symbols they have been studying in the core texts, like various 'bodies', planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, descriptions of the hierarchies, etc.

They can obviously still make the imaginations in their minds as they read those texts. I'm assuming they can still feel the same draw and interest to how they are understanding those texts as when they first enthusiastically picked up the books and felt the desire to deepen their understanding. But, the point you are talking about is after they've developed the capacity to consciously experience what they exercises bring; now, with this capacity functioning, they then try to penetrate the other concepts more deeply and they fail. I'm assuming they might not know they are failing? They might feel that they have a much deeper sense of those symbols than they had before they had developed the basic capacity you've pointed to. Or, I imagine they ight feel that they are not penetrating the symbols, that they have the same (still inspiring and beautiful and meaningful) experience they had before.

Either way, you are saying that this person demonstrates having an unconscious fear of encountering the Gaurdian? Is that within the ballpark of what you are saying?

[AshvinP]

Hi there,

The placement and non-placement of quotation marks somewhat confused me in trying to track the thoughts of the person you were quoting. But I think I got it.

In reading those words, I was left with more questions than anything else. This is typical for me. Well, as I get older. Earlier, I would have felt very confident that I understand what they were expressing and would have had a fairly clear sense of what I thought was healthy and/or unhealthy about it.

Now, I'd just need to ask a shit ton of questions before I'd get my bearings on what they actually mean by many of their words and phrases and implications.

All that said, I did build my own little hallucination of what they could mean. If we pretend that my hallucination is correct, and to answer your question, I'd say that I feel this person is in the middle of their journey and has found really good tools to dig into their experience, but also might be overrelying on those tools and sort of digging themselves into some kind of trench. It could be that the spot they are stopping in is exactly where they will eventually make a big self-discovery. I think that is typically the case. Or we don't. We stay in that spot, often feeling very cozy and impressed that we've found the 'key' or the true ground-floor from which all the rest must follow.

That's my hallucination. Like I said, I'd need to really ask about quite a few terms and phrases before I could even begin to understand what they really mean.

Since we have encountered this same mystical conception many times, I have a pretty good orientation to where it comes from. Consider what you said earlier after doing the movement of attention exercise:

Yes, I experienced this willed movement of focused attentional activity. I use 'empty space' in a very specific way that probably doesn't correspond to this context, so I'd need to know more exactly what you mean by it. But if we are talking about my sense of 'space' in the room and how I was experiencing the shift of focus when I would intend my attention in various movements and upon various objects, yes, I experience that movement and that space.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you would go further and say, I didn't only 'experience' this willed movement as some movie playback, but I felt causally united with this attentional movement. That intuitive feeling is a direct fact of experience - you discern that, without your causal attentional activity, something would be missing from the World flow. This person, however, would say you are experiencing a 'mysterious force' that moves attention and the feeling of causal responsibility is a mirage, an illusion born out of habit. In fact, there is no "you" to experience anything, there is only mysterious attentional movement.

In other words, the 'starting point' of inner knowledge has been assumed away and the conceptual constraint, "there is only mysterious attentional movement that is observed as playback", acts as a shot of novocaine for the intuitive life. It completely numbs sensitivity to the feeling of causal responsibility for intuitive movements and therefore becomes a dead-end on the path of inner knowledge. It is impossible for this person to ever explore the intuitive curvatures in any deeper way until the shot of novocaine wears off. But if he (I assume it's a male and, as an aside, I wonder if it's like for a female to fall into this conceptual trap given their natural intuitive feeling) simply does nothing and waits for it to wear off, the surrounding environment will immediately inject him with another shot.

The whole context of modern society tends toward making us feel like passive experiencers of external movements. I got an electric toothbrush the other day and immediately noticed how it works to numb sensitivity to what we are doing in the act of brushing our teeth. Instead of working with living movements of the hands in a potentially musical way, we just place the toothbrush somewhere and let it vibrate, then mechanically move it to the next spot, etc. This technological context plays right into reinforcing the mystical conception of "there is no center to do anything or pursue any paths, only observers of mysterious movements". The intuitive movements are exactly what we need to actively explore and feel creatively united with if we want to attain any sense of the deeper curvatures that structure phenomenal experience.

What are your thoughts on that?

...................

Regarding your prior message:

"...but then cannot translate this into the equally symbolic pointers of the bodies, planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, the descriptions of 'beings' and their activity, etc., then I would conclude they are experiencing being pulled away from the inner phenomenological method."

Okay, so this would be a person practicing the kind of exercises you've shared in the context of studying the core texts of spiritual science. So this person has gotten to where they can share in the basic forms of experiencing that you have pointed to in these practices, but, then, they can't translate this kind of direct experiencing into the other content/symbols they have been studying in the core texts, like various 'bodies', planetary incarnations, epochal transitions, descriptions of the hierarchies, etc.

They can obviously still make the imaginations in their minds as they read those texts. I'm assuming they can still feel the same draw and interest to how they are understanding those texts as when they first enthusiastically picked up the books and felt the desire to deepen their understanding. But, the point you are talking about is after they've developed the capacity to consciously experience what they exercises bring; now, with this capacity functioning, they then try to penetrate the other concepts more deeply and they fail. I'm assuming they might not know they are failing? They might feel that they have a much deeper sense of those symbols than they had before they had developed the basic capacity you've pointed to. Or, I imagine they ight feel that they are not penetrating the symbols, that they have the same (still inspiring and beautiful and meaningful) experience they had before.

Either way, you are saying that this person demonstrates having an unconscious fear of encountering the Gaurdian? Is that within the ballpark of what you are saying?

Yes, well it's hard to say what exactly is happening here. Did they ever really share in the direct intuitive experience of their spiritual activity, or did they instead form a conception of that experience and move right back to some analytical examination of spiritual science? I think the person above can be used as a limit case, the extreme end of the spectrum where the Guardian was approached and immediately repelled them back without further ado. Not only that, the experience of 'failing' on the first one or two attempts was rationalized into a mystical world-conception that solidifies the barrier as an inescapable reality, i.e. it is simply the nature of reality that we cannot (and should not) feel active within the deeper strata of Be-ing. Everyone else (including me, of course) falls on a spectrum of greater or lesser inner constraints to courageously confronting the Guardian and making the inner life more objective to our cognitive perception.

I said before that we need to take seriously the experience of the intuitive movements, but it's more like that we first learn to take seriously what it means to take something seriously. We don't need to overcome all the inner obstacles in one fell swoop (and we won't), but we need to at least have a sense that we are encountering inner obstacles and we are falling short of an ideal inner disposition that is ready to take creative responsibility for the deeper intuitive movements. Then we at least have an orientation to the differential between where we are now and where we could potentially be if we persist in our efforts.

[findingblanks]

Like I said, I only have an hallucination of what that person means. I've certainly met people who can distinctly and evocatively describe their self-willed attentional activities, but who, from my observation, are living in a delusion of freedom. And the converse, people who describe their attentional activity in words and phrases that eliminate the notion of a self-willed 'center' that they identify with, and yet who I experience (and they describe) as living from a space of highly senstive freedom. Of course, because of the linguistic structures that make the most sense to them, their language will seem to contradict any possibility of 'freedom' to those who can't fathom how it is logically possible to be free without having the notion of a subject that is 'doing' the freedom.

Steiner's (and others), "It thinks in me" and "It wills through me" are experiences that many people not within his tradition describe as their own experience when they pay closer attention to what is actually happening in their experience of attentional activity. To steer clear of debate mode, I am not saying that their experience necessarily confirms Steiner's description, only that they read his phenomenology as validating what they experience.

But, yes, I can imagine the person you are describing being very lost and wayward and deluding themselves in various ways.

When I pay close attention to the experiences of going through your exercises, I don't find a 'self' that is doing the exercise. I do find a narrative about that. And, most importantly, I 100% can attend to the facet of the experience that I am happy to call 'self'. I tyipcally speak in terms of 'self'. It's useful, more useful than coming up with terms that work against the grain. Sort of like how Steiner will use language that presupposes space/time/perception and then need to clarify that he simply can't avoid speaking in those terms but wants the listeners to realize he pointing to experiencing that is outside of those frames. And, I really can speak of a 'self' and mean it, despite knowing that most people have a slightly different frame for it.

The importance of noticing what is utterly distinct about intentional experience can't be overstated. As you say, there is a causal identity in that experience. For me, one way of saying it is that there is a polaric experience between "It" and "I" that feel absolutely fundamental and in which the experience of freedom arises and, if carefully maintained, can be developed. I can see why the experience of this polarity will be languaged by some as a primal self-experience, and by other's a primal 'no self' experience. If those different people each seem to be demonstrating the 'fruits' and underlying phenomenologies of the experience, I see them as each speaking from a direct experience of this polaric 'primitive'. But, as I said, people can be speaking 'perfectly' from either position and still be lost completely. I only know this because I still can experience falling off the surf board in both directions. But learning to surf and stay up for longer periods and find our own style of interacting with the waves...is well worth the spills. As I know you know.

................................

I'm not really following you about the Steiner student who has gotten to the first step but then isn't developing the capacity to directly perceive the realities they are reading about in the core texts. I'm not sure that it is important that I grasp such an example, but I was just curious about it because it is interesting to think about the experience of starting to directly know something that you never knew existed until you read about somebody describing it themselves. The easy analogies are hearing about a distant land from somebody and then going there yourself; but I think this leaves out the most interesting differences when it comes to 'discovering' or 'validating' a reality that a clairvoyant has first described and then explained that if we develop correctly we will know because we will validate that experience.

But more importantly, the ground floor kind of exercises you've been sharing are certainly examples that I feel could help anybody become more sensitive to the nature of their attentional activity. I can see why a certain kind of person, who has soaked up a certain linguistic tradition, would probably not even be attracted to these kinds of exercises because they would immediately interpret the language incorrectly through their lens. And the same thing happens in the other direction. People like me who love Kuhlewind exercises can easily dismiss descriptions of experience that seem to make mistakes from the very beginning by using the same words differently, or different words in an unknowingly same way.

So, in my opinion, anybody who can begin your exercises can experience an increase in sensitivity that will have all the benefits that come with increased concentration capacity, increased awareness of the 'flow' and 'curvatures' forming experience, and just the joy that comes from grasping an aspect of Truth firmly in hand. And much more.

[findingblanks]

p.s. I added a couple sentences for clarification, in case you've read it and are coming back later.