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

[Cleric]

"Could it be that we simply say "If I don't grasp my inner being as extending into the Cosmos, where I would live in spheres weaved of the musically lawful ideal activity of beings, then there's simply no such thing, and anyone claiming the opposite is simply back-projecting shadows."?"

For me this would be translated as acknowleding that the degree to which somebody's experience is not coming from a union with reality is the degree to which any claims they make about objective reality are insubstantial.

Somebody might be experiencing and speaking from a deep unity with reality and, yet, they might not fully grasp this, thereby they themselves would inaccurately characterize their experience as less objective than it really is. The opposite is probably the more obvious cases we experience. An experience that one person characterizes as 'extending their inner being into the Cosmos' might be both experienced and explicated via other symbols that don't sound anything like 'extending' or 'being' or even 'cosmos'. However, my hunch is that if we spend enough time carefully listening to each of those people, we'll find that there is very powerful overlaps in what they are talking about, despite the fact that on the surface it will sound to each like the other is just soupy or some other description that makes good sense from within that frame.

So, yes, I do think we can say that to the degree that somebody is making truth claims that aren't coming from within reality itself those claims are untrue. That can be anywhere from 1% to 99% in my opinion.

FB, I’m quite aware that your view is nuanced and multifaceted, synthesizing many different things together. Above, I intentionally expressed in a sharper way, probably justifiably seeming like I oversimplify your views, but my goal was to point attention to certain core questions. Being flexible and capable of sensing the grain of truth in every perspective, no matter how diametrical they might be, is a necessary skill, but we also need to be able to discern when there are certain things that cannot be both true.

I’ll add something in line with Ashvin’s post above. Imagine how we can smoothly move our attention through the interior experience of our body, we can start from the head, pass through the neck, the chest, the belly, the legs. These are direct phenomenological experiences. We may call them illusionary dashboard experiences but this simply throws us in the head where we assemble flimsy mental images of dashboards. We can in no way build the inner experience of the legs or anything else from combinations of these mental fragments.

Imagine that for some reason you know only the reality of your head region (maybe you have grown up as a brain in a vat). You experience certain sensations and thoughts but you have never had a body – or maybe it’s there but you haven’t found its sensations yet. For example, the concept of a hand doesn’t even make sense. Your whole inner existence can be described as head sphere/space. Now someone tells you “Through certain inner effort I’m able to expand my attentional activity and pass through regions of inner experience that I choose to call chest, belly, etc. The words are not important, they are only tokens for the actual phenomenological experiences I’m describing.”

Now you are faced with two basic options. (1) One is to quickly survey your head-sphere experience and ask: “What could it be from my familiar experience that this person may be mistaking for whatever he describes as chest experience, legs experience, etc.?” If we take this route, we more or less assume that the person is having inner experiences not too different from our own, but for whatever reason he describes them as going beyond our ordinary conscious sphere.

(2) The other option is that maybe the person is speaking of something experientially factual. This doesn’t mean that we should blindly take his word but simply investigate the route of inner experiences that he describes and try to stretch our attentional activity in ways that maybe we didn’t even suspect could exist before.

Does this analogy make the whole situation clearer? Of course, the analogy is not perfect. When we move through the bodily regions we still feel as an “I” that moves the spotlight of attention through domains of various senses qualities. This is all different when, for example, we consider the movement from Earth region, through Moon, Sun, to Saturn region. Now we do not simply contemplate shifting colors and other qualities on our screen of perception but our most intimate being joins/awakens into regions of increasingly ideal intuitive activity of the Cosmic Mind. Our sensations in our Earthly bodily volume are only the decohering condensation of the higher activity. But the point remains the same: in both the head-sphere and the Cosmic case, we are speaking of inner experiences that can never be found were we to remain within our familiar inner movements and phenomena.

I beg you to give a moment of dispassionate and unprejudiced contemplation of these options. Try to feel how there’s something tempting in the view that in our brain-in-a-vat state, we already have everything necessary at our disposal. Thus, when someone speaks of other kinds of experiences, described as being lifted outside our familiar sphere, we simply try to guess what of our familiar brain-space phenomena, this person is back-projecting into fantastic metaphysical ideas.

On the other hand, try to feel how in the other case we need to start with certain humility, and be clear that maybe there are aspects of existence that our life’s journey as of yet hasn’t acquainted us with. This humility is not meant to demean us but only to prepare the fertile conditions for growing toward something new.

In the lines of what Asvhin asked, could you, please, take a concept – say the Sun sphere – and try to feel what experiences this brings about in you? Do you try to search through the palette of your familiar psycho-somatic phenomenology and basically say “So I think that when Steiner spoke of the Sun sphere, he was simply experiencing so and so, which I also experience, but because he was a product of his times and he lived in certain cultural conditioning, he decided to speak of these experiences through Theosophical and Christological terms.” Or you take seriously what Steiner explains all the time – namely, that our consciousness needs to be lifted from the body and expand into the higher spheres of the Cosmic Mind, just like we need to be lifted from head-space if we are to find the legs-space – and conceive that we encounter inner experiences of ideal activity at Cosmic scales that cannot be reduced to our familiar bodily experiences. It’s actually the opposite – only from that perspective do we truly understand our embodied experiences as a kind of convoluted and aliased (perforated) fragments of the Cosmic. No amount of patching and recombining of our ordinary psycho-somatic experiences can ever build the Cosmic, but we can trace how the former precipitates and decoheres from the latter.

Please recognize that this is a question that cannot be solved by saying “It’s all a spectrum, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” Yes, this sounds highly satisfying for the abstract intellect but leads nowhere in regard to actual experiences. It’s like the brain in the vat saying about the leg experience “yeah, it’s both. It’s a projection from within my head space but maybe there’s also something factual about it – that is, there’s something that justifies that projection, it’s not a completely arbitrary fantasy.” However, this is just a polite way to say to the person reporting the experience “Call them legs if you will, but I know that you are simply projecting the same head-experiences that I have. The time will come when we’ll get rid of such unnecessary projections and we’ll all accept the only reality of our head-spheres.”

Right now I can’t think of a simpler and more explicit way to point at this fundamental problem. Maybe you can indeed explain what you experience when you meditate on the Sun sphere (or you would probably say that you meditate not on the Sun sphere per se, but on what Steiner must have experienced that he dubbed ‘Sun’). Here ‘Steiner’ is just a synonym for anyone who reports experiences beyond our familiar psycho-somatic space. Many possible variants open up. For example, one can say “I think that those who have developed their subtler organization can indeed become conscious within the Cosmic scale strata of the Divine Mind, but I simply can’t confirm whether these higher-order spheres are like they describe it.” Another option is: “Maybe these experiences are indeed Cosmic in nature and irreducible to familiar ones, but they emerge as a kind of Cosmic-scale hallucination and we need some kind of proof coming from another direction that these experience correspond to real structures in the Divine Mind. It could be that there’s no such higher Mind at all!” Or we can be completely blunt and say “These are all completely trivial human-scale experiences that are loaded with superstitious ideas of Cosmicallity.” I’ll be grateful if you describe your own inner process.

[findingblanks]

Ashvin,

Hopefully by now you at least can see that I value exercises like imagining a relationless aggregate. I guess I started that one around 1996 and, despite my change in view regarding how it is used and understood, I still find value in exercises that try to utilize it.

In terms of Old Saturn and the rest; I haven't talked to anybody who would be explaining those to me unless they had read Steiner's core text and lectures. That doesn't mean they are useless. It doesn't mean they don't come from real interactions Steiner had with reality. But it does matter to me that the only people who teach me about those things wouldn't be teaching me about them unless they had read and meditated on Steiner's book. And the few who have claimed they can now independently verify everything Steiner said in OC, well, I've found them to be fairly unstable. That said, I know there are Anthroposphists who have small followings of people who claim they are directly verifying most of Steiner's cosmology. I don't want to debate which of these folks are crazy, who are frauds, and who are people who have some degree of intutions and have come to find deep meaning in the symbols, able to experience them dynamically. I'm not the most clairvoyant guy on earth, but I remember exaclty what it was like when those conceptual symbols began to come alive for me. So even when people aren't claiming to have discovered it on their own or that they can now directly observe and verify the stages of Cosmic evolution, I realize the value and sacred experience in deeply experiencing how those meditations can go from being stale and static, to opening up in ways that are profound. I have a friend who part of a very different tradition (from Madagascar) and when he describes the conceptual symbols of his view of Cosmic Evolution, I not only can see why those archetypes would be very profound to integrate and work with, but I can see how they overlap in really great ways with Theosophy and with Steiner's images. I don't think it is a waste of time to take in a teacher's symbols and use them as part of one's schooling of consciousenss.

"I am still not sure whether you even acknowledge the existence of higher-order spiritual beings whose essential inner nature is a much more purified and encompassing experience of what we also experience in our intuitive/intentional gestures and movements, or rather they are more akin to electromagnetic fields imbued with some kind of basic awareness."

I'm still deeply working on how I understand the nature of these interactions and if they would be called 'beings' in the sense we read from Steiner and others who characterize them that way or as something else. I'm comfortable with beings in the sense of there being an experiencing and an intentionality that is on 'the other side' of the interaction. But I'm pretty sure that very often what is being called a 'being' is translating an implicitly functioning aspect of the Logos into an individualized being. This wouldn't be all that wrong in that you are indeed interacting with a being, and even the translative process would be capturing real aspects of how the Logos is manifesting.


" Again, I'm trying to orient better toward where the discrepancy is, and why what you notice inwardly while meditating seems to be severed from these symbolic concepts of spiritual science..."

As I've said, I mediated and did the exercises for years in the context of the symbolic concepts of spiritual science. That's the only reason I was ever having such excited and sacred conversations with my Anthroposophical friends. I wouldn't say that going back to the basics is a severing. As I keep stressing, I don't think that Steiner was only wrong. I hope I don't have to keep repeating that. These severe words like 'severing' and all of the either/or presuppositions feel unnecessary considering what's I've said about this stuff.

"In other words, this inner phenomenological method leads us to discover the realities of these spiritual symbols, through an inner experience no less lucid and precise than our experience of mathematical reasoning, even if we are not particularly aiming for that."

I don't think Steiner or earlier initiates were free from trainings and expectations prior to their initiation experiences and guidance. And I think the first guidance is certainly happening from within a specific tradition/frame/practice/assumptions/etc.

" but couldn't it be that the latter is a dim, shadowy, and rare experience of what is continuously unfolding in the higher worlds? Couldn't it be that, for example, this clip below resonates deeply and stirs our inner soul movements with feelings of optimism, heroism, excitement, anticipation, admiration, moral courage, and love precisely because it speaks to us of a much more purified and expansive spiritual reality that is our native existence and is 'projected-forward' into our mental images and feelings, and which we can resurrect through our concentrated phenomenology?"

Yep. That's what I'm talking about when referring to experiencing the fundamental impulse working through us.

[findingblanks]

Cleric,

The fact that you are saying,

"Please recognize that this is a question that cannot be solved by saying “It’s all a spectrum, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” Yes, this sounds highly satisfying for the abstract intellect but leads nowhere in regard to actual experiences."

Just means that I've failed to communicate with you well enough. That's on me. I'll ponder and get back to you if I can think of a way to make what I'm saying land. I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but your summations and reflections of my view just indicate that I haven't gotten there yet.

[Cleric]

Cleric,

The fact that you are saying,

"Please recognize that this is a question that cannot be solved by saying “It’s all a spectrum, a little bit of this, a little bit of that.” Yes, this sounds highly satisfying for the abstract intellect but leads nowhere in regard to actual experiences."

Just means that I've failed to communicate with you well enough. That's on me. I'll ponder and get back to you if I can think of a way to make what I'm saying land. I'm not expecting you to agree with me, but your summations and reflections of my view just indicate that I haven't gotten there yet.

FB, you are making your view explicit enough. You have further done that in the response to Ashvin above. The frustration that you feel because of my posts is because I deliberately try to drive you out of your comfort zone, so to speak. In other words, my questions aim to make you question certain aspects of your view.

Let’s use an analogy again. Let’s say I’m speaking with a physicalist, who enthusiastically explains neuroscience and how not very far down the road, we’ll finally have a clear understanding of how consciousness emerges from the purely physical processes going on in the brain. Then I pose to him certain questions that question the core assumptions implicit in his view. This causes him frustration. He says “The fact that you ask these questions tells me that I haven’t yet made my view understood.” But this reaction still rests on a secret assumption. It is the assumption that the only reason one may question physicalism is because they don’t understand it. In other words, the person says “If you did understand what I’m saying, you wouldn’t be asking these silly questions but you would be looking down the road together with me, and you would anticipate the revelations that will finally unveil the mystery of how consciousness emerges out of the movements of physical processes.”

Of course, for a person who has resolved certain riddles about how their inner process of existence unfolds, it is transparently clear that this ‘down the road’ would never lead to the results the physicalist dreams of. This riddle is resolved in a different stratum of our soul life and in a different way, by entering more deeply into what we are in fact innerly doing when we think about consciousness emerging from physics. Any attempt to lead the physicalist to this deeper stratum, where he needs to question not the specifics of the theory but investigate in a new way the whole intellectual endeavor and how it is placed in the wider context of the given existence, is seen by him as misunderstanding of his view. There’s an unresolved knot in the physicalist soul life which keeps his cognitive horizon searching for truth in a particular plane, namely, as a certain patchwork of mental images of neurons, computation, etc.

Now probably this analogy causes even more frustration in you. But this is kinda the goal. In a sense, I do try to shake you. I now question not your view, but whether you are open to question your own view. Question it not through intellectual discourse but considering at least for a moment the possibility that maybe there’s something unresolved, that there’s a knot in the blind spot of the inner process, that makes one expect that the ‘exact clairvoyance’ of the future will somehow resolve everything down the road. But what if this version of ‘down the road’ is a dead end? As the analogy suggests, this doesn’t require that we go all the way until we find out that this could be the case. This can be understood here and now, right at this moment, but we need to at least be open to the possibility that there’s something that needs to be resolved.

Now the basic frustrating question again: do you entertain at least as a possibility, that something like the experience of a Sun sphere (or anything else communicated from Initiatic science) may seem implausible not because you have widened your conscious horizon so much that it now contains everything that the initiates of the past lived through and you see that there’s nothing of value that deserves to be called a Sun sphere of the Cosmically expanded being, but because you are looking for these experiences in a particular plane of experience where they can never be found to begin with? Or in other words, can you formulate to yourself the thought "Could it be that there's something faulty in my very foundations, that the way I seek clairvoyant consciousness leaves in the blind spot a wholly different mode of experiencing reality? Could it be that initiates communicate things from within that mode and that's why I don't find the experiences that they talk about as facts within the field of what I conceive to be clairvoyance?"

Now would you respond like: "You have understood nothing of my view! If you understood one bit you wouldn't be asking these silly questions aiming to shake my view, but you would be looking together with me down the road, expecting the exact clairvoyance of the future."? Or you may say "Yes, I understand where you are leading but I have already invested too much in this view. I leave some 0.1% chance that maybe I simply have never really grasped the very basics of Initiatic Science and that's why I don't find anything of what it speaks of, but it's too late to go back and reconsider everything from its foundations. If I'm wrong maybe I'll just explore that other avenue in the next incarnation (if there's such a thing)."

[findingblanks]

Cleric, I'll come back and read your posts when I have figured how to make at least my basic notions graspable to you. I know you think you know them. But your questions betray that. I know you don't agree. Ashvin has reflected back basic understanding (which does NOT mean agreement) of many of these things. This allows us to continue speaking. As long as you feel certain that you are understanding me, and, from that certainty, ask question which presuppose a point-of-view I don't share, I am not "smart" enough to both re-articulate myself to you in a more helpful way and entail a response in that re-articulation that then not only rephrases your question but addresses it. I can't do that. That's on me.

One more example, which I know you won't understand; not because you are dumb. No way! But something does block you from recognizing this:

"Now the basic frustrating question again: do you entertain at least as a possibility, that something like the experience of a Sun sphere (or anything else communicated from Initiatic science) may seem implausible not because you have widened your conscious horizon so much that it now contains everything that the initiates of the past lived through and you see that there’s nothing of value that deserves to be called a Sun sphere of the Cosmically expanded being, but because you are looking for these experiences in a particular plane of experience where they can never be found to begin with?"

You chose the word 'implausible'. Is it possible for you to do something very very boring? If so, please show me where I have ever said that 'something like' the experience which Steiner translated as 'Sun sphere' is implausable. I've said the opposite. But, as you know, details matter. You didn't ask me a quesiton that reflected my claims that Steiner is usually interacting with reality. You somehow presuppose that I've suggested there is no experience at all that corresponds to what Steiner terms 'Sun sphere.'

For me to answer your questions, I have to assume your premises, which I don't. The whole, "Why did you stop beating your wife" thing, but in the context of long sentences that make up to four or five such presuppositions. Ashvin also struggles with trying to figure out where he and I aren't understanding or agreeing. But he will often ask one question about that spot in a very specific manner that allows for conversation. The multi-embedded presuppositions of things I haven't said might be an esoteric 'trick', but my hunch is that you and I could have a conversation if it was in smaller chunks and you didn't assume so much. I have no doubt that Steiner's experiences (and those of the traditions in which he developed them) of the planetary spheres reflects an objective interaction with reality in various ways.

[findingblanks]

Ashvin, since this thread is branching out in more a free form manner, I might just plop down some questions that could be interesting for me to hear you respond to, and maybe even help me figure out some of our overlaps and non-overlaps better. However, if you'd rather get back to the phenomenological pointers, that's great too. I'm sure both can happen at the same time.

Speaking in your own way (no need to try to translate into my frames), do you experience that the angelic beings involved in forming the earth before, say, mammals evolved would have a way of distinguishing between a mountain and a valley? If so, can you try (I know, not easy!) to articulate this experience for me? If not, can you explain why they would not be capable of making such a distinction?

Also, what might be a good example of a kind of daily human experience that an angel (you can pick the hierarchy) has access to and an example of a kind of daily experience that they would not have access to?

[findingblanks]

A riff of an aspect.

I can imagine some guy who had only taken in Skinner's psychology. We all know how limited that lens is, even though we probalby can speak to the facet of reality that Skinner was interacting with objectively, and, therefore, able to 'pull out' concepts that had aspects of truth and aspects of utility.

I can imagine this guy has to sit with Freud on a train for six hours. At first Freud annoys him, but he begins to find Freud somewhat charming and is really impressed by the breadth of Freud's classical education. Of course, as with Skinner, we are all probably aware of massive limits to how Freud was mapping the inner landscape. That said, I can image that this man would begin to recognize that Freud was showing him glimpses of something that Skinner wasn't seeing. This man would not be as sophisiticed and spiritual as we are, so he would not immediately understand the massive flaws in Freud's maps. He would merely be excited as his own map was expanding and he'd have a vague sense of how this expansion was participating directly in/with reality.

When this young man is much older, he may begin to see that even though Freud's basic map of the soul was so much more helpful to him back when he was a pure Skinnerian, he is now seeing the way that Freud's basic distinctions and concepts obscured many more intricate experiencings. It's not that "superego" was a delusion. In fact, in order for Freud to extract truth, he had to deeply interact with reality and his map reflects reality. To an extent. Freud gets made fun of these days for all the ways that we can see how silly and distorted many his ideas were. However, his legacy will include not only those 'silly' mistakes, but the intricacy he was wrestling with and the spirit of his attempts to engage with these facets as honestly as one can. One group of people will only laugh at him and show how he was wrong. Another group will still embrace him as the only person who really figured it out. But there will be those who can distinguish the content of Freud's work (high and low) from the actual engagement he was making, noticing how the very filters he brought into it both allowed reality to reveal aspects of itself and caused it to conceal other aspects. I'm not a Freudian! However, I defend his basic model of the psyche from those who mock it and can't notice the ways in which his basic observations were reflecting important (albeit distorted) aspects of reality.

Of course, Steiner was an example of somebody who could reveal the degree to which a 'wrong' philosophy reflected (in distorted and accurate ways) an engagement with reality. Depending on the context, Steiner could be scathing and sometimes make it sound as if somebody was simply wrong or crazy. But you find other contexts in which he can show you the wisdom in that same figure, even showing how the very concepts he seemed to be trashing did reveal something novel or distinct, something that this person was fishing out and struggling to get right.

[Federica]

Hey FB. You may have a sense of how much I do not like your online personality. Yet, please believe me, this one line is sincere, and genuinely friendly. In this thread, you have been offered a life-saving chance. This must be because you DESERVE it. Now do yourself a self-saving favor. Drop all these things you are doing, and TAKE IT.

[findingblanks]

Thanks, Frederica. You have a powerful world-view. Thanks for letting me know I have a chance to save my life in this conversation. I honestly believe you are engaging with some aspect of reality, by the way.

Oh, and if you are into this sort of thing, please feel free to pull out comments I've made to Ashvin that you find upsetting in terms of my personality. I have no doubt we are all bumping into such moments, but i'd really love to hear from you on that.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, since this thread is branching out in more a free form manner, I might just plop down some questions that could be interesting for me to hear you respond to, and maybe even help me figure out some of our overlaps and non-overlaps better. However, if you'd rather get back to the phenomenological pointers, that's great too. I'm sure both can happen at the same time.

Speaking in your own way (no need to try to translate into my frames), do you experience that the angelic beings involved in forming the earth before, say, mammals evolved would have a way of distinguishing between a mountain and a valley? If so, can you try (I know, not easy!) to articulate this experience for me? If not, can you explain why they would not be capable of making such a distinction?

Also, what might be a good example of a kind of daily human experience that an angel (you can pick the hierarchy) has access to and an example of a kind of daily experience that they would not have access to?

I will try to respond to this later, FB. The short answer is that these things can only be satisfactorily approached through a sustained phenomenological practice that ascends along a vertical gradient of spiritual activity. We can, of course, abstractly describe the differences and overlaps between human experience and Angelic consciousness, but we have no basis to orient toward and evaluate those descriptions properly unless we begin to experience the overlap through our inner efforts, i.e. how the Angelic consciousness modulates our own life of feelings, mental pictures, and verbal thoughts.

The bigger issue is that, as Cleric remarked, you have been very clear in the last few posts about how you understand the symbolic concepts of spiritual science. If you remember some of our earlier Facebook discussions surrounding PoF and spiritual science, I made many of the same points that Cleric is now trying to point your attention toward. I even asked you if it was possible that you have misunderstood the essential inner aspects of supersensible/clairvoyant experience and need to revisit that domain of inquiry afresh. I believe you responded that it was certainly possible and you are always looking for opportunities to discern how your understanding is falling short.

Well, this is what we are trying to communicate now and possibly provide that opportunity. Your recent posts make it evident that you consider Steiner's (as a synonym for initiatic science) ideal framework as simply one amongst many other philosophical-spiritual systems that are in touch with objective inner experiences in some ways and stray from it in others. This itself suggests that the vertical axis of spiritual activity is not well understood. It is obvious, though, that we are completely stuck if you feel that vertical axis is understood and every attempt to point toward why it might not be is met with, "you don't seem to understand the meaning of what I am saying." It's noble of you to take the blame on yourself, but after a while, that doesn't spare us from the implication that we are complete dullards who can't understand the meaning of sentences like - "In terms of Old Saturn and the rest; I haven't talked to anybody who would be explaining those to me unless they had read Steiner's core text and lectures".

To be fair, you followed that with some equivocations about how these can be useful symbols to meditate on and come alive in some way, but it all remains vague and nebulous. Again, I think we now have a very good sense of why you speak of it in this way, but things might be easier if you spoke more precisely about what you feel Saturn, Sun, Moon (or any similar concepts) symbolize for the archetypal inner context of our living cognitive experience. Then at least there would be little room for us to keep misunderstanding your views.