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

[findingblanks]

Cleric said,

"To this date, I don't think you have signaled that there's anything derived from experiences in the spiritual world..."

Okay, rather than join your shadow dance, I'll wait to see if you become lovely again. But I'm not going to play that particular game with you. However, I have a really good sense of when people warm up and I'll keep my eyes open.

[findingblanks]

Future readers:

I don't know if Amazon exists anymore for you or where the best place to find categories of books...

But what can you tell me about the exact clairvoyants who are researching education and medicine? Are they publically speaking as Steiner did about their experiences and how they result in new steps in their fields? Are there still those kinds of exact clairvoyants who mainly teach people how to become exact clairvoyants?

At some point, did Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon's school begin generating enough exact clairvoyants who could save the world within those specific time-frames YBA specifies every few years? It doesn't take a ton of them, but we need enough to transform in the way his clairvoyance indicates so that the world has a chance to go forward. I'm curious if he kept writing books and/or maybe he still is? Does he have a new critical window of time in which his school needs to save us?

Are there still some Anthroposophists who don't believe Ben-Aharon is as objective with his clairvoyance as he claims to be? Those debates were raging for a while around 2008 - 2015. Is his school still around? He had some very powerful students.

[Cleric]

Cleric said,

"To this date, I don't think you have signaled that there's anything derived from experiences in the spiritual world..."

Okay, rather than join your shadow dance, I'll wait to see if you become lovely again. But I'm not going to play that particular game with you. However, I have a really good sense of when people warm up and I'll keep my eyes open.

I'm lovingly serious, plus you have quoted only the first half of the sentence. Without the second half, it doesn't have the same meaning.

I'm just trying to understand whether we at all speak of the same thing when we use the term 'spiritual world'. It may turn out that this is at the core of the issue.

Please understand that you are giving very sparse information about what your overall conception of reality is. This leaves us guessing and probing, then you are insulted if we miss. You have kinda indicated that the higher spheres of Cosmic consciousness are a conjecture (that is, it may be approved/refuted by future 'exact' clairvoyance). For example, I don't know what you think of karma and reincarnation - conjecture or reality? As said, you have been explicit only on the fact that death is not the end.

What I asked has nothing to do with shadows but was a simple question - what of the communications from the various schools reaching into the spiritual world, you consider to be realities instead of mere conjectures (besides the non-terminality of death)?

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, in the same way you've shared your way of imagining a field of experience in which there is no meaning yet attached to any percepts, could you share your experience of the etheric body of plants? I have questions about how this manifests in different contexts, and I obviously don't always get a chance to talk to somebody who has developed this first stage of clairvoyance. I've often met folks who talk about achieving this stage, folks who up till that point were not shy at all about sharing their understandings of Occult Science, but then get so quiet about sharing their direct experience of etheric bodies. You've asked me lots of questions. If I promise to make my questions very specific and less than 7, would you be willing to answer them? I'm trying to not write too many paragraphs so that things don't get lost.

I have already done that several times, admittedly briefly, and so has Cleric. These things are simply missed, they pass right through our consciousness, if we don't have the living concepts for them. It's the same reason you don't find anything of body-free thinking and etheric perception in PoF. You can study it for decades and never experience its true spiritual value if you don't humbly admit you were letting implicit assumptions numb your sensitivity and start afresh.

For ex., when Cleric writes his recent essays and posts here, I always engage them as if it's the very first time I have come across these ideas and illustrations, even though we have been discussing many of them for some time. This is not something I simply repeat to myself in verbal concepts that float at the surface, but I actively work to get myself into that inner state of feeling, into the proper mood as it were. I allow myself to really live through the metaphors, illustrations, examples, and meditations, as if I am approaching a profound work of art from Da Vinci, Raphael, Michaelangelo, etc. I do this with every single post. This is the only way to mine their spiritual value and resonate with the first-person contextual depth that we artistically describe as the supersensible members - the etheric, astral, and ego. It takes a lot of time, persistence, good faith, and concentrated effort.

Overall, we need to start taking seriously the fact of our existence and meaningful experience within the flow of existence. This depth of our existential experience is the most wondrous thing, something we couldn't even imagine existed before, but that reality only begins to dawn on us when we approach it with the greatest humility, reverence, and awe. And I'm sorry to say you are consistently revealing that you lack this at the current time. If I were to go into a few paragraphs about how I think we can better orient to the living etheric realm of existence, which would necessarily involve first unwinding various dead habits of thinking, you would brush most of it aside in the same way you did Cleric's extended response on your question about the Angels and mountains/valleys.

Let's first see if you are interested in taking this whole thing a little more seriously. On a scale from 1-5, where "5" is "fully reachable, already reached by some, something every individual experiences after death exactly as described, and something that each individual can objectively experience right here and now via Anthroposophical exercises", and "1" is "hardly reachable, perhaps will only be reached in the future, something that doesn't necessarily need to be experienced by every individual after death, and will probably only be experienced by those who are trained within the Anthroposophical lens" - how would you rate the following from Steiner? You can add some commentary if you want, but even a simple number will suffice.

Ordinarily, the only thing we know in regard to this earthly existence is that which we can call up in memory; we have pictures of our experiences. But what is now experienced by means of this strengthened thinking is not of the same kind. It appears as if in a tremendous tableau so that we do not recollect merely in a dim picture what we passed through ten years ago, for instance, but we have the inner experience that in spirit we are retracing the course of time. If someone carries out such an exercise in his fiftieth year, let us say, and arrives at the result indicated, what then happens is that time permits him to go back as if along a “time-path” all the way, for instance, to the experiences of his thirty-fifth year. We travel back through time. We do not have only a dim memory of what we passed through fifteen years earlier, but we feel ourselves to be in the midst of this in its living reality, as if in an experience of the present moment. We travel through time; space loses its significance, and time affords us a mighty tableau of memory. This becomes a precise picture of man's life, such as appears, even according to scientific thinkers, when anyone is exposed to great terror, a severe shock—at the moment of drowning, for instance—when for some moments he is confronted by something of his entire earthly life in pictures appearing before his soul—to which he looks back later with a certain shuddering fascination. In other words, what appears before the soul in such cases as through a natural convulsion now actually appears before the soul at the moment indicated, when the entire earthly life confronts one as in a mighty tableau of the spirit, only in a time order. Only now does one know oneself; only now does one possess real self-observation.

It is quite possible to differentiate this picture of man's inner being from that which constitutes a mere “memory” picture. It is clear in the memory picture that we have something in which persons, natural occurrences, or works of art come upon us as if from without; in this memory picture what we have is the manner in which the world comes into contact with us. In the super-sensible memory tableau which appears before a person, what confronts him is, rather, that which has proceeded from himself. If, for instance, at a certain definite point of time in his life he began a friendship with a beloved personality, the mere memory picture shows how this person came to him at a certain point of time, spoke to him, what he owes to the person, and so on. But in this life tableau what confronts him is the manner in which he himself longed for this person, and how he ultimately took every step in such a way that he was inevitably led to that being whom he recognized as being in harmony with himself.

That which has taken place through the unfolding of the forces of the soul comes to meet one with exact clarity in this life tableau. Many people do not like this precise clarity, because it brings them to enlightenment regarding much that they would prefer to see in a different light from the light of truth. But one must endure the fact that one is able to look upon one's own inner being in utter freedom from preconceptions, even if this being of oneself meets the searching eye with reproach. This state of cognition I have called imaginative knowledge, or Imagination.

[findingblanks]

2.3

His description almost exactly matches many NDE reports, from folks who came into them as atheists, Christians, Muslim's, agnostics....kids, uneducated, educated.

[findingblanks]

We can vividly imagine an experience in which everything we notice is disconnected and has no apparent meaning, inwardly and outwardly.

[AshvinP]

2.3

His description almost exactly matches many NDE reports, from folks who came into them as atheists, Christians, Muslim's, agnostics....kids, uneducated, educated.

Alright, thanks. That's an interesting weight you give. Even though it matches the NDE reports from many different lenses, do you still feel like it is only a somewhat reachable first-person experience during life, not necessarily experienced by each individual after death, and somewhat conditioned to an Anthroposophical lens?

As the quote indicates, Steiner was well aware of the NDE phenomenon and said that, because of it, even secular scientists were being forced to acknowledge after-death experiences that were previously only known through initiatic science. Yet I think we both know Steiner didn't come up with these descriptions by reviewing compilations of NDE reports like most people do today. Rather they were first-person artistic descriptions of his own experiences when developing Imaginative cognition through the appropriate inner methods, exactly as he indicates in various places.

Is there any reason to think the panoramic tableau is not something every single individual experiences after death as a sort of inverted, holistic, and qualitatively rich perspective on their encounters with others during life? Is it conceivable to you that we can free ourselves from reliance on second-hand reports, which although pointing to something real are also conditioned by many lenses, and investigate this state we normally only experience after death, in the here and now? That we can do this fully consciously precisely to render the lenses transparent (objective knowledge) and understand the life tableau as a symbolic anchor for even more holistic intuition of our Cosmic-Earthly existence?

And, even beyond all those questions, I would like to settle the fact that when we speak of 'clairvoyance' at the initial stages, we are exactly speaking of this capacity to lucidly and precisely investigate the 'etheric' spectrum of panoramic memory that normally people only haphazardly encounter by nearly dying, completely unprepared and unoriented to what the experience could mean within the greater World flow. We enter this same state of experience with fully attentive consciousness and thus the ability to trace exactly how and why it came about, and therefore its relation to our ordinary Earthly states of thinking, memory, feelings, and sensations. If we can settle that, this should at least make clear that we have very different understandings of 'clairvoyance', especially as it proceeds to even more integrated experiences of the World flow across the threshold of death.

[findingblanks]

"Alright, thanks. That's an interesting weight you give. Even though it matches the NDE reports from many different lenses, do you still feel like it is only a somewhat reachable first-person experience during life, not necessarily experienced by each individual after death, and somewhat conditioned to an Anthroposophical lens?"

I think it will depend on the individual. And rather than it being 'the' experience, we see that it is a varity of experiences which show various kinds of ovelap. This matches perfectly with Steiner's explanations as to why such experiences will always reveal themselves in partiuclar ways, that the point isn't to map out 'the' pictures and sounds and sensations (spiritual, of course) that are more objective but to be able to read through whatever symbols are given to the actual occurance (which is the implcitly active side of all the different presentations). A true seer could read a very simplisitic account by a child or a foriegn culture and recognize that the person had the same intricacy of experience as a highly elaborated account.

"Yet I think we both know Steiner didn't come up with these descriptions by reviewing compilations of NDE reports like most people do today. Rather they were first-person artistic descriptions of his own experiences when developing Imaginative cognition through the appropriate inner methods, exactly as he indicates in various places."

I'm not sure we agree on the role that reading prior spiritual descriptions play in the formation of one's own coming experiences. Steiner himself does a fairly great job of explaining why you can't experience the details painted in Occult Science unless you take them up and internalize them in very specific and intense ways first. Steiner was reading occult books in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I assume he was beginning to learn why (from his lens) it was necessary for him first to take up specific ideas and images before he could confirm them direclty himself.

"Is there any reason to think the panoramic tableau is not something every single individual experiences after death as a sort of inverted, holistic, and qualitatively rich perspective on their encounters with others during life?"

Nope. Again, the reality versus the presentation will be the most important distinction that an Anthroposophist will be able to make in the future.

"Is it conceivable to you that we can free ourselves from reliance on second-hand reports, which although pointing to something real are also conditioned by many lenses, and investigate this state we normally only experience after death, in the here and now? "

To the extent that I agree with Steiner that you MUST first study Occult Science, thinking about and meditating upon his images and ideas deeply, before you will be able to 'see' them for yourself and verify or critcize them directly -- to that extent, I don't think we will find some kind of 'pure post-death experience'. But to the extent that I don't quite agree with Steiner's view regarding the only way to verify his claims - to that extent, I do believe there can be more or less 'pure' trackings (again, not via the presentations) of post-death experience. For future readers: I've already said elsewhere that I believe the post-death experience is evolving rapidly.

Ashvin, can you reliably see the etheric body of a plant when you look at a living seed? Also, can you talk about the ways in which you, once you began to have this exact capacity, you then ensured that the etheric vision was exact? I know that mediums and such state that they simply, over time, notice that the vision is validated by the states reported by their sitters. But, as an exact clairvoyant in the Anthroposophical tradition, I assume your standards of tracking the validity of your etheric vision was a bit more sophisticated? When you first began to reliably be able to see the etheric body of plants, can you describe the process of improving it's accuracy?

[AshvinP]

"Alright, thanks. That's an interesting weight you give. Even though it matches the NDE reports from many different lenses, do you still feel like it is only a somewhat reachable first-person experience during life, not necessarily experienced by each individual after death, and somewhat conditioned to an Anthroposophical lens?"

I think it will depend on the individual. And rather than it being 'the' experience, we see that it is a varity of experiences which show various kinds of ovelap. This matches perfectly with Steiner's explanations as to why such experiences will always reveal themselves in partiuclar ways, that the point isn't to map out 'the' pictures and sounds and sensations (spiritual, of course) that are more objective but to be able to read through whatever symbols are given to the actual occurance (which is the implcitly active side of all the different presentations). A true seer could read a very simplisitic account by a child or a foriegn culture and recognize that the person had the same intricacy of experience as a highly elaborated account.

"Yet I think we both know Steiner didn't come up with these descriptions by reviewing compilations of NDE reports like most people do today. Rather they were first-person artistic descriptions of his own experiences when developing Imaginative cognition through the appropriate inner methods, exactly as he indicates in various places."

I'm not sure we agree on the role that reading prior spiritual descriptions play in the formation of one's own coming experiences. Steiner himself does a fairly great job of explaining why you can't experience the details painted in Occult Science unless you take them up and internalize them in very specific and intense ways first. Steiner was reading occult books in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, and I assume he was beginning to learn why (from his lens) it was necessary for him first to take up specific ideas and images before he could confirm them direclty himself.

"Is there any reason to think the panoramic tableau is not something every single individual experiences after death as a sort of inverted, holistic, and qualitatively rich perspective on their encounters with others during life?"

Nope. Again, the reality versus the presentation will be the most important distinction that an Anthroposophist will be able to make in the future.

"Is it conceivable to you that we can free ourselves from reliance on second-hand reports, which although pointing to something real are also conditioned by many lenses, and investigate this state we normally only experience after death, in the here and now? "

To the extent that I agree with Steiner that you MUST first study Occult Science, thinking about and meditating upon his images and ideas deeply, before you will be able to 'see' them for yourself and verify or critcize them directly -- to that extent, I don't think we will find some kind of 'pure post-death experience'. But to the extent that I don't quite agree with Steiner's view regarding the only way to verify his claims - to that extent, I do believe there can be more or less 'pure' trackings (again, not via the presentations) of post-death experience. For future readers: I've already said elsewhere that I believe the post-death experience is evolving rapidly.

Ashvin, can you reliably see the etheric body of a plant when you look at a living seed? Also, can you talk about the ways in which you, once you began to have this exact capacity, you then ensured that the etheric vision was exact? I know that mediums and such state that they simply, over time, notice that the vision is validated by the states reported by their sitters. But, as an exact clairvoyant in the Anthroposophical tradition, I assume your standards of tracking the validity of your etheric vision was a bit more sophisticated? When you first began to reliably be able to see the etheric body of plants, can you describe the process of improving it's accuracy?

Why must everything of value in this domain only arrive in the future? We can only say this if we are missing something about what is possible in the here and now via the available cognitive methods of modern initiation.

Do you think it is possible to change the very structure of timeless mathematical relations by approaching them via set theory, Lambda calculus, Turing machines, Category theory, etc.? Surely the artistic images we use to kindle our intuitive movements through the ideal relations can subtly color how we understand those relations, but a) that will be a minimal effect relative to our intuition of the objective relations (which themselves structure our artistic perceptual anchors) and b) the coloring effect will be mitigated in direct proportion to how conscious we are of it and how conscious we are that multiple different axiomatic systems can lead us into the same 'mathematical' (spiritual) intuitions. Then we are no longer at risk of confusing our particular axiomatic basis at any given time for the only 'right' one.

By truly experiencing the silence of the soul, we become able to hear spiritually what dwells in the world of Spirit. The ordinary sensory world then becomes a means for us to interpret what lives in the spiritual world... what resounds approaches me with a certain vivacity, it can give me, say, something like the color yellow gives me if I am sensitive and receptive to colors. Then I have something in the sense world through which I can express my experience in the world of Spirit. My perception is one I can describe by saying that 'it effects me as the color yellow does'. Or like the tone C or C sharp in music, or like warmth or cold. In brief, my sensory experiences offer me a means for expressing in ordinary words what appears to me in the world of Spirit. In this way, the whole sensory world becomes like a language to express what I experience in the spiritual world.

Those who seek too rapid progress do not understand this and come only to a superficial judgment. This is why patient investigators describe their experiences in terms of colors, tones, and so on. Just as we shouldn't confuse the word "table" with an actual table, so we should not confuse the world of Spirit itself... with the manner in which it is described.

As far as I know, Steiner never said that the realities depicted in GA 13 can only be approached through the particular images and symbols he used. This would be in direct conflict with the quote above and many similar ones. This is such an important principle to grasp inwardly when working through the artistic descriptions of spiritual science. It is very comfortable and convenient to simply stare at the finger pointing to inner realities and build Cosmological models, either clinging to those models as "truth" or dismissing the lawfulness of the underlying spiritual experiences because we have cast them into superficial judgments. In other words, because our inner experiences are totally conditioned by sensory symbols, we assume Steiner's must be as well and use that as a reason to equate all that is described with some semi-subjective report that holds equal weight with NDEs, mediums, etc. It takes much more imaginative effort to live through the symbols and experience how their finger-pointing activity overlaps with the inner reality itself, and does so at ever-greater scales the further we purify our inner states.

The following passage is critical for us to orient toward the essence of Anthroposophical meditation: 

Thinking, which has become more and more conscious of its passive role in connection with external research, and is not willing to disavow this, is capable of energizing itself inwardly to activity. It may energize itself in such a way that, although not exact in the sense in which we apply this term to measure and weight in external research, it is exact in relationship to its own development in the sense in which the external scientist, the mathematician, for example, is accustomed to follow with full consciousness every step in his research. But this occurs when that mode of super-sensible cognition of which I am here speaking replaces the ancient vague meditation, the ancient indistinct immersion of oneself in thinking, with a truly exact development of this thinking... The human being should really compel himself, for the length of time which is necessary for him—and this is determined by the varying innate capacities of people—to exchange the role of passive surrender to the external world, which he otherwise rightly assumes in his thinking, for that different role: that of introducing into this thinking his whole inner activity of soul. This he should do by taking into his mind day by day, even though at times only for a brief period, some particular thought—the content of which is not the important matter—and, while withdrawing his inner nature from the external world, directing all the powers of his soul in inner concentration upon this thought. By means of this process something comes about in the development of those capacities of soul that may be compared with the results which follow when any particular muscles of the human body—for instance, the muscles of the arms—are to be developed. The muscles are made stronger, more powerful through use, through exercise. Thus, likewise, do the capacities of the soul become inwardly stronger, more powerful by being directed upon a definite thought. This exercise must be arranged so that we proceed in a really exact way, so that we survey every step taken in our thinking just as a mathematician surveys his operations when he undertakes to solve a geometrical or arithmetical problem....

This cannot be done if we take a thought content out of our own memory; for so much is associated with such a thought in the most indeterminate way, so much plays a role in the subconscious or the unconscious, and it is not possible to be exact if one concentrates upon such a thing. What one fixes, therefore, in the very center of one's consciousness is something entirely new, something that one confronts only with respect to its actual content, which is not associated with any experience of the soul. What matters is the concentration of the forces of the soul and the strengthening which results from this. Likewise, if one goes to a person who has made some progress in this field and requests him to provide one with such a thought content, it is good not to entertain a prejudice against this. The content is in that case entirely new to the person concerned, and he can survey it. Many persons fear that they may become dependent in this way upon someone else who provides them with such a content. But this is not the case; in reality, they become less dependent than if they take such a thought content out of their own memories and experiences, in which case it is bound up with all sorts of subconscious experiences. Moreover, it is good for a person who has had some practice in scientific work to use the findings of scientific research as material for concentration; these prove to be, indeed, the most fruitful of all for this purpose.

If this is continued for a relatively long time, even for years, perhaps—and this must be accompanied by patience and endurance, as it requires a few weeks or months in some cases before success is achieved, and in some cases years—it is possible to arrive at a point where this method for the inner molding of one's thoughts can be applied as exactly as the physicist or the chemist applies the methods of measuring and weighing for the purpose of discovering the secrets of nature. What one has then learned is applied to the further development of one's own thinking. At a certain moment, then, the person has a significant inner experience: he feels himself to be involved not only in picture-thinking, which depicts the external events and facts and which is true to reality in inverse proportion to the force it possesses in itself, in proportion as it is a mere picture; but one arrives now at the point of adding to this kind of thinking the inner experience of a thinking in which one lives, a thinking filled with inner power. This is a significant experience. Thinking thus becomes, as it were, something which one begins to experience just as one experiences the power of one's own muscles when one grasps an object or strikes against something. A reality such as one experiences otherwise only in connection with the process of breathing or the activity of a muscle—this inner activity now enters into thinking. And since one has investigated precisely every step upon this way, so one experiences oneself in full clarity and presence of mind in this strengthened, active thinking. If the objection is raised, let us say, that knowledge can result only from observation and logic, this is no real objection; for what we now experience is experienced with complete inner clarity, and yet in such a way that this thinking becomes at the same time a kind of “touching with the soul.” In the process of forming a thought, it is as if we were extending a feeler—not, in this case, as the snail extends a feeler into the physical world, but as if a feeler were extended into a spiritual world, which is as yet present only for our feelings if we have developed to this stage, but which we are justified in expecting. For one has the feeling: “Your thinking has been transformed into a spiritual touching; if this can become more and more the case, you may expect that this thinking will come into contact with what constitutes a spiritual reality, just as your finger here in the physical world comes into contact with what is physically real.

Only when one has lived for a time in this inwardly strengthened thinking does complete self-knowledge become possible. For we know then that the soul element has become, by means of this concentration, an experiential reality.

This is what we are trying to point attention to, which is directly relevant to your question about pursuing exact clairvoyance of the etheric plant world. The etheric spectrum is what you call the 'lenses' which color our experience of objective ideal relations. By awakening into this spectrum through Imaginative cognition, we simultaneously become more conscious of these lenses which are, in fact, creative formative forces that structure our perception and, moreover, these very same forces structure the rhythmic life cycles of the plant world and the external forms that are the outer physiognomy of these spiritual metamorphic cycles.

In other words, when Steiner or anyone else investigates the etheric 'death spectrum' via Imaginative concentration, the panoramic life tableau, he is investigating the lenses through which we perceive, understand, and orient to inner experiences (including sensory events), which are the same creative forces that structure the lawful metamorphoses of the events we perceive, understand, orient to, and act upon during ordinary life. That is possible because this investigation proceeds with mathematical clarity and precision, so every single step in the process is traceable. No lens of the soul can remain hidden and opaque during this investigation. In fact, the whole aim is to render the soul lenses increasingly transparent, which also renders the lawful processes of the 'outer world' more transparent, because they are much more united as One within the etheric spectrum.
 
Can you please confirm if the above is understood? Not if you agree with it, but if you at least understand how we understand higher cognition, and how we consider any other common understanding that may be convenient to reach and familiar to our ordinary sensory experience except with more 'subtle' perceptual content, to be a fictional caricature and therefore completely useless to work with. Such caricatures are not even remotely related to higher cognitive development as understood by Steiner or us.

[findingblanks]

Ashvin said 'everything'. Look:

"Why must everything of value in this domain only arrive in the future?"

Future readers: go and find where I said that nothing of value is found now. Each time you see me talk about great value in the present, collect Ashvin's pattern of communication.

I'll back later, but I can tell you, Ashvin, are in the mode that requires I demonstrate that I'm reading your words very carefully.