ChatGPT answers metaphysical questions :)

[Federica]

Yesterday I started writing the following in response to your previous post but didn't have time to finish it:

Thank you so much, Cleric!

[AshvinP]

On one hand, I understand your motivation for the Eiffel Tower (ET) example. Our visual canvas indeed feels more like ground, while our verbal thoughts are sent as smoke rings against it. If we stop puffing the smoke rings we still see the canvas (as if we project the image with our ray of activity). Yet, the visual picture of the tower is still a symbolic anchor against which the concept is experienced. You can try to concentrate on the picture of the ET. You can pronounce also the words, maybe in different languages. But try to concentrate on the concept/meaning of the ET without using either a word or a visual image, or making a shape with your imaginary hands, etc. Not so easy, is it? Without any imaginative support we are left wondering "How do I even know what I'm concentrating on? What does it even mean to concentrate on the pure meaning/concept, without any inner phenomena that the meaning elucidates? What would that feel like?" We may try to cheat by picturing a blurry blob and recast the concept into it, but that's still another symbol we have created. As a matter of fact, such a meditation gives a hint about what training for Inspirative cognition feels like.

On the other hand, Ashvin's response may have left the impression, that he can't grasp cognition without verbal support (as if he can't experience the concept of the ET by contemplating the inner image without casting a word smoke ring). So it's natural that one who can think about the ET both pictorially and verbally should see the one who prioritizes verbal thought, as being stuck in a more constrained situation. Ashvin can answer for himself, but here's what I think.

Verbal thought is important because in the inner sound phenomena ('shapes' in the sound ether) we experience much more finely the reflection of our spiritual activity. For example, when we visually picture the ET, this usually comes as a whole stamp. Normally we don't build up the inner image in the way we would draw it bit by bit. Thus, thinking in pictures clearly relies on the etheric reverberations of past visual perceptions. When we think of the ET, it's like we browse for a whole photograph within our etheric organism. It should immediately be said that something very similar can happen when we think verbally in such ready-made etheric audiograms (analogy with the etheric photographs). This kind of thinking is what you are mainly and rightly opposed to. Yet, as far as the investigation of our deeper spiritual activity goes, the willful manipulation of the phenomenal 'pixels', seems to feel more intimate when we do that in the sound of our inner voice. Try it and tell how it feels to you. Try manipulating the color pixels of an inner image and observe how it feels in relation to your inner activity. Then try it with manipulating the auditory pixels of your inner voice. Which of the two feels more intimate, as if reflecting more of your I-ness, and which feels a little bit more remote, as if you manipulate something on a canvas at a small distance? It's not a question of demeaning or avoiding one kind of imaginative activity in expense of another, in exactly the same way as we shouldn't avoid bodily will, just because it feels to manifest through more unknown layers. So in this sense, just like we have previously graded TFW according to how in-phase they feel to our innermost intuitive intents, so we can differentiate even the strata of purely imaginative activity into such gradations from more remote to more intimate - warmth ether, light/color ether, sound ether, life ether.

Thanks Cleric, this illustration of the gradient within imaginative activity is very helpful.

Related to that, I want to note that our thinking tied to linear verbal sequences often correspondingly tries to conceive of experiences in discrete segments (either horizontally across content or vertically across modes/scales of inner activity) when investigating various existential questions. We start to forget about more overlapping and encompassing rhythms of experience through which our thought-full experiences are continually integrated into our intuitive context. In this way we can lose sight that, implicit in the meaning of our wordless pictorial anchors, of the ET for example, is all that we have been able to work out through our prior verbal thinking. Actually you used the ET example before and it can be instructive here as well.

When we grasp these things in depth we also understand the importance of proper spiritual development. We see how serious all this is. It's common to hear today "Ah, what do you care, we'll see what is it like when we die." Unfortunately, what it will be like depends entirely on what we do today. We also see that it is entirely in our hands to work in such a direction that in our next incarnation we'll have memories from the current. We work in that direction when we follow everything in living thinking. Let me give another example. After death, in the elemental spectrum there exists the etheric side of everything that we find with our senses. Let's imagine that we've been in Paris and we've seen the Eiffel tower but we did that in a completely superficial manner, we only cared about taking our selfie so that we can brag about it on instagram. After death, in the etheric spectrum, the forces that are employed in the Eiffel tower exist but they are not spatially shaped like it. We'll actually pass right through these forces and never recognize them. What shall we do if we are to recognize these forces? We have to experience as much as possible about the tower through our thinking while still on Earth. Just as we can feel the shape of an object with our fingers, so we must feelingly move our thinking along the curves of the tower, we must feel its shape. We must think about the material it is made of, to livingly feel the difference between steel or stone. Not only to note the difference in the different words but to experience it vividly. Stone is not just a word, it immediately links to the rocky crust of the Earth. And what about iron? It should bring living thoughts of the bowels of the Earth, where the ore is extracted, how it goes through fire in the smelter and so on. We can think something about the person Eiffel. In all of these, it's not important that simply words pass through our mind but that we're innerly mobile with our spiritual activity. It's not the picture of the form of the tower - it's the movement we trace with our thinking in order to bring that picture to life. If we have experienced things in such a way, the etheric spectrum becomes something which can be read - it speaks to us. When we encounter the forces of the tower we recognize them because the etheric spectrum is precisely weaved out of spiritual gestures. When we step in these forces and we can figuratively speaking say: "Hey, the dynamics of this activity feel much in the same way as while in the body I felt the shape of the Eiffel tower".

Clearly we can't simply run a dry verbal commentary on the ET and its ideal constellation, amassing various facts about its history, construction, etc. to build an intellectual framework about it. That won't help us resonate with the living etheric spectrum. Yet the very same imaginative (in this case verbal) content can start serving that function when we place them in the above context, with the intention that they anchor our vivid explorations of the intuitive meaning surrounding the ET constellation. Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards. We wouldn't be able to mine the hierarchical depth of conceptual meaning implicit in this ET constellation. The pictorial muscles certainly need to be exercised in these living explorations, yet all of that pictorial meaning in the light ether should also be continually refined through verbal gestures in the sound ether. Then even when we anchor our intuition in a simple wordless image, the fruits of our verbal gestures will be implicit in the rich depth of meaning we experience.

[Federica]

Yet, the visual picture of the tower is still a symbolic anchor against which the concept is experienced. You can try to concentrate on the picture of the ET. You can pronounce also the words, maybe in different languages. But try to concentrate on the concept/meaning of the ET without using either a word or a visual image, or making a shape with your imaginary hands, etc. Not so easy, is it?

Absolutely, I recognize that. That’s what I also said

The thing is, a concept is not symbolic if with symbolic we mean word-symbols.

----

Yet, as far as the investigation of our deeper spiritual activity goes, the willful manipulation of the phenomenal 'pixels', seems to feel more intimate when we do that in the sound of our inner voice. Try it and tell how it feels to you. Try manipulating the color pixels of an inner image and observe how it feels in relation to your inner activity. Then try it with manipulating the auditory pixels of your inner voice. Which of the two feels more intimate, as if reflecting more of your I-ness, and which feels a little bit more remote, as if you manipulate something on a canvas at a small distance? It's not a question of demeaning or avoiding one kind of imaginative activity in expense of another, in exactly the same way as we shouldn't avoid bodily will, just because it feels to manifest through more unknown layers. So in this sense, just like we have previously graded TFW according to how in-phase they feel to our innermost intuitive intents, so we can differentiate even the strata of purely imaginative activity into such gradations from more remote to more intimate - warmth ether, light/color ether, sound ether, life ether.

Yes I don’t need to be convinced. I surely feel that, and tried to say it, writing in the posts about the connection of sound and feeling, and that language is so much more than encoding, though I didn’t have that clarified in terms of different qualities of imaginative substance. That puts things in clearer perspective, thank you.

[Federica]

Related to that, I want to note that our thinking tied to linear verbal sequences often correspondingly tries to conceive of experiences in discrete segments (either horizontally across content or vertically across modes/scales of inner activity) when investigating various existential questions. We start to forget about more overlapping and encompassing rhythms of experience through which our thought-full experiences are continually integrated into our intuitive context. In this way we can lose sight that, implicit in the meaning of our wordless pictorial anchors, of the ET for example, is all that we have been able to work out through our prior verbal thinking. Actually you used the ET example before and it can be instructive here as well.

When we grasp these things in depth we also understand the importance of proper spiritual development. We see how serious all this is. It's common to hear today "Ah, what do you care, we'll see what is it like when we die." Unfortunately, what it will be like depends entirely on what we do today. We also see that it is entirely in our hands to work in such a direction that in our next incarnation we'll have memories from the current. We work in that direction when we follow everything in living thinking. Let me give another example. After death, in the elemental spectrum there exists the etheric side of everything that we find with our senses. Let's imagine that we've been in Paris and we've seen the Eiffel tower but we did that in a completely superficial manner, we only cared about taking our selfie so that we can brag about it on instagram. After death, in the etheric spectrum, the forces that are employed in the Eiffel tower exist but they are not spatially shaped like it. We'll actually pass right through these forces and never recognize them. What shall we do if we are to recognize these forces? We have to experience as much as possible about the tower through our thinking while still on Earth. Just as we can feel the shape of an object with our fingers, so we must feelingly move our thinking along the curves of the tower, we must feel its shape. We must think about the material it is made of, to livingly feel the difference between steel or stone. Not only to note the difference in the different words but to experience it vividly. Stone is not just a word, it immediately links to the rocky crust of the Earth. And what about iron? It should bring living thoughts of the bowels of the Earth, where the ore is extracted, how it goes through fire in the smelter and so on. We can think something about the person Eiffel. In all of these, it's not important that simply words pass through our mind but that we're innerly mobile with our spiritual activity. It's not the picture of the form of the tower - it's the movement we trace with our thinking in order to bring that picture to life. If we have experienced things in such a way, the etheric spectrum becomes something which can be read - it speaks to us. When we encounter the forces of the tower we recognize them because the etheric spectrum is precisely weaved out of spiritual gestures. When we step in these forces and we can figuratively speaking say: "Hey, the dynamics of this activity feel much in the same way as while in the body I felt the shape of the Eiffel tower".

Clearly we can't simply run a dry verbal commentary on the ET and its ideal constellation, amassing various facts about its history, construction, etc. to build an intellectual framework about it. That won't help us resonate with the living etheric spectrum. Yet the very same imaginative (in this case verbal) content can start serving that function when we place them in the above context, with the intention that they anchor our vivid explorations of the intuitive meaning surrounding the ET constellation. Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards. We wouldn't be able to mine the hierarchical depth of conceptual meaning implicit in this ET constellation. The pictorial muscles certainly need to be exercised in these living explorations, yet all of that pictorial meaning in the light ether should also be continually refined through verbal gestures in the sound ether. Then even when we anchor our intuition in a simple wordless image, the fruits of our verbal gestures will be implicit in the rich depth of meaning we experience.

Indeed, these were relevant considerations, using the ET as an example. I wasn't aware of that post. The ET came to mind independently. I lived in Paris for more than a decade, and the ET is an important landmark and visual anchor of my life.

I believe we can definitely do what the quote describes without the verbal anchors "Eiffel" and "Tower". As I wrote before, I think this is possible for perceptions that have a direct and clear sensory anchor, like the Eiffel Tower (although, yes, there is much else in the background, and, yes, the intuitive context we use has been developed in a being who has developed as linguistic being, thus having such quality incorporated in all activity). Also, when I think about Gustave Eiffel, his portrait comes to mind. The name Eiffel is indeed relevant, in its quality of being a French name, and so working through feeling anchoring, rather than as primary verbal anchor for the focal point of the ET.

The reason why I think it's possible to do all that when we can solidly rely on a precise sensory anchor, is that we don't really need the hierarchy that only language can offer, like we would need for more complex ideas, like "evolution", or "Christianity", or "industry". Moreover the risk of starting dreaming in words is always lurking (dependence on concept tokenization) so if we do count primarily on the verbal anchors, there is the extra difficulty of feeling the anchors, rather than dreaming in them, which would take us in the opposite direction, away from the activity described in the quote.

[Cleric]

Clearly we can't simply run a dry verbal commentary on the ET and its ideal constellation, amassing various facts about its history, construction, etc. to build an intellectual framework about it. That won't help us resonate with the living etheric spectrum. Yet the very same imaginative (in this case verbal) content can start serving that function when we place them in the above context, with the intention that they anchor our vivid explorations of the intuitive meaning surrounding the ET constellation. Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards. We wouldn't be able to mine the hierarchical depth of conceptual meaning implicit in this ET constellation. The pictorial muscles certainly need to be exercised in these living explorations, yet all of that pictorial meaning in the light ether should also be continually refined through verbal gestures in the sound ether. Then even when we anchor our intuition in a simple wordless image, the fruits of our verbal gestures will be implicit in the rich depth of meaning we experience.

I'll have to investigate this more, but it feels to me that it is not the verbal anchors that are the most defining characteristic of what we talk about. We know that people born deaf can think in hand gestures and images, thus the "I" experiences itself much more in the warmth/tactile and light/color spectrum. This thinking can still grasp aspects of contextuality, hierarchy, and so on, since these things can be comprehended also pictorially. As you have implied, there isn't really much of our modern intellectual life that cannot be incarnated into discrete intellectual tokens of whatever kind.

There's one thing, however, which cannot be very well grasped without the experience of sound and that is music. Rhythm we can still grasp pictorially, for example, a light bulb flashing in a certain pattern can be easily grasped. However, the experience of pitch, of vertical harmonies and symphony, is already something that evades the more spatially oriented inner movements. There's an aspect of contextuality which becomes innerly known only when we live in tone.

Of course, we should be clear that there isn't really such a situation where the soul weaves only in the lower ethers. The full spectrum is always present, the difference is that the soul could be living in tone more instinctively. This holds not only for a deaf person but also for anyone who thinks verbally but mechanically, without really having self-reflection in tone. I think that something like the vowels exercise highlights what it could mean to awaken to our spiritual activity in the ability to weave in tone. Of course, singing has already been doing that, as long as one is consciously active.

So I guess it's a question of even finer distinction and differentiation. For example, it feels to me that one can still enter some form of an Imaginative state even without the experience of tone. This is obviously true in a visionary state. What one cannot know, however, is Inspirative cognition, the inner life of the spiritual world. That's why Steiner calls Inspiration inner hearing. This is the Music of the Spheres. Of course, we are not speaking about perceptual sound but about the fine 'vibrations' of meaning within which our soul lives. What we called sound ether is the more perceptual counterpart of this. In the tone of inner activity we can more intimately comprehend how the inner life of the Cosmos is superimposed.

So when you say "Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards." I'm inclined to say that we can do that to some extent even without verbal anchors but we cannot do it unless our soul lives, even if still instinctively, in the Inspirative world of ideal tone. This is the decisive factor. If we have that, we'll find a way to express that musicality even with hand gestures, even if with greater difficulty and with a lesser chance of conveying the deeper experiences to another soul. Experiencing our spiritual activity in the inner voice brings us closer to consciousness of the Inspirative world, yet we should remember that the latter instills the Logoic order to all ethers. Coincidentally, today's thought by BD is on the topic (I'm translating it).

Music is a quality of the soul. It bases itself on two centers at the forehead. Every person within whom there's music, he's a spiritual person. He may not be going to church but there's an aspiration toward the Sun in him and in my view he's a religious man. Every spiritual person can be religious but not every religous is spiritual.
In the first place in life we have eating, then music. So the first music is eating, its center is phrenologically under the ear. The second music is singing - its center is under the forehead. The third music is prayer - its center is at the top of the head.

[Federica]

Ashvin,

Forgive me the Sherlock Holmes hat here. There are a few facts about you that have come to mind, which are connected with this whole question. I am saying the following in good will, for the reason that I believe there is a chance this may be useful. On the one hand, I am reminded of something you said about a preference for concentrating on texts, rather than images. This was a while ago, and it may not be the case anymore, but perhaps a relevant indication or preference? (I don't know if preference is the right word). On the other hand, I remember that, it was a while ago, you said you considered yourself not as inspired as you would have liked to find out metaphors and images for your essays.

Also - and in my impression more importantly - I am reminded about a lack of comments from your side on various ideas on pictorial thinking and language. From you, who are often abundant with comments, I sometimes thought in passing that it was surprising not to read something about those thoughts. At the singular moments, I didn't pay much notice to that. Now it's coming back. For example, there was a little experiment with icons blended in the body of text. If I am not mistaken, you didn't participate and didn't comment either. I have other examples in mind. One of them is:

Yet, if we persist we may soon find out that we can gain intuitive awareness of whatever we are doing before it becomes verbalized. For example, when we look at the lamp we may feel something like wordless insight, the meaning of illumination. It may even be accompanied by an imaginative flash of illumination, as if we wordlessly intuit: "The lamp brings about light phenomena." And the imaginative element may be very dim or even non-existent. It is our knowing of the connection between the lamp and illumination that fills our intuitive context. From this standpoint we can very slowly try to feel how our words crystalize as symbols of precisely this intuition filling our whole conscious atmosphere. Of course, the actual thinking words we hear only in the act of truly speaking them, yet we may be surprised how much we already intuitively know even before that.

Gradually, by experiencing more closely this horizon at which our thinking words manifest, we begin to realize that our inner being always lives in rich dream-like flow. For example, behind the dry words "It is controlled by a switch", we can feel something expanding like a whole theatrical scene - we reach for the switch, flip it and the room is flooded with light. This is what our soul being really lives in. Every intuition of our deeper being is like the meaning of a movie scene. The thinking words are like dry symbolic encodings of this deeper life. So our soul being continuously experiences the World flow in such rich dream-like scenes, each of which makes a certain degree of intuitive sense. They either resonate with the general intuition of the World flow, or they rattle like notes out of place. Our waking self normally lives only in the semi-automatic symbolic encodings of this hidden dream flow.

Our inner chatter babbles all the time but we rarely stop to recognize what is it that it really describes with the words. For example, we may think "I better finish that project at work, it's already overdue." This is a dry, prosaic thought. But what does it describe? Behind it, a whole dream scene can be felt. It's like our soul has experienced a dream compressed to a point, which if expanded could look like a movie scene where we are being yelled at by our boss. This movie scene is meaningful. It potentially fits in the general movie flow. So it's like our intellectual self has sensed in a flash this compressed movie scene, without really registering it, and all that precipitates are the dry words. It is sometimes possible to recover the dream scene that has stimulated the thought by backtracking it.

I am not sure how exactly one could pull these strings and come to a precise idea, but I wanted to bring these pieces to attention, as I believe there may be something there.

[AshvinP]

Clearly we can't simply run a dry verbal commentary on the ET and its ideal constellation, amassing various facts about its history, construction, etc. to build an intellectual framework about it. That won't help us resonate with the living etheric spectrum. Yet the very same imaginative (in this case verbal) content can start serving that function when we place them in the above context, with the intention that they anchor our vivid explorations of the intuitive meaning surrounding the ET constellation. Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards. We wouldn't be able to mine the hierarchical depth of conceptual meaning implicit in this ET constellation. The pictorial muscles certainly need to be exercised in these living explorations, yet all of that pictorial meaning in the light ether should also be continually refined through verbal gestures in the sound ether. Then even when we anchor our intuition in a simple wordless image, the fruits of our verbal gestures will be implicit in the rich depth of meaning we experience.

I'll have to investigate this more, but it feels to me that it is not the verbal anchors that are the most defining characteristic of what we talk about. We know that people born deaf can think in hand gestures and images, thus the "I" experiences itself much more in the warmth/tactile and light/color spectrum. This thinking can still grasp aspects of contextuality, hierarchy, and so on, since these things can be comprehended also pictorially. As you have implied, there isn't really much of our modern intellectual life that cannot be incarnated into discrete intellectual tokens of whatever kind.

There's one thing, however, which cannot be very well grasped without the experience of sound and that is music. Rhythm we can still grasp pictorially, for example, a light bulb flashing in a certain pattern can be easily grasped. However, the experience of pitch, of vertical harmonies and symphony, is already something that evades the more spatially oriented inner movements. There's an aspect of contextuality which becomes innerly known only when we live in tone.

Thanks, Cleric, these are really helpful and stimulating additional considerations. The above reminds me of a nice Bergson quote, which points to how intuitive thinking can reintroduce musicality into our speech/writing (or unveil its implicit musical structure):

To [understand the author, the pupil] must fall into step with him by adopting his gestures, his attitudes, his gait, by which I mean learning to read the text aloud with the proper intonation and inflection. The intelligence will later add shades of meaning. But shade and color are nothing without design. Before intellection properly so-called, there is the perception of structure and movement; there is, on the page one reads, punctuation and rhythm.

Now it is in indicating this structure and rhythm, in taking into consideration the temporal relations between the various sentences of the paragraph and the various parts of each sentence, in following uninterruptedly the crescendo of thought and feeling to the point musically indicated as the culminating point that the art of diction consists.
...
There is a certain analogy, be it said in passing, between the art of reading as I have just described it and the intuition I recommend to the philosopher. On the page it has chosen from the great book of the world, intuition seeks to recapture, to get back the movement and rhythm of the composition, to live again creative evolution by being one with it in sympathy.

Of course, we should be clear that there isn't really such a situation where the soul weaves only in the lower ethers. The full spectrum is always present, the difference is that the soul could be living in tone more instinctively. This holds not only for a deaf person but also for anyone who thinks verbally but mechanically, without really having self-reflection in tone. I think that something like the vowels exercise highlights what it could mean to awaken to our spiritual activity in the ability to weave in tone. Of course, singing has already been doing that, as long as one is consciously active.

So I guess it's a question of even finer distinction and differentiation. For example, it feels to me that one can still enter some form of an Imaginative state even without the experience of tone. This is obviously true in a visionary state. What one cannot know, however, is Inspirative cognition, the inner life of the spiritual world. That's why Steiner calls Inspiration inner hearing. This is the Music of the Spheres. Of course, we are not speaking about perceptual sound but about the fine 'vibrations' of meaning within which our soul lives. What we called sound ether is the more perceptual counterpart of this. In the tone of inner activity we can more intimately comprehend how the inner life of the Cosmos is superimposed.

So when you say "Can we imagine doing this without verbal anchors? Not really. For the reasons you mentioned, the inner gestures simply wouldn't be refined enough if we approach monumental cultural accomplishments only through pictorial storyboards." I'm inclined to say that we can do that to some extent even without verbal anchors but we cannot do it unless our soul lives, even if still instinctively, in the Inspirative world of ideal tone. This is the decisive factor. If we have that, we'll find a way to express that musicality even with hand gestures, even if with greater difficulty and with a lesser chance of conveying the deeper experiences to another soul. Experiencing our spiritual activity in the inner voice brings us closer to consciousness of the Inspirative world, yet we should remember that the latter instills the Logoic order to all ethers. Coincidentally, today's thought by BD is on the topic (I'm translating it).

Music is a quality of the soul. It bases itself on two centers at the forehead. Every person within whom there's music, he's a spiritual person. He may not be going to church but there's an aspiration toward the Sun in him and in my view he's a religious man. Every spiritual person can be religious but not every religous is spiritual.
In the first place in life we have eating, then music. So the first music is eating, its center is phrenologically under the ear. The second music is singing - its center is under the forehead. The third music is prayer - its center is at the top of the head.

Right, this is a good reminder that we can't isolate our spiritual activity into one imaginative strata and only modulate that strata. The bold part was a main factor that I was contemplating concerning the verbal anchors. It's somewhat conceivable we could be born deaf and acquire refined spiritual concepts through sign language and images, yet how deeply we could refine the meaning attained and participate in spiritual research (including simply discussing extensively with others, like we do here) is harder to imagine. The latter of course is the critical aspect of the Christ impulse in our time. As you point out, the inner voice anchor brings us into more intimate contact with the intuitive consonances and dissonances of the spiritual world. Incidentally, this is a topic I wanted to mention in response to Federcia's earlier post. I will share it here since it fits in.

***

I don't think we need to strictly delineate the ideal element, feeling element, or will (inner impulses) element when anchoring in either verbal or pictorial element. All of these are superimposed and what element predominates will be an individual question, although we know the ideal element of all perceptual forms is most proximate to our modern consciousness. Most people won't be moved very strongly by an impulse from a picture, even less still a word. Even if we immerse ourselves in rich music, without verbal or pictorial forms, the feeling element is but a dim shadow of what our ancestors experienced. One person today can concentrate on Eiffel and experience his ideal life, another person may lack that element but dimly feel some qualities of the French language, and so on. In all cases, the hierarchical depth of meaning we experience will depend on our previous inner movements throughout life, especially our precise logical thinking and corresponding ideas.

The meaning of the more 'complex' (archetypal) ideas is exactly what we want to imbue our inner movements with when navigating the sensory spectrum, if we are using the latter as a means of inner development. Our living explorations should lead us into the hierarchical depth of meaning. This doesn't seem possible if we try to move through all aspects of ET with only pictures. We may move in our personal feelings and thoughts (memories) tied to ET If we just use pictures, but we will find it very difficult to feel our way into the archetypal distinctions between stone and steel, for example. And it would be even more difficult if we hadn't already moved our refined verbal thinking through concepts associated with these materials, like the inner bowels of Earth, ore extraction, smelting, and so on. Again accompanying the verbal forms with pictures is also very helpful, and as we know, that is always happening implicitly, but we shouldn't lose sight of the critical function of the former.

Even when we try to think only in pictures, most people will subtly mumble some words anyway. We may not even notice this happening unless we pay specific attention to it. We don't need to struggle to stop thinking verbally but simply need to become more conscious of what we are doing anyway, and thereby actively take hold of the verbal condensation process and artistically redirect it toward our ideally intended aims. More broadly, this is exactly why the archetypal meaning explored via spiritual science needs to be anchored and communicated in thoroughly precise verbal forms, from dozens of different angles. Only in this way can we participate in spiritualizing the Earthly spectrum, beginning with the cultural institutions that weave heavily in verbal communication of ideas.

I am not sure how exactly one could pull these strings and come to a precise idea, but I wanted to bring these pieces to attention, as I believe there may be something there.

Let us know when you pull some strings together and come to a precise idea

Of course, I have focused on the pictorial element pretty extensively in the retracing essays. I also find enormous value in the images used in Cleric's essays to anchor our intuition of the inner dynamics. That includes the icons blended in the text - I used the letter example with FB (and a Substack comment) precisely because it was so helpful. Like most people, I am in the process of developing my pictorial thinking muscles, but I am in no rush in that respect. As we have discussed above, when we have the luxury of experiencing our spiritual activity intimately through the inner voice, we can leverage that into refining our intuitive orientation to an extent that will prove critical for the meaningful richness of our pictorial and higher consciousness. On the other hand, if we prematurely steer away from precise verbal articulations and start drifting into vague feeling-based speculations and opinions of our higher structure and dynamics, without precise ideas, we can succumb to many temptations and misunderstandings that are common for spiritual seekers today. We will still be extensively anchoring our intuition in verbal form, but we will be doing it much more instinctively according to etched patterns.

[Federica]

To continue the reflection on LLMs and the nature of language, I believe there are at least two ways in which nowadays the nature and potential of language can be missed, and essentially are missed. The question is not straightforward because of how language intersects our spectrum of activity in between thinking and feeling.

One way to misuse language is what Cleric referred to as “verbal tokenization”, when we are “too lazy to think in pictures”. I believe this dependence on tokens extends beyond episodic laziness. It's also a generalized phenomenon. It consists of the concrete difficulty, without proper spiritual development, to come to the reality of a collective concept (such as for instance the concept of triangle) without pictorial thinking and eventually imaginative approach. Without that, the word “triangle” remains a mere word, as Steiner says. As a consequence, the common denominator among all triangles is experienced as only a verbal symbol. The sense is that the only collective element is the mere token. This is one major problem of our language habits. And, even when pictorial thinking and imagination are worked with, this imprisonment in the words-in-themselves tends to persist. It’s a pervasive linguistic modality of today, that does not just dissipate the moment the power of images is discovered. We still tend to externalize language to the space of words-in-themselves, where we use it as mere encoding of abstract, unpictured, definitional, operable concepts.

In this modality, language is the arranger of an intellectual life, spent in an internally coherent, but rather isolated layer of experience, with little etheric resonance. Perhaps we could call this modality Language as a Service - LaaS. The idea is that language becomes hosted in a functional, readily accessible space, but that space is not grounded in owned imagination. It resides with an external provider. It’s almost like we pay a periodic subscription to it, in order to be granted access to its mechanistic-linguistic logic, as a modular service, for the purposes of ordinary communication, and intellectual viability. Our ordinary self scampers in that space, using the ready-made, proven functionalities - the verbal links - rather than making them anew every time, out of active soul substance. We take home the practicality on the one hand, but also pay for it, in diminished soul substance, so that the direct connection of living concept to word is essentially lost (or never found). Maybe the metaphor of building a website with Wix or Squarespace can work. It’s convenient, it gets results, but the more I build, the more I complexify the linguistic construction within the pre-made architecture, the more I am locked in, and the smaller the chance to know what background understanding and what work it would take to steer the front-end in full autonomy of expression, away from dependence.

The other problem we face, strictly connected to the first one, when we are used to the practicality of Language as a Service - when we trade our labor-intensive first-person activity against easy, pre-assembled verbal modules - is the disconnection with feeling. This is probably just the other side of the same disconnection. When we are not aware, or not attentive to, the responsibility to use language as a felt expression of the soul, the connection word-sound-feeling that makes the spoken word a testimony of the individual human heart (also as part of a human group) remains unrealized. Even when it is realized, it's still very easy to lose it. This has little to do with vague feelings and etched soul pathways. It’s rather the lack of experiential knowledge of the creative connection between the heart and the word - through sound. As a modern habit, it boils down to treating words as mere verbal symbols. This habit misses the conscious experience of the powerful divine prerogative (made available to humans as language) to re-create the world (the concepts, the ideas,...) out of oneself.

That’s what language can achieve for man, simultaneously to its quality of facilitating living thinking. In and with its quality of facilitating human thinking, language puts this higher prerogative into our individual and collective hands, so that we put our unique stamp on reality, or re-form it, re-create it, in words, out of ourselves, out of our unique self, unique in its individuality of soul and also in its belonging to groups. This inevitably relies on the experience of sound in language (sound and all its inherent qualities). If this essential, feeling-nature of language is ignored, I believe language becomes like a sort of leakage for the soul. Spiritual efforts get constantly diluted and blurred in the captivity of LaaS.

In this context, I believe that LLMs actually are the true-size, mirror manifestation of this epochal tendency to use words-in-themselves, words that we have renounced to enliven with home-made activity, vertically connected, and imbued with both living thinking and living feeling. LLMs constitute the accomplished cultural output of our modern language use as mere, functional encoding. Though they may feel less immersive than VR, I believe LLMs are actually more immersive than VR, if we don’t restrain considerations to the purely sensory. VR, as we know it today, directly addresses the sensory spectrum of our perceptual flow, while thoughts and emotions are affected as a consequence.

However, as subscribers and habitual users of Language as a Service, all our mental pictures, our entire perceptual spectrum is taken care of directly, in verbalized repurposing. And I think that LLMs can be seen as the neat rendering of this mode of being, to ourselves, in the technological space. It’s like a VR-at-large. VRAL? (it's 'fun', in Swedish, vrål means something like "horrible scream"). Anyway, it goes one notch deeper into the capture of our flow of becoming. Is the next notch going to be what Levin is working at, targeting the will? I guess so.

[Federica]

Even when we try to think only in pictures, most people will subtly mumble some words anyway. We may not even notice this happening unless we pay specific attention to it. We don't need to struggle to stop thinking verbally but simply need to become more conscious of what we are doing anyway, and thereby actively take hold of the verbal condensation process and artistically redirect it toward our ideally intended aims.

I think Cleric has illustrated in various posts and with various examples how there's a great value, even an indispensable value, in struggling to stop the verbal commentaries, precisely to become more conscious of what one is doing. For instance:

We have to keep in mind that even if unconsciously, our soul always lives in Imaginative metamorphoses. Whatever precipitates as intellectual thoughts can be thought of as Imaginations that have been subconsciously encoded into symbolic thought sequences.
...
purely intellectual encodings and Imagination are different chapters, there’s marked difference. But the point is to understand how the intellect relates to the Imaginative mode. This is critical. It is true that when we study SS, initially we agitate only small part of the larynx soul organ, simply due to the fact that we repeat the verbal movements as we read. Yet the key is that these intellectual vibrations only serve their right purpose if we anticipate how they are embedded and self-similar to the much greater dynamics of the soul body. Our intellectual movements are only encoded projections of full soul Imagination.

Another example:

You can try to make these plans entirely pictorially. Just picture yourself doing what you intend to do. It doesn't have to be vivid picture, but it must engage your full-body and senses imagination.

Probably it won't be immediately easy, you may find yourself 'commenting' on everything you imagine. That's OK. With little practice you'll see how you can pictorially imagine whole episodes of activities without having to utter a word. All the meaning that you intend is already reflected in the images. If you find that you think verbally, don't get frustrated but simply take what you just verbally thought and say "OK, let's see how that thought could be expressed in a completely pictorial way."

The important thing is that you can be fully creative in this pictorial flow. The spiritual activity that we employ in the flow of pictures is of the same essence as that which flows into words. We are only channeling it differently. In verbal thinking we channel it mainly through the etheric larynx. In full-body imagination we engage the full spectrum.

As in these and other examples (like when reading Occult Science), it seems very possible to experience archetypal meaning distinctly as "full soul imaginations" rather than through the larynx, especially in our times when we face the two problems I have described in the post above, that is:

1. Verbal thinking is strongly inclined to become captive to the intellect, and

2. Verbal thinking is strongly unaware of the individual creative potential of speech


Because of this situation, verbal thinking (the larynx) becomes a bottleneck that obscures the full-soul imagination. Hence the value of struggling to quiet the verbalizing voice and let the imaginations emerge.

[AshvinP]

Even when we try to think only in pictures, most people will subtly mumble some words anyway. We may not even notice this happening unless we pay specific attention to it. We don't need to struggle to stop thinking verbally but simply need to become more conscious of what we are doing anyway, and thereby actively take hold of the verbal condensation process and artistically redirect it toward our ideally intended aims.

I think Cleric has illustrated in various posts and with various examples how there's a great value, even an indispensable value, in struggling to stop the verbal commentaries, precisely to become more conscious of what one is doing. For instance:

We have to keep in mind that even if unconsciously, our soul always lives in Imaginative metamorphoses. Whatever precipitates as intellectual thoughts can be thought of as Imaginations that have been subconsciously encoded into symbolic thought sequences.
...
purely intellectual encodings and Imagination are different chapters, there’s marked difference. But the point is to understand how the intellect relates to the Imaginative mode. This is critical. It is true that when we study SS, initially we agitate only small part of the larynx soul organ, simply due to the fact that we repeat the verbal movements as we read. Yet the key is that these intellectual vibrations only serve their right purpose if we anticipate how they are embedded and self-similar to the much greater dynamics of the soul body. Our intellectual movements are only encoded projections of full soul Imagination.

Another example:

You can try to make these plans entirely pictorially. Just picture yourself doing what you intend to do. It doesn't have to be vivid picture, but it must engage your full-body and senses imagination.

Probably it won't be immediately easy, you may find yourself 'commenting' on everything you imagine. That's OK. With little practice you'll see how you can pictorially imagine whole episodes of activities without having to utter a word. All the meaning that you intend is already reflected in the images. If you find that you think verbally, don't get frustrated but simply take what you just verbally thought and say "OK, let's see how that thought could be expressed in a completely pictorial way."

The important thing is that you can be fully creative in this pictorial flow. The spiritual activity that we employ in the flow of pictures is of the same essence as that which flows into words. We are only channeling it differently. In verbal thinking we channel it mainly through the etheric larynx. In full-body imagination we engage the full spectrum.

As in these and other examples (like when reading Occult Science), it seems very possible to experience archetypal meaning distinctly as "full soul imaginations" rather than through the larynx, especially in our times when we face the two problems I have described in the post above, that is:

1. Verbal thinking is strongly inclined to become captive to the intellect, and

2. Verbal thinking is strongly unaware of the individual creative potential of speech


Because of this situation, verbal thinking (the larynx) becomes a bottleneck that obscures the full-soul imagination. Hence the value of struggling to quiet the verbalizing voice and let the imaginations emerge.

Yes, we can and should certainly work to withhold verbal condensation in specific meditative settings, and we can experience archetypal meaning without immediately collapsing into verbal sequences. But the key is that nothing should become a one-sided goal, as if we need to get away from verbal thinking in all circumstances. We need to carefully balance our efforts and harmonize the strata of our intuitive being, so the intellectual thinking voice can serve its proper function of anchoring and artistically clarifying our higher intuitions.

Early on after some meditative breakthroughs, I felt a similar impulse to move away from the inner voice toward pictorial thinking, and asked Cleric as follows:

I have a question for you. Sorry if it's really rudimentary. I notice when I read, I still have the habit of sounding out all the words with inner voice. I sense that it would be better if I could read more imagistically, so to speak. Is that accurate and do you have any tips for developing such a skill, or know of any resources of Steiner archive? I imagine he deals with this somewhere in his pedagogical material, but I have not come across it yet. Anything you can share is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

He responded:

I don't think it is a problem at all that you're sounding out the words. Sounding the words doesn't negate the imaginative experience. Take for example Eurhythmy. It is 'sound made visible'. The imaginative experience can perfectly well grow through the words. BD has given some prayers accompanied with something like gymnastic exercises. These help a lot for the experience of the words. For example, when we say something like "May your Spirit come over me and bless me" it can be accompanied with the following movement of the hands. We lift our hands and straighten our arms, touching the tips of the fingers above our head (making /\ shape). Together with this we imagine that we reach in light filled world. Then we begin to slowly lower our touching hands as if we begin to carry the light towards our head. As the hands reach our head they are separated and pass on both sides of the head, then continue along the chest and down the body. Practically we reach in for the blessings of Light and shower ourselves with them, instilling them in our soul and body. When our words are accompanied with such movements, the effects can be very powerful.

This is just an example. So in short, we haven't even begun to explore the magical side of speech. There's a very long evolution in front of us before spoken language becomes obsolete. At this point it's important that Imaginations begin to grow around words, that is - speech shall be spiritualized. It is true that in meditation many things are perceived in wordless manner but ultimately they must be spoken.

Think about the following: language has formed by decoherence of an original much more spiritual proto-language, where the sounds were like fractals of more encompassing Imaginations. These relations have been lost, language has lost its spiritual context. Before we get away with language we'll first have to make our speech imaginative once again. This is connected with the lotus flower in the larynx area.

The key is that when we speak we must imaginatively experience what we speak of. Our words should be fractal images of our soul contents. Of course, in purely mechanical sense, the sound vibrations have almost nothing of the splendor of our soul world. A materialistically inclined listener would never grasp that richness. But this should not discourage us. Every word that we speak as a projection of our rich soul experience has magical powers. We set in motion not only air molecules but also etheric currents. Those who are receptive, would receive something in their etheric body. Here we once again see that digital communication doesn't make things much easier in this regard.

So I would say, don't think of the inner voice as an obstacle. Spiritual activity goes through the heart lotus organ, where we have the deeper forces of our being, the more existential ones, related with our karma, our sympathies and antipathies, our goals in life, etc. These are the greater time-waves. In the larynx organ these forces become thinking - that's where the deeper forces of the heart become more finely shaped and turn into thinking gestures (not only verbal). When these forces enter the head organ they become perceptions - sounds, colors, etc. But even further than this thinking can become expression of our hands movements. This is a very significant occult fact. Our etheric hands are like extension of our thinking (these things are mentioned in Knowledge of Higher Worlds ...). This is comprehensible if we conceive how we can think in sign language.

So this system - heart-larynx-head-hands - actually forms the depth axis. It can be imagined like this: Imagine that your deeper being is centered in the Sun. Your soul has its life and goals in this lofty world, the plan for each incarnation is inspired through this world of harmony. Imagine that your spirit reaches out of that sphere and goes through a denser shell (still concentric to the first). Here the Love flow becomes more finely grained into thinking. Further thinking becomes perceptible (Earth sphere) and even further we 'dip' our etheric hands (which are the extension of this axis) into the perceptions. The spheres are not spatially separate, they are also not really only shells. Clearly the sphere of perceptions fills the whole spatial volume, it is not only a thin spatial shell. Everything interpenetrates. It's only in 'wave-lengths' that they are differentiated.

Seen in this way, our goal should be not so much to suppress inner verbalization but instead to make every word the core around which imaginations grow. So the words must be heart-felt and as they sound forth, they must bring something from the heart-sun world into imaginative perception. It's even more powerful if we bring our etheric hands in motion. The example with the prayer is one such instance. So the goal is to experience the word as expression of living reality.