Saving the materialists

[Cleric]

Doesn't there exist a 'discontinuity' between incarnated and disincarnated state? and, at a smaller scale, between waking and sleeping? At an even smaller scale, can't it be said that we continually awaken to our thoughts, coming from another state - call it intuitive-contextual, unconscious, or distracted state - in which the thought was not present? You wouldn't imagine calling any of these rhythms "fondamental discontinuities" I am sure. What I'm referring to is of this same nature: it is a thought cycle of descending below clear, reasoning consciousness in the middle of a thought-picture concatenation, only to reemerge at a discontinuous point of the contextual matrix. I am simply describing one modality of what we are already familiar with, that you definitely agreed with: our continuous awakening to our formed thought-images. The difference is only that in the process I refer to, the passages from consciousness to unconsciousness along the parabola of reasoning happen inopportunely, in the middle of the curve, so to say. You find no fundamental discontinuity in the following, I am sure:

And I'm saying, language plays a central role in how the micro-derailments happen. Perhaps this phenomenon is on an even smaller scale compared to what Cleric described above as constant reincarnation in our thoughts. This is a particularly fragmented mode of checking in and off the conscious parabola of reasoning, perhaps even one magnitude below the normal distraction patterns in our standard cognition. Where are we with our willed, steering consciousness when a normal distraction kicks in? We are at a less dense and pregnant level than the one in which attention is maintained without interruption, for example to solve a geometrical problem, correct? I'm saying, there is an hyper-distracted state, where the distraction doesn't correspond to (short and erratic, but still present) emergence in consciousness, within the context of the distracting thought. In this hyper-distracted state the thinker believes the main train of thoughts has never been abandoned. It's believed that continuity of reasoning was maintained. How is this possible? Because the space of distraction in which the mind is dreaming has been hijacked by some distracting force, and language is used as a proxy of thought, that makes us feel as if there is meaningfulness, as if there is continuity of reasoning. But there is not necessarily. Then, we awaken again from that dream, somewhere else closer to our preferences. The loose ends are patched together and the discontinuity remains unrealized. Even scientific work is sometimes executed in this mode, often, but not always, with the great complicity of LLMs (as it's been demonstrated time and again, like when it turns out that papers in major scientific publications have been written with Chat GPT, as an example).

We need to be extra careful precisely here because if we try to see language as a sub-cycle of thinking, we may artificially introduce difficulties that will later prevent us from knowing the true origin of language.

Consider a simple sentence like “The boy was walking, then tripped, fell, and hurt his knee.” Since this is a pretty straightforward description of a sensory scene, we can very easily depict it visually:



Now let’s for a moment put aside the verbal part and try to observe what we are doing when we unfold this scene in our visual imagination. We pass through a series of inner metamorphoses. Like many other processes, this transformation goes in stages. There’s relatively monotonic development and then a period of more pronounced transformation. Such is the case, for example, when an insect passes through its metamorphoses, when a plant transitions from vegetative growth to flowering, when the ruling political system changes, when the seven-year life periods morph, etc. So we start with an image of a walking boy. This scene can potentially be continued indefinitely. Remember that we do not look at this scene as some object-in-itself, but, in a sense, it is the soul texture of our own first-person flow of becoming. Then through our inner activity, we meaningfully intend a transformation, an inner revolution, that switches our pictorial growth process to the next stage. Now the essence of our pictorial flow signifies how an obstacle has been encountered. Then we transition into the next scene, where the obstacle has not been avoided and the boy is falling. Then our inner flow ‘flowers’ into the next stage where the boy is down and his knee hurts. (As a side note, we already stumble upon something that cannot easily be depicted as a purely visual element. For someone who doesn’t know the experience of pain neither the red circle nor the word ‘hurt’ will evoke the intended inner experience.)

In what we described we have an example of the deeper aspect of thinking as the intuitive movements through which we manifest the flow of imagery and the transitions of stages. In this simple example we can see that whether we flow in purely visual pictures, or only verbal, or the two together, they are all expressions of pretty much the same general flow and meaningful transitions that we intend. In a way, the words are a different way of painting the texture of the growth and transitions of our inner flow.

Now you may say that the words form a sub-cycle because they consist of sequences of sounds. But this holds the same for the visual texture too. We picture “the boy was walking” as something monolithic but it can be broken down into many quite complicated sub-movements of the different limbs. If we grasp this, then we can feel how the actual real-time nature of thinking is the scale at which we are intuitively conscious of the meaningful flow and transitions. Calling the visual or tone texture ‘sub-cycles’ makes it difficult to see how they both are the very immediate manifestation of the scale, pace, and granularity of our intuitive becoming.

Now when we see things in this way, the even more interesting observation is that language is something deeper. From our simple example we can see that the words are not ordered through some artificial grammatical rules but in a sense they reflect the imaginative growth process and its transitions, precisely like the pictures reflect it. In this way, the deeper intuitive movements are already a kind of universal language. The kinds of textures that we use can vary – we can use words in different languages, we can draw stick figures or photorealistic images – but in a sense, these are all ‘words’ that reflect the intuitive growth and transitions of our first-person flow. I think it is obvious, especially in our simple example, that it would be quite arbitrary to say that the verbal images are of a deeper sub-cycle than the visual pictures. One can argue that the visual aspect is something that we find as immediate reality, while the verbal description can only be added by thinking as something secondary. This is true in the case of sensory observation, however, when we want to express an idea, what is primary is the thinking/imagining metamorphosis and in its case, the visual pictures and the words are practically on the same level. They both paint precisely the growth and transitions of our intuitive becoming.

So the redemption of verbal thought consists not in seeking some kind of thinking activity from whose perspective the words feel like sub-cycles but seeing the tight reflection of the intuitive growth and transitions in the full spectrum of inner phenomena. Even the simple example here allows us to exercise in this direction. Instead of picking one or the other, we can imagine both the visual pictures and the verbal thoughts and feel them as an organic whole. They complement each other and enrich the reflection of intuitive movements. As such they are of the same scale and tightly mirror the intuitive growth and transitions of our inner flow of becoming.

If we can feel how the full spectrum soul texture reflects our intuitive growth process, it will be easier to grasp how both pictures and words are structured by the Logoic ‘grammar’. It’s true that different languages instantiate that grammar in more specific patterns, yet the order of verbal language reflects mostly the more universal Logoic order within which our intuitive transitions metamorphose. And this is kinda obvious, otherwise it would have never been possible to translate between verbal languages, sign languages, storyboards, etc.

Now I’m prepared that you may say this is exactly what you were saying all along – that verbal language is only a more specific pattern of the Logoic (thinking) order. If that is the case, then I guess the difference would be that me and Ashvin were simply putting stress on how we should relate to the thinking word in meditation. The point was that we can’t simply move into some ‘pure’ Logoic thinking and then try to perceive the linguistic sub-order as some layer that our pure activity passes through and becomes words. We begin to enter the depth of the Logoic order by first becoming fully concentric with its forms of manifestation. The Logos is liberated from within its experience in the thinking word. But again, this has relevance only when we truly enter into concentrative meditation. Only then can this be seen as giving answers to problems that we encounter in the concentrative experiences.

[Federica]

We need to be extra careful precisely here because if we try to see language as a sub-cycle of thinking, we may artificially introduce difficulties that will later prevent us from knowing the true origin of language.

Consider a simple sentence like “The boy was walking, then tripped, fell, and hurt his knee.” Since this is a pretty straightforward description of a sensory scene, we can very easily depict it visually:



Now let’s for a moment put aside the verbal part and try to observe what we are doing when we unfold this scene in our visual imagination. We pass through a series of inner metamorphoses. Like many other processes, this transformation goes in stages. There’s relatively monotonic development and then a period of more pronounced transformation. Such is the case, for example, when an insect passes through its metamorphoses, when a plant transitions from vegetative growth to flowering, when the ruling political system changes, when the seven-year life periods morph, etc. So we start with an image of a walking boy. This scene can potentially be continued indefinitely. Remember that we do not look at this scene as some object-in-itself, but, in a sense, it is the soul texture of our own first-person flow of becoming. Then through our inner activity, we meaningfully intend a transformation, an inner revolution, that switches our pictorial growth process to the next stage. Now the essence of our pictorial flow signifies how an obstacle has been encountered. Then we transition into the next scene, where the obstacle has not been avoided and the boy is falling. Then our inner flow ‘flowers’ into the next stage where the boy is down and his knee hurts. (As a side note, we already stumble upon something that cannot easily be depicted as a purely visual element. For someone who doesn’t know the experience of pain neither the red circle nor the word ‘hurt’ will evoke the intended inner experience.)

In what we described we have an example of the deeper aspect of thinking as the intuitive movements through which we manifest the flow of imagery and the transitions of stages. In this simple example we can see that whether we flow in purely visual pictures, or only verbal, or the two together, they are all expressions of pretty much the same general flow and meaningful transitions that we intend. In a way, the words are a different way of painting the texture of the growth and transitions of our inner flow.

Now you may say that the words form a sub-cycle because they consist of sequences of sounds. But this holds the same for the visual texture too. We picture “the boy was walking” as something monolithic but it can be broken down into many quite complicated sub-movements of the different limbs. If we grasp this, then we can feel how the actual real-time nature of thinking is the scale at which we are intuitively conscious of the meaningful flow and transitions. Calling the visual or tone texture ‘sub-cycles’ makes it difficult to see how they both are the very immediate manifestation of the scale, pace, and granularity of our intuitive becoming.

Now when we see things in this way, the even more interesting observation is that language is something deeper. From our simple example we can see that the words are not ordered through some artificial grammatical rules but in a sense they reflect the imaginative growth process and its transitions, precisely like the pictures reflect it. In this way, the deeper intuitive movements are already a kind of universal language. The kinds of textures that we use can vary – we can use words in different languages, we can draw stick figures or photorealistic images – but in a sense, these are all ‘words’ that reflect the intuitive growth and transitions of our first-person flow. I think it is obvious, especially in our simple example, that it would be quite arbitrary to say that the verbal images are of a deeper sub-cycle than the visual pictures. One can argue that the visual aspect is something that we find as immediate reality, while the verbal description can only be added by thinking as something secondary. This is true in the case of sensory observation, however, when we want to express an idea, what is primary is the thinking/imagining metamorphosis and in its case, the visual pictures and the words are practically on the same level. They both paint precisely the growth and transitions of our intuitive becoming.

So the redemption of verbal thought consists not in seeking some kind of thinking activity from whose perspective the words feel like sub-cycles but seeing the tight reflection of the intuitive growth and transitions in the full spectrum of inner phenomena. Even the simple example here allows us to exercise in this direction. Instead of picking one or the other, we can imagine both the visual pictures and the verbal thoughts and feel them as an organic whole. They complement each other and enrich the reflection of intuitive movements. As such they are of the same scale and tightly mirror the intuitive growth and transitions of our inner flow of becoming.

If we can feel how the full spectrum soul texture reflects our intuitive growth process, it will be easier to grasp how both pictures and words are structured by the Logoic ‘grammar’. It’s true that different languages instantiate that grammar in more specific patterns, yet the order of verbal language reflects mostly the more universal Logoic order within which our intuitive transitions metamorphose. And this is kinda obvious, otherwise it would have never been possible to translate between verbal languages, sign languages, storyboards, etc.

Now I’m prepared that you may say this is exactly what you were saying all along – that verbal language is only a more specific pattern of the Logoic (thinking) order.

Thanks, Cleric. I'm certainly not going like "this is exactly what I was saying all along". Conversely, I do see a point or two where I could add some pink - where I guess you have been gathering indirectly from Ashvin, rather than directly from what I wrote, but never mind. The point is, I am not convinced. I totally admit that my intuitions are not well formed and I am unable to provide a complete reasoning, and maybe the best is that I wait until I gain the means to make the ideas clear and robust (or abandon them, if they turn out to be empty). But to mention a few isolated points:


- this example is super simple and doesn't provide much space for language to play its tricks, like to deviate the intuitive flow and pull it in dreamy direction, for example because the name of the obstacle on which the boy falls sounds like the word for a completely different object that happens to be part of the slogan of a popular TV ad, let's imagine.

- the condition of the example is phenomenological and calm attention, but that's not the background rule of how language is used in life, and that use is what has determined its progressive degeneration.

- as an alternative to try again to explain why I don't see that verbal and visual flow are on the same spectrum in relation to the underlying intuitive flow, I may ask another question: If they are on the same scale and spectrum, why is it that verbal language today versus verbal language, say, 3000 years ago has degenerated (in the sense Steiner means that)? Could the pictorial flow have degenerated in comparable way?

- also, I can't but wonder, if verbal and pictorial flow are stable, ticking in parallel, on the same full spectrum that accompanies the intuitive flow, and everything else you have described here, what did you mean when I plugged in the symbol of the flashing light, and you said it felt like a H-bond? That it was promising for the future, or prefiguring a future tendency of language, to become much more "volumetric"?

[Cleric]

- also, I can't but wonder, if verbal and pictorial flow are stable, ticking in parallel, on the same full spectrum that accompanies the intuitive flow, and everything else you have described here, what did you mean when I plugged in the symbol of the flashing light, and you said it felt like a H-bond? That it was promising for the future, or prefiguring a future tendency of language, to become much more "volumetric"?

The problem arises when we take the protein image (or any other hierarchical picture) as the absolute map of ideas, thinking, and verbal expressions. Clearly, the folded structures symbolize more holistic forms of meaning. But if we take this as a strict map, we may be led to believe that words (the amino acids) can only embody fragments of meaning, while the holistic (folded, integrated) meaning is inaccessible to words.

Let’s take a shoelace-tying example.



This is something that is quite laborious to express in words. In contrast, it can be presented with a few-second video or several storyboard pictures. So the total act is like the folded protein and it can be analyzed down into a chain of aminoacid words. However, granted that we know what shoelace tying is and how to perform it, we can just as well anchor its meaning in a single verbal flash “shoelace-tying”, just like we can experience the same holistic meaning in a single image of hands holding the shoelaces. So from this simple example, it’s clear that words are not fundamentally limited to sequencing only some low-level fragmentary details.

To be sure, the protein analogy can be applied just as well to the visual aspect. A silent film can be symbolized by its movie poster but its full experience, which unfolds the complicated H-bonds of the storyline, consists of aminoacid movie frames. As such, can we say that expressing the holistic meaning through “shoelace-tying” verbal flash or pictorial flash are fundamentally at different scales? The first flash consists of word aminoacids, while the second of color aminoacids, yet they both anchor the same folded idea.

There are aspects of experience that are better conveyed through pictures but sometimes a word is more efficient. For example, we could have said “The boy will walk, trip, fall, and hurt his knee.” It’s a small change, however it invokes a different inner context. In the “was” case it is like we seek the pictures of the scene ‘down’ in the receding World state reverberations, while in the “will” case it’s like we look upon the incoming flow and expect the pictures. Presenting this difference in the storyboard images is not trivial. In fact, it cannot be presented as a literal visual element. We can try to add additional images of clocks, calendars, etc. but anyone seeing the images will need a kind of insight to understand that the images are not merely literal visual content but aim to symbolize whether the images refer to something that has already happened or will happen. If we agree upon it, we can use some small symbol to represent this information, but then, isn’t what we are doing already beginning to resemble verbal language, except living in pictograms instead of sound?

- as an alternative to try again to explain why I don't see that verbal and visual flow are on the same spectrum in relation to the underlying intuitive flow, I may ask another question: If they are on the same scale and spectrum, why is it that verbal language today versus verbal language, say, 3000 years ago has degenerated (in the sense Steiner means that)? Could the pictorial flow have degenerated in comparable way?

The reasons for degeneration are deeper and live primarily in the soul (astral) nature. I apologize for the following example but I want to reach into an extreme to make the point clear. Let’s imagine someone obsessed with pornography (we consider not the moment when the content is watched but when it is reimagined). He certainly lives in non-verbal images, maybe even full-body imagination. And these may be not simply fragmentary frames but have their ‘grammar’. There are scenes, poses, movements, etc. Thus the protein picture is valid here too. Our Logoic metamorphic flow goes through a kind of growth process and stages and experiences itself in visual and bodily images. Isn’t this an example of degenerated pictorial thinking/imagination? I think we can agree that the problem here is not that the grammatical rules of the flow of images are inherently fragmentary and thus derail and degenerate the otherwise ‘poetic’ flow. It’s rather that we need to investigate why the soul is at all drawn into such ‘poetry’, how that fits with the greater flow of reality, how it affects relationships, and so on. In this sense, maybe it hasn’t been such a concern in Steiner’s time, but I think it is definitely a concern today with the flow of visuals from tiktok, pornhub, etc. It should be clear that people think in these images and they rarely invite the ennoblement of the human being.

Now you may say that I once again use very simple, purely sensory-like example of thinking flow, but isn’t this in what humanity stumbles anyway? It’s certainly more convoluted like “taking a credit, solving the logistics to go to another city and buy that thing, going out with that person, etc.” but is this really the fault of verbal or pictorial language in itself? Or this is simply the grammar of modern life, these are simply the units of meaning that we grasp at and navigate our life along, while our forms of expression adapt to it?

[Federica]

- also, I can't but wonder, if verbal and pictorial flow are stable, ticking in parallel, on the same full spectrum that accompanies the intuitive flow, and everything else you have described here, what did you mean when I plugged in the symbol of the flashing light, and you said it felt like a H-bond? That it was promising for the future, or prefiguring a future tendency of language, to become much more "volumetric"?

The problem arises when we take the protein image (or any other hierarchical picture) as the absolute map of ideas, thinking, and verbal expressions. Clearly, the folded structures symbolize more holistic forms of meaning. But if we take this as a strict map, we may be led to believe that words (the amino acids) can only embody fragments of meaning, while the holistic (folded, integrated) meaning is inaccessible to words.

Let’s take a shoelace-tying example.



This is something that is quite laborious to express in words. In contrast, it can be presented with a few-second video or several storyboard pictures. So the total act is like the folded protein and it can be analyzed down into a chain of aminoacid words. However, granted that we know what shoelace tying is and how to perform it, we can just as well anchor its meaning in a single verbal flash “shoelace-tying”, just like we can experience the same holistic meaning in a single image of hands holding the shoelaces. So from this simple example, it’s clear that words are not fundamentally limited to sequencing only some low-level fragmentary details.

To be sure, the protein analogy can be applied just as well to the visual aspect. A silent film can be symbolized by its movie poster but its full experience, which unfolds the complicated H-bonds of the storyline, consists of aminoacid movie frames. As such, can we say that expressing the holistic meaning through “shoelace-tying” verbal flash or pictorial flash are fundamentally at different scales? The first flash consists of word aminoacids, while the second of color aminoacids, yet they both anchor the same folded idea.

There are aspects of experience that are better conveyed through pictures but sometimes a word is more efficient. For example, we could have said “The boy will walk, trip, fall, and hurt his knee.” It’s a small change, however it invokes a different inner context. In the “was” case it is like we seek the pictures of the scene ‘down’ in the receding World state reverberations, while in the “will” case it’s like we look upon the incoming flow and expect the pictures. Presenting this difference in the storyboard images is not trivial. In fact, it cannot be presented as a literal visual element. We can try to add additional images of clocks, calendars, etc. but anyone seeing the images will need a kind of insight to understand that the images are not merely literal visual content but aim to symbolize whether the images refer to something that has already happened or will happen. If we agree upon it, we can use some small symbol to represent this information, but then, isn’t what we are doing already beginning to resemble verbal language, except living in pictograms instead of sound?

I think the problem with the shoelace tying proposition is highlighted when we consider this, from Steiner:

Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought.

In this sense, I wouldn’t equate the meaningful reach, or capacity, of the verbal flash “shoelace-tying” to the pictorial scene’s (I don’t think we need to limit it to a single visual frame, just as I wouldn’t call the verbal flash “shoelace-tying” a single verbal flash), even if “we know what shoelace tying is and how to perform it”, because one is connected with life and activates the body, while the other doesn’t (more about that further down). We read/hear/say: “shoelace tying”, it sounds familiar, we know we do lace our shoes somehow, and yet, as such, the idea remains abstract. The only way to really sense and experience the activity is if we think more carefully and concretely, through our body and hands, about the sides, the rotations, the up-down and right-left movements, that is, if we think pictorially.

More generally, the question coming to mind when reading through your post - well illustrated by your second example, the silent film and its movie poster - is that your 2024 protein picture and your 2025 one seem substantially different to me.

There is not much foldedness, or volumetry, in the protein picture as you intend it now. You seem to be proposing more of a ‘flat protein’ here. When you presented the protein metaphor last year, I understood it as a ‘deep protein’, in which every level of structure not only condenses strings of sequentially expressed meaning in denser symbols, but also (rather) allows a degree of further spiritualization of language - suggesting a different quality of expressed meaning, that better transcends the various constraints compounded in any earthly embodiment of meaning. Otherwise there is no volume, but only a linear contraction, only a tighter sequence. As it seems to me, for how you are using the protein metaphor now, you don’t actually need such a rich 3D imagery. A picture of a linear meter would do just as well. As we zoom out from the millimeters to the centimeters, and to the meters, we can say that, by the time we have the meter scale in focus, we don’t perceive the millimeters anymore, though we know they are nested within it. You don’t need volumetric, folded H-bonds for how you are treating linguistic as well as pictorial grammar in this post, that is, on the same level, or spectrum. You only need a linear timespace scale. The meter is your condensed symbol for the more sequential centimeter series, and the same is true for a centimeter and its contained millimeters. But, in your deep-protein version of the metaphor, you wrote:

...our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word.

This doesn’t seem to fit with the flat protein understanding that you are doing now. Now, you are saying: “The value of these words is on a par with the value of the secondary-structure symbol, the pictorial symbol. They are equally valid expressions of the Word: either the one or the other may fit better, depending on the situation”. And only in the flat protein version can you apply the protein analogy just as well to the visual aspect. It’s only because, basically, you are now using it as a microscope, going up and down the level of magnification unidirectionally, no folding involved.


I will now try and give a slightly different take on the whole question, then I will come to your extreme example in a separate post, because now I have to go (also, I haven't edited for clarity enough - sorry).

In the same way as - to use Ashvins words - “the concepts of ‘mass’, ‘force’, ‘energy’, ‘space’, ‘time’, and so forth, which are used to describe the ‘mechanisms’ of outer nature, are only possible to conceive because we have instinctively learned these qualities within ourselves”, and we should revive those concepts from within out, in that same way should we revive the linguistic tokens that have mostly become abstract econding bricks out there (combinatorics), connected by an abstract grammar and syntax (as in flat protein structure). Similarly, the revival of abstract grammatical and syntactical laws will happen when we fill the worded sequences “with life itself” - as Steiner would say - that is, with living pictorial symbols, because those are active in the physical-etheric body more than abstract concepts and ideas are. Concretely, this means more than recognizing the language grammar, according to which some epitomizing visual symbols are condensed, such as movie posters. If that was the case, it would be like saying that the spiritualization of physics happens when we condense some isolated gravitational phenomena in the pictorial symbol: F = G m1 m2 / r2. But as we know, this is the perseverance of abstraction, rather than the beginning of spiritualization. Conversely, we know that spiritualization improves with sensing the meaning of gravity first through the body and feet, along the top-bottom dimension, and then continually, through the soil of the Earth. So, saying that word tokens and pictorial symbols are on the same spectrum, sometimes the ones are better, sometimes the other ones, sounds to me like saying that the abstract laws of physics are on the same spectrum with the living inner laws to be rediscovered. I would rather say that, like in a deep-protein structure, the pictorial symbols are like real H bonds, that is, they lift up the worded concepts from their combinatory abstractness, and give them volume: they anchor them to inner sensations, hence bridging inner and outer together in concrete way. This makes me realize that eurhythmy does exactly that, it brings the verbal symbols back to a concrete human scale, in the physical-etheric body.

This is one part of the revival of language. The other part of the necessary revival (but this is less in focus on our discussion here) is the tonal aspect of language. The beings living in the tones of language need to be rediscovered in the sounds and rhythms, so that we may unite the subjective experience of speech with the universal soul-spiritual quality of sound, first through the various idioms, and then beyond them, in pure sound.

[Cleric]

I think the problem with the shoelace tying proposition is highlighted when we consider this, from Steiner:

Most of what we call “thinking” in ordinary life is merely a flow of words: people think in words, and much more often than is generally supposed. Many people, when they ask for an explanation of something, are satisfied if the reply includes some word with a familiar ring, reminding them of this or that. They take the feeling of familiarity for an explanation and then fancy they have grasped the thought.

In this sense, I wouldn’t equate the meaningful reach, or capacity, of the verbal flash “shoelace-tying” to the pictorial scene’s (I don’t think we need to limit it to a single visual frame, just as I wouldn’t call the verbal flash “shoelace-tying” a single verbal flash), even if “we know what shoelace tying is and how to perform it”, because one is connected with life and activates the body, while the other doesn’t (more about that further down). We read/hear/say: “shoelace tying”, it sounds familiar, we know we do lace our shoes somehow, and yet, as such, the idea remains abstract. The only way to really sense and experience the activity is if we think more carefully and concretely, through our body and hands, about the sides, the rotations, the up-down and right-left movements, that is, if we think pictorially.

More generally, the question coming to mind when reading through your post - as illustrated by your second example, the silent film and its movie poster - is that your 2024 protein picture and your 2025 one seem substantially different to me.

There is not much foldedness, or volumetry, in the protein picture as you intend it now. You seem to be proposing more of a ‘flat protein’ here. When you presented the protein metaphor last year, I understood it as a ‘deep protein’, in which every level of structure not only condenses strings of sequentially expressed meaning in denser symbols, but also (rather) allows a degree of further spiritualization of language - suggesting a different quality of expressed meaning, that better transcends the various constraints compounded in any earthly embodiment of meaning. Otherwise there is no volume, but only a linear contraction, only a tighter sequence. As it seems to me, for how you are using the protein metaphor now, you don’t actually need such a rich 3D imagery. A picture of a linear meter would do just as well. As we zoom out from the millimeters to the centimeters, and to the meters, and can say that, by the time we have the meter scale in focus, we don’t perceive the millimeters anymore, though we know they are nested within it. You don’t need volumetric, folded H-bonds for how you are treating linguistic as well as pictorial grammar in this post, that is, on the same level, or spectrum. You only need a linear timespace scale. The meter is your condensed symbol for the more sequential centimeter series, and the same is true for a centimeter and its contained millimeters. But, in your deep protein version of the metaphor, you wrote:

...our language takes sequential form, just like the primary structure of the protein consists of a specific sequence of amino acids. I believe this is how most of the writings here feel for many - just as an endless string of words, without beginning or end, that just go on and on without anything happening. This however, as we have explained many times, is only because it is unsuspected that the value of these words only comes if through them we grasp an ideal secondary, tertiary, and quaternary structure of the Word.

This doesn’t seem to fit with the flat protein understanding that you are doing now. Now, you are saying: “The value of these words is on a par with the value of the secondary-structure symbol, the pictorial symbol. They are equally valid expressions of the Word: either the one or the other may fit better, depending on the situation”. Only in the flat protein version can you apply the protein analogy just as well to the visual aspect. It’s only because, basically, you are now using it as a microscope, going up and down the level of magnification unidirectionally, no folding involved.


I will now try and give a slightly different take on the whole question, then I will come to your extreme example in a separate post, because now I have to go (also, I haven't edited for clarity enough - sorry).

In the same way as - to use Ashvins words - “the concepts of ‘mass’, ‘force’, ‘energy’, ‘space’, ‘time’, and so forth, which are used to describe the ‘mechanisms’ of outer nature, are only possible to conceive because we have instinctively learned these qualities within ourselves”, and we should revive those concepts from within out, in that same way should we revive the linguistic tokens that have mostly become abstract econding bricks out there (combinatorics), connected by an abstract grammar and syntax (as in flat protein structure). Similarly, the revival of abstract grammatical and syntactical laws will happen when we fill the worded sequences “with life itself” - as Steiner would say - that is, with living pictorial symbols, because those are active in the physical-etheric body more than abstract concepts and ideas are. Concretely, this means more than recognizing the language grammar, according to which some epitomizing visual symbols are condensed, such as movie posters. If that was the case, it would be like saying that the spiritualization of physics happens when we condense some isolated gravitational phenomena in the pictorial symbol: F = G m1 m2 / r2. But as we know, this is the perseverance of abstraction, rather than the beginning of spiritualization. Conversely, we know that spiritualization improves with sensing the meaning of gravity first through the body and feet, along the top-bottom dimension, and then continually, through the soil of the Earth. So, saying that word tokens and pictorial symbols are on the same spectrum, sometimes the ones are better, sometimes the other ones, sounds to me like saying that the abstract laws of physics are on the same spectrum with the living inner laws to be rediscovered. I would rather say that, like in a deep-protein structure, the pictorial symbols are like real H bonds, that is, they lift up the worded concepts from their combinatory abstractness, and give them volume: they anchor them to inner sensations, hence bridging inner and outer in concrete way. This makes me realize that eurhythmy does exactly that, it brings the pictorial symbols back to the human scale, in the physical-etheric body.

This is one part of the revival of language. The other part of the necessary revival (but this is less in focus on our discussion here) is the tonal aspect of language. The beings living in the tones of language need to be rediscovered in the sounds and rhythms, so that we may unite the subjective experience of speech with the universal soul-spiritual quality of sound, first through the various idioms, and then beyond them, in pure sound.

OK, the reason I presented more 'flattened' examples was because I was trying to point at something very specific, yet the simplicity of the example backfired. What I intended was to distinguish on one hand the full spectrum experience at any stage of consciousness from ordinary to Intuition, and on the other the different ways in which we can represent aspects of these full spectrum experiences in symbols that utilize some more limited palette of our ordinary consciousness. For example, we can take the consciousness of ancient Saturn. We can represent something of the experiences there in visual symbols:



Or we can use words to 'paint' the inner experience. There's no denying that any of those can only be an extract that outlines certain quite limited aspects of the infinite richness of the experiences. My point was only that from within the intuitive higher experience we paint both the visual and the verbal symbols in a similar way, in the sense, that in both cases we make an Imaginative representation. In a way, they are like the amino acids. But as far as the inner experience is concerned, when the Initiate lives in Intuitive consciousness and extracts the representations, this doesn't feel as if our verbally speaking ego has been pushed away into the periphery and we experience it 'from a distance', weaving in higher-order Intuitions which trickle down the gradient and we see how they become words sub-cycles when they pass through the (now foreign from the higher perspective) Earthly ego. It's rather that Intuition can speak directly through our ego as words or visual symbols. The Saturn consciousness and the ego operate from the same center and form a unified system, so to speak. This doesn't mean that there are such Earthly human words in the pure Saturn consciousness, but this is what the experience is when the Earthly ego becomes concentric with that consciousness. And this was the whole reason for warning that we do not try to revive language by lifting from it, and seeing words as fragmentary sub-cycles below us.

OK, I realize that I'm writing the same things a few times already. It must seem that I simply try to defend verbal thoughts as if I do not understand that they are only very specific forms that spiritual activity can take, and thus I don't sense the deeper intuitive gestures that are not formatted by the verbal slots and their grammatical rules. While in fact, I'm trying to describe what the experience of reaching into these deeper intuitive gestures feels like. However, there's probably a need to change something in my method of conveying the point, so I'll throw some thought in that direction.

[AshvinP]

I want to share a thought here which may be of value to the discussion, or if it is seen as tangential to the positions that are being discussed, it can be ignored. In either case, I intend this as a brief aside to the current discussion, not to start a secondary discussion.

The protein structure post has been brought up a lot. My sense was that Cleric never intended a 1:1 equivalence between the pictorial symbol and the secondary structure. The higher folds are the invisible curvatures of intuitively steered meaning, which can never be seen perceptually at the intellectual scale. As he has said, both the pictorial and verbal symbols are sequenced amino acids that 'paint' the meaning of this folded structure. Under well-orchestrated inner circumstances (of the author, but even more so the recipient), a short phrase or pictorial symbol can act as a 'hydrogen bond' that intensely anchors/evokes the meaning of the folded structure. In that case the bond was a pictorial icon inserted into the text, but we are also familiar with such phrases in poetry, for example. I am sure Cleric has even come across many prosaically written technical scientific descriptions in theoretical physics, computation, engineering, etc. which were poetically evocative, acting as such a bond, even if the author was not at all conscious of spiritual reality. So a lot of that depends on our inner configuration and development, not on the amino acid sequences themselves.

Now one can say, "Yes but the poetic phrases only work as a bond precisely because they evoke holistic pictorial scenes, even if mostly subconsciously. In that case, aren't we more directly accessing the folded structure when we work with the pictorial scenes than detouring through the word-sequences which evoke them?" I think there are several issues here. One is that the holistic pictorial (or rather, imaginative) scenes are not at the same inner scale of the sequenced amino acids, so there is no 1:1 comparison between such scenes and either the sequenced words or visual symbols. Then we have already ascended from thinking at the scale of amino acids to thinking within the secondary structure of the folds. Secondly, we cannot so neatly separate thinking at this secondary scale into audial and visual elements as we are accustomed to experiencing at the intellectual scale. It is characteristic of the imaginative scale that it is neither strictly subjective nor objective, strictly spatial nor temporal, strictly noun nor verb, strictly audial nor visual, etc.

Steiner also drops certain hints toward this more integrated state in various lectures, for example:

The second thing that ceases in the super-sensible is all that we have as sense-perception in the physical world. To put it briefly: in the super-sensible world light ceases and one finds oneself in darkness. But that is not the whole story, for in reality it is not only light that ceases; light ceases in the physical world for the blind, who still possess other senses. But in the science of the spirit the word light often embraces not only light and colour, but everything audible, tangible or perceptible as warmth, and so on.

I'm not sure about others, but aside from any meditative states, in the transition from sleeping to waking is when I am most sensitive to the different thinking scales (intellectual and secondary/imaginative). Many of us have probably 'painted' especially vivid images imbued with some profound meaning in this transition, even if only as quick flashes and with dim intuition of the meaning. Yet I also sometimes experience what could be characterized as a 'rapid download' of verbal meaning, or something like ultra-speed reading that is imbued with the same clarity of meaning as if I was reading at normal speed (but again this meaning rapidly fades away upon fully waking). I think this can help us orient to the fact that, even at the threshold of the secondary structure, our experience of thinking both verbally and visually transforms significantly, and one could say they also feel more interwoven with one another. When Cleric speaks about how painting intuitive meaning with words or visual symbols is equally on the same spectrum, I think this becomes pretty evident even at this slightly more integrated scale of spiritual activity (and even when experienced without full waking consciousness).

If nothing else, it helps us realize we can't really fairly judge the essence of our painting palette, whether verbal or visual, solely from the intellectual perspective of manipulating their sequentialized grammar (as is also the case with the perceptual spectrum more generally). As is so often the case, when it proceeds in this way, the intellect is more likely to throw up obstacles in its own way, as preferences and expectations, than to gain genuine insight into the nature of linguistic or visual symbols. At the very least, the intellect needs to also try and understand how these things are experienced from the higher cognitive perspectives to more effectively 'triangulate' a concrete sense of these physical-etheric aspects by which we consciously navigate intuitively experienced meaning on Earth.

[Federica]

I want to share a thought here which may be of value to the discussion, or if it is seen as tangential to the positions that are being discussed, it can be ignored. In either case, I intend this as a brief aside to the current discussion, not to start a secondary discussion.

The protein structure post has been brought up a lot. My sense was that Cleric never intended a 1:1 equivalence between the pictorial symbol and the secondary structure. The higher folds are the invisible curvatures of intuitively steered meaning, which can never be seen perceptually at the intellectual scale.

Would it be a fitting reading of your thought to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges”, only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do?

[AshvinP]

I want to share a thought here which may be of value to the discussion, or if it is seen as tangential to the positions that are being discussed, it can be ignored. In either case, I intend this as a brief aside to the current discussion, not to start a secondary discussion.

The protein structure post has been brought up a lot. My sense was that Cleric never intended a 1:1 equivalence between the pictorial symbol and the secondary structure. The higher folds are the invisible curvatures of intuitively steered meaning, which can never be seen perceptually at the intellectual scale.

Would it be a fitting reading of your thought to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges”, only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do?

No, it would be fitting reading that you assumed Cleric was comparing apples to oranges (pictorial amino acids to secondary structure), when in fact he never intended it that way. That's why you also assumed he shifted his position on the protein structure between then and now. Both he and I know what was generally intended in that protein post, the art is how to communicate it to you such that you believe we are not retroactively changing the intention to simply 'prove you wrong'

[Federica]

I want to share a thought here which may be of value to the discussion, or if it is seen as tangential to the positions that are being discussed, it can be ignored. In either case, I intend this as a brief aside to the current discussion, not to start a secondary discussion.

The protein structure post has been brought up a lot. My sense was that Cleric never intended a 1:1 equivalence between the pictorial symbol and the secondary structure. The higher folds are the invisible curvatures of intuitively steered meaning, which can never be seen perceptually at the intellectual scale.

Would it be a fitting reading of your thought to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges”, only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do?

No, it would be fitting reading that you assumed Cleric was comparing apples to oranges (pictorial amino acids to secondary structure), when in fact he never intended it that way. That's why you also assumed he shifted his position on the protein structure between then and now. Both he and I know what was generally intended in that protein post, the art is how to communicate it to you such that you believe we are not retroactively changing the intention to simply 'prove you wrong'

Nobody following this thread can miss that what you now say Cleric always meant with the protein metaphor - to point to various levels of cognition - is precisely what you have spend rivers of words, posts, and pages, to accuse me to be doing.

[AshvinP]

Would it be a fitting reading of your thought to say that first you spent a long series of posts banging on my head because I was wrongly and foolishly “comparing apples to oranges”, only to end up saying that Cleric has been comparing apples to oranges all along, and that, actually, comparing apples to oranges is amongst the most appropriate and sublime things to do?

No, it would be fitting reading that you assumed Cleric was comparing apples to oranges (pictorial amino acids to secondary structure), when in fact he never intended it that way. That's why you also assumed he shifted his position on the protein structure between then and now. Both he and I know what was generally intended in that protein post, the art is how to communicate it to you such that you believe we are not retroactively changing the intention to simply 'prove you wrong'

Nobody following this thread can miss that what you now say Cleric always meant with the protein metaphor - to point to various levels of cognition - is precisely what you have spend rivers of words, posts, and pages, to accuse me to be doing.

I was certainly wrong to the extent that I said we should try to resolve this issue from the intellectual perspective alone, without trying to understand the higher cognitive experience of at least the Imaginative spectrum (or the Intuitive as Cleric has pointed to). To the extent any of your posts focused on that spectrum, I was wrong to say you shouldn't be doing that. I think we both used Steiner's quotes which were pointing in that direction as well.

Now the question is, do you want to properly orient to the higher cognitive experience of the spectrum from which the sequenced audial and visual images condense? From which neither audial nor visual images are seen as special sub-cycles of the other one, or of our intellectual scale thinking in general?

It simply doesn't make sense to fall back on, "but you said something differently before, so I'm still not sure about this". Even if that is true (which it isn't, for the reasons we have both tried to explain), then that just means the protein post was off-base and we need to recalibrate to what is true in the here and now.

The main point is that no part of the amino acid perceptual spectrum 'lifts us up' into the folded structure of its own accord, more directly than other parts, relatively independently of our soul configuration. If we allow our reasoning to be constrained by such an expectation, the psychedelic user can just as easily say he lives in profound archetypal pictorial patterns and is therefore deeper within the folded structure than all us chumps who are still messing around with our flat and dry word-sequences on this forum.