On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[Federica]

Last year in this thread we had a long discussion on Steiner's views on heart function, and sensory and motor nerves. I feel that an important element was not mentioned then, which I believe brings something fundamental to what Steiner meant with his famous contention that motor nerves don't exist. I am not trying to reopen that discussion, I simply want to add this element for future reference. I think it makes an important difference.

Regarding the following supersensible observation, it would be interesting to know how it may be wrong, and what could explain that Steiner, as a result of 30 years of research, had continuously unobjective imaginative observations of the human organization:



"In this state, however, in which the soul can think without the body, it can also see the body. Just as you see something that is outside of yourself, as you know that you see the table with your eyes, so too do you look back with imaginative, inspired, and intuitive cognition at your physical and etheric bodies. You are there within yourself only as a soul being. You are what you otherwise are in unconscious sleep, but now conscious. And now something very peculiar occurs.

It happens that we do not see everything within this physical body. Only the nervous system is objectively visible to the soul. Seen thus from the outside. The human being is a nerve sense being. Our nervous system together with the senses becomes visible from outside. I emphasize this because it has played a role although not in these evening lectures, but in many of the day lectures. I emphasize this because not only the so-called sensory nerves but also the so-called motor nerves become visible, and it is precisely at this stage of cognition through direct observation that we arrive at this research result. There is no difference in principle between sensory and motor nerves. The sensory nerves are there to mediate the perception of the external world through our senses. The motor nerves which are also sensory nerves are there so that we perceive the position and the presence of our limbs within ourselves.

That we have within ourselves a perception of ourselves is mediated by the motor nerves which are actually sensory nerves in this respect. Such research results arise on this path of soul research. Thus on the one hand you have now attained in this way to the greatest extent what belongs to the human nervous system. You have it before you like an objective thing."



From "Becoming Fully Human: The Significance of Anthroposophy in Contemporary Spiritual Life CW 82"

Federica,

Isn't this what we have been saying?

Steiner makes it very clear in this passage that the idea of "motor nerves are also sensory nerves that perceive the position and presence of our limbs" is an Imaginative observation, that can only be attained and verified through 'this path of soul research', at 'precisely this stage of cognition'. Thus, it is not something that can be reasoned out from entirely within the focal plane (here he makes that clear, but in other passages, it seems he is not so clear about it). There is nothing "unobjective" about observations at the Imaginative scale of our intuitive navigation, but we need to be clear that it is an entirely different sort of "objective" than what can be considered as such from the focal plane perspective. We certainly can't imagine that we remain as a homunculus perspective that views the branching nervous system as clear-cut mental pictures, like a diagram we may find in a physiology textbook. It is better to understand "seeing the nervous system" at this scale as developing an intuitive orientation to how the system mediates our perceptions within the soul-spiritual landscape.

What does this Imaginative observation of the motor nerves, as perceivers of our internal states, translate to when we zoom back in to our ordinary focal scale of objectivity? It becomes the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction in response to our will impulses. There is only a contradiction between these two if we try to flatten the Imaginative observations onto the focal plane and treat them as commensurate with physical observations in terms of their 'objectivity'. As we mentioned in the other thread, our deeper soul being has an entirely different perspective on 'what reality is', what 'we are', what is 'objectively true', and so on. It is no longer interested in forming rigid pipelines with its mental images to mimic the phenomenal flow and predict what that flow, as some independent reality, will do next. It doesn't consider such pipelines "correct," in contrast to all other pipelines, which are considered "incorrect". As Cleric put it in the latest essay, at the Imaginative scale:

"We no longer try to calculate a prediction about what our next thought would be (while the calculating thoughts themselves still cannot be pre-calculated), but we attain finer sensitivity for the curvature of the flow through the here and now. Just like we have some intuitive orientation for our inner process when we shape it consciously, like when we count to ten, so we begin to intuitively feel how aspects of the contextual flow also stream in ways that make intuitive sense. In other words, instead of stacking a prediction within the picture-in-picture sub-flow and then seeking correlations with the primary flow, we begin to gain an expanded intuitive sense about the rhythms and interferences of certain real-time tendencies of the contextual flow, about where they ‘come from’ and where they are ‘headed’. This is known not as an intellectual guessing or interpretation, but by directly feeling the in-phaseness of the intuitive curvature of the flow and the receding phenomena."

So we should be clear that everything Steiner conveys in this domain of occult physiology, whether about the deeper understanding of heart function, motor nerves, or something else, is a result of the process described above, which is certainly a process of objective inquiry but a different kind of objective inquiry than we are accustomed to within the focal plane. He then artistically depicts these Imaginative observations through various concepts available to the intellectual palette of his time, generally motivated by the critical aim of loosening the rigid, materialistic-reductionist perspective on the human organism and its soul-body relations, as we discussed earlier. That can lead to certain passages where he seems to indicate that the motor-sensory nerve distinction (or heart pump-flow distinction) collapses even with ordinary focal-plane observations and reasoning. Yet that is where it is up to us to become discerning and see how such passages take shape through a certain intermixing of one scale of 'objective' with another scale of 'objective'.

I was being ironic. Of course I don't consider that imaginative observation unobjective. And I know that the observation can only be arrived at in higher cognition, and that the physical plane responds to different laws. Indeed, we have discussed that through a long series of posts. But I do think that, once the observation is known, the result should illuminate focal-plane physiology too. And I think this was one of Steiner's goals as well. In this sense, something is still missing. It's not enough to say that the observation is objective in imagination but unobjective on the focal plane. It remains to be explained precisely how that comes about, beyond the generic statement that the observation translates into the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction. Steiner too says that they are precondition for muscle contraction. But how does the metabolic reason for that translate into sense-observable physiology? This remains to be elucidated, because the planes are different but they should stand in harmonious relationship with each other. So there should be a way to find in the observable physiology of the motor nerves something that is traceable to metabolic activity, as opposed to "the brain sends a signal through the nerve which activates the muscle". Don't you think that something is still missing?

[Federica]

I was being ironic. Of course I don't consider that imaginative observation unobjective. And I know that the observation can only be arrived at in higher cognition, and that the physical plane responds to different laws. Indeed, we have discussed that through a long series of posts. But I do think that, once the observation is known, the result should illuminate focal-plane physiology too. And I think this was one of Steiner's goals as well. In this sense, something is still missing. It's not enough to say that the observation is objective in imagination but unobjective on the focal plane. It remains to be explained precisely how that comes about, beyond the generic statement that the observation translates into the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction. Steiner too says that they are precondition for muscle contraction. But how does the metabolic reason for that translate into sense-observable physiology? This remains to be elucidated, because the planes are different but they should stand in harmonious relationship with each other. So there should be a way to find in the observable physiology of the motor nerves something that is traceable to metabolic activity, as opposed to "the brain sends a signal through the nerve which activates the muscle". Don't you think that something is still missing?

I think the same with regards to the heart - which is why I previously shared this hypothesis. Steiner wrote a book (Riddles of the Soul) with the specific intent to highlight and emphasize these "results of anthroposophical research". He was concerned with bringing together natural and spiritual science, and I don't think we can settle the question simply saying, "These are imaginative perceptions, but in the world of the senses it's another story. Steiner in this field communicated sort of awkwardly and unclearly. He used to intermix the planes in the same sentence, and there's actually nothing about his heart and the nervous system statements that can be practically traced to the physical body. We can still use a different vocabulary that includes words like 'metabolism' but for all intents and purposes nothing changes in how physiology can be done on the focal plane, until someone develops Imagination." He published a book about that, that is he addressed a public who did not have access to higher cognition. I think something is missing in this story.

[AshvinP]

I was being ironic. Of course I don't consider that imaginative observation unobjective. And I know that the observation can only be arrived at in higher cognition, and that the physical plane responds to different laws. Indeed, we have discussed that through a long series of posts. But I do think that, once the observation is known, the result should illuminate focal-plane physiology too. And I think this was one of Steiner's goals as well. In this sense, something is still missing. It's not enough to say that the observation is objective in imagination but unobjective on the focal plane. It remains to be explained precisely how that comes about, beyond the generic statement that the observation translates into the fact that these nerves are preconditions for muscle contraction. Steiner too says that they are precondition for muscle contraction. But how does the metabolic reason for that translate into sense-observable physiology? This remains to be elucidated, because the planes are different but they should stand in harmonious relationship with each other. So there should be a way to find in the observable physiology of the motor nerves something that is traceable to metabolic activity, as opposed to "the brain sends a signal through the nerve which activates the muscle". Don't you think that something is still missing?

I found Cleric's previous tornado metaphor very helpful in elucidating the answers to such questions, or at least the direction in which we should start thinking about the answers. There is certainly harmony between the scales, but not the sort of commensurability that the intellect seeks, i.e., to find 'traces' of the Imaginative process in a localized domino chain of mental images. The Imaginative scale brings our intuitive steering into the domain of what we may refer to, from our focal perspective, as 'non-local potential'. We experience hints of that when we simulate and rehearse multiple scenarios before allowing one to become our intended continuation. But even at this point, we are already dealing with receding images of the light pole. If anything, we could correlate the outputs of mental images from our simulation and rehearsal with those of the sense-observable nervous system (certain atavistic clairvoyant capacities may also be traced to sense-observable physiology). Yet the subtle Imaginative steering unfolds entirely 'beneath the noise floor'. And because the focal plane is woven from negative images of the soul-spiritual (from what we have been prevented from flooding with our attention), when we focus exclusively on the domino chains of the latter, it often looks like the opposite of what we would expect to find from our understanding of the supersensible dynamics. That is why so many bright, idealistic thinkers still cannot help but become enamored with a bottom-up evolutionary understanding of the human organism and soul life, for example. That is why it will perpetually remain easy, practically forced, for natural scientists to dismiss Steiner's research until certain inner efforts are made to grow into the Imaginative scale.

On that note, as a wider consideration here, we can contemplate Steiner's frequent criticism of rational Christian apologetics, which seeks to find verifiable traces of the Christ events, including the existence, miracles, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus, through analysis of the sense-perceptible (historical) facts recorded in various contemporary accounts. What he points out, in a nutshell, is that expecting this to be possible fails to understand the whole reason for those events. It was not so supersensible realities could be traced right down into the focal-historical plane and everyone could then understand the significance of what happened, as if the latter should be undeniable to anyone with working senses and a logically trained mind (trained on the logic of sensory life, of course). Rather, the events were intended to invite individual souls to develop their inner faculties and more closely unite their inner flow with the supersensible realities. Only then can they begin to look at the historical facts with an Imaginative eye, with higher-order Imaginative logic trained on a deeper scale of the flow, and see the profound meaning of those events for our lives. It is more like tracing archetypal impulses, feelings, and intuitions to the symbolic events of a dramatic play, in that sense.

I think it's quite an analogous situation here. For example, we often speak of our intuitive navigation as proceeding along "meaningful curvatures". And we know there is an objectively valid relationship between the spiritual activities of hierarchical beings and the observations of theoretical physics that point to mathematically precise space-time curvature. So how do we find the trace of that spiritual activity in the movements of celestial bodies? We certainly won't find that trace in ever more refined pipelines of mental images that somehow reveal subtler strata of intentional gestures. The only way to find the trace is by shifting our perspective and looking at the models as artistic renderings of intuitively experienced realities. In other words, we need to engage in a phenomenology of spiritual activity, and only then do the observations and results of natural science become testimonies to the independently experienced research of spiritual science. We begin to gain an expanded orientation to how the negative images of the focal plane originally take shape. That is what is always missing: the experience of intuitive navigation, of how our pipelines of philosophical-scientific mental images are inwardly constrained, of how this experience relates to the broader evolutionary process, and so on. As long as these inner experiences remain in the blind spot and we expect to trace the higher realities right down into the historical-focal plane and its domino chains, the bridge between natural and spiritual science is being procrastinated. And as expressed in the essay, "In ordinary life, we can procrastinate on our tasks and duties while still retaining a clear sense of what must be done to undertake and complete them. In our occult life, however, every gesture of procrastination is like a dimming of our orientation toward what we planned to do. With each passing day without inner experimentation, our plans for higher development feel more ghostly within our palette of possible navigatory gestures and more remote from what we can plausibly imagine ourselves undertaking."

This is why we can't ignore Steiner's repeated emphasis on developing the inner faculties to find the 'meeting point', including in the books and lectures you are referencing. The tracing is only possible through that inner development. I think that is made abundantly clear in Riddles of the Soul, for example.

"Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in either of these two ways. It does not form hypotheses about the supersensible world because it must agree with those who feel that any basis for reflection is lost if mental pictures are left in the same form as when taken from sense perceptions, and yet are to be applied in a realm transcending the sense world. Anthroposophy does not relate to “limits of knowledge” in the first way either, because it realizes that in our encounter with these so-called limits of knowledge, something can be experienced by the soul that has nothing to do with the content of mental pictures gained from sense perception. If the soul focuses only upon this latter content, then, if its self-examination is honest, it must admit that this content can reveal nothing directly to our activity of knowing except a copy of what we experience through the senses. The situation changes if the soul goes further and asks itself: What can be experienced within the soul itself when it fills itself with those mental pictures to which it is led when confronted by our usual limits of knowledge? After sufficient self-examination, the soul can then say to itself: Through such mental pictures I cannot, in the ordinary sense of the word, know anything; but in the event that I really make this powerlessness of my knowing activity inwardly visible to myself, then I become aware how these mental pictures work within my own self. As ordinary cognitive pictures, these mental pictures remain mute; but the more their muteness communicates itself to our consciousness, the more these mental pictures take on an inner life of their own that unites with the life of the soul. And the soul then notices how, with this experience, it is in a situation comparable to that of a blind being who has also not experienced much development of its sense of touch. Such a being would at first keep bumping into things. It would feel the resistance of outer reality. And from this generalized sensation, it could develop an inner life for itself, filled with a primitive consciousness that no longer has merely the general sensation of bumping into things, but that differentiates this sensation and distinguishes between hardness and softness, smoothness and roughness, etc. — In the same way, the soul can hold and differentiate its experience of the mental pictures it forms in its encounter with the limits of knowledge. The soul learns to experience that these limits represent nothing more than what arises when the soul is touched by the spiritual world in a soul way. The dawning awareness of such limits becomes an experience for the soul that can be compared with the experience of touch in the sense world.8 What the soul formerly regarded as limits to knowledge it now sees as a soul-spiritual touching by a spiritual world. And out of the soul's attentiveness to its experiences with the various pictures it makes for itself at this borderland, the general sensing of a spiritual world differentiates for the soul into diverse perceptions of a spiritual world. In this way, the spiritual world's lowest form of perceptibility, so to speak, becomes an experience. This characterizes merely the very first opening of the soul to the spiritual world. But it also shows that the spiritual experiences striven for in what I mean by anthroposophy do not point in the direction of general, nebulous, emotional experiences that the soul has of itself, but rather in the direction of something that can be developed in a lawful way into a true inner experience. This is not the place to show how this first primitive spiritual perception can be intensified by further soul practices in such a way that one can speak of other, in a certain way, higher kinds of perception besides this soul-spiritual blind groping. For a description of such soul practices I must refer the reader to my anthroposophical books and essays. Here only the basic principle of spiritual perception was to be indicated of which anthroposophy speaks."