AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2026 3:26 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2026 12:45 pm
Yes. Our mental pipelines can take multiple beneficial shapes. For example, the shape of the game metaphor. Another example is the shape of the chess metaphor. The cognitive methodology they point to is one, but the shapes of the mental pipelines are distinct. Both pipelines are intended to facilitate convergence between scales. Now, if one doesn't want to become fundamentalist of the phenomenology of spiritual activity, one will also admit the possibility that other pipelines, which constrain the mental flow differently, can equally facilitate perspective inversion. This is what I referred to elsewhere on this forum as moving first east and then north, rather than first north and then east. The destination is the same, but the routes are different.
These other pipelines do not have to directly point to the phenomenology of cognition and what spiritual exercises to practice. It is also possible to facilitate inversion by guiding the mind through territories that are not landscapes of concentration and meditation exercises, but stimulate the mind to
eventually converge toward those landscapes.
To suppose that, in order to induce the mind to engage on the spiritual path, the one and only way is to speak about cognitive methodology and spiritual exercises would be a reductive view. The reason why I think that differently shaped pipelines can be as effective as the ones focused on cognitive methodology is that the capacity for distinguishing truth from error is present to some degree in the soul, in its entirety. Even the sentient soul is sometimes able, within the chaotic flow of sympathetic and antipathetic drives, to retain intuitions with transformative power. We have all heard the story of someone once afflicted by heavy drug addiction who somehow transformed and even completely inverted their life. At the level of the intellectual soul, intuition is also present. Most often, intuitions are immediately flattened by the intellectual activity of concept identification and juggling. But they nevertheless make their appearance in the intellect, to initiate the natural-scientific search for conceptual truth. Because the soul - developed and undeveloped - has an inbuilt capacity for sensing the truth, this capacity can be stimulated
directly by means of pipelines that appropriately present truths within this or that field of human inquiry. While these are not about the phenomenology of cognition and its training, they point to the same outcome of perspective inversion by first inserting a seed of intuition in the vessel of the soul, to stimulate its sense for truth. This seed can relate to any sort of applied knowledge and practice, science and art.
So there is no need to refer to Steiner's lecturing to realize that the human soul at the present level of evolution can be stimulated by various types of mental pipelines. This being said, it is simply indisputable that Steiner gave countless public lectures on applied knowledge and practice to audiences unfamiliar with cognitive methodology and the phenomenology of spiritual activity. It is equally indisputable that in these lectures the topics were specific fields of human knowledge and practice, and that no mental pipelines about cognitive phenomenology and spiritual exercises were given. However, the possibility for the audience to pursue the intuitions instilled in the vessel of the mind through spiritual-scientific methods was always referred to in passing, typically in the form, "whoever intends to pursue this approach and explore these territories directly is invited to read my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Occult Science and do the exercises illustrated there". Because, indeed, only the development of higher cognition allows to move past the inversion horizon, to join on the same side of the beings responsible for all phenomena. However the motivation to begin such development may come from many directions, not only from the phenomenology of thinking.
PS. Regarding the work of K.D. Moore I have not said and cannot say much, since I have read not even a line of his work. I only quoted a post by someone who cited it as a source. I described in
this post why I did that.
Thanks for elaborating on what you meant, again.
At this point, I mainly want to note that it is what I thought you were proposing, and I simply disagree with it for many reasons we have already discussed in the threads. You have spelled everything out very clearly above, and I hope we can bookmark this comment for the next iteration of the discussion, if and when that occurs. Then there should be absolutely no suggestion of mischaracterizing views, because
the view I have been characterizing and disagreeing with is exactly what you outline above.
I think it inevitably reinforces the default stance of seeking the reality of our intuitive navigation in patterns of mental outputs, which
precludes genuine perspective inversion and occult development. It inevitably leads to the type of mental pipelining we find in Cowan, Moore, et al. And the healthy intuitions of the intellectual soul in our time
should steer it away from those pipelines with skepticism, with the feeling that 'something is off here', because the reality of our intimate intuitive steering should not be conflated with anything we can find as domino chains in the focal plane.
I see any pipelines that circumvent a phenomenology of spiritual activity as a form of unhealthy procrastination, at a critical juncture when such procrastination simply cannot be afforded by the intellectual soul. You may refer to that as fundamentalist or reductive, and I would also disagree with that characterization, because I know that the phenomenological pipelines are the only ones that help us gradually decondition from reductive thinking.
You may say I am opposed to what Steiner is doing in some of his lectures - and if that's what he was actually doing, then you would be correct - I am so opposed (and I think the reasons why the alternative pipelining won't produce good fruit have only grown more stark in the last 100 years). So I hope it is clear that all of my comments on this topic, in the past, present, and future, are born from that fundamental disagreement. Basically, I see the above as a form of the
usual stance in intellectual life, as souls seek answers to their existential questions through philosophy, science, religion, esotericism, etc., and all of the essays have been about stressing the urgency of seeing these things in a much different way. The helplessness of steering through these indirect pipelines (non-phenomenological, non-concentrative, non-meditative) needs to be felt at a core level of our being.
I also want to share another quote from Steiner that I think speaks directly to the workability of alternative intellectual pipelines. We should feel how what the intellect does in this way is a kind of shell game, a Kabuki theater, even when the intuitions stimulated through these pipelines feel profound and powerful. This is exactly what needs to be confronted and overcome in our time for the perspective inversion to take hold, and it should be pursued in the most direct way possible.
https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA213/En ... 21p01.html
"Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.
Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.
And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted.
...
I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy..."
Thanks, Ashvin.
First, to really try and rule out any misunderstandings on this topic, let’s be precise and note that the bold is incorrect. The other day, you did
not characterize exactly what I outlined above. Rather, you posted
this characterization, which is incompatible with the outline above (and with my previous outlines). However, if this is clarified now, that’s all that matters. I will just repeat the important part: I know that there’s only one way to participate in the reality of any phenomena, and this is not by representing them in pictures. This said, the observation of how insensitive people can be to the possibility of unexpected, non representational modes of cognition, when these are presented upfront - no matter how skillfully and gracefully expressed - leads to the necessity to explore what other communication methods may exist. And indeed, it appears that the duality of man, and man's soul constitution, allow for an alternative.
We can begin by keeping in mind that mental pictures must be used in any case. Essays are expressed in discursive language made of such pipelines - inevitably. The particular feature in your essays is that the pictures conceptually represent the necessity to move past ...themselves. No matter how much progressive and perfectly contextualized the
conceptual walkthrough is, this is a sharp turn, to say the least, which usually leaves the reader dazed, or in discomfort. Usually one ends up off track. The sharp turn is missed, and once off track, lost in the undergrowth, many souls feel: “I see no path here, no ground, no way forward”. Now, I believe that a solution for that is to
initially use the inevitable mental pictures to reflect the world, rather than the process of cognition. Not in a traditional fashion, but using what Steiner often called “new concepts” - concepts that become available and deeply comprehended only from the standpoint of higher cognition, but can elicit intuitions and feelings of recognition in any soul, at all soul levels (and we know through spiritual science that this is completely possible). Not that the existence of unexpected cognitive means has to be kept secret, of course. It should be laid in the background that the full circle can only be achieved by the development of specific inner powers, but at least the mind is not rushed into a hard turn for which many have neither the soul endurance nor the range or motion. On the other hand, practical life and the physical world are already at the core of everyone’s attention, thus an insight-provoking, reflected perspective on an applied topic provides something new and stimulating for the mind to grip to, as a kind of
conceptual lifebelt. Once this is introduced, the conceptual context becomes significantly more favorable to the necessary turn 'northwards'. Now it is in order to go deeper in the understanding of the archetypal idea constellated by the newly contemplated concepts and insights that unfamiliar cognitive efforts to come can be intended, not in order to take a hard leap into the conceptual void. Again, there’s a natural capacity to sense specific truths that can be beneficially leveraged here, on top of the existing interest in understanding the world. These two ‘assets’ are often available to leverage, but are missed out on, if the mental pictures point head-on to the necessity of transcending themselves. This is a much higher demand on the soul, because there's nothing in sight it can cling to. The proposition is to journey into the void, straight in.
So there are two differences between what I am proposing and the "usual stance of seeking answers in intellectual life". Firstly, there's nothing usual in it. Yes, the approach makes use of mental pictures which are captured by the intellect (the same happens in your essays) but the content of these pictures should be anchored to new concepts, not usual ones. The second difference is the goal. The goal is not to dwell indefinitely within the intellectual domain, but only as long as necessary to create a
'conceptual lifebelt' that makes the necessary introduction of new cognitive methods more gradual, progressive, and less of a leap into completely unchartered territory. The idea of saying something even vaguely in favor of chemical methods of cognitive exploration is very far from me - as you surely know. However, I believe that such experiences, once they are there, may provide a kind of (very costly) conceptual 'lifebelt'. What I propose is to leverage instead the human interest in the natural and cultural world, and the objective soul capacity for intuiting truths, to build a much healthier conceptual lifebelt, as a preparation for the phenomenological bypassing of the world of representation.
In conclusion, I wouldn't say that we can speak of procrastination. Procrastination implies that the procrastinator is aware of what is being procrastinated. From your standpoint, it is a fully justified concept. But a random reader cannot procrastinate a task whose nature and significance is beyond their radius of comprehension. I fully understand that you disagree with this view and why, and even sympathize with many of the reasons behind your standpoint. But you think that the phenomenological pipelines are the only ones that help us gradually decondition from reductive thinking. We have to ask: is this really the case? In fact, what I am proposing aims to provide precisely such progression - a gradual deconditioning which I seriously doubt is generally attainable through phenomenological pipelines. For you they have worked like that, but this doesn't indicate that the same is the general case. In fact, my admittedly limited but not insignificant experience (and I guess yours as well?) shows the opposite. Despite all your efforts to make the phenomenological pipeline gradual and progressive, it doesn't seem to be experienced as such, at least not in the
pure form pursued in the current essays, no matter how impressively formed and awe-some they are - and I truly think they are. I believe that these essays have and will continue to have a powerful impact on a few individuals, but many would benefit from an approach anchored in applications, at the beginning.
Regarding the Kabuki theater of intellectualism and Steiner's quote - I think I see clearly enough what that points to. My way to express that here across threads has been by speaking of "the imminent death of epistemology and then philosophy" (and I was glad to recently come across a lecture - I can't remember which one now - where Steiner speaks quite clearly of how future philosophy can only be Anthroposophy). I hope I have clarified enough how my viewpoint has nothing to do with maintaining intellectualism, but rather with using the inevitable conceptual means (which your essays have to use too) along a more gradual trajectory, a trajectory that attempts to take advantage of some available assets within the current human organization.
It is always various ways of approaching the central topic, or the center of the central topic, because that is what is habitually neglected in our time, and that is what the intellect continually tries to rationalize away with its 'other approaches', its 'other converging pipelines', and so on. That is why our essays always focus on the same cognitive methodology and its refinement, which we (and Steiner) perceive as the one and only way of advancing spiritual scientific understanding and thus improving practical outcomes.
