On Attaining Spiritual Sight (Part I)

[AshvinP]

Ashvin, you are completely missing the meaning of my post.

What Moore says could very well be completely false. Let me repeat, I happen to have no idea since I read nothing from him, and it plays no role to my point here anyway. The point is, you stated that conventional science would never take a look at these views and say "Oh wait, our standard view has been missing something. Our theories were incomplete". You literally put it in these terms here. You said it would NEVER happen that science would say, maybe something is missing.

So, first, you have mocked me for proposing that it could happen, and on top of that you have turned around my viewpoint as if it were a proof that I ignore or don't understand the phenomenological pipelines, being unable to work through them properly.

And - ironically enough - a few days later I happen to bump into a (probably) physicalist, recognized health scientist and professor - yeah, isn't it MEGA COOL that a physicalist says that? - and guess what, he and his community are literally saying,"This heart-is-not-a-pump idea is SO COOL!". They are saying what you mockingly stated conventional science would never say: "Oh wait, it turns out that none of our ideas in physics, chemistry, and so on, rooted in sensory observation and intellectual-mathematical analysis, can properly account for these properties of pendulums, water, motor nerves, blood flow, etc".

This [the idea that the heart is not a pump but a vortex] is so cool, at several levels. The heart functions via vortex and vacuum, not just pump! 1. Another beautiful example of how our existing models are often far over-simplified, particularly in biology. 2. The beauty of spirals, all through our bodies! 3. These vortices contribute to electromagnetic fields in our bodies. The full implications are far from understood! 4. Natural selection leverages so many forces, principles, and processes in parallel to achieve astounding results!"

https://substack.com/@alancohen888903/n ... 1?r=1qj4a6

Now to me this looks like, by your unfair expressions, you have simply deserved to be taken down a peg by the facts. Notice, I didn't even search for this evidence that current science actually can flow with the (true or false it doesn't matter) idea of the vortex heart. So if I were you, I would just take it gracefully now, instead of harping on the phenomenological pipelines for the thousandth time. Simply recognize that your mocking and assuming attitude was probably not the best soul attitude and communication choice. Here you have such a great opportunity to come across as a mature spiritual scientist, if you only are able take it gracefully...

You are only digging the hole of misunderstanding deeper, Federica. First, it is simply disingenuous for you to suggest that your point had nothing to do with the accuracy of Moore's indications. You brought it up in reference to your previous suggestion that we (Cleric and myself) are 'missing something' about the focal plane dynamics of the heart and nerve systems. You obviously have a great deal of sympathy for these indications, as that has been the recurring focus of your posts on this forum over the last few months. You are desperately trying to show that I am wrong to say there is something missing in your orientation, that we are the ones failing to understand Steiner's lectures properly, and that the focal plane research is beginning to confirm his understanding. This is extremely obvious to everyone, so please don't pretend otherwise.

Secondly, the professor you are now referencing is an exact confirmation of what I stated. He is an example of someone who looked at these shaky indications of something vaguely spiritual in the functioning of the cardiovascular system and said, "Natural selection leverages so many forces, principles, and processes in parallel to achieve astounding results!". In other words, these indications were seamlessly fitted into his already established physicalist perspective and conceptual palette. That is exactly what I was pointing to in my previous comment, and why it is simply a failure to understand the inner dynamics when we imagine that these indications might suddenly jolt various scientists out of their slumber. That is literally like imagining that some combination of dream experiences will provide the dream character with an intuitive orientation to his waking state from which the dream imagery takes shape. Your whole AP approach banks on that possibility through 'sporadic flashes of intuition', but people like Cohen further illustrate why it will never happen.

On top of all of that, it is amazing to me that you don't even care whether Moore's indications are false, and you claim that it is irrelevant to your underlying point. That suggests your underlying point is simply to win an abstract argument for its own sake. It has nothing to do with helping people actually develop a healthy orientation to spiritual reality. Your agenda here is slowly turning against the very spirit of spiritual science. You are starting to take comfort in the fact that other people are quoting the same flawed indications you have quoted, adopting the same flawed orientation that you are falling into. It's sad, Federica, and I hope it is just a temporary phase you are going through.

Obviously, nothing that I write is helping the situation at this point, no matter how clearly and logically I state these things. Therefore, I will stop engaging you on this entire topic. It feels like, despite my best efforts, I am only fueling your misorientation at this point, because you so desperately want to 'prove me wrong', no matter what the cost to that orientation.

[AshvinP]

Let me repeat: what Moore says could very well be completely false. I happen to have no idea since I read nothing from him, and it plays no role to my point here anyway. The point is, you stated that conventional science would never take a look at these views and say "Oh wait, our standard view has been missing something. Our theories were incomplete". You literally put it in these terms here. You said it would NEVER happen that science would say, maybe something is missing.

So, first, you have mocked me for proposing that it could happen, and on top of that you have turned around my viewpoint as if it were a proof that I ignore or don't understand the phenomenological pipelines, being unable to work through them properly.

And - ironically enough - a few days later I happen to bump into a (probably) physicalist, recognized health scientist and professor - yeah, isn't it MEGA COOL that a physicalist says that? - and guess what, he and his community are literally saying,"This heart-is-not-a-pump idea is SO COOL!". They are saying what you mockingly stated conventional science would never say: "Oh wait, it turns out that none of our ideas in physics, chemistry, and so on, rooted in sensory observation and intellectual-mathematical analysis, can properly account for these properties of pendulums, water, motor nerves, blood flow, etc".

By the way, Cleric made this exact same observation in a previous iteration of this discussion. The principles he so precisely illustrated with the pendulum example could also be applied to the heart-pump example or many similar examples in a slightly modified form. So please, let's try to disassociate this observation from me, and all feelings connected with the need to 'take me down a peg', and simply contemplate it carefully. Because it is one of the most critical intuitions for spiritual seekers to integrate in our time. It is not a question of whether academics and scientists will entertain enigmatic behaviors of physical or biological systems (of course, they will, and often in a rather careless manner, as we see from Levin, Cohen, and many others), but a matter of how they will entertain them and position themselves toward them. If our aim is not simply to have a bunch of people endlessly inflating their intellects to encompass enigmatic behaviors in their models, but rather to intuit a new way of orienting their perspective within the flow, then we need to take this seriously.


"The example with the rock is different, but alas, it can hardly be used to point attention to the supersensible. Let me be clear - it can totally be used to point attention to the supersensible, in the sense that we're pointing out that there's something entering and leaving the sensory frequency band of reality, and we need to open up for it. However, such a statement is accommodated in a specific way by the intellect (to whom we appeal).

For instance, when we look at the GR case, we can make an analogy with the following. Imagine that for a long time we've been studying an engine that has been perfectly insulated from the environment. In this way, no heat can escape. We conclude that there's a law of conservation of heat. If the insulation cracks, however, heat escapes into the outer environment, the engine cools, and we conclude that heat is not conserved. Of course, this will not in the least incite us to think of anything supersensible. We simply enlarge our intellectual model to include also the environment, and now we follow how heat transforms through this wider system. Something comparable happens in the GR sense, as explained in the video with the pipe cracks. The difference is that the types of quantities also transform. What has been kinetic energy (the rock's inertia) becomes transformed into some aspect of the spacetime curvature. But now, in this greater picture, there's still a closed system (the continuity principle). So there's once again equilibrium, except that not simply between kinetic and potential energy but among more fundamental aspects. And then, just as the rock apparently loses its kinetic energy as the underlying spacetime lattice stretches, so one may say that if for some reason the spacetime oscillations elastically rebound and contract, then we may see a stationary rock spontaneously gaining momentum, apparently for no reason, as if it creates its energy out of nothing.

The important thing is that the intellect can inflate in this way without limit. Even if we tell him "There's something more that evades the senses", he'll simply answer "No problem, I'll just widen the scope of my concepts. Now I'll capture this elusive something and try to build a model for the way it pours in and out of the sense perceptible spectrum." This can be done even for Steiner's quote above, if it is grasped purely intellectually. One can say. "Sure, there's this imaginative energy that continuously transforms into the sense-perceptible energy oscillations of Nature." And this is really the difficult part. It's very difficult to point attention that we're not merely trying to conceive of some more encompassing metaphysical substance which explains what matter/energy is losing/gaining through the conservation violation, but that a different mode of positioning ourselves within the flow of existence is implied."

[Federica]

For the records, I am reminded of the fact that in 2023, in response to questions by Anthony and Eugene, Cleric wrote a few posts to begin to elaborate on "the nature of light" from a spiritual perspective - from this post.

As he wrote elsewhere, "If we want a truer sense of the physical world, we shouldn't try to make a visual picture of it but try to feel from within, the depth of our bodily space and how it has assumed its present state through continuous metamorphosis". Interestingly, in response to those questions he didn't say: "Shut up and do your phenomenology of thinking!". Instead he elaborated on the phenomenon of light, and later he also explicitly proposed to bridge towards that phenomenology of thinking starting from the milestones of contemporary science:

These days I'm busier than usual and don't have much time for writing extensive posts, so if you have an inclination, I can offer to again try reaching shared understanding and experience of the higher stages of consciousness, by starting from our contemporary scientific milestones.

So it seems that he thought it is not entirely foolish to discuss phenomena of the wider flow through their scientific pictures at first, to try and present them from a spiritual perspective in order to then arrive at a phenomenology of thinking. Interestingly, he didn't receive any fundamentalist "Shut up and focus on the phenomenology of thinking!" attacks. Instead, quite the opposite happened. So we can see how arbitrary soul forces can shape the receding individual flow in powerful ways, and this may continue to happen (of course) well after a capacity for approaching and exploring the event horizon has been developed.

[AshvinP]

Also, for the record, you are sharing an example from Cleric where the very first sentences are - "Alas, it’s not that easy to approach that question. There are so many preconceived patterns of thinking that have to be reimagined. For example, instead of simply asking the question, we can start by introspecting what we’re doing with our thinking when we think of light and filters?"

In other words, this example couldn't be any more directly a phenomenology of thinking. Even in your snippet, he speaks about feeling from within the depth of bodily space, which is another way of saying "shut up and do phenomenology." Cleric didn't receive any "focus on the phenomenology" responses because that's exactly what he was doing from the very beginning and what he does in 100% of his posts on this forum. My whole 'focus on the phenomenology' stance and orientation was shaped by observing and emulating him! He never constructs a pipeline that does not act as a direct guideline for introspecting our cognitive perspective, and its typical characteristics. He provides these guidelines from the very outset because he knows that there is zero chance of proper orientation to the topic of the 'nature of light', or any other scientific topic, without the shift in cognitive perspective.

"In order to continue this exploration we have to be very clear with this situation. It is very important that we identify within ourselves this kind of thinker that imagines flying fireballs that are absorbed by filters. Each one of us has this kind of thinker within ourselves. And this is not in itself the problem. The problem comes when the different thinkers in ourselves overstep their rightful domains.

We can indeed build better intuition of light and interestingly, our sciences have already led us very close, we only need the right perspective, the right mode of consciousness. But we have to first become fully aware of what we’re doing with our thinking when we think about light going through a filter."

I shouldn't need to requote these things and add so many bold and underline marks, but I suppose, at this point, that is what's necessary to highlight what's actually being implied. This isn't new. You are often invoking examples that are saying and implying the opposite of what you think they are saying and implying. It has happened with Steiner quotes, too. What is going on here? I think this whole recent trend is entangled with your feeling that I need to be 'taken down a peg' and you have made it a mission to do whatever it takes, to twist your thinking in whatever direction possible, to help accomplish that goal. You will seize on any possible example, from any possible source, to further that aim, even if it illustrates the opposite of what you imagine it does.

And I can sympathize with how you feel, because you are often on the receiving end of my corrections. I know this can become frustrating and tiresome after a while, to always be told you are misperceiving or misunderstanding something. But at some point, you have to realize that only happens because, in recent times, you increasingly stray away from the cognitive phenomenology and shape opinionated pipelines about occult physiology and so on, mostly to substantiate some abstract position. The only reason there is nothing to similarly correct me on, in contrast, is that my posts stick closely to the basic contours of cognitive phenomenology, exploring the same verifiable dynamics from many different angles. The same could be said for Cleric. So you are not being unfairly targeted; rather, I am giving you honest feedback on the misorientations I perceive in your lines of reasoning that stray from what can be verified through introspective experience. In other words, you are getting honest feedback on your pipelines that are constructed without doing what Cleric (and Steiner) indicate is absolutely necessary before we have any hope of a proper orientation to any scientific (or any other) milestones.

Of course, if you would rather not have any of that honest feedback, then I am happy to stop responding to your posts on these AP topics.

[Federica]

Yes, it is evident that your intention has been to emulate Cleric - probably too tightly, and now you are drifting into a skewed turn. If you emulated the approach a bit more loosely and single-handedly, letting go of the well-known metaphors and pictures, you would certainly be able to avoid falling in this whole attitude of extreme rigidity, which not only fails to serve your spiritual development, but also forces you to dismiss what you used to appreciate and praise, but now categorize in a bunch, under a “heading”, and speak of with one of your signature voices, your typical mildly disparaging voice: “I think such works can be generally grouped under the heading of 'Goethean phenomenology', which is quite prevalent in our time. It is the sort of pipelines that Matt Segall, Ashton, et al. are generally interested in fashioning as well.”

You also don’t seem to draw any food for introspection from the fact that, to support this attitude, you have to override a huge share of Steiner’s own work (you boldly wrote: “I am opposed to what Steiner is doing in some of his lectures”); you have to ignore Cleric’s explicit intention for the future to compile a list, the list of "our contemporary scientific milestones” to start from there and try to reach “shared understanding and experience of the higher stages of consciousness”; and you have to entirely brush off the life work of Anthroposophists like for instance Dennis Klocek, dismissing his evident capacity to bridge spiritual science through what you derogatorily call “Goethean phenomenology”, as for example demonstrated in this series (at the timestamp, he addresses exactly our question):





I hope you will soon notice that this attitude is neither beneficial nor sustainable, Ashvin, and will adjust the flow accordingly.

[AshvinP]

You also don’t seem to draw any food for introspection from the fact that, to support this attitude, you have to override a huge share of Steiner’s own work (you boldly wrote: “I am opposed to what Steiner is doing in some of his lectures”); you have to ignore Cleric’s explicit intention for the future to compile a list, the list of "our contemporary scientific milestones” to start from there and try to reach “shared understanding and experience of the higher stages of consciousness”; and you have to entirely brush off the life work of Anthroposophists like for instance Dennis Klocek, dismissing his evident capacity to bridge spiritual science through what you derogatorily call “Goethean phenomenology”, as for example demonstrated in this series (at the timestamp, he addresses exactly our question):

It doesn't make you look any less biased, Federica, when you knowingly snip phrases from posts in order to misportray them. As you know, that phrase was qualified by the condition that "what Steiner is doing" is what you imagine it to be. But, he isn't. I have already shown you many times that what you imagine Steiner is doing in some lectures is the result of your straying from the cognitive methodology and reinterpreting everything in light of intellectual combinatorics. You have even characterized Steiner's references to the cognitive methodology scattered throughout those lectures as "empty reminders". Why? Only because those references don't support the narrative that you are so desperately trying to impose on us now.

This is the most troubling aspect of your gradually building misorientation. You are dropping into a worse understanding of "Cleric's intention" than you had a few years ago on that thread, similar to your understanding of "Steiner's intention" in those lectures. You don't seem to realize that Cleric meant 'starting from contemporary scientific milestones' as direct metaphorical portals into higher cognitive experience, even though he spells it out clearly on all of those threads. He writes:

"If we understand this analogy, we should be prepared that in order to understand the nature of light, we’ll have to approach a level of consciousness which by its own nature will give a different way to understand it. We shouldn’t imagine that this higher consciousness will simply give us the ‘right’ theory of light that we’ll then use in our intellectual life. In the same way, becoming lucid in a dream doesn’t provide us with some more fanciful means to understand the ‘dream photons’. Instead, it helps us understand dream light in a new, completely unexpected way. We have to equip ourselves with a similar attitude if we are to approach the true nature of physical light. Our intellect’s thirst for knowledge will be satisfied but not in the way it expects – as some clever arrangement of thoughts about photons... Of course we have said almost nothing about how all this relates to the experience of physical light but we can’t do otherwise than prepare the proper perspective. Otherwise we’ll continually snap back to errors like trying to explain the dream world through interaction of dream photons."

In other words, his intention has little resemblance to what Zajonc was doing in 'catching the light', for example, or the references you keep making to Moore, Brown, et al when asked about what the APs may look like (which you immediately distance yourself from once the errors in their logic are pointed out). It's a completely different intention, moving in a completely orthogonal direction, because he understands the phenomenology of the modern intellect and what that implies. In fact, his latest essays are what that intention looks like. There is no future bridging pipeline he is planning to write that will be completely different. At the end of the last essay, he wrote - "In the next two parts we’ll attempt to show that our modern scientific conceptions, when seen rightly [that is, after experimenting with eight installments of direct cognitive methodology], are far closer than one might expect to what existence feels like in our direct meditative flow-experience." This is what 'starting from the scientific milestones' looks like, but it is exactly these essays that you feel need to be first prepared for with some other pipelining method.

Again, you used to understand all of this better, and even on that thread you remarked to Anthony - "The thought itself of "joining the dots" and the sequential logic it implies, could be quite misleading as a thinking gesture, or at least that's how I intuit it. We should strive for a more holistic, intuitive, feeling-based modus operandi for understanding..." And when you comment on our essays in recent times, after consistently engaging and experimenting with the cognitive methodology, you likewise have a better feel for how it is indispensable and can in no way be substituted with or prepared by the intellect's game of 'joining the dots', whether that is done through Zajonc, Klocek, or anyone else (and I suspect there is now a lot of reinterpreting going on with Klocek's indications in those presentations). But just as we can gradually lose weight when remaining diligent and eating healthy, we can even more rapidly gain it back by straying away from the healthy diet for even a few meals. We can oscillate between the two from one day to the next. That is what is happening now, and I hope you are able to see it eventually and decide that it is more important to course-correct back to a healthy phenomenological diet than to consume decadent AP cakes in hopes of winning a rather meaningless argument on this forum.

The latter is simply an intellectual justification for refusing to take the next step in cognitive development. You may say, for example, "I still find a lot of value in reading the essays and commenting on them, but I don't see myself ever constructing such essays, and rather, I think my focus needs to be on working with and communicating pipelines that engage the reader by starting with considerations about the wider phenomenal flow and how those considerations relate to spiritual ideas." But this overlooks that writing about phenomenology is a critical method for deepening our cognitive experience. It immerses our intuitive navigation in the intimate spectrum of cognitive experience and stimulates our artistic faculty to paint the diverse feelings of that spectrum with our symbolic concepts. Constructing the 'preparatory' APs, on the other hand, immerses us in the complete opposite. Then we fail to recognize that this is the intellect's clever way of justifying an avoidance of the next step. And this is such a basic trap that the intellect falls into. When Eugene, Anthony, Lorenzo, or anyone else speaks about alternative paths to the same goal, the demanding nature of the cognitive method, the inability to connect this with standard scientific ideas, the lack of interest, and so on, it's easy for the rest of us to recognize the rationalization mechanism at work. None of us is immune to this same trap, and we will inevitably fall into it in various ways, for various domains of life experience and our personality that we wish to preserve. The only question is whether we try to remain aware of how these mechanisms shape our intellectual flow, or instead try to justify staying where we are and develop a corresponding antipathy toward anyone who points out what is happening to us.

In any case, I have said all that I care to say on this matter, and I will refrain from responding to the next post on the AP topic. The only exception is if you quote Steiner, Cleric, or me, and continue to misportray what we are saying and implying. In that case, I feel an inner responsibility to correct the record.

[Federica]

It doesn't make you look any less biased, Federica, when you knowingly snip phrases from posts in order to misportray them. As you know, that phrase was qualified by the condition that "what Steiner is doing" is what you imagine it to be. But, he isn't.

It is indisputable that Steiner consistently presented what you call "Goethean phenomenology" for the general public. He did it. And your exact words speak for themselves. Here they are. I didn't distort them, as everyone can check, but you are now repudiating your own words. I had higher expectations from you...

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).

With this, I will stop replying to you, since your attitude is only getting more rigid and actually ugly. At least until you seriously and equanimously consider what I presented today in the post above with Klocek's YT video - which I invite anyone to watch, for at least five minutes from the timestamp.