Güney27 wrote: ↑Wed Sep 02, 2026 7:40 pm
I don’t think debating with people on the internet achieves anything. I have never had good experiences with it. In the end, it mostly came down to intellectual combat or doubt. However, it depends entirely on the intention. I don't think any philosophy can lead someone to suddenly read Steiner and become an anthroposophist. Neither Cleric's essays nor yours can do that. Nowadays, I believe much more that these are deeply personal matters related to interests, needs, and desires that are not purely intellectual. In the end, you don't convince anyone who isn't already close to you anyway if one even attempts to do so.
I think Tomberg is right: when it comes to spiritual or religious topics, it is about personal certainty, not universal certainty, and this happens primarily through the heart. Reflecting on the past five years, it wasn't just Steiner's philosophical work that kept me engaged with these topics, but interests, needs, hopes, etc. The science of spiritual breathing is inherently different from physical science or philosophy. Perhaps it is even wrong to debate; at the very least, I have noticed within myself how corrupting it can feel to do so.Perhaps I am wrong, I do not know. But I believe it primarily concerns the heart, not primarily thought. If one lacks the aspiration to strive for religious or spiritual questions, one can always adopt the perspective of saying: "It may be that this knowledge exists, but as long as it cannot be intellectually proven to me with absolute clarity that this knowledge is more than personal experience, more than ecstasy, I will not pursue it." Doesn't that somehow reminiscent of the people who wanted Jesus to come down from the cross so they could believe in him? But i cant give your an answer yet.
As mentioned, I think you have accurately assessed the deeper obstacles which could be generally grouped as a lack of burning interest to explore the inner volume. The primary motivation should not be so much about convincing others to pursue the inner path, but stimulating
our own inner development. An important consideration is that we need to continually articulate our deeper intuitions to refresh, refine, and expand our inner orientation. It's always tempting to feel that this orientation will remain stable at its current state without too much effort to express the inner dynamics. Yet we all know the feeling of when the latter seems to fade away, become more remote, more difficult to focus on, and so on, after we are immersed in ordinary sensory and intellectual life for a while. The deeper inner dynamics simply don't imprint themselves into our physical organization in the same way as the sensory dynamics or intellectual inquiries that are extrapolated from those dynamics. Thus, our concepts that focus these deeper intuitions can't become external supports in the same way as ordinary philosophical-scientific concepts, such that we can memorize and play them back later to quickly regain orientation to the meaning we were exploring. Instead, we need to put some effort into going through the same inner movements we went through when originally exploring the concepts.
Such articulations don't need to be conveyed to other people at first, although it's easier to find motivation when in dialogue with others. And if we are going to articulate these inner experiences anyway, then sometimes (the vast majority of articulations we should likely hold back) sharing them at least gives an opportunity for seeds of inner stimulation to be planted. As has been remarked before, if we focus on what Tomberg
did, we see this articulation in practice. He wrote one of the most comprehensive tomes on esoteric wisdom, connecting it with modern philosophical-scientific knowledge and everyday life experience. And that was the fruit of many decades of articulating his mystical, gnostic, and magical researches to others. Most of us simply cannot compare ourselves with late Tomberg who withdrew into mystical contemplation, but are much more like early Tomberg who needed to explore and articulate the precise spiritual scientific dynamics for quite a few years.
So I think that is always an unstated background context of these discussions. It is why we strive to articulate the inner dynamics in many varied ways, never settling too rigidly into a certain framework, system, or terminology. If it were only about convincing others, we could hammer them with the same conceptual presentations over and over. The latter would be more akin to the approach of academic philosophers like Kastrup and Essentia Foundation, who hope to 'convince' the physicalists that consciousness is fundamental. If that's what we end up doing, then I think you are correct that our time is better spent elsewhere.
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Here are some additional comments from a
separate article. It seems to me that JW uses 'physical' as more like 'bodily', i.e., as whatever interfaces consciousness with a shared space of substantial experience, instead of only as gross material substance. I am hoping that can be leveraged to point toward deeper scales at which conscious activity can interface with shared experiential spaces.
A: JW,
I believe your post raises the possibility, even the likelihood, that the boundary between pre-articulate 'experience' (using that term very broadly and loosely, as a symbol for unfamiliar domains of entangled states) and articulated reality is fluid, flexible, malleable, depending on the state of the experimenter. One experimenter may feel forced to manipulate already articulated mental images and at best only infer the pre-articulate domain of entanglement, and another may find leeway to play along the boundary of articulation. Could yet another learn to play within what feels as a pre-articulated domain of entangled states from the ordinary articulated perspective, by becoming more and more self-conscious of what it is always doing?
I have written about this possibility in a few essays and am curious what you generally think about it. Could this become a concrete experience that can be explored and fleshed out further, not necessarily by adding additional articulations, but by shifting our entire perspective on the purpose such articulations have always served? For example: [essay quote]
JW: I think your question reaches something important, although I would formulate the boundary somewhat differently.
The boundary between the prearticulate and articulation is certainly not fixed, but neither is consciousness itself. Consciousness is an evolving physical event, and I see no reason to regard its present human form as its culmination. A primitive single-celled organism could no more have anticipated poetry or music than it could have anticipated quantum mechanics. Yet all of these eventually emerged through the continuing evolution of living organization. We should therefore be cautious about turning the present limits of human consciousness into limits upon what consciousness might ever become.
This is one reason I find your suggestion of learning to “play along the boundary of articulation” intriguing. Different modes of consciousness already gather differently. Dreams, poetry, music, painting, affect and disciplined attention do not articulate experience in the same way as conceptual reason. Poetry, for example, can hold ambiguities and tensions together that propositional thought tends to resolve. Music can gather relations without first converting them into concepts. These are not simply inferior or less precise versions of rational articulation. They disclose differently.
But even the image of a boundary can mislead if it suggests two separate realms. We never cease to be within the prearticulate itself. Consciousness does not stand on one side of a divide and attempt to peer across at something inaccessible on the other. Articulation occurs within what it articulates. The cut produces distinctions within that event; it does not establish an ontological separation that was already there.
This is also why I do not regard the prearticulate as another version of Kant’s noumenon. We are not epistemological spectators barred from reality-in-itself. We physically belong to what we are attempting to articulate. Articulation is itself an event within it.
Nor does this mean that articulation tells us nothing about the prearticulate. Quite the contrary. A fuller articulation can disclose something of its character while never exhausting it. The fact that every articulation involves a reduction does not make every articulation equally reductive. Some preserve more multiplicity than others. A poem can gather what its paraphrase destroys. A musical work can sustain tensions that conceptual explanation resolves. What is disclosed remains partial, but partial does not mean arbitrary.
Quantum mechanics matters to me in much the same way. Superposition, entanglement and complementarity do more than demonstrate the failure of certain concepts. The particular character of those failures tells us something. When separability, locality, determinate identity and ordinary causal description repeatedly fail at the quantum boundary, I do not think we are entitled to turn those failures into a positive metaphysical description of what ultimately exists. But neither are they empty. They disclose negatively something about what our ordinary articulation has reduced away.
That is where I find your question about the possible development of consciousness particularly interesting. If consciousness has already undergone radical transformations during the history of life, why assume that our present manner of making the cut is final? Perhaps further development could produce forms of consciousness capable of gathering multiplicities that we presently collapse immediately into determinate objects, identities and relations. I have no idea what such consciousness would be like, and that ignorance seems philosophically important rather than embarrassing.
So I would slightly change your image of moving toward the prearticulate. We are already within it and have never left it. What can change is the manner in which it becomes articulated through us. The boundary moves because consciousness and its modes of articulation change.
This is also where I would remain cautious about some of the language you subsequently introduce. “Soul landscape,” “alternative histories,” “collective destinies,” and particularly “micro-astrology” seem to me to begin determining positively what this openness might disclose. My inclination is to resist that move. It risks constructing another metaphysical architecture precisely where the experience is asking us to remain open.
I therefore take something slightly different from quantum mechanics. It does not provide me with a model of a hidden reality that consciousness might eventually learn to navigate. It shows experimentally that the forms of articulation we inherited from classical experience cease to be adequate at certain boundaries. That failure is itself a disclosure.
Perhaps, then, what you call learning to “play along the boundary” would mean cultivating the ability to remain within that disclosure without immediately forcing it back into a determinate conceptual order. Aesthetic experience already suggests that this is possible. Evolution suggests that we should not presume to know how much further it might go.We do not encounter the prearticulate from outside. Articulation is the prearticulate becoming partially articulate from within itself. And there is no reason to assume that the particular way it presently becomes articulate through us is the last word.
A: I sense great alignment with what you have expressed here. I think the central question then becomes whether our poetic consciousness can be integrated with our scientific-philosophical consciousness, so that we no longer need to oscillate between esthetically experiencing the prearticulate states and positively describing that experience with precise images and concepts. In a sense, we are both already doing that to some extent in this discussion, as we leverage the QM experimental observations to more precisely flesh out the inner dynamics that make our ordinary capacities for observation, thinking, etc. possible, but cannot be found contained within or produced out of the articulated content of our perceptions and thoughts.
The difference between us and the QM researchers is that we are more conscious of this relationship and purpose, while they only seek to 'explain' the articulated results, at best imagining they only relate to the participation of some hypothetical 'consciousness' or 'observer'. . The scientists may play along the boundary in various physical experiments, but they aren't aware of what this intimate boundary signifies. Our concepts only aim to further refine the inner relationship we intuitively experience and (hopefully) never settle into some rigid framework or terminology that purports to define or explain that relationship. Can we become even more conscious of what we are doing to become philosophically-scientifically and esthetically aware of this relationship?
This question leads to the question of whether the 'future' evolved potential of consciousness already exists, in some sense. I like how you stated the issue with respect to QM interpretations:
"Delayed-choice experiments intensify the difficulty because our ordinary causal language insists upon reconstructing a temporal narrative: the photon must already have been a wave or a particle, must already have taken one path or both paths, and the later experiment therefore must somehow have changed what happened earlier.But those “musts” belong to us. They express our demand that an articulated classical history exist prior to the conditions under which that history becomes determinate."
In a similar sense, we can say the bodily event through which, from our articulated perspective, more evolved and integrated forms of consciousness can be accessed in the future are already germinally present. It is only our demand, rooted in our intuition of already articulated contents, that these forms must be separated out into a linear sequence from past to future, an articulated classical history of consciousness. Because of that, we always tend to assume the new forms will arrive down the road, and for now, we can only play with the familiar forms of consciousness in slightly new ways. We become wary of making any positive statements about the truly new forms. It becomes like the donkey chasing the carrot tied to its head which it can never reach: the new forms are already present, but to disclose them we need to become more and more conscious of the entangled states we are already participating in and which make our ordinary articulations possible.
These 'future' bodily events could be said to function at deeper scales. The bodily organizations that reflect or articulate holistic conscious experience can become more integrated and unfold their functions from within new 'boundaries' or thresholds. These are commonly referred to as 'subtle bodies' in esoteric literature. In that sense, there is never some free-floating consciousness without a bodily-energetic organization, but the latter itself becomes more like what we consider 'consciousness' from our articulated perspective. Instead of only following existence insofar as it flashes together with our neural firings, our palette of holistic ideas becomes a mirror for our deeper conscious activity (which we normally experience as dreaming or dreamless sleep). This is precisely about remaining within the space of pre-articulate disclosure without forcing it into a determinate conceptual order. The concepts we later use to describe the experience become more like the colors a painter may use to express what lives in their imagination, or the words of the poet. Except now we are painting the experience of very precise and lawful inner dynamics, instead of only nebulous esthetic feelings.
JW also posted this comment on the last Chess essay:
Much of what you describe concerning meditation is surprisingly close to my own experience. I have meditated for nearly forty years, and that experience has been formative for my thinking, although I use a very different vocabulary. I have tended to describe meditation as widening the aperture: loosening the habitual reductions through which consciousness makes a determinate world and becoming receptive to what appears without immediately forcing it into concepts. In such moments I do not experience myself as a detached subject contemplating an external object, but something closer to an energetic entanglement with existence itself.This may explain why I find so much in your essay familiar despite our very different philosophical languages. What you describe as loosening or redirecting soul flows I tend to understand as relaxing reductions and allowing a broader gathering. Neither formulation need imply that ordinary experience is false. Rather, ordinary consciousness is highly selective. It must be. What we call a stable world requires innumerable exclusions and determinations. Meditation can loosen that selectivity and allow relations ordinarily suppressed by the cut to become experientially available.Where I remain more cautious than you is in naming what becomes available when the aperture widens. My experience of meditation has actually reinforced my reluctance to do so. The more the usual conceptual differentiations loosen, the less justified I feel in converting what is encountered into a determinate ontology—whether of Matter, Consciousness, soul, archetype, or anything else. The experience discloses something; I have no doubt of that. But disclosure need not entail exhaustive determination of what has been disclosed.Perhaps our difference, then, is smaller than our vocabularies initially make it appear. We both seem interested in what becomes possible when the habitual organization of experience loosens. You are more willing to articulate positively the landscape that then appears. I tend to remain closer to the opening itself—to what I call the prearticulate—and to ask how much can be gathered without prematurely reducing it again.