On the Spiritual Essence of the Catch-22 (Part I)

[Federica]

Can you expand on why you think it is an anomaly? I thought it was a completely expected reaction from someone who has not experienced the intimate reality of their spiritual activity, i.e. the perspective inversion, but rather has become stuck in some version of Goethean phenomenology that only concentrated on perceptual phenomena encompassed within the mind container. We simply can't perceive the depth of inner phenomena, even if it is staring us in the face, until we have the proper living concepts.

Yes. I thought it was agreed that, in order to understand and benefit from something like the Fundamentals of Human Cognition, there are no conceptual pre-requirements. That text is accessible to practically anyone. Of course, the reader needs to have a dissatisfaction with ambient materialism - thus a desire to know beyond matter. True, one should also not be completely flimsy: there’s some intent to invest in an unusual text that requires careful reading. Other than that, the ideal flow is very accessible, which is what makes the text so remarkable. One can be well settled in their mind container, read that, and, as an immediate consequence, start realizing that something out of a blind spot is being uncovered. The curious reader will find the text interesting and thought provoking, at the very least. I thought this much was agreed! So, since Marco is surely not flimsy and surely interested in spiritual facts, there must be some other blockage or anomaly that prevents him from even just finding that text interesting. The reason why it is written the way it is written, is precisely to work around the perspective inversion, or to work around the Catch-22.

[Federica]

So I am having a hard time understanding what this 'pure experimentation' might be. We shouldn't undervalue the fact that Steiner, Cleric, etc. always provide elaborate reasoning and phenomenological illustration with any given exercise, including the vowel exercise, the alien dwelling illustration, etc. That is done for important and indispensable reasons. It's fascinating to consider how every such elaboration can act as a fractal image of a more encompassing phenomenolgy of spiritual activity.

Living thinking simply can't be discovered and explored until we have the proper concepts in place to elucidate its nature, not as dry and external descriptions and models, but as living imaginative symbols that testify to inner movements. We should remember that all of these esoteric approaches were structured very deliberately based on deep intuitive insight. As Cleric said recently:

I think one of the greatest skills when communicating with others about such things is to have deep intuition for the gradient and know where exactly we should exercise a nudge. Otherwise, we often start by explaining our most recent insights, forgetting that many things must be already in place if they could be taken in.

That is something we will all continue learning how to do, of course, and we will certainly fall short of the ideal in many of our attempts. Yet we should also try to pay heed to the Wisdom of prior approaches and not strive to reinvent the wheel each time. If we don't want people to stray into nebulous mysticism or atavistic visionary states, we need to also provide thorough and logical conceptual reasoning surrounding the pictorial exercises. The latter also allows us to remain free and to develop the skills of discernment necessary as we progress deeper into exploring the imaginative soul space.

Pure experimentation would be praticing pictorial thinking with some exercises and finding the concepts as you go. I don’t remember that the vowel exercise was provided with elaborate reasoning. Or if it was, I just couldn't find enough meaning in it, when reading it the first time. Still, the exercise did something, which I realized by doing it. I got a sense of the creative power of thinking. That's the thing. That sense didn’t come from elaborate reasoning first, it came from pure experimentation first. In this sense, it was indeed a discovery and an exploration. A modest one, but still very relevant. So I disagree that the proper living concepts need to be in place, the perspective inverted, etcetera. This is not at all an attempt to reinvent the wheel or a lack of respect to prior approaches. It’s something much smaller. It’s only the observation that a few realizations about one’s own thinking process seem very much at reach, and could be helpful to develop and seize first, so that more motivation for further research can be gained.

[AshvinP]

So I am having a hard time understanding what this 'pure experimentation' might be. We shouldn't undervalue the fact that Steiner, Cleric, etc. always provide elaborate reasoning and phenomenological illustration with any given exercise, including the vowel exercise, the alien dwelling illustration, etc. That is done for important and indispensable reasons. It's fascinating to consider how every such elaboration can act as a fractal image of a more encompassing phenomenolgy of spiritual activity.

Living thinking simply can't be discovered and explored until we have the proper concepts in place to elucidate its nature, not as dry and external descriptions and models, but as living imaginative symbols that testify to inner movements. We should remember that all of these esoteric approaches were structured very deliberately based on deep intuitive insight. As Cleric said recently:

I think one of the greatest skills when communicating with others about such things is to have deep intuition for the gradient and know where exactly we should exercise a nudge. Otherwise, we often start by explaining our most recent insights, forgetting that many things must be already in place if they could be taken in.

That is something we will all continue learning how to do, of course, and we will certainly fall short of the ideal in many of our attempts. Yet we should also try to pay heed to the Wisdom of prior approaches and not strive to reinvent the wheel each time. If we don't want people to stray into nebulous mysticism or atavistic visionary states, we need to also provide thorough and logical conceptual reasoning surrounding the pictorial exercises. The latter also allows us to remain free and to develop the skills of discernment necessary as we progress deeper into exploring the imaginative soul space.

Yes. I thought it was agreed that, in order to understand and benefit from something like the Fundamentals of Human Cognition, there are no conceptual pre-requirements. That text is accessible to practically anyone. Of course, the reader needs to have a dissatisfaction with ambient materialism - thus a desire to know beyond matter. True, one should also not be completely flimsy: there’s some intent to invest in an unusual text that requires careful reading. Other than that, the ideal flow is very accessible, which is what makes the text so remarkable. One can be well settled in their mind container, read that, and, as an immediate consequence, start realizing that something out of a blind spot is being uncovered. The curious reader will find the text interesting and thought provoking, at the very least. I thought this much was agreed! So, since Marco is surely not flimsy and surely interested in spiritual facts, there must be some other blockage or anomaly that prevents him from even just finding that text interesting. The reason why it is written the way it is written, is precisely to work around the perspective inversion, or to work around the Catch-22.
...
Pure experimentation would be praticing pictorial thinking with some exercises and finding the concepts as you go. I don’t remember that the vowel exercise was provided with elaborate reasoning. Or if it was, I just couldn't find enough meaning in it, when reading it the first time. Still, the exercise did something, which I realized by doing it. I got a sense of the creative power of thinking. That's the thing. That sense didn’t come from elaborate reasoning first, it came from pure experimentation first. In this sense, it was indeed a discovery and an exploration. A modest one, but still very relevant. So I disagree that the proper living concepts need to be in place, the perspective inverted, etcetera. This is not at all an attempt to reinvent the wheel or a lack of respect to prior approaches. It’s something much smaller. It’s only the observation that a few realizations about one’s own thinking process seems very much at reach and could be helpful to seize first, so that more motivation for further research can be gained.

Yes, the FoHC is what I mean by elaborate conceptual phenomenology which doesn't work around the perspective inversion but leads right to and through it. It requires initiative, humility, open-mindedness, and precise logical reasoning faculty that can follow the thread of ideas closely and work with the concepts as artistic symbols of deeper intuitive movements in which the reader partakes. It is a fine balance of illustrative exercises and precise conceptual reasoning. Many default assumptions and prejudices about 'how reality works' or 'what thinking is' need to be unwound or at least put on pause to engage the reasoning properly, as the essay itself takes care to outline at the beginning (and in that sense may be more approachable for 'laymen' with some thinking initiative). If that experience is worked with (probably multiple times), then one can gradually start to feel the perspective inverting and the mind container becoming more transparent to holistic spiritual gestures.

On the 'pure experimentation', I would point to this post from Cleric.

Yes, exactly the bolded part. Remember what Steiner explains, for example, about the rose cross meditation. If you just show a picture of it to someone and say: "Here, concentrate on this", it's unlikely that any results will be achieved. RS says that the symbol only has power if we have gone through the process of building it ourselves. Not only its visual aspect but also the feeling. The power of the rose cross is that our living and purified spiritual nature (symbolized by the rose) is grafted upon the the dark cross of our lower self. When we livingly imagine these things, certain currents are set in motion in our soul, even if we perceive nothing. Yet, after the symbol is built we need to hold it quietly in concentration. We no longer move it, morph it and so on but we live in spiritual activity that sustains it through time. Then after we begin to gain consciousness of this temporal flow, we can once again discover the forces that we have stirred while building the image but now from their subtler side, as deeper forces that curve our soul life.
...
For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration.

When did you first do the vowel exercise? I imagine it was after some time of reading through posts on the forum and orienting to what this intuitive thinking path might be about. It took me quite some time of establishing a thinking orientation before I started on any meditative exercises and that's how it should be. Even if the conceptual exploration didn't mean much for us at first, it was still subtly working on our inner organization if we approached it with good faith and some effort. We can present people with a list of exercises like the vowel one and say, "here, try this out and feel the creative power", but that is neither likely to entice them nor is it actually helping them establish a path of freeing their spiritual activity from lower impulses and translating higher gestures into lucid insight. We have to remember that we are only on a somewhat 'strait and narrow' path because we have had the ongoing benefit of all the conceptual and imaginative guidelines, in one form or another, which mitigates the chances of veering off to one side or another, which is always a risk on the inner path.

[Güney27]

But mostly I think the exercises you are referring to find the most value after the perspective shift. We could imagine people doing such exercises and then becoming interested in more rigorous phenomenology. Eventually, they would reach the stage of someone like Marco. Not only does he recognize thinking's active participation in structuring the World Content but he even sees the value in conceiving spiritual depth through the Cosmology of Sri Aurobindo. Nevertheless, his thinking is repelled by the boundary of the Catch-22 and refuses to consider anything that speaks of already crossing that boundary, any spiritual scientific facts that would help orient to the lawful karmic processes at work in a more intimate way. (that reminds me of a paper by Seth Miller that compared the overlaps between Sri Aurobindo and Steiner, which perhaps should be brought to Marco's attention at some point - https://www.academia.edu/190001/Rudolf_ ... Comparison)

One of the things that impressed me the most about Marco is his comment on The Fundamentals of Human Condition, that it was not particularly relevant in his view. That's stupendous! That he is completely insensitive to those key ideas. So I don't know what sort of stage he might have reached, but to me it can't be particularly desirable, if it doesn't allow him to recognize how the key considerations in that opening essay pave and waymark the main walkable path to the one burning topic. I think this is some kind of anomaly, and believe other thinkers would be more able to recognize it relevance (if they were exposed to it). So the "layman" I am talking about is one who would be attracted to the illustrations in the essay, for example. I think that same person could find it intuitively interesting to explore the pictorial character of thinking - not necessarily through something like PoF, or through a cosmology, but through pure experimentation, moved by a dissatisfaction with mainstream intellectualism in tackling the important questions. I don't even want to call that experimentation phenomeno-logy, there is no need to put this label on what could otherwise simply express a practical-spiritual quest.

We should also remember how certain exercises may carry much more meaning and value for us precisely because of the whole effortful process we have gone through to orient to the spiritual depth in an intimate experiential way. PoF and the spiritual scientific research we have explored, whether through Steiner's terminology or the various lenses we have used here on the forum, add a lot of richness and depth to these experiences. For those who have not gone through such a process already, there simply wouldn't be any orientation to what it could mean. It would be felt as acts of arbitrary fantasy that lead further away from 'true reality'.

I am not sure, but my belief at this point is that there is no strict need for added richness and depth, to start with. Only a little bit of guidance is needed, and maybe a bit of intuition. The conceptual orientation to what the exploration could mean also does not seem strictly necessary, as long as a different navigation of the normal thinking flow is experienced and takes shape. Even just the fact that one may discover the pictorial aspect of thinking in much more solid and consistent way than before, is enough. There is no need to experience Steiner's terminology or other lenses', in order to realize that there's something crucial to be further explored there. When I read for the first time about the vowel exercise and I tried it out, I had no understanding of what it meant. But it was still incredibly interesting, in a mysterious, yet experiential way. Indeed, the thought content of the exercises can be felt as arbitrary fantasy, but that's ok, that's even the deal, the agreed expedient to make the pictorial character of thinking stand out. It's a game. Isn't the alien dwelling an arbitrary fantasy, as a thought content? Does that deprive it from its insightfulness? Not only as a metaphor but especially as a thinking exercise.

So it's once again the Catch-22 - for the exercises to provide pictorial thinking value, the person needs to already know why/how it provides value, which means they need to have already exercised their imaginative activity in some way. In the next part, I will try to explore how this can be accomplished through the perspective shift. At the end of the day, it comes down to cultivating moral virtues by which we can gradually release the domineering grasp on thinking-sensory experience and become receptive to how the spiritual Cosmos thinks through us. However, this can't be done in any blind ascetic or moralistic way but should be engaged freely out of deepening analogical knowledge of how the moral-spiritual structures the natural-sensory and the latter feeds back on the former.

Can you expand on why you think it is an anomaly? I thought it was a completely expected reaction from someone who has not experienced the intimate reality of their spiritual activity, i.e. the perspective inversion, but rather has become stuck in some version of Goethean phenomenology that only concentrated on perceptual phenomena encompassed within the mind container. We simply can't perceive the depth of inner phenomena, even if it is staring us in the face, until we have the proper living concepts.

So I am having a hard time understanding what this 'pure experimentation' might be. We shouldn't undervalue the fact that Steiner, Cleric, etc. always provide elaborate reasoning and phenomenological illustration with any given exercise, including the vowel exercise, the alien dwelling illustration, etc. That is done for important and indispensable reasons. It's fascinating to consider how every such elaboration can act as a fractal image of a more encompassing phenomenolgy of spiritual activity.

Living thinking simply can't be discovered and explored until we have the proper concepts in place to elucidate its nature, not as dry and external descriptions and models, but as living imaginative symbols that testify to inner movements. We should remember that all of these esoteric approaches were structured very deliberately based on deep intuitive insight. As Cleric said recently:

I think one of the greatest skills when communicating with others about such things is to have deep intuition for the gradient and know where exactly we should exercise a nudge. Otherwise, we often start by explaining our most recent insights, forgetting that many things must be already in place if they could be taken in.

That is something we will all continue learning how to do, of course, and we will certainly fall short of the ideal in many of our attempts. Yet we should also try to pay heed to the Wisdom of prior approaches and not strive to reinvent the wheel each time. If we don't want people to stray into nebulous mysticism or atavistic visionary states, we need to also provide thorough and logical conceptual reasoning surrounding the pictorial exercises. The latter also allows us to remain free and to develop the skills of discernment necessary as we progress deeper into exploring the imaginative soul space.

Not to negate the weight of the Catch-22, but I believe it applies (not only but) primarily to the rationalist and academically trained mind. For some more independent spirits, I suspect that the discovery of pictorial thinking could support itself as a spiritual entry point - with the help of some simple guidance of the kind that can be conveyed in a book, or video series. This said, I look much forward to your second part and the effect of moral virtues. In my experience, this is a difficult realization, that the nature of reality in inherently moral.

It really applies to anyone who is conditioned to accumulate knowledge within the 'mind container', and that is practically all of us in the Western world, academically trained or otherwise. Pictorial thoughts are still experienced as being encompassed and manipulated within the mind container, so that's why we need the inversion of perspective through which we intuitively experience how the sources of phenomenal reality exist ‘behind’ our mind’s eye and creatively structure our first-person perspective on all phenomenal content. The mind container should start to feel its knowing gestures modulated by a more open-ended domain of mysterious potential. Until that happens, the encompassed thoughts, no matter how pictorial in character, can only be understood at a flattened resolution.

I am not sure what you mean by 'simple guidance'. I would say it needs to be something of the conceptually elaborate sort we find in PoF and Knowledge of Higher Worlds, although that can take many different artistic forms as we have seen on this forum. I think Steiner nearly perfected the guidance on developing moral virtues in the domains of thinking, feeling, and willing, at least within the intuitive thinking path, so it's really just a matter of expressing the same things in different forms.

Ashvin,

I currently reading steiners dissertation and think about the written.

Steiner try’s to create a artificial given, a aggregate of colors, forms and other sensation, that have nothing in Common with another.
Even the notion of sensation is a product of cognitive activity.

By creating this given, isn’t Steiner doing something akin to Kant, when he speaks of the „thing itself“?
Because this given isn’t something which one can experience.

Steiner demonstrates how our thinking isn’t just a copy of a world outside, but that the world becomes only conscious trough the act of cognition.

This could be end up as an abstract model, but that should not lead us any further than other models of cognition.
How can we become conscious of this process?


Do we look at ideas or at objects (: ?

[Federica]

Yes, the FoHC is what I mean by elaborate conceptual phenomenology which doesn't work around the perspective inversion but leads right to and through it. It requires initiative, humility, open-mindedness, and precise logical reasoning faculty that can follow the thread of ideas closely and work with the concepts as artistic symbols of deeper intuitive movements in which the reader partakes. It is a fine balance of illustrative exercises and precise conceptual reasoning. Many default assumptions and prejudices about 'how reality works' or 'what thinking is' need to be unwound or at least put on pause to engage the reasoning properly, as the essay itself takes care to outline at the beginning (and in that sense may be more approachable for 'laymen' with some thinking initiative). If that experience is worked with (probably multiple times), then one can gradually start to feel the perspective inverting and the mind container becoming more transparent to holistic spiritual gestures.

On the 'pure experimentation', I would point to this post from Cleric.

Yes, exactly the bolded part. Remember what Steiner explains, for example, about the rose cross meditation. If you just show a picture of it to someone and say: "Here, concentrate on this", it's unlikely that any results will be achieved. RS says that the symbol only has power if we have gone through the process of building it ourselves. Not only its visual aspect but also the feeling. The power of the rose cross is that our living and purified spiritual nature (symbolized by the rose) is grafted upon the the dark cross of our lower self. When we livingly imagine these things, certain currents are set in motion in our soul, even if we perceive nothing. Yet, after the symbol is built we need to hold it quietly in concentration. We no longer move it, morph it and so on but we live in spiritual activity that sustains it through time. Then after we begin to gain consciousness of this temporal flow, we can once again discover the forces that we have stirred while building the image but now from their subtler side, as deeper forces that curve our soul life.
...
For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration.

When did you first do the vowel exercise? I imagine it was after some time of reading through posts on the forum and orienting to what this intuitive thinking path might be about. It took me quite some time of establishing a thinking orientation before I started on any meditative exercises and that's how it should be. Even if the conceptual exploration didn't mean much for us at first, it was still subtly working on our inner organization if we approached it with good faith and some effort. We can present people with a list of exercises like the vowel one and say, "here, try this out and feel the creative power", but that is neither likely to entice them nor is it actually helping them establish a path of freeing their spiritual activity from lower impulses and translating higher gestures into lucid insight. We have to remember that we are only on a somewhat 'strait and narrow' path because we have had the ongoing benefit of all the conceptual and imaginative guidelines, in one form or another, which mitigates the chances of veering off to one side or another, which is always a risk on the inner path.

Ashvin, well, maybe this discussion is becoming unhelpful. The quote seems off topic to me, at least when it comes to the topic I was trying to explore. "Leads right through" or "works around it" point to one thing, at the end of the day. That is, that essay makes any reader, who bothers to engage with it, advance spiritually. Surely, if someone reads it once, he won't be led through any inversion. Still, something more at hand *will* happen, when the invitation to follow the reasoning and try the exercises is accepted. And I was simply suggesting that these latter results could possibly be worth amplifying. Not through meditation/concentration. This is not what I was talking about and I am sure I made it clear. I first did the vowel exercise the first time I read TCT, not sure exactly when that was, but rather early on, I would say. By the way, contrary to what you are suggesting now, the invitations I was receiving were more than clear in the direction of experimenting, as early as possible. I even remember you were *regretting* that it took you quite some time to start experimenting and doing exercises yourself. Not that "this is how it should be", as you say now. Anyway, clearly, you disagree that some "easier" pictorial thinking exercises at the beginning can increase the odds of getting past the Catch-22. Fair enough. Got it

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

I currently reading steiners dissertation and think about the written.

Steiner try’s to create a artificial given, a aggregate of colors, forms and other sensation, that have nothing in Common with another.
Even the notion of sensation is a product of cognitive activity.

By creating this given, isn’t Steiner doing something akin to Kant, when he speaks of the „thing itself“?
Because this given isn’t something which one can experience.

Steiner demonstrates how our thinking isn’t just a copy of a world outside, but that the world becomes only conscious trough the act of cognition.

This could be end up as an abstract model, but that should not lead us any further than other models of cognition.
How can we become conscious of this process?


Do we look at ideas or at objects (: ?

Guney,

This is a good question. I had a similar discussion with FB/Jeff recently. He felt that what Steiner was doing is misleading because we don't find a 'relationless aggregate' of sensory impressions in our phenomenal experience, but rather all impressions are already united with coherent meaning as soon as we become aware of them. The fundamental reason for this objection is that the text is taken as a theoretical treatise, similar to other modern philosophical works, where states of experience are merely being described with concepts.

That is partly what prompted me to write this article. We can instead understand what Steiner is doing as creating analogical portals for our imaginative activity to explore. The concepts are artistic expressions of higher spiritual gestures that are normally merged together in our consciousness as "sensory experience", together with the emotions and concepts/ideas that give sensory experience its meaning. The way to make this non-abstract is to first really understand it thoroughly. We can approach that understanding, not in a passive and descriptive way, but in more engaged and imaginative way.

This is where analogies become very helpful tools. For ex. the one from the article:

With the application of electrical current at the cathode and anode, water sublimates into hydrogen and oxygen gases. The qualitative properties of the gases cannot be said to resemble those of fluid water in the least. Hydrogen is one of the most flammable gases, which is the polar opposite quality of water that is used to quench flames. The same relation holds between our sensory perceptions and sense-based concepts (water), which are generally interwoven with one another like the H2 and the O in our normal experience, and our imaginative perceptions and ideas (gases) which can be experienced as distinct streams of fiery spiritual activity that are focused and ‘cooled off’ through the lens of our “I” bound up with the neurosensory system. Once that condensation takes place, they appear as fixed perceptions that are already united with some meaning. It is because we normally only awaken at the water stage that we start to assume the meaning was ‘always there’ independently of our spiritual activity.
...
A path of intuitive thinking, such as we find in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, is exactly such an inner electrolysis. It helps us delaminate the normally fused-together components of our mental-sensory representations into their more subtle streams of activity through logically precise imaginative exercises.

Of course, we can approach the same underlying intuition of these higher inner realities from many different angles, with many different analogies, illustrations, real-life examples, etc. One example we have used here is the bistable images - what are the subtle imaginative gestures that are being made to perceive the image one way or the other? It's easier to imaginatively resonate with examples involving ideal perceptions, like images created by humans, rather than natural perceptions like the tree outside. The sensory-ideal coherence of the latter proceeds from much greater intuitive depths.

The consciousness of this subtle spiritual activity can come from nowhere except our consistent and persistent imaginative working through these types of phenomenological explorations, as well as concentrated meditations and prayer. We can study-meditate PoF and the early epistemological works over and over again, or the various essays on this forum. We can set aside a bit of time each day to work with the concentration exercises. We can pray as much as possible. That is the diligent work we need to put in.

[AshvinP]

Yes, the FoHC is what I mean by elaborate conceptual phenomenology which doesn't work around the perspective inversion but leads right to and through it. It requires initiative, humility, open-mindedness, and precise logical reasoning faculty that can follow the thread of ideas closely and work with the concepts as artistic symbols of deeper intuitive movements in which the reader partakes. It is a fine balance of illustrative exercises and precise conceptual reasoning. Many default assumptions and prejudices about 'how reality works' or 'what thinking is' need to be unwound or at least put on pause to engage the reasoning properly, as the essay itself takes care to outline at the beginning (and in that sense may be more approachable for 'laymen' with some thinking initiative). If that experience is worked with (probably multiple times), then one can gradually start to feel the perspective inverting and the mind container becoming more transparent to holistic spiritual gestures.

On the 'pure experimentation', I would point to this post from Cleric.

Yes, exactly the bolded part. Remember what Steiner explains, for example, about the rose cross meditation. If you just show a picture of it to someone and say: "Here, concentrate on this", it's unlikely that any results will be achieved. RS says that the symbol only has power if we have gone through the process of building it ourselves. Not only its visual aspect but also the feeling. The power of the rose cross is that our living and purified spiritual nature (symbolized by the rose) is grafted upon the the dark cross of our lower self. When we livingly imagine these things, certain currents are set in motion in our soul, even if we perceive nothing. Yet, after the symbol is built we need to hold it quietly in concentration. We no longer move it, morph it and so on but we live in spiritual activity that sustains it through time. Then after we begin to gain consciousness of this temporal flow, we can once again discover the forces that we have stirred while building the image but now from their subtler side, as deeper forces that curve our soul life.
...
For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration.

When did you first do the vowel exercise? I imagine it was after some time of reading through posts on the forum and orienting to what this intuitive thinking path might be about. It took me quite some time of establishing a thinking orientation before I started on any meditative exercises and that's how it should be. Even if the conceptual exploration didn't mean much for us at first, it was still subtly working on our inner organization if we approached it with good faith and some effort. We can present people with a list of exercises like the vowel one and say, "here, try this out and feel the creative power", but that is neither likely to entice them nor is it actually helping them establish a path of freeing their spiritual activity from lower impulses and translating higher gestures into lucid insight. We have to remember that we are only on a somewhat 'strait and narrow' path because we have had the ongoing benefit of all the conceptual and imaginative guidelines, in one form or another, which mitigates the chances of veering off to one side or another, which is always a risk on the inner path.

Ashvin, well, maybe this discussion is becoming unhelpful. The quote seems off topic to me, at least when it comes to the topic I was trying to explore. "Leads right through" or "works around it" point to one thing, at the end of the day. That is, that essay makes any reader, who bothers to engage with it, advance spiritually. Surely, if someone reads it once, he won't be led through any inversion. Still, something more at hand *will* happen, when the invitation to follow the reasoning and try the exercises is accepted. And I was simply suggesting that these latter results could possibly be worth amplifying. Not through meditation/concentration. This is not what I was talking about and I am sure I made it clear. I first did the vowel exercise the first time I read TCT, not sure exactly when that was, but rather early on, I would say. By the way, contrary to what you are suggesting now, the invitations I was receiving were more than clear in the direction of experimenting, as early as possible. I even remember you were *regretting* that it took you quite some time to start experimenting and doing exercises yourself. Not that "this is how it should be", as you say now. Anyway, clearly, you disagree that some "easier" pictorial thinking exercises at the beginning can increase the odds of getting past the Catch-22. Fair enough. Got it

Perhaps you can briefly outline what this "easier" approach would be. You mentioned a couple of pictorial exercises and perhaps a book or video series. What does this look like for you? If it amounts to basically a compilation of phenomenological essays (or just one) with exercises interspersed, similar to what I tried to do with the retracing essays, then of course I agree that is a helpful approach. If instead you mean a book that is simply a list of pictorial exercises, then yes I disagree it will be helpful and have offered the reasons why.

I did regret procrastinating for so long on the meditative exercises (like more than a year), but not at all the diligent conceptual exploration which I believe is necessary as a foundation and also as something ongoing the entire time. The persistent conceptual work we invest upfront, provided it is somewhat imaginative and effortful, will 'pay off' a thousandfold for our higher cognitive development. That will also be necessary for translating and sharing the fruits of our intuitive insights with others, which of course is the living 'mechanism' of spiritual evolution.

[AshvinP]

This is where analogies become very helpful tools. For ex. the one from the article:

With the application of electrical current at the cathode and anode, water sublimates into hydrogen and oxygen gases. The qualitative properties of the gases cannot be said to resemble those of fluid water in the least. Hydrogen is one of the most flammable gases, which is the polar opposite quality of water that is used to quench flames. The same relation holds between our sensory perceptions and sense-based concepts (water), which are generally interwoven with one another like the H2 and the O in our normal experience, and our imaginative perceptions and ideas (gases) which can be experienced as distinct streams of fiery spiritual activity that are focused and ‘cooled off’ through the lens of our “I” bound up with the neurosensory system. Once that condensation takes place, they appear as fixed perceptions that are already united with some meaning. It is because we normally only awaken at the water stage that we start to assume the meaning was ‘always there’ independently of our spiritual activity.
...
A path of intuitive thinking, such as we find in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, is exactly such an inner electrolysis. It helps us delaminate the normally fused-together components of our mental-sensory representations into their more subtle streams of activity through logically precise imaginative exercises.

I should add that a key aspect of these analogical tools is that, by thinking through the analogy, we are already living in the same subtle processes that are being illustrated by the analogy. This was hinted in the article:

This function of the spiritual analogy is to help us understand the difference between sensory concepts and more integrated ideas, not by defining that difference for us, but by allowing us the opportunity to become more sensitive to how we accomplish the condensation of intuitive gases into conceptual-sensory water, or the sublimation of the latter into the former, through inner electrolysis. In other words, by vividly working through such analogies, our verbal thinking is redeemed from its ‘truth-killing’ function. The analogical verbal thinking is understood as pointing right back at the intuitive and imaginative activity that is doing the analogizing. In that sense, the spiritual analogy is a recursive imaginative tool that serves to awaken thinking to the ascending and descending, sublimating and condensing, movements of its subtle activity. These deeper fruits of analogies usually don’t ripen until well after they have been worked through - they germinate as seeds within the soil of our imaginative soul life.

That also ties into this current article on the recursive paradox - how to know the subtle 'gaseous' gestures by which we know if our knowing has already condensed those gestures to the water stage? Such knowledge is only possible because reality is only spiritual activity at various scales and therefore our spiritual activity, by which we perceive the analogical images and think about the analogical concepts, is participating in the same creative processes that the analogy is intended to elucidate. We should try to keep this as a feeling in the background of all our analogical and phenomenological explorations. That will naturally bring more life to those explorations and make them less abstract, more intimate.

[Federica]

Perhaps you can briefly outline what this "easier" approach would be. You mentioned a couple of pictorial exercises and perhaps a book or video series. What does this look like for you? If it amounts to basically a compilation of phenomenological essays (or just one) with exercises interspersed, similar to what I tried to do with the retracing essays, then of course I agree that is a helpful approach. If instead you mean a book that is simply a list of pictorial exercises, then yes I disagree it will be helpful and have offered the reasons why.

I did regret procrastinating for so long on the meditative exercises (like more than a year), but not at all the diligent conceptual exploration which I believe is necessary as a foundation and also as something ongoing the entire time. The persistent conceptual work we invest upfront, provided it is somewhat imaginative and effortful, will 'pay off' a thousandfold for our higher cognitive development. That will also be necessary for translating and sharing the fruits of our intuitive insights with others, which of course is the living 'mechanism' of spiritual evolution.

This is a strange question, Ashvin. If you are asking whether I am nonsensical enough to suggest an approach like your retracing and then ask you if you agree, I am obliged to answer that I am not

Again, I don’t have a set idea of what exercises would work best and how to present them, admitting they could help. If I had it, if I was able to create an essay or book about it, I would. As you know well, I'm not. (so what is your question really?)
That’s why I have been hypothetical: “Lately I've been pondering the question: what are some accessible suggestions that could stimulate pictorial thinking in connection with everyday sensory experiences, to make normal cognition more elastic and self-sensitive? Is it possible to disturb the stubborn mind habits and rigidity of concepts with low-maintenance exercises or games? … I am thinking about exercises that invite to picture material objects transforming along extended time lapses, as if to infer their possible paths of transformation in the past and future. … don't you think there should be ways to nudge the pictorial thinking muscles in a way that lays the ground for more conscious work to come?”

[Federica]

Coincidentally (I haven't searched for that) I have come across the following from Steiner, which seems relevant in this discussion (and previous ones) - how, in this time, *the intellect* needs to become the bridge between the spiritual and the material, in freedom.

We know that since the year 1879 the spirits of darkness who are closest to human beings, the spirits belonging to the kingdom of the angeloi, wander about within the human kingdom, because they were thrown out of the spiritual world into the human kingdom and now exist within human impulses, are working through human impulses. I have said that, exactly because of this, beings that are close to man work in an invisible way among human beings, and man is held back from recognizing the spiritual with the intellect through the play of forces of evil. This is again bound up with the task of the fifth post-Atlantean period, because precisely through this many opportunities are given to the fifth post-Atlantean period to lend itself to dark illusions and the like. Man must accustom himself to a certain extent in this period to grasping the spiritual with his intellect. The spiritual will already have been revealed. Because the spirits of darkness were overcome in 1879, more and more spiritual wisdom can flow down from the spiritual worlds. Only if the spirits of darkness had remained above in the spiritual kingdom would they have become a hindrance to this flow. This flow of spiritual wisdom they henceforth cannot hinder, but they can cause confusion and could darken souls. We have often described which opportunities for darkening are exploited. We have already mentioned what arrangements are made to prevent the human being from receiving the spiritual life.

Naturally, all of this cannot give rise to wailing or something of that sort but should strengthen the force and energy of the human soul to approach the spiritual. If in this fifth post-Atlantean period man can achieve what can be achieved through embodying the forces of evil in a good sense, then at the same time something tremendous will be achieved; then this fifth post-Atlantean period will know something for human evolution out of greater ideas than any other post-Atlantean period, yes, than any other period of earthly evolution. Christ appeared, for example, in the fourth post-Atlantean period through the Mystery of Golgotha. Only the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, however, can make this mystery its own through the human intellect. In the fourth post-Atlantean period, human beings could grasp that they possessed something in the Christ impulse that would lead them as souls beyond death. This became sufficiently clear through Pauline Christianity.

Something still more significant, however, will enter the evolution of the fifth post-Atlantean period, in which human souls will recognize that they have in Christ the helper to transform the forces of evil into good. One thing is bound up with this characteristic of the fifth post-Atlantean period, however, one thing that one should inscribe anew every day within the soul. It should never be forgotten, although man is especially inclined to forget this, that man must be a fighter for the spiritual in this fifth post-Atlantean time. He must experience that his forces will weaken if he does not continually hold them in check for the conquest of the spiritual world. Man is given his freedom to the highest degree in this fifth post-Atlantean period! He must endure this. To a certain extent the idea of human freedom must be the testing ground for all that meets man in the fifth post-Atlantean period. If the forces of man should weaken, everything could take a turn for the worse.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/ReapChri ... 19p01.html