Philosophical Speculations

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 3:54 pm "But then, if an inner experience belonging to the Sun patch is indistinguishable from say, the mental image of a coin in my local patch, how do we ever make any useful sense of this condition?"

I'm not sure we are speaking the same language. I'll have to take time and try to understand the meaning behind some of the terms we are using. I don't find anything I've said in the presuppositions of your question and the following. Not blaming you at all. I just realize that unless I can communicate in a basic way to you, you won't have the chance to ask questions that line up with a shared understanding. I'll try to look into this when I can. In short, I'm not sure what I've said that indicates everything is indistinguishable.

OK, then focus on the archetypal plant question - it's the same principal thing.

What I'm asking is very simple and fundamental. Picture the clairvoyant inner flow - in whatever way you conceive it. What makes an inner experience clairvoyant? You gave the example with the hero's breath and the archetypal plant. Within our intellect we summon both these mental images through our thinking/attentional activity. They are just thought images - may or may not relate to something more. Yet in the clairvoyant experience, what quality or whatever, makes the image of the archetypal plant feel different such that you know that you are drawing upon the reality of the Cosmic depth? How do you know that you are not simply dimly summoning your memory images of what you have read from Goethe and in a dazed state say "Yeah, yeah, I see it. The Urpflanze!"? What makes the experience of the Urplfanze exact and true clairvoyant experience? What distinguishes it from a false one, from a hallucination?

The 'seeing' of the archetypal plant is purely intuitive. It can be explicated into patterns, like when Goethe sketched it out; but, and I'm sure you get this, it was a mistake when people took his sketch to suggest that his 'seeing' was of THAT. When we begin to see how the whole is expressing itself through each part/process of the animal, we aren't adding percepts to our field of perception, but we are literally seeing the animal/process anew.

Same as when some great Waldorf teachers begin to be able to perceive the whole expressing itself (or trying to) via the child's finger movements or pauses in speech. This seeing can then be translated into Inspirations and Imaginations (and some people think these are the objective percepts), but the intuitive merging with the process cognitively (and as a whole) is the actual seeing, which can be translated into countless representations, all of which more or less objective depending on their purpose/context.

"How do you know that you are not simply dimly summoning your memory images of what you have read from Goethe and in a dazed state say "Yeah, yeah, I see it. The Urpflanze!"? What makes the experience of the Urplfanze exact and true clairvoyant experience? What distinguishes it from a false one, from a hallucination?"

I don't believe there is absolute certainty. I think that belief itself is a good indicator that of all kinds of possible blind-spots. And I believe there can always be 'more' when it comes to seeing how the whole is manifesting through each 'part'. Goethe was able to allow for a big revel, and this allowed him to understand more about the plant and/or animal and even make some predictions that could be verified. But I don't believe what he 'saw' or what any of us as we begin to seeing the expression of the whole is complete. And as Steiner and many others point out, we have to reenliven the seeing each time; otherwise, it's fine to rely on some memory pictures and representations when talking about it; but those obviously are not the unifying experience itself.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 6:13 pm The 'seeing' of the archetypal plant is purely intuitive. It can be explicated into patterns, like when Goethe sketched it out; but, and I'm sure you get this, it was a mistake when people took his sketch to suggest that his 'seeing' was of THAT. When we begin to see how the whole is expressing itself through each part/process of the animal, we aren't adding percepts to our field of perception, but we are literally seeing the animal/process anew.

Same as when some great Waldorf teachers begin to be able to perceive the whole expressing itself (or trying to) via the child's finger movements or pauses in speech. This seeing can then be translated into Inspirations and Imaginations (and some people think these are the objective percepts), but the intuitive merging with the process cognitively (and as a whole) is the actual seeing, which can be translated into countless representations, all of which more or less objective depending on their purpose/context.

This is all good. I remind that we got here because of the expansion of the patch. Here's a quote:

RS wrote: Now you may ask what significance all this has. It has a great significance, because the present cycle of mankind is such that we attain unadulterated genuine and really true results in spiritual science only when what is of a soul and spiritual nature is lifted out of the head.  So that the clairvoyant aspect of a man observed in the light of spiritual science is this—that the soul-spiritual is for the most part lifted out and, as it were, joined to the forces of the cosmos as if by a spiritually electric contact. (See Diagram I.)

Diagram I

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA161/En ... 27p02.html

I wonder if you can relate to this Intuition? Just by looking at the image, and trying to feel what intuitive inner experience Steiner has tried to artistically express. Later he says "Our own thinking ceases and our head becomes the stage on which the higher hierarchies work". Not only in this lecture but virtually everywhere he speaks about how consciousness has to grow beyond the body. Thus the expansion of consciousness is clearly explicit everywhere.

There are at least two ways in which we can understand the above. One is that Steiner simply surrenders his inner process in meditation and experiences his head as the stage of unknown intuitive forces, yet he experiences them more or less as one could hear voices in their head. In other words, the lines in the image, depicting the expanding head space are simply a back-projection. It's like Steiner feels firmly in his head but says "I think that these thoughts may be coming from the Cosmic spheres. I'll build my science on this premise."

Another way to understand the above is that Steiner has been quite literal in his choice of words. Our consciousness is indeed lifted from the bounds of the body, it expands and joins with the spheres where we live with the Macrocosmic intuitive intents of the hierarchies, and these can be followed as condensing (coming into focus) into human-head-scale mental images. In this case there's no back-projection from the head toward the supposed spheres but our intuitive spirit expands and finds its higher existence there, experiencing the condensation of mental images toward the head region (so in a sense, there's real forward-projection from the Cosmos toward the head).

Can you relate to something like the second option? Or you would rather consider that the only certain fact is that we experience intuitive thoughts in our head region (thus no expansion), while any intuition about spheres and hierarchies is only a kind of back-projection?

"Another way to understand the above is that Steiner has been quite literal in his choice of words."

I think most of us are drawn to Steiner (and other teachers like him) because they give us artistic images to work with and we find our own way into those images. I've been to countless Steiner study groups, so I know the joy of reading such passages, meditating on them and then having a community of good people who also are relating to them. I'm very aware of how wonderful that all is.

Also, I think Steiner took his head quite literally in that his view is that heads and livers and arms are actual objects. I obviously know he didn't mean this in a materialistic frame. But he was often very clear that he saw the head as an ontological reality that related to thinking. From within that frame (which is very deeply entwined kind of presupposition with real power), when one begins to experience real shifts, it will need to be experientially translated in that context. Hence, of course it might express itself as directly 'observing' that we are awake outside of our body/head. If somebody doesn't experience the head as an ontological reality in that way, they will necessarily translate their experiences of these shifts in cognition differently. They will not perceive their thinking freeing itself from their brain. And that's okay, too. If they can give a rich artisitic description of the process, they might have students who more adjacent to that starting point. No point in both groups arguing about the actual nature of 'the head' if they feel they are making great progress in their way. And most folks are busy enough with one basic frame of living to begin studying the translitive process itself that is operating in any phenomenological unfolding. I ultimately believe Anthroposophy is attempting to become centered in direct understanding of this process, rather than conforming to the specifics that Steiner generated in that life. But that doesn't stop me from cheering on any and all efforts of people to begin seeing the etheric body of the plant when looking at the seed. I have my reasons for doubting that we are going to ever see a great increase in that capacity; but I feel fairly confident that we will have a science in which more and more people will direclty 'see' the seed/plant/whatever in it's 'spiritual' reality. And, to boot, we might have a time in which various streams that never really take off do indeed go through a slight budding. The version of Anthroposophy that is still being practiced might be such a stream.

I have no problem understanding that Steiner was trying to give words to a real experience. I have no problem realizing why his students can go very deeply into these images. Even if they don't become 'clairvoyant', very real and often useful shifts are happening in how they cognize and perceive. There is deep value in such dedication and efforts. Same goes for any wisdom tradition that cares more deeply about the work to transform experience.

"Or you would rather consider that the only certain fact is that we experience intuitive thoughts in our head region (thus no expansion), while any intuition about spheres and hierarchies is only a kind of back-projection?"

I think you might be conflating what has been said earlier about 'patches' with some more literal notion of stretching out a so-called 'patch' to include more content. I say we drop it. I've tried to make clear what I mean by 'patch' and I don't think it matters in the idea you're wanting to get across about thinking getting outside the brain.

Steiner was part of a tradition that had deeply condensed ideas and notions regarding hierarchies of beings. When we read his early lectures in praise of the core texts in Theosophy, it is clear that he was deeply aware of this tradition by that point. I think of traditions as complex and powerful lenses. I'm not surprised that somebody from the Theosophical tradition might translate a certain kind of objective interaction into a certain kind of percept, whereas a person from another tradition/practice would translate the same objectivity into other percepts. Often, even across these differences, they can recognize an overlap; each tends to think their 'perception' is a bit more objective than the others. That makes sense.

So I would simply reduce Steiner's experiences to retroactive-projections, as if it is just an outer little picture that he drapes upon reality. I think they are the very objective means by which he was capable of finding the interaction itself.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 10:28 pm "Or you would rather consider that the only certain fact is that we experience intuitive thoughts in our head region (thus no expansion), while any intuition about spheres and hierarchies is only a kind of back-projection?"

I think you might be conflating what has been said earlier about 'patches' with some more literal notion of stretching out a so-called 'patch' to include more content. I say we drop it. I've tried to make clear what I mean by 'patch' and I don't think it matters in the idea you're wanting to get across about thinking getting outside the brain.

Steiner was part of a tradition that had deeply condensed ideas and notions regarding hierarchies of beings. When we read his early lectures in praise of the core texts in Theosophy, it is clear that he was deeply aware of this tradition by that point. I think of traditions as complex and powerful lenses. I'm not surprised that somebody from the Theosophical tradition might translate a certain kind of objective interaction into a certain kind of percept, whereas a person from another tradition/practice would translate the same objectivity into other percepts. Often, even across these differences, they can recognize an overlap; each tends to think their 'perception' is a bit more objective than the others. That makes sense.

So I would simply reduce Steiner's experiences to retroactive-projections, as if it is just an outer little picture that he drapes upon reality. I think they are the very objective means by which he was capable of finding the interaction itself.

Thank you FB, for this clear answer.

To be honest, it's difficult for me to comprehend how you may have any optimism about humanity's future development in this direction. The impulse of Spiritual Science signifies the moment of humanity's evolutionary development, where human consciousness at large (not only initiates in the mystery schools) can begin to emerge from Plato's cave (the cave is really a metaphor for our soul patch). By 'emerging' I don't mean that our patch moves from one floor to another but that the consciousness of man grows to find its native existence as intrinsic to the Cosmic depth. The same depth that we expand into every night or in the period between death and birth. Note how this is a different way of grasping the whole and the parts. The shadows in the cave (corresponding to our intuitive thoughts and their images) indeed correspond to the bizarre ways in which the Cosmic whole projects into the patch parts. Yet we still intimately experience ourselves as a part. It is different when consciousness gradually expands into the whole and then feels it as inner reality on a Cosmic scale, analogously to the way our intellectual life feels as inner reality at the head scale.

This impulse for growing into the Cosmos cannot be immediately taken everywhere and by everyone equally. For many, it consists in slightly lifting our head, noticing inexplicable experiences, and concluding: "The spiritual world is a soup of potential where anything goes. Our encaved existence is the kernel that we enrich with that potential. Let's simply draw upon that potential and embellish our encaved existence such that we can live in peace." In other words, when hearing about the spiritual Cosmic strata having certain regularities, lawfulness, intuitive life, etc., one says "Well, this is just an interpretative framework for the shadows on the walls, heavily influenced by the traditions of old. This is how the ancients (and those who followed in their footsteps) back-projected their cave-bound intuitions and imagined a Divine world and beings within the Cosmos encompassing the cave. We know better now. We lucidly recognize our back-projections and do not fall for the trap of seeking a calf under the bull."

With that said, I wonder if you entertain at least a possibility (maybe you can assign certain percentage in your humorous style ) that maybe you have simply not followed the Initiatic path beyond the cave? Are you absolutely certain that, for example, that what Steiner communicated is nothing more than an interpretative framework that back-projects the shadow dance on the cave's wall into speculative metaphysical ideas that try to imagine order in the soup of potential where there's none?

I'm asking these questions without expecting answers, even though I admit I'm curious about whether you at least theoretically recognize the possibility that maybe you have preferred the convenience of the cave-patch and assumed that the world-whole beyond it can only be known as far as its soup-nature impinges in bizarre ways as shadows. This is convenient because it saves us from even considering that the being of man can have lucid conscious existence within the Cosmic depth - something which would require lengthy inner development, perfecting the constellations of the lotus flowers, and so on. Could it be that we simply say "If I don't grasp my inner being as extending into the Cosmos, where I would live in spheres weaved of the musically lawful ideal activity of beings, then there's simply no such thing, and anyone claiming the opposite is simply back-projecting shadows."?

"To be honest, it's difficult for me to comprehend how you may have any optimism about humanity's future development in this direction."

By the way, Cleric, at this point your use of 'patch' is so divergent from how Ashvin and I were just beginning to fashion it that I'll refrain for now from trying to sort that out. I know there is poetry and meaning in all of our words, but I don't want to give the impression that I'm tracking 'patch' in any technical sense, and I don't feel the need to have you or Ashvin track my meaning.

The difficulty you are experiencing seems natural to me. The optimism you experience is grounded in how you understand the relation between countless specific other ideas, experiences, concepts, traditions, all baked together in knowledge and continued development. Not being able to find optimism in what you've understood from me so far is just one way of marking your curiosity, which may lead to more questions or might lead to more explications on your part about how you generate optimism via your understandings. It seems both have happened.

Your first two paragraphs instance kinds of experiences that I find happening in very grounded contexts of living via different peoples and traditions. I certainly know it well from my Anthroposophical contexts. I know that language and much of the basic experiences and how they are framed.

"With that said, I wonder if you entertain at least a possibility (maybe you can assign certain percentage in your humorous style ) that maybe you have simply not followed the Initiatic path beyond the cave? Are you absolutely certain that, for example, that what Steiner communicated is nothing more than an interpretative framework that back-projects the shadow dance on the cave's wall into speculative metaphysical ideas that try to imagine order in the soup of potential where there's none?"

No offense taken, but I have addressed this and it seems to be dropped and taken back into a very flat commentary on my position. I will always take the most responsiblity for that, but I also know that I can't force anybody to understand me immediately or to track those aspects of meaning that will address most of their confusions. Please re-read what I've said about Steiner's brillance and how I see it falling on a spectrum, even allowing that areas in which I think he might be most distortive, even those, can't be reduced to flat 'projections'. Your question assumes much of the opposite of what i've said directly. I know that is not your fault. I know you are working hard to track my most basic statements. I'm doing the same. We can't expect to instantly understand each other. But, considering that I have just recently directly spoken on this, I probably need to step back before restating my thoughts about why Steiner's work should not be reduced to simple projections or that just that he's very smart and dresses up his insights spiritual garmets.

"I'm asking these questions without expecting answers, even though I admit I'm curious about whether you at least theoretically recognize the possibility that maybe you have preferred the convenience of the cave-patch and assumed that the world-whole beyond it can only be known as far as its soup-nature impinges in bizarre ways as shadows."

I think Ashvin understands me a bit better. Since he knows your language, he might be able to suggest why the above comments by you assume much of what I don't. Maybe not. But he has recently demonstrated at least seeing past this idea that just because I have another vantage point, I'm not suggesting a 'soup-nature' of science. I don't find my view or current experiences particularly 'convenient' but I thikn I understand why tha word came up for you in the context of your experience of the hard work it takes to become initiated into a more exact clairvoyance. I thikn I understand why other ways would seem more soupy and less exact, a bit more easy, maybe more sloppy, certainly less engaged with the fluid details of the spiritual world that become open to those who walk strictly on the path of spiritual science in your manner. An adult ape is much more 'developed' than a human embryo, and I can fully understand why the massively increased differentiations and behavioral-intelligent capacities could be seen as more defined and less soupy. "Developed" was in quotes for all the reasons stated above regarding how much one's frame determines how one will experience other people's articulations and understandings.

But, all this said, nothing I'm saying should suggest that your experiences are wrong or need to be modified in any way. I imagine that your path this time around should be to only increase the depth and breadth of your spiritual experiences, especially as they confirm themselves as expresses of geniune spiritual science in line with the stream that Rudolf Steiner initiated.

"Could it be that we simply say "If I don't grasp my inner being as extending into the Cosmos, where I would live in spheres weaved of the musically lawful ideal activity of beings, then there's simply no such thing, and anyone claiming the opposite is simply back-projecting shadows."?"

For me this would be translated as acknowleding that the degree to which somebody's experience is not coming from a union with reality is the degree to which any claims they make about objective reality are insubstantial.

Somebody might be experiencing and speaking from a deep unity with reality and, yet, they might not fully grasp this, thereby they themselves would inaccurately characterize their experience as less objective than it really is. The opposite is probably the more obvious cases we experience. An experience that one person characterizes as 'extending their inner being into the Cosmos' might be both experienced and explicated via other symbols that don't sound anything like 'extending' or 'being' or even 'cosmos'. However, my hunch is that if we spend enough time carefully listening to each of those people, we'll find that there is very powerful overlaps in what they are talking about, despite the fact that on the surface it will sound to each like the other is just soupy or some other description that makes good sense from within that frame.

So, yes, I do think we can say that to the degree that somebody is making truth claims that aren't coming from within reality itself those claims are untrue. That can be anywhere from 1% to 99% in my opinion.

findingblanks wrote: ↑Wed Oct 09, 2024 4:02 pm " The above should also hint at how our phenomenological method, which starts with more proximate curvatures of experience, can expand and overlap with participating in the experimentation of spiritual science at a level that gives true knowledge of the Cosmos and its manifold objective relations."

Right, the reason I don't say that spirtiual science is a sham is because I believe it is an actual process. What you've said above doesn't conflict with anything I've said. If it seems so, it's simply because we are still trying to understand each other.

Maybe this is just about degrees. The fact that I don't believe the experiential aspects of spiritual science, down the road, will match up with what we read in much of Steiner might be all this is about.

You might be somewhat happy that I acknowledge Steiner was having objecive experience. You might be puzzled why I would think it was all over the map in terms of degree. And, of course, we'd both acknowledge that thousands of his claims live in the area where most folks say, "We'll have to wait and see." I'm fine with all of that.

If the real issue is that I simply don't see him having 'exact clairvoyance', I'm not sure we need or want to dive into that. The only way I can see that being interesting at all is if you have your own reasons for spotting patterns of errors in his work and you'd like to explore your ideas on that. If your basic view is, "Of course he could get some things wrong and he wasn't perfect, but considering the massive increase in objectivity he offered, it's hard to know why we should put too much attention on trivial aspects of his work," I respect that. If you don't have your own passionate hunches regarding Steiner's blind-spots, I'm not sure if this conversation is where we should talk about why I think Steiner kicked off something that was mutated in ways that will need (and are being) to be carried forward in ways that will appear drastically different.

I'm happy to talk about phenomenology, to talk about what we notice inwardly while meditating, what it is like to 'subtract' concepts from perceptions. If the desire is to switch to a conversation that investigates a difference of opinion regarding Steiner's objectivity, maybe we stop for a bit and we can consider how we'd like to frame that in a a new post?

I get where you're coming from here and, to be clear, the discussion of Steiner is not about debating what he got right or wrong, but it is only about better orienting toward what sort of inner knowledge we can attain through the concentrated phenomenological method. I am probing to see what sort of implicit assumptions may be at work as numbing agents, because we have to admit there are some clear discrepancies when you imply, for example, that spiritual beings were not active in the primordial Earthly development of the kingdoms (and that neither did Steiner think they were while developing his foundational epistemology). We have had many similar discrepancies in our previous discussions and there are hints in this one too. 

I can't help but notice you often speak of Old Saturn, Sun, Moon, astral, etheric, the hierarchies, karma/reincarnation, etc. as if they are somewhat antiquated 'new age' notions, borrowing the lenses of ancient esoteric traditions and cosmologies, and mostly irrelevant to our scientific understanding of the ideal Cosmos. I am still not sure whether you even acknowledge the existence of higher-order spiritual beings whose essential inner nature is a much more purified and encompassing experience of what we also experience in our intuitive/intentional gestures and movements, or rather they are more akin to electromagnetic fields imbued with some kind of basic awareness. Now I completely understand that many people within Anthroposophy can confuse these artistic symbols for abstract representations of 'ontological structures' - some separate dimensions/realms with their own parallel beings and 'laws' - and therefore be led away from phenomenological realities, but that doesn't stop us from orienting properly to what they symbolize in the living flow of cognitive experience.

Are these the kind of aspects that you don't think will 'match up' with what we discover through spiritual phenomenology 'down the road'? That it will turn out there is no need to postulate previous planetary incarnations or subtle bodies and so forth? Again, I'm trying to orient better toward where the discrepancy is, and why what you notice inwardly while meditating seems to be severed from these symbolic concepts of spiritual science, ancient scriptures, and mythologies even though the latter are precisely the inner constraints-patches that we should become more sensitive to through meditation. In other words, this inner phenomenological method leads us to discover the realities of these spiritual symbols, through an inner experience no less lucid and precise than our experience of mathematical reasoning, even if we are not particularly aiming for that.

We don't see the bodies, etc. as exotic visions that would no doubt be conditioned by our expectations and lenses, but we understand intuitively (like we understand our own thought flow) and immediately how Steiner, the ancient myths, the scriptures, etc. were describing the exact same inner initiatory experiences when we revisit all of their symbolic descriptions. That doesn't mean we are discovering some static substructure of experience that has remained the same for thousands of years, but we certainly recognize how there are relatively stable features of the inner landscape that shape and constrain our ordinary condensing flow of mental images by which we intuitively orient to our existence. In other words, we reach the true experiential essence of 'original participation' which lifts us beyond our heads, our mental images of lifeless objects, processes, fields, etc., and into the realms more faithfully depicted by our ancestors as the living and weaving activity of be-ings who imbued the Earth and humanity with concrete tasks and capacities to fulfill those tasks. 

Some may say this is Anthropomorphic thinking and simply 'back-projects' our experience of learning skills and cooperatively working with other people to fulfill noble tasks onto the ideal Cosmos, but couldn't it be that the latter is a dim, shadowy, and rare experience of what is continuously unfolding in the higher worlds? Couldn't it be that, for example, this clip below resonates deeply and stirs our inner soul movements with feelings of optimism, heroism, excitement, anticipation, admiration, moral courage, and love precisely because it speaks to us of a much more purified and expansive spiritual reality that is our native existence and is 'projected-forward' into our mental images and feelings, and which we can resurrect through our concentrated phenomenology? 





PS - this clip also speaks to the 'paradoxical' nature of imagining a 'relationless aggregate' and so on In other words, such exercises are about stretching our spiritual activity in unfamiliar directions so it can transcend its head-confined existence of sharply contrasted mental images and reach higher domains of meaningful potential where holistic and selfless spiritual activity reigns.