Güney27 wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2024 3:50 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Jul 13, 2024 1:25 pm
Cleric K wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2024 4:01 pm
This sounds pretty good and concise, Ashvin. It really targets the cognitive center that we also try to. Is the rest of the book good?
Cleric,
I am still trying to decide that. I can say that the rest isn't
bad so far
(I am about 40% through)
I feel that there is not much explication in the way of practice, techniques, and hints for 'pure perception' or pure thinking, but it is more a brief discussion of what a practice might look like followed by a more lengthy discussion of what can result from that practice. The results are described pretty abstractly with spiritual terms from my perspective.
On the other hand, I found some other books by him, that were originally lectures, to be quite helpful. I am currently reading these:
Spiritual Science in the 21st Century: Transforming Evil, Meeting the Other, and Awakening to the Global Initiation of Humanity -
https://a.co/d/cRNoYZ8
(this one has some fascinating discussion of 20th century philosophy and its relation to modern initiation, particularly French postmodernism)
Jerusalem (quoted to Anthony on the other thread)
Ashvin,
I have that book since 2022.
I didn’t read it fully because at that time I couldn’t understand it in depth.
It seems that he starts with explaining that ordinary cognition consists of a synthesis of thinking and sense perception.
This process of synthesis is unconscious and condition our waking consciousness.
The practice he teaches is to decompose sense perception and thinking.
I remember that he wrote that one has to detach for example colors from the object (the idea) and experience it in a pure way.
It seems to contradict the practices given by Steiner or Cleric. Instead of concentrate the inner voice, he emphasize to stop it for an interval, to experience how the world of perception changes without thinking.
But I have to read it again and fully to say that with 100% certainty.
That's correct. I didn't spend much time on the 'etherization of sight' because I am not too familiar with it and figured I could return to it later. It's not necessarily contradictory but is approaching the delamination of soul forces from the opposite pole of pure thinking, i.e. sensory perception. I would be interested to hear Cleric's understanding of this as well. It seems to me that we are starting from where perceptions are most out-of-phase with our current spiritual activity (unlike pure thought-perceptions), so it would require a much greater strength of devotional willpower to 'decompose' the sensory-perceptual representation. On the other hand, sight is closely tied to our cognitive capacity so it would be less problematic than the other bodily senses. He does mention that this etherization should be undertaken only after we have become quite accustomed to pure thinking in the sense of PoF. And I believe the soul disposition of abundant gratitude for the free gift of our perceptual experience that he expresses below is of prime importance to cultivate no matter what sort of spiritual exercises we are doing.
Here is the relevant passage:
"The breathing in of colours and light is the least difficult among the various sense inhalation processes undertaken in the course of cognitive yoga practice and research. The reason for this is that the sense of sight is in the middle between the mostly unconscious bodily senses and the super-conscious senses that perceive the other person.* Furthermore, it is also more conscious in comparison to sensations of cold and warmth, sounds, and especially smelling, tasting and touching.
...
Of course for most people today, in the case of colour breathing, the first reaction is ‘I don’t feel anything when I see blue or red’, but this relative neutrality of affect and effect is an advantage. Colour influences and purification processes stand somewhat in between the unconscious bodily senses which are altogether too intense on the one hand, and pure light, which is too ethereal, on the other. Also, the still higher, human-spiritual senses: the perception of the ‘I’, and the perception of the thoughts and words of the other person, are as difficult to bring down to ordinary cognition as it is difficult to bring the lower body and soul sensations up to consciousness. Therefore, among the senses sight will be chosen as the most suitable candidate for demonstrating the process of sense purification, etherization and inhalation.
...
The first step in the decomposition and deconstruction of the ‘cognitive composition’ in seeing is to concentrate our attention on the colour alone, and disregard the object to which it is attached. As was pointed out above, in the formation of the representation of any object, manifold sense impressions and bodily sensations are amalgamated and synthesized together with many and various concepts, representations, memories and associations. Untangling this complex knot of the representation of the whole object to which a colour is attached is therefore the first step in the purification process. (In the case of pure light, with which we are not primarily concerned here, this would mean, for example, unknotting the representation ‘a ray of light’ with all its invested concepts and focusing solely on the non-objectified light impression.)
The separation of the pure sense quality from the object to which it is attached is an active cognitive process. We aim to both separate the quality from its object as well as focus our attention on the freed quality ‘red’, while fully erasing from consciousness the complex body of representations associated with this object or the form or surface to which the colour is attached. This seems to be a daunting task, and as any real empirical scientific research, it requires meticulous experimentation, variation, and verification over many years. Naturally, only an abbreviated report of this can be given here.
The first major obstacle is that it proves difficult to hold the separated sense quality in our consciousness in this object-free state for a long time. It easily dissipates while our attention is immediately pulled back to the manifold representations associated with the object ‘red cinnabar’ or ‘red patch’. Furthermore, being pulled back to the representation of the red cinnabar, reactivates the whole instinctive set of representations connected to it. In no time at all, we find that we have rekindled and relinked diverse chains of representations that we have formed in our life about red things in general, and so on. And then we have to start all over again.
Therefore, when we deconstruct the object, separate the chosen quality and focus our attention solely on its perception, we cannot simply remain passive, because the quality diffuses and slips away from our consciousness immediately. Provided that the work on the purification of thinking is constantly practised, using The Philosophy of Freedom, the next step will be possible. After trying many alternatives to hold and prolong the pure quality, I came to the practical conclusion that I have to export and attach a quantity of life force to it from my own resources to keep it alive and growing in its separate, pure state. This force proves necessary for prolonged spiritual experience and research. This solution, however, immediately brought the next problem. (This is how it happens in real research – any solution is but an invitation for new problems.) Now the crucial problem with this move is: if we want to be absolutely certain that we are investigating the red in itself and not our subjective, personal reactions to its influences on body and soul, we must take special care that the energy we donate to the red impression flows solely from the red and not from anything else, inner or outer, otherwise attached to this experience. But this still seems to beg the main question. And the cognitive yoga work takes this paradox and contradiction fully into account: if I have to donate the life force, how can it be red's pure force? This force must possess a miraculous power, to give back to the chosen being the essential being of this other being! And so it does, in fact.
Therefore, we have to search for deeper human forces, through which we hope to find what is less personal in our experience of red. And this leads us to the soul and life forces through which we experience the red as a freely given gift. After all, red gives everything it has, it gives itself. In ordinary life we naturally consume and use its gift to serve our personal, sensual, cognitive and practical daily purposes. We aren’t interested in the red for itself, but only in how we can use it to fulfil our own needs and interests. But the more we experience the objective gift of pure red, the more we feel an inner need and impulse to give back to the red what we have received from it during our life. This impulse can only come about by itself, from real soul experience and should not come about through autosuggestion or command. We feel the colour red as an inspiration that has constantly blessed us since the moment of our birth and that it continues to give its gift of life in this very moment. When we become conscious of this persistent blessing and grace, it fires our soul and we feel the following intensely: we want to give back something of the abundant gifts that we have received from red all our life. This is what establishes the first cognitive-moral bond, an essential subjective-objective, reciprocal determination and exchange of forces between the red and us. And a kind of ‘mutual trust’ is established as well, without which no further ‘cooperation’ is to be expected with the forces of the real spiritual world working through red. In a sense, we have to prove to the real spiritual world our loving and grateful acknowledgement of the fact that this red is part of life as a whole, and that through red it is the whole universe that brings us into being and supports us. Only this repeatedly activated selflessness, our ability to experience the pure quality as a world gift apart from our special interests, gradually allows us to return the gift, intensified by our own forces, as a free and loving donation. This ‘mutual gifting’ makes the purified red quality more intense, vibrant and saturated, not only in comparison to the shadowy ‘red’ experienced in the perception of ‘red cinnabar’, but also in comparison to the soul experience of the pure quality experienced thus far. Our donation becomes vibrant when it is reciprocally acknowledged; we experience how it is received by the deeper being of red, and how it calls forth a further, reciprocal inflow of red's deeper life forces that, at least for us, flow more freely and abundantly through the quality red. This mutual interplay becomes increasingly more alive and intense until a mutual exchange of intensities comes about, that is self-intensifying and self-supporting. And now comes a moment, perhaps only after many efforts, in which the experience of the pure quality of red becomes so intense, vibrant, saturated and alive, that we begin to forget ourselves for more than a fleeting second and we experience that our conscious awareness is maintained and carried without our self-conscious reflection. And the remarkable scientific discovery now is that while we forget ourselves the greatly enhanced forces of red take over and support our self-consciousness when we cannot support it ourselves. When this happens we know that we are beginning to find the firm ground for our cognitive yoga research in the field of perception. We note in our lab. diaries this great moment, this event: we have found a path; we know we are on the right track."
Ben-Aharon, Yeshayahu. Cognitive Yoga: Making Yourself a New Etheric Body and Individuality (p. 55). Temple Lodge Publishing. Kindle Edition.
