Philosophical Speculations

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Sep 10, 2025 11:33 am These are all real inner experiences. The question is how they are reconciled with the plane of concrete focus, where comets seem to occupy a concrete spatial place, and the same for our bodily parts. This is where we can still feel with Steiner a certain intermixing between the physical spectrum and the Imaginative. Now, before saying that this is disrespectful to Steiner, I remind that in a certain way this was the only way things could proceed. Remember that the intuitions and Imaginations had to be captured by the intellectual lattice of the time. In a way, he had to counteract the tendency of the intellect to spread with the intellectual fantasy into the spheres. It was simply not possible to counteract this in any other way except to mix the Imaginative into the physical. The Newtonian lattice simply didn't allow for anything else!

GA 84, 7 wrote:By truly experiencing the silence of the soul, we become able to hear spiritually what dwells in the world of Spirit. The ordinary sensory world then becomes a means for us to interpret what lives in the spiritual world... what resounds approaches me with a certain vivacity, it can give me, say, something like the color yellow gives me if I am sensitive and receptive to colors. Then I have something in the sense world through which I can express my experience in the world of Spirit. My perception is one I can describe by saying that 'it effects me as the color yellow does'. Or like the tone C or C sharp in music, or like warmth or cold. In brief, my sensory experiences offer me a means for expressing in ordinary words what appears to me in the world of Spirit. In this way, the whole sensory world becomes like a language to express what I experience in the spiritual world.

Those who seek too rapid progress do not understand this and come only to a superficial judgment. This is why patient investigators describe their experiences in terms of colors, tones, and so on. Just as we shouldn't confuse the word "table" with an actual table, so we should not confuse the world of Spirit itself... with the manner in which it is described.

Cleric wrote: ↑Wed Sep 10, 2025 11:33 am

Federica wrote: ↑Tue Sep 09, 2025 3:31 pm So, this bioelectricity, or physiological electricity, is very similar to electricity (correct?). My first thought about how this may not contradict Steiner's vision is that it's an adversarial permeating force, that only can be "leveraged" when purposefully highjacked, or diverted, in other words when the will is permeated by the head forces too much, so that technological (black) magic - or bio-technological magic - is developed, or extracted (Levin's style).

Great. Now all we need to do is to have the lucid recognition of how much of our contemporary bodily movements are actually of such bio-technological magic, and how much are due to direct warping of the curvature of becoming, so to speak. Over- or underestimation was considered precisely in this aspect.

As a preface, I would like to start more broadly. We can only understand things right if we realize that the intellectual lattice, within which higher intuitions can be captured, itself develops. It has often been emphasized how notoriously difficult Steiner's task has been. The lattice that he had to operate within was practically the Newtonian picture of space, substances, and forces. With these tools, anything that we can state about the deeper flow of reality can never be anything more than a parable. As such, Steiner had to constantly seek a balance. Let's look at a more concrete example.


(the Flammarion engraving)

It is difficult to comprehend how much consciousness has changed in the twentieth century, even for the layperson. In the space age, even the average man feels his imagination readily stretching into the physical Cosmos (as if one can stretch hands and touch planets and galaxies and follow them into their orbits). Think how different this would have been a century ago. The sky was really a dome. It is 'there', but at the same time it's a mystery. Just think of what an uncertainty it is to live in the intellectual sphere and truly not knowing whether if one could fly up in the sky, they would actually hit the boundary of the dome. Of course, scientists of the last two millennia were extending their intellectual and sensory feelers (especially with the invention of the telescope) into the physical Cosmos, but for the occultist, it was still clear that these are mental projections. The ego still lives at its meso scale of mental images and simply extrapolates them into the greater space. Steiner was also aware of this and strongly felt that we live in intellectual fantasy when we picture orbiting planets, stars, nebulae, etc. Note that this is a fact. We truly live in intellectual imagination when we picture the planets as circling marbles. The same also holds in the opposite direction. Steiner has said:

Now when we pass into sleep, we are not in the world this side of the senses, we are then in reality inside things, we are on the other side of the tapestry of sense-perceptions. But in his earthly consciousness, man knows nothing of this and he dreams of all sorts of things lying beyond the realm of sense-perception. He dreams of molecules, of atoms; but they are only dreams—dreams of his waking consciousness. He invents molecules, atoms and the like, and believes them to be realities. But study any description of atoms, even the most recent... you will find nothing but minute objects which are described according to the pattern of what is experienced from the surface of things. It is all a tissue woven from the experiences of waking consciousness on this side of the tapestry of sense.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/Dates/19211127p01.html

And this too is a fact of inner experience. When we think about atoms and molecules, we imagine fuzzy balls. We summon inner pictures, which are repurposed images of everyday sensory experiences. This doesn't mean that there's no deeper justification to picture both the micro and the macro physical world, but we're only stating the fact that we live in meso-scale imagination.

Equipped with this occult knowledge, one is bound to feel a little conservative. This, however, can swing the pendulum a little more in the other direction (Lu). At its extreme, this leads to our familiar stance that all Earthly existence is just a thin dream picture supported by the Demiurge. Of course, in Steiner there's not a trace of such extremism. Nevertheless, we can still find that sometimes the conservatism slightly takes the upper hand. This can be subtly noticed in many places. For example, the dome conception can be felt in certain places, say, when he speaks about how comets dissolve when they leave the spheres of the Solar system and coalesce when they enter again. Similarly, he speaks of how if we were to enter the Sun, we would encounter something like negative space.

All of this should be understood rightly. All of this emerges from the experiences in the spiritual spectrum of existence and is brought down into Imaginations. The links here are very deep. Even in ordinary physics we know that as we send our gaze further in space, we are also moving back in time. In a similar way, when our consciousness grows into the depths of inner space, we reach the more archetypal nature of everything. We can no longer speak of a comet as a point-like rock formation. Instead, we live in the 'comet-cloud' (analogy with the fuzzy electron cloud) - the non-local spiritual flow that pertains to everything having to do with the comet's concrete existence. As we contract in consciousness toward our bodily spectrum, the comet-cloud gradually collapses into concreteness, together with our bodily sensations (or think of a blurry image gradually coming into focus).

These are all real inner experiences. The question is how they are reconciled with the plane of concrete focus, where comets seem to occupy a concrete spatial place, and the same for our bodily parts. This is where we can still feel with Steiner a certain intermixing between the physical spectrum and the Imaginative. Now, before saying that this is disrespectful to Steiner, I remind that in a certain way this was the only way things could proceed. Remember that the intuitions and Imaginations had to be captured by the intellectual lattice of the time. In a way, he had to counteract the tendency of the intellect to spread with the intellectual fantasy into the spheres. It was simply not possible to counteract this in any other way except to mix the Imaginative into the physical. The Newtonian lattice simply didn't allow for anything else! This leads to a very important effect. The intellect had to speak of the spiritual in a certain sense through spatial categories. I beg you to understand this in the proper spirit. I'm not in the least suggesting that Steiner was seeking the spirit in the way the spiritualists do (inside matter)! But nevertheless, the intellectually-bound imagination constrained by the Newtonian picture could simply not do otherwise but experience things as if on an axis that had to coincide with geometric scale. In other words, if the intellect was to be truthful to the facts of higher experience, it had to picture that, were it to travel physically beyond the spheres, our being would need to pass into an etheric, then astral state, etc.

So, to repeat, within the Newtonian intellectual lattice, it is inevitable that the spatial axis (close and far) and the spiritual axis (focused physical, non-local, spread out archetypal) had to be, in a sense, intermingled. There's simply no other way to unite the spiritual with the Newtonian picture! If one were to seek reality, one couldn't move outside in a purely spatially-intellectual sense, without also dissolving things into the spiritual.



So, the Newtonian picture could only be spiritualized through the left image above. This was the only way to counteract the tendency of the intellect to see everything in a purely mechanistic way. And notice that this is not wrong in an absolute sense. In inner space, the spatial (symbolized by the horizontal circle) and the spiritual axis (symbolized by the dome-volume) are indeed archetypally of the same origin! In other words, one had to speak to the soul at that time: "If you are to move with your imagination away into space, and if you are not to remain in the materialistic dream (the extrapolated Earthly mental images), you must gradually morph into spiritual consciousness! Your Earthly mental images must dissolve and pass into the increasingly non-local astral, and then archetypal!"

Through the physics of the twentieth century, our intellect has attained the possibility to decouple these axes far more precisely, even though the physicalist scientists of today do not even realize it. Both quantum mechanics and general relativity force the intellect to include thinking that transcends the focal plane (even if still in a flattened way). In the former, one needs to conceive of the hidden order of the wavefunction that pilots the manifestation of focal points. In the latter, one needs to conceive of the hidden curvature of spacetime, which once again funnels the manifestations of matter-energy through time. We must realize that this leads the intellect into an orthogonal direction to the Newtonian picture which lies flatly on the horizontal circle.

Now we must realize that we have a new task that Steiner didn't yet have to deal with, which, if we fail to realize, we'll be paying the greatest disservice to Spiritual Science. In fact, the latter will only become a subject for even more mockery. And the sad truth is that most of this mockery will be, in fact, justified! It is up to us to understand when the intuitions must be re-accommodated into the evolving intellectual lattice. Otherwise, by trying to put the new wine into old wineskins, we quickly fall into superstition!

So, the right image symbolizes how today we attain new degrees of intellectual freedom through which we can traverse the horizontal focal plane and the volumetric (spiritual) dome in a much more decoupled manner.

Why is this important? Because it frees us from the inner obligation to seek in space (in the focal plane) something like the interruption of the nerves, or the dissolving comet. The best way to conceive of these things is that the focal plane is better understood as a frequency band of the total Cosmos. Simply put, if we are using photons (focal points) to probe the Cosmos, we'll only detect photons everywhere. This doesn't negate the integral picture. It's rather that when we ring a tuning fork from within our center, from the limitless potential similarly attuned potential tuning forks will ring back in resonance. In other words, by reaching into the depths of inner space with our sensory organs (both bodily and mechanical), we can detect only that which is of like-frequency, so to speak. But we'll never find an area within physical space (the focal plane) that is no longer woven of matter but of something more 'spiritual'. And let's emphasize again that Steiner never intended the intermingled picture in the naive physical sense. His reaching out into the spheres was synonymous with reaching out in consciousness.

It is critically important to realize this in our age, because otherwise we risk making Spiritual Science into a laughing stock. If we maintain that a comet physically dissolves as it leaves the spheres, we'll have to explain how Voyager I and II have gone quite a long way beyond the Solar bubble and are still intact. Then a series of comical exchanges can follow. For example, when one day Voyager inevitably loses power (because the energy cell has a limited lifespan) or simply malfunctions, the anthro-fanatics will scream: "See! Voyager has dissolved; it has passed into an astral condition." It's clear how nothing productive can ever issue from such exchanges. And we do something very similar if we fanatically try to show that the heart is not pumping blood.

We must realize that all said holds true also when going toward the micro world. Just as in the intermingled view we are justified to speak of the comet as dissolving into its higher spiritual nature, so it is justified to dissolve into the spiritual when we reach down into the biological world. Steiner had to put an airbrake on the materialistic tendency and point out that one lives only in scaled mental images when they fantasize about the micro world. If we are to penetrate into the spiritual reality of the microworld, we must dissolve the physical pictures. Thus, it was necessary to speak of the spatial-like interruption of the nerves. If we complete the arc entirely within the focal plane, we can never grasp that the spiritual plays a part. Today, however, we have probed the focal plane deep enough, and there's no physical interruption to be found. The nerves indeed seem to form closed circuits. This, of course, only reinforces the physicalist outlook. Obviously, if we stubbornly maintain that there is an interruption because our guru has said so, no one will take us seriously anymore.

So we see that the spiritual scientific endeavor of humanity is not a simple matter. Even things said not so long ago (a century is not that much in the scale of evolution) need to be continuously revisited from within an ever-widening context and further-differentiating cognition. And Steiner has been very clear about this. All truths need to be seen as relative to the corresponding evolutionary context. Of course, this doesn't mean that something like the truth of evolution is relative in the sense that tomorrow its opposite will be true. It's rather that the consciousness and resolution through which we grasp this truth today will move further. Then the concepts of today will seem like the helping wheels through which a higher being has developed. They are relative because one day, there will no longer be rocky comets to speak of, nor an intellect that can do the speaking.

Let's return to the over- and under-estimation. In a sense, such pendulum swings were inevitable because the intellect lacked the cognitive lattice that would allow it to find a firmer balance point. Thus, a certain overshoot is inevitable and in fact necessary.

To understand why the nervous system even had to come into being, we need to Imaginatively position ourselves within the flow of the past evolution. Imagine a rarefied astral condition in which we live as a soul being, within a Cosmic aura of inner imagery. We contract, expand, grow into a certain direction of experience, retract from another, and so on. These are all 'tunnels' of soul becoming that we explore and navigate. There's no need for 'forces' that act on astral matter. It's all steering, as if the soul continuously intuitively/instinctively 'votes' for a certain continuation of the first-person Cosmic movie. In a sense, there's a kind of superfluidity here. Imagine going into a theater and moving toward seats that are already occupied. The person there says, "That's OK, I was just leaving anyway." So within this soul labyrinth of becoming, there's still a certain fluidic balance. It's not a true superfluid; there can still be increases in pressure when two souls want to continue the movie as sitting in the same seat, but the resolutions are still more 'lubricated', so to speak.

As the interferences of intents become ever more complicated, so the steering continuations of the movie feel more frictious. This applies not only to inter-being relations but also to the volume of inner space that is gradually to densify into our inner bodily space. As such, even the metamorphoses of this space, the contractions and expansions, begin to evade the soul's intents. It is as if all possible continuations of the soul movie only offer variants of a twitching inner form that never follow the intuitive intents. It's like the soul is saying, "The inner space that I occupy no longer plays along. It has its own opinion on which seats to take, so to speak. If I do not lead the movie into a direction that gives me some leverage over the situation, it will become impossible to find my self-consciousness within this volume of inner space. All my inner intents will dissipate into oblivion without anything ever reflecting back to match them." (and in fact, all kingdoms of Nature are the soul degrees that could not find continuations with the needed leverage and remained stuck in place for the time being)

Of course, things are far more complicated. The soul doesn't singlehandedly shape the movie continuatious - the whole Cosmic hierarchy of Intelligences is at play, but for simplicity we can still speak in this way. The nervous system (at least as far as the motor half is concerned) can be seen as the attempt to provide this leverage to the soul. It is, in a way, an amplifier of the souls' intents. The soul simply loses authority over the volume of bodily space otherwise. All muscle cells will follow their elemental intents and will twitch out of sync. The holistic curvature of the flow is simply shattered. The only solution that the Intelligences have found to rescue the situation is to build a kind of an organic gradient that, on one side, is non-locally and holistically sensitive to the gentle tipping pushes of the soul, while on the other, it amplifies these pushes into organically constrained pathways that command the muscles to act in synchrony.

This is the black magic bio-technology that you speak of. My point is that at our present physical state, this is the primary way of actuating all bodily movements - even the heartbeat! Even the gods cannot, at present, instill the needed coherence to force the muscle fibers to work in synchrony. Our world exists as it is precisely because it has been allowed to go out of synchrony to such a degree. The nervous system is the compromise that has been developed in order to have coherent authority over the bodily volume.

We need to constantly remember that, regarding our present bodily nature, we're a walking corpse. Everything in our physical nature is practically dying. Steiner has clearly stated that in our bodily nature of nerves, bones, muscles, blood (physical), etc., we are a walking Lucifer-Ahriman. We carry Lucifer-Ahriman round with us all the time (https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA134/En ... 31p01.html). It is a grotesque truth, but it is a fact. Our mineral bodily nature is far more a bio-technology, than our noble spiritually-striving ego might want to admit.

So with all this, I once again try to hint that in Steiner we still find things (necessarily) in a more intermixed state. It's like it's not fully clear when he speaks of the physical blood or the soul essence, just like it is not clear whether he speaks of purely physical space when the comet goes beyond the spheres or inner space. It is up to us today to make the differentiation. Yes, at depth, the soul steers the willful flow holistically - it seeks certain continuations of the inner movie. It doesn't calculate which muscle neurons to fire in order to take the cup of tea from the table, but steers into the movie continuation where we see ourselves reaching and taking the cup. The rest is accomplished by the organic gradient, as if through inverse kinematics.

If we insist that we must be able to find the interruption in the focal plane, we fail to properly differentiate the Cosmic spectrum 'frequency-wise'. We still intermix the plane and the volume. This would be like taking the bus metaphor from the inner stretching essays and considering the intent for a walk. When we zoom into the details, we see that we move about by alternately stepping with our feet. If we take things in an intermixed way, we may say, "This isn't right, I must find the spiritual within these steps. I sin against the spirit if I recognize them only as alternating physical steps. I must find a place for the spirit within this picture, I must somehow inject it there, or rather (because I'm not a spiritualist-materialist) I need to find the specific void, where the physical is interrupted, and which should justify me of speaking of the spiritual as the only thing that can fill that void (and thus explain my walking)."

To be sure, this interruption is really there. Even the movement of an electron cannot be observed as a smooth, uninterrupted process. Rather, we detect the electron now here, then there. What happens in between remains a mystery. But we sin in a higher sense against the spirit if we fail to differentiate properly the axes. There's nothing antispiritual if we recognize that within the focal plane, the picture looks like alternating steps. We need to find the spiritual aspects along the frequency gradient, not as something that is there or missing within the focal plane. It's the same with the nerves. There's nothing problematic in tracing the chain of events of firing neurons, activating muscle fibers. We only sin against the spirit if we fail to expand consciousness within the spiritual gradient that guides and is amplified within the physical chain of events (the footsteps). And as explained, I see it that in Steiner's day, it was still impossible to do otherwise, but to somehow intermingle the Imaginative and the sensory. The intellectual lattice that allows us to do that with more precision only came about with twentieth-century physics. Now it is our duty to disentangle 'frequency-wise' the total picture. Of course, in the future, they will be once again firmly integrated into the unitary inner space, but now we need the lucid differentiation.

PS: I started with "how much of our contemporary bodily movements are actually of such bio-technological magic, and how much are due to direct warping of the curvature of becoming", but now we can see that these are not really opposite things. There's no real warping (as if our soul applies certain forces), but there are different continuations that we steer into. As such, the bio-technological magic is actually included within these continuations. They are the bureaucratic details that need to be in place for these continuations to be able to connect the alpha and the omega of the intent. Then, evolution is not simply the turning to one aspect in expense of the other, but bringing the flow back into a more cooperative mode, where we can steer into continuations where all Nature seems to 'conspire' to be in synchrony with intents.

It is also interesting to observe all of this in the social sphere, where we have an artificial replica of the whole process within legislation and law enforcement. Just like the nerves took shape in order to ensure certain enforcement of intent, as the muscle fibers were 'rebelling' to go in their own Brownian ways, so human individuals would sink into Brownian chaos without the presently external enforcement of certain rules. These laws will become unnecessary when human beings consciously strive to resonate with the higher-order curvatures of being, which, in a sense, will inspire when one is to sit or stand from a chair. It is in the same sense that the nervous system will become obsolete when the physical world is brought into a more fluidic and harmonious flow.

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 11, 2025 5:37 pm Cleric, thank you. These ideas bring elucidation to various sides of the question. I suppose I was trying to read the intermixed Imaginations in terms of what they may point to physically, which did not yield much. But now, taking them as such is definitely clarifying. Now, when it comes to why the pictures were intermingled, I also feel that you have wrapped the ideas in a particular shape, and have felt the need to contemplate them in unwrapped form, if it makes any sense.

First, trying to grasp the gist of it, you are almost saying: "Spiritual science came almost too early. It intended to be a science, but actually couldn’t find the intellectual soul substrate to become one in effect. On the one hand, the only way to connect to “science”, in “spiritual science”, was to intermix physical and spiritual perception for the benefit of the scientific mind of the time, and on the other hand, Steiner himself was not completely able to close the circle and fully separate reality from unreality within the deeply convoluted physical spectrum."

At the end of the day, there are actually a few of these mismatches: the comets, the fluid planet Mars, the heart and nerve question, and a few more, previously mentioned. While I’ve definitely been feeling that the least one can do, in the face of such inconsistencies with modern science, is to try hard and probe in all available directions to understand how Steiner’s claims could still be true physically - especially since he’s been hammering them strongly, for years, even making them into the core of his applied message - I can also conceive that someone with a higher viewpoint on the matter may have already done that work and seen factual inconsistencies. This is still difficult to integrate, also because Steiner didn’t tackle future areas of scientific progress (like for example when you say that in the future man will build etheric amplifiers). Rather, he diametrically opposed present-day scientific contentions, stating that those contentions would become comical unrealities in the future. Thus I felt such claims deserved the biggest benefit of the doubt, unlike some more isolated mistakes which I was quick to acknowledge in the past. And so I have never, ever, been fanatical about accepting things as is, just because Steiner said it. Especially given my limited means, my purpose has always been to try and get to the bottom of the question (even against the stream of course) not to draw premature conclusions. At this point, I can say that I find your overall explanation quite convincing. Steiner had the extraordinarily difficult task of opening the way to a science of the spirit. He carried out a huge amount of research, deep and wide, and probably didn’t even have enough time to close the circle perfectly in terms of the entire physical spectrum. Ok, it makes sense.

Still, unwrapping your ideas, I don’t feel that all of them are convincing, or necessary to understand that mistakes happened. I don’t feel it’s necessary to say that there was no other way to proceed for Steiner, and it doesn’t seem convincing to me either. Also, I am unsure regarding the spiritual big limitations of the Newtonian mindset in relation to our day, and how significant the change is, 100 years later. On the one hand, new concepts to accommodate new realities don’t only come from the advancements of natural science. Steiner often spoke of the need to overcome laziness and form new concepts, like on the spot, without waiting for mainstream science to provide the metaphors. On the other hand, I have myself as a representative layperson of the XXIst century, a quite Newtonian conceptual toolbox. Yes, I have learned from you about wave functions, Mandelbrot sets, and other images (on top of the Newtonian pendulums, gears, and other mechanics) but it’s not that I could say: “Oh yeah, I can now draw from my scientific understanding of these things, and expand from there”. Those were new, standalone concepts that I was told were also scientific, but that aspect was, and still is, blank for me. I grasped those concepts (vaguely) through the spiritual ideas, not the other way around. And I guess, if they had been as skillfully presented to students of spiritual science at Steiner’s time, they would have worked similarly, most of them. Looking at things the other way around, we can also see that just because today we have relativity and QM, it doesn’t seem that grasping spiritual reality has become any easier, not even for the scientists themselves who are familiar with the changed intellectual lattice.

Fact is, we still use our meso-scale intellectual imagination to picture reality beyond the frontiers of everyday sense experience, and there’s today the same need to counter that. Laymen and scientists alike, we do that (as nicely described by SH here. Of course I don’t understand the scientific details, but it seems to me that she is nailing the meso-scale residency of present scientific imagination). So, these new QM concepts lay there, as a potential lattice for a future science, but I don’t see that they change the way we tend to conceptualize the universe so much (as exemplified in the video) and even less, the way we tend to conceptualize the human physical body, for example the heart and the blood. Moreover, if we look at our forum, you have leveraged this new lattice beneficially to further conceptualize for us the expansion of inner experience, that is the other side of Spiritual Science; not so much to help us get the make-up of the physical world as a microcosm of the spirit (if I am not mistaken). For example in this discussion, in order to describe the dynamics of blood and nerves you have proceeded differently, you have rather used an alternative intellectual lattice.

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 11, 2025 5:37 pm
Another thing that seems unnecessary in order to ‘buy’ that Steiner made overestimations, is to suggest that he intermixed, for the said purposes of countering the meso-scale tendency, but without being fully sure about the physical contentions comprised in the intermixing, like taking the risk (I’m not totally sure you suggest that, but I believe you do?). So basically Steiner thought: "Let's render the will spatially, as an impulse that manifests into muscle movement directly (metabolism), and let’s say that nerve structure confirms that, because people can only arrive at an intuition of the will through their intellectual imagination. If I only speak of potential, eventlines, and soul intents, without any spatial simile connected to everyday sensory life, they will not get it.” But I find it hard to believe that he may not have been positive himself about the physical statements, especially given the intensity of the assertions. I think his statements were whole. But now, if he was himself fully persuaded that the nerves are all sensory for example, then we must conclude (or so it seems to me) that he intended to leverage what he considered a physical fact - eventually to be confirmed by science - in order to put under the nose of their audience something tangible, to substantiate for the intellect the validity of supersensible reality, thereby aligning with the intellectual imagination and its meso-scale range of comfort, rather than counteracting it.

In other words, you say: "When explaining the physical world as a reflection of higher realities, Steiner mixed Imaginative pictures (like vanishing comets) in the physical facts, as the only way to accommodate Imaginative realities in the mind of the Newtonian man, while avoiding the ‘meso-scale tendency’ (circling marbles)."
But one could equally say: "Explaining the higher worlds and how they condense in the physical spectrum, he intermixed physical pictures - what he considered physical facts - as the only way to accommodate intuitions of the higher worlds in the mind of the Newtonian man, hence leveraging - not counteracting - the meso-scale tendency.”

Intermixing counteracts the meso-scale tendency just as much as it confirms it. It’s a bridge to go from intellect to Imagination and vice versa. As such, it leads to something just as much as it leads from something. In this sense, the intermixing seems to me simply a sign that he endeavored to build a two-way bridge: in one direction, he taught how to develop higher knowledge, to eventually reach back to the intellect. In the other direction, the bridge was also meant to lead from intellect to Imagination, to make Spiritual Science an all-round knowing. But in his private, inner research effort to make the countless bricks, he was not completely able to trace the spiritual facts all the way down, through the convolutions, into the physical time-specific layer. This is good enough for me at this point.

Federica wrote: ↑Thu Sep 11, 2025 5:37 pm The second part of your post - the nature of the nervous system and its evolution - has been extremely helpful, by zooming out, to understand that the pendulum swings of the overestimations are integral to the evolutionary path in the big scheme of things, and how the overestimations become completely relative, like controlled oscillations in the sure steering towards the momentous development of the consciousness soul. I also see how I lack sufficient distance to admit, and even concretely realize, the walking corpse nature, grotesque nature of the mineral body. I see it logically, but I cannot feel it. I still have what I have to describe as a sort of pride of the physical body, even as it is now in the fifth PA-time. It seems beautiful to me as it is. But I do realize the shortsightedness of this feeling, and that it inevitably limits appreciation of the high-level view that you have conveyed in the second part of your post. So I do have a need to independently inquire about such questions, but I also recognize that I can't draw defintive conclusions, and I am greateful for the glimpses that your posts offer.

Cleric wrote: ↑Fri Sep 12, 2025 4:31 pm Well, this is the area that I'm 'unsure about'. And to be honest, I'm reluctant to push much further. It would simply be way too pretentious to imagine that I can figure out such a pivotal soul. If I'm to express bluntly whatever is on the tip of my thinking, yes, I would say that he simply projected too strongly the Imaginative insight directly into sensory pictures. Whether this is really the case, we'll be able to tell when we mature more. And even if some day it indeed turns out that he was a little bold to project the Imaginations in such a way, this still doesn't invalidate that we need to find the inner perspective from which the Imaginations were derived. There's something that the soul experiences when it attunes to the astral Mars. It is from here that the images of fluidity stem.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat Sep 13, 2025 5:21 pm Another thing to note here is that, out of the vast scientific output of Steiner, these instances are quite rare. So it's not that we suddenly need to be skeptical of every instance in which Steiner questioned the dominant scientific conceptions and (most importantly), questioned the manner of researching and drawing conclusions. For example, we have pointed previously to how Steiner questioned the dominant scientific conception of his time that the genetic process of heredity can be used to practically explain all stable psycho-physical characteristics and capacities of the human organism. In this case, more advanced research within the focal plane (Noble, Levin, et al.) has only recently caught up to what Steiner was able to previously confirm through supersensible research, i.e. that genetic heredity is not so foundational of a factor and many psycho-physical characteristics of the human organism are structured through top-down formative influences, reflected in novel protein-enzyme activity, for example. That is just one of many examples where Steiner correctly questioned the dominant scientific ideas, as quite a lone voice crying in the wilderness, and was proven justified by later research. Of course, even such research is not sufficient to establish the formative influences without a cognitive shift that illuminates its testimonial nature. Without such a shift, even this research will backfire and lead to superstitious conceptions which leave the real-time formative influences in the blind spot.

The main lesson for me is that we are always safer when we first look to how Steiner was challenging the very way of doing scientific inquiries (as we also challenge here), and how his assertions were an illustrative means of prompting listeners toward a more imaginative, artistic, flexible, expansive, etc. approach, such that the intellect can resonate with deeper soul experiences which are implicit in the unfolding of phenomena within the focal plane. It is indeed difficult to assess to what extent he intended to project this deeper scale flow into strictly physical pictures that can be studied by the intellect, i.e. whether a physical spaceship landing on physical Mars would find jelly-like consistency, or traveling into the Sun would find negative space, and so on, but we know for certain that he at least partially intended the physical pictures as symbolic testimonies of that deeper flow. So we can't go wrong by orienting toward the physical pictures in a metaphorical and pictorial way. The rare over-projections, excessive intermixing, etc., remains pretty trivial in the bigger scheme unless we fail to orient properly toward the pictures and begin using them as a means to either ignore the deeper scale flow to which they testify (as FB often does, for example), or a means to somehow establish that deeper scale flow for the intellect strictly through their closed-loop combinations.

Cleric wrote: ↑Fri Sep 12, 2025 4:31 pm You have a point. I guess it isn't really the physics on its own, but that the twentieth century really pushed the intellectual soul to its limits. Probably we can compare this with the end of the age of the great geographical discoveries. Up to some point, we've been pushing into completely unknown territory, but then, after the globe has been probed, especially after satellite imagery, the general picture is clear. Of course, it can be infinitely refined, but the overall geometry is set.

I believe something similar happened in the twentieth century and certainly continues now. For example, the work of Turing, Church, Gödel, etc., really outlined what is principally possible with thinking that seeks certain foundational mental images and the laws of their metamorphoses. The SH video you linked is a good example. It is obvious that even if a theory of everything is discovered, because of the equivalence of formal systems, that ToE could be recast in endless different formal bases (thus the impossibility of determining whether our mental image of a wave or particle is the right one). Fewer and fewer scientists have any illusion that the intellectual endeavor can bring certain depth and answer the great questions. SH says it's not her job to find any 'truth' but only to have a working description. Needless to say, these same people consider that those whose job is to answer such questions (philosophers) are simply poets - they may serve some function of uplifting the souls, giving them things to stir their emotions, but they do not really get us anywhere near some actual truth. As such, the Kantian divide is as strong as ever.

Cleric wrote: ↑Fri Sep 12, 2025 4:31 pm I certainly don't suggest that we should seek to see the body as grotesque, as if to forcefully demean it. It's probably about realizing that our attunement and comfort with that body is to a great extent due to our lower soul organism. And this is easy to discern even in ordinary matters. For example, we have some sense of what a 'normal' human looks like. Seeing a person with a malformed limb, for example, can elicit a whole spectrum of emotions, like empathy, revulsion, fear (as if at the thought of how we would handle this if it were to happen to us), and so on. Furthermore, it is interesting how our sense of beauty is still quite species-specific. What if humans had evolved in such a way that we had beaks? What would a kiss look like? What would we find attractive, color, shape? Think of the whole spectrum of beauty procedures that the salons would need to have in their service list: cleaning the beak, polishing, painting, piercing... Picturing the human being in such a way surely feels grotesque, but if we were in that form and it was 'normal', we would find it beautiful and maybe even sexy BTW Steiner (unfortunately, I don't remember the exact lecture cycle) was speaking of the human form in the Lemurian epoch, where he said that he wouldn't describe it in detail because it would be seen as too grotesque from today's standpoint.

The point is that we should see the present human form as a work in progress. The ultimate Idea of Man is sublime. As far as we see in the human form the attractor of this sublime Human, we should really find it beautiful. But we must also be aware that with our lower astral body, we feel at home in this form and find it bearable and even attractive because of this specific adaptation. For example, if we look at our feet, we see something quite odd. It's a stage of evolutionary metamorphosis where we have these almost dysfunctional toes, clearly atrophied fingers of a prior form. Yet we like our feet. Some people may even find them arousing in their partner. So, as said, there's no need to force ourselves to see our body in such strange ways, but we should also gradually gain awareness of the Ideal Human that passes through the current form and will perfect it further (beyond the physical).

Federica wrote: ↑Tue Sep 16, 2025 11:02 am I have pondered this a little, but I don’t get what is meant by “our sense of beauty is still quite species-specific”. I believe that the sense of beauty can only be species-specific? The creation, as work in progress, is alive and beautiful in very different ways that connect with its differentiated supersensible radiance. Only a bird can be beautiful with a beak, just as only a human can be beautiful within the current human form, and I don't think we find the present human form beautiful because we just happen to find it as it is, and if we somehow suddenly found a beak in the 'normal form', we would like it just as well. I think we find it beautiful - when this is felt deeply as in "truth, beauty and goodness", not necessarily and only as physical attraction - because that form is a testimony to the harmonious lawfulness active behind it.
What is the meaning of “still” in “our sense of beauty is still quite species-specific”?

AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Sep 16, 2025 8:30 pm Sometimes it can also help to approach from the other direction. Many people may feel like they appreciate the beauty of animal forms just as much as the current human form. Today, I was taking my morning walk and came upon a dead mouse on the middle of the path. There was a slight sense of disgust and sadness, but of course, the feelings weren't very intense, I strolled by and didn't give it too much more concern. I did wonder, however, what if I had come across a dead human form? Things would clearly be different. Our crude astral organism still isn't much bothered by the decay or death of other species, even though they belong to the archetypal human being in the higher sense.

Federica wrote: ↑Wed Sep 17, 2025 8:42 am

AshvinP wrote: ↑Tue Sep 16, 2025 8:30 pm Sometimes it can also help to approach from the other direction. Many people may feel like they appreciate the beauty of animal forms just as much as the current human form. Today, I was taking my morning walk and came upon a dead mouse on the middle of the path. There was a slight sense of disgust and sadness, but of course, the feelings weren't very intense, I strolled by and didn't give it too much more concern. I did wonder, however, what if I had come across a dead human form? Things would clearly be different. Our crude astral organism still isn't much bothered by the decay or death of other species, even though they belong to the archetypal human being in the higher sense.

Thanks Ashvin, but your idea confuses me more. I guess pretty much anyone would be more concerned about coming upon a dead human body in the park than one would be when seeing a dead mouse. But I don't see the connection with beauty. Does that prove that one finds the human form more beautiful than the mouse form? The human form like any other living forms is beautiful when alive. As Steiner says (sorry I will probably continue to say "Steiner says" for a long time) while truth is in the physical and in the past, beauty is in the present ether, and goodness is in the astral/future. A corpse, or a decaying cadaver, can hardly be beautiful as such. It rather integrates the beauty of the Earth, which reveals its ethers, or puts them in pictures. That we are more touched by the view of a corpse, depends on various reasons that are not directly connected with beauty, I believe. And I think a human being properly developed, should find all of nature equally beautiful, in its very differentiated manifestations (which I find difficult for myself) but still be more concerned with a corpse than with a dead mouse.