Philosophical Speculations

Güney27 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2024 11:02 pm Did anyone came across such an exercise ?

https://www.headless.org/experiments/pointing.htm

I tried it out and had very interesting results.

Those are nice little exercises, thanks for sharing. I like these little go-to exercises that we can use throughout the day to refocus attention on the formless inner life. It doesn't take much time or effort or special conditions. It is all too easy to go many hours at a time, perhaps even days, without the chance for a proper meditative session, so these are helpful to mitigate the continual impacts of modern sensory life that drag our attention quite erratically.

As we know, what first feels as homogenous and boundless no-thingness is filled with currents of spiritual activity and the deeper task is to unveil those currents and how they structure our attentional gestures during sensory life. Then even the finger pointing at outer objects is also experienced more as the finger pointing back at our head. I have been writing about this for Part III and will share an excerpt:

***
In Part I, we discussed how concepts can become living symbols for the intuitive movements that gave birth to them, such as the recursive camera experiment when used as a metaphor for thinking’s enchantment with the receded perceptual models of its past activity. Then we are involved in a truly artistic method of philosophy and science that leads us, not into further enchantment with external models, but into greater resonance with real-time intuitive movements. Our concepts become like the finishing aesthetic touches on the canvas of deeper intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. We won’t conceptualize those movements very clearly at first but we will sense them much more subtly, as an indistinct feeling that something is happening beneath the surface of consciousness from which our concepts ripple out. A simple example can help strengthen this feeling. Try to intuitively experiment with the following sentence:

“A sentence is understood when intuitive thinking discerns the invisible connection between the words.”

Here we have a recursive sentence that explicitly directs attention to what we are doing with our thinking in the act of understanding the sentence’s meaning. The sentence can serve as a mini-experiment or exercise that allows us to test its meaning. Through the portal of the explicitly symbolic sentence, we become more sensitive to what we are doing to understand it. We may even sense a subtle shift in movement as we go between the spaces from the non-italicized word to the italicized word and back. The content of the sentence only matters insofar as it serves this sensitizing function. If we instead try to understand the sentence as a simple transmission of information to be grasped within the mind container - an assertion about how 'a sentence is understood' - it will be practically useless. By utilizing it as a symbolic portal through which we experience our mysterious inner movements, the message and the medium through which it is conveyed - the ‘substance’ of intuitive gestures - are brought into closer alignment through us. What is illustrated here through language can also become an experiential reality for the perceptual world more broadly; for our daily life of thoughts about the sensory world.

We can learn to value the content of all those thoughts, in whatever form they take, only for their function in sensitizing our consciousness to intuitive gestures that we are participating in. Scientific models can also be experienced as recursive perceptions in this way. That is perhaps easiest to illustrate with the example of a quantum mechanical model describing how the conscious observation or ‘measurement’ of a superimposed, nonlocal system of entangled particle states will collapse the system into localized and sequentially ordered states. When we understand that as a recursive symbol, rather than an external model describing some separate “strange quantum world”, it points to how our conscious activity is always isolating and sequencing particular thought-perceptual elements from a more integrated storyboard of intuitive meaning. We realize that quantum mechanical experiments simply provide one possible way of heightening attention to this inner process that is always present, which we can then follow up with our additional inner efforts to purify that state of heightened attention.

Güney27 wrote: ↑Fri Aug 16, 2024 11:02 pm Did anyone came across such an exercise ?

https://www.headless.org/experiments/pointing.htm

I tried it out and had very interesting results.

Also related to this, I came across a great quote from Steiner:

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If the things I have written about in my little book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds get one in the habit of very, very intensive thinking, a moment will come when one is able to do something quite special. But people are not easily prepared to get in the habit of very intensive thinking today. They'll not do such a thing as withdrawing completely into their thinking, for they say everything should be given to them from outside; the secrets of the world must be investigated from the outside. Of course, it is not at all easy, for one has to pay very careful attention with this thinking. If one is very much alive in one's thinking, one must of course be terribly careful. But a moment will come in life where one is able to do something quite special. You see, anyone will understand it if I use my hand to lift up a chair, for it is something that is done all the time. But I can also keep my hand still and not use it to do the things it usually does. The work done by the lens in one's eye is not in our power like that. When an impression comes from outside, well, you simply look in the direction of it through your lens. When there's no impression coming in, the lens is at rest.

But just think, gentlemen, that someone has really worked very hard to make his thinking very strong. He then lives wholly within his inner thinking. He does not look at the outside world, keeping his lens still just as we keep a hand still when not using it to do something. What happens then is that the whole of the starry heavens is reflected in the place where one otherwise has the transparent lens that enables one to see. This is the truly wonderful thing, I'd say, that if one uses the method I have given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds one learns to use one's individual organs not for the earth but indeed for the other world. Now if salts have become deposited, of course, the lens develops cataract and becomes non-transparent whether you want it or not. When someone thinks very deeply, it will stay transparent, of course, but the person is not looking through the lens, he is not looking at the outside world. And then it begins to illumine the whole world from the lens. But it is the spiritual element one then sees, the whole of the starry heavens in their true inner significance. This small area in the human being where the lens is located can teach us about all the things one then takes heart to say about the stars and so on. You see, that is how magnificent things are with the human being, that tremendous insights are gained in the smallest place.

Rudolf Steiner
From Mammoths to Mediums
GA 350
III. Blood circulation and movement of the heart. Perceiving things of the spirit through the lens in the eye
6 June 1923, Dornach

Ashvin the intuitive nudges cleric speaks about, are something that I experience sometimes, but in normal day consciousness.
It is like a will impulse that pops into consciousness, and has a certain meaning, that I don’t need to “think” into a sequence of words, in order to grasp it.
These experiences are really short and elusive though.
I don’t know if this is exactly what cleric speaks of, but the description seems to point at that phenomenon at least.