Franz Bardon's IIH

[Federica]

Right, but such distractions occur in the context of our intentions. On a spiritual path, we are especially attempting to navigate life more and more through our consciously set intentions. As we know, it is about harmonizing our intentional activity, our intuitive movements, with our perceptual contents as much as possible (what we are thinking about what we are doing with our inner activity). So would you agree that, if we intend to remain concentrated on work-related tasks, it would be an improvement if we start out bouncing our thoughts to a dozen non work-related areas of experience and gradually attain a state where we are able to stay mostly within work experience? Then would the content be relevant to how much we have inwardly improved, in the context of specific intentions to remain present in certain tasks?

Yes, definitely. If we set our intention to only think work-related thoughts for a while, and then we succeed, that is an improvement compared to being unable to follow up on the intention. But is this the same thing as what Bardon proposed as an exercise - which was the starting point of this discussion?

"The next exercise deals with thoughts which obtrude within us unwanted and persistently, and with not allowing them to emerge in our minds."

You may say that setting the intention to only navigate the work-related associative thought-field is a first step, or an attempt to block the intruding distractions. For my part, I doubt the efficacy of the method. Concentrating attention on such a large associative field is scarcely effective for the purpose of consistently avoiding intruding thoughts. The power of willed steering comes from the reduction of the surface, from the simplicity and tight circumscription of the target thought. Remaining concentrated on only work-related thoughts is an oxymoron, an overwhelming and dispersed purpose, as I see it. It would work for a little while, until we inevitably need to 'breathe in' and that's when the intruding thoughts will easily come in.

This said, I do think that setting that intention is useful. I often do it, when I need to work as efficiently and fast as I can. Then I try to remain disciplined until I am finished with the task. And it is useful indeed - for the purpose of educting the will in everyday tasks, harmonizing our flow of becoming with our intentions. Doing this, we improve the soul discipline and may hope to become more virtuous, but I don't think we improve thought discipline in particular. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it works for some, I don't know.

[AshvinP]

Right, but such distractions occur in the context of our intentions. On a spiritual path, we are especially attempting to navigate life more and more through our consciously set intentions. As we know, it is about harmonizing our intentional activity, our intuitive movements, with our perceptual contents as much as possible (what we are thinking about what we are doing with our inner activity). So would you agree that, if we intend to remain concentrated on work-related tasks, it would be an improvement if we start out bouncing our thoughts to a dozen non work-related areas of experience and gradually attain a state where we are able to stay mostly within work experience? Then would the content be relevant to how much we have inwardly improved, in the context of specific intentions to remain present in certain tasks?

Yes, definitely. If we set our intention to only think work-related thoughts for a while, and then we succeed, that is an improvement compared to being unable to follow up on the intention. But is this the same thing as what Bardon proposed as an exercise - which was the starting point of this discussion?

"The next exercise deals with thoughts which obtrude within us unwanted and persistently, and with not allowing them to emerge in our minds."

You may say that setting the intention to only navigate the work-related associative thought-field is a first step, or an attempt to block the intruding distractions. For my part, I doubt the efficacy of the method. Concentrating attention on such a large associative field is scarcely effective for the purpose of consistently avoiding intruding thoughts. The power of willed steering comes from the reduction of the surface, from the simplicity and tight circumscription of the target thought. Remaining concentrated on only work-related thoughts is an oxymoron, an overwhelming and dispersed purpose, as I see it. It would work for a little while, until we inevitably need to 'breathe in' and that's when the intruding thoughts will easily come in.

This said, I do think that setting that intention is useful. I often do it, when I need to work as efficiently and fast as I can. Then I try to remain disciplined until I am finished with the task. And it is useful indeed - for the purpose of educting the will in everyday tasks, harmonizing our flow of becoming with our intentions. Doing this, we improve the soul discipline and may hope to become more virtuous, but I don't think we improve thought discipline in particular. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it works for some, I don't know.

Yes, the intention is generally to remain concentrated on whatever particular task is at hand, whatever destiny has brought into our flow of experience. I just can't imagine that it makes no difference, in terms of our inner improvement, if we intend to concentrate on work task A and our thoughts begin meandering into completely non-work-related domains versus work-related task B, C, etc. When I try to live through the experience, or remember what it was like, it feels clear that there is relevance to how 'far' our thoughts meander from the present intention. Again, we aren't speaking of spatial proximity or some absolute geography of thought-distances that governs each soul, but simply recognizing the fact that our life flow is comprised of given nested rhythms, on one hand, and our conscious intentional steering, on the other. Whenever we set a conscious intention, we are 'somewhere' (in terms of vertical temporality) within these nested rhythms and our thoughts can be more or less attenuated from that 'location'. Does that make sense?

The bold also seems synonymous to me - we only improve the soul discipline and virtue through thought-discipline. The latter is the portal into educating the will, since we can stabilize our thought-flow long enough to reach deeper scales of conscious activity and let higher moral impulses flow in and take hold.

[Federica]

Right, but such distractions occur in the context of our intentions. On a spiritual path, we are especially attempting to navigate life more and more through our consciously set intentions. As we know, it is about harmonizing our intentional activity, our intuitive movements, with our perceptual contents as much as possible (what we are thinking about what we are doing with our inner activity). So would you agree that, if we intend to remain concentrated on work-related tasks, it would be an improvement if we start out bouncing our thoughts to a dozen non work-related areas of experience and gradually attain a state where we are able to stay mostly within work experience? Then would the content be relevant to how much we have inwardly improved, in the context of specific intentions to remain present in certain tasks?

Yes, definitely. If we set our intention to only think work-related thoughts for a while, and then we succeed, that is an improvement compared to being unable to follow up on the intention. But is this the same thing as what Bardon proposed as an exercise - which was the starting point of this discussion?

"The next exercise deals with thoughts which obtrude within us unwanted and persistently, and with not allowing them to emerge in our minds."

You may say that setting the intention to only navigate the work-related associative thought-field is a first step, or an attempt to block the intruding distractions. For my part, I doubt the efficacy of the method. Concentrating attention on such a large associative field is scarcely effective for the purpose of consistently avoiding intruding thoughts. The power of willed steering comes from the reduction of the surface, from the simplicity and tight circumscription of the target thought. Remaining concentrated on only work-related thoughts is an oxymoron, an overwhelming and dispersed purpose, as I see it. It would work for a little while, until we inevitably need to 'breathe in' and that's when the intruding thoughts will easily come in.

This said, I do think that setting that intention is useful. I often do it, when I need to work as efficiently and fast as I can. Then I try to remain disciplined until I am finished with the task. And it is useful indeed - for the purpose of educting the will in everyday tasks, harmonizing our flow of becoming with our intentions. Doing this, we improve the soul discipline and may hope to become more virtuous, but I don't think we improve thought discipline in particular. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it works for some, I don't know.

Yes, the intention is generally to remain concentrated on whatever particular task is at hand, whatever destiny has brought into our flow of experience. I just can't imagine that it makes no difference, in terms of our inner improvement, if we intend to concentrate on work task A and our thoughts begin meandering into completely non-work-related domains versus work-related task B, C, etc. When I try to live through the experience, or remember what it was like, it feels clear that there is relevance to how 'far' our thoughts meander from the present intention. Again, we aren't speaking of spatial proximity or some absolute geography of thought-distances that governs each soul, but simply recognizing the fact that our life flow is comprised of given nested rhythms, on one hand, and our conscious intentional steering, on the other. Whenever we set a conscious intention, we are 'somewhere' (in terms of vertical temporality) within these nested rhythms and our thoughts can be more or less attenuated from that 'location'. Does that make sense?

The bold also seems synonymous to me - we only improve the soul discipline and virtue through thought-discipline. The latter is the portal into educating the will, since we can stabilize our thought-flow long enough to reach deeper scales of conscious activity and let higher moral impulses flow in and take hold.

Well, I don't recognize the work-related associative thought-field as a given nested rhythm. It is not given. It's only if we arbitrary decide an association according to which the thought about client A, who is Australian, is somehow closer to the thought about client B, who is Brazilian - simply because they are both my clients - than it is to a thought about the town of Sidney, or the Australian landscapes. That's arbitrary. One could equally argue that, as my mind sends me to the Australian flatlands, I am simply contextualizing the thoughts about client A, whilst if I am mind-wandering all the way to my upcoming meeting with client B, that's when I am getting really distracted. It's completely arbitrary - along what axes you want to nest things. There are infinite associative axes. They are not given. So no, we can't say that thinking about client B is an improvement no matter what. Only if, for some personal reason, I initially gave myself the arbitrary instruction to remain within the perimeter of directly work-related stuff, then it is a success if I actually manage to comply with my own instruction.
In other words, I may be 'somewhere' in vertical temporality thinking about client A, but how can you determine that the Australian landscape is less "attenuated from that location" than the Brazilian client? In my opinion you can't at all.

Moreover, if this kind of will exercises (impart to oneself the instruction to restrain trains of thought within certain associative thought-fields) is synonymous with thought-discipline, why concentrate on one single thought-image as Steiner teaches? Is there anything that Steiners concentration gives, which this Bardon exercise does not give, in your view? And why do we have, in Steiner, separate exercises for will-discipline and for thought-discipline, if they are so synonymous?

[AshvinP]

Yes, definitely. If we set our intention to only think work-related thoughts for a while, and then we succeed, that is an improvement compared to being unable to follow up on the intention. But is this the same thing as what Bardon proposed as an exercise - which was the starting point of this discussion?

"The next exercise deals with thoughts which obtrude within us unwanted and persistently, and with not allowing them to emerge in our minds."

You may say that setting the intention to only navigate the work-related associative thought-field is a first step, or an attempt to block the intruding distractions. For my part, I doubt the efficacy of the method. Concentrating attention on such a large associative field is scarcely effective for the purpose of consistently avoiding intruding thoughts. The power of willed steering comes from the reduction of the surface, from the simplicity and tight circumscription of the target thought. Remaining concentrated on only work-related thoughts is an oxymoron, an overwhelming and dispersed purpose, as I see it. It would work for a little while, until we inevitably need to 'breathe in' and that's when the intruding thoughts will easily come in.

This said, I do think that setting that intention is useful. I often do it, when I need to work as efficiently and fast as I can. Then I try to remain disciplined until I am finished with the task. And it is useful indeed - for the purpose of educting the will in everyday tasks, harmonizing our flow of becoming with our intentions. Doing this, we improve the soul discipline and may hope to become more virtuous, but I don't think we improve thought discipline in particular. But I may be wrong. Perhaps it works for some, I don't know.

Yes, the intention is generally to remain concentrated on whatever particular task is at hand, whatever destiny has brought into our flow of experience. I just can't imagine that it makes no difference, in terms of our inner improvement, if we intend to concentrate on work task A and our thoughts begin meandering into completely non-work-related domains versus work-related task B, C, etc. When I try to live through the experience, or remember what it was like, it feels clear that there is relevance to how 'far' our thoughts meander from the present intention. Again, we aren't speaking of spatial proximity or some absolute geography of thought-distances that governs each soul, but simply recognizing the fact that our life flow is comprised of given nested rhythms, on one hand, and our conscious intentional steering, on the other. Whenever we set a conscious intention, we are 'somewhere' (in terms of vertical temporality) within these nested rhythms and our thoughts can be more or less attenuated from that 'location'. Does that make sense?

The bold also seems synonymous to me - we only improve the soul discipline and virtue through thought-discipline. The latter is the portal into educating the will, since we can stabilize our thought-flow long enough to reach deeper scales of conscious activity and let higher moral impulses flow in and take hold.

Well, I don't recognize the work-related associative thought-field as a given nested rhythm. It is not given. It's only if we arbitrary decide an association according to which the thought about client A, who is Australian, is somehow closer to the thought about client B, who is Brazilian - simply because they are both my clients - than it is to a thought about the town of Sidney, or the Australian landscapes. That's arbitrary. One could equally argue that, as my mind sends me to the Australian flatlands, I am simply contextualizing the thoughts about client A, whilst if I am mind-wandering all the way to my upcoming meeting with client B, that's when I am getting really distracted. It's completely arbitrary - along what axes you want to nest things. There are infinite associative axes. They are not given. So no, we can't say that thinking about client B is an improvement no matter what. Only if, for some personal reason, I initially gave myself the arbitrary instruction to remain within the perimeter of directly work-related stuff, then it is a success if I actually manage to comply with my own instruction.
In other words, I may be 'somewhere' in vertical temporality thinking about client A, but how can you determine that the Australian landscape is less "attenuated from that location" than the Brazilian client? In my opinion you can't at all.

I take a different view. Surely the associative linkages in our fourth intellectual-sensory convolution are not simple and straightforward, and the example you gave may very well be valid for some souls - that linking from client A to the Australian flatlands is a somewhat proximate move, no less so than linking to client B. So we should be careful not to define the proximity along any simple linear axis, which is why I have been saying it is not a definitional/computational inquiry but an intuitive one that should be gradually elucidated by each soul's concentrated efforts. Yet we are going to the other extreme when we say it is all arbitrary. The general work rhythm is probably as old as human civilization itself, tied closely with the rhythm between daylight and nighttime. It is a given rhythm that we have inherited from being Earthly humans, in that sense. Moreover, our particular career, work tasks, and the colleagues, clients, etc. that we interact with are the reflection of various personal and collective karmic entanglements, related to our temperament, our inner capacities, our life mission, our national mission, etc. All of these are curvatures of destiny that are given to us in a structured and lawful way, they are not arbitrary. Everything we think about, feel, and do within our work rhythm points back to these lawful curvatures. Thus, it is not arbitrary to consider this 'associative thought-field' as a given nested rhythm that is relevant to our inner efforts and the 'phase-relation' between our intentional activity and our mental contents.

If we make this all into some intellectual-computational exercise of dissecting the thought-linkages and 'figuring out' which particular distracted thoughts are better than others, then all of your objections about the infinite associative axes and so forth hold. That is not the proper purview of the intellect and there is indeed too much room for arbitrariness to creep in based on personal assumptions, opinions, and preferences. Yet the objections don't hold if we approach it as it is meant to be approached in the context of spiritual development, as an organic and intuitive process of sensitizing to the underlying soul patterns. Our intuitive thinking can truly probe these infinite axes and gain a concrete sense of orientation within them, without conjuring up any rigid definitions or rules. The intellect then only serves to loosely anchor our intuitive process. By 'spectrum analyzing' the total intuitive potential into these characteristic nested rhythms of experience, like the work and non-work rhythms, we establish a basis to more effectively resonate with the higher karmic intents that structure their unfoldment. If we keep everything smeared together, as in most mystical approaches, it becomes more difficult to attain that resonance. We need a refined differentiation of the experiential flow to gain consciousness within the deeper strata.

Moreover, if this kind of will exercises (impart to oneself the instruction to restrain trains of thought within certain associative thought-fields) is synonymous with thought-discipline, why concentrate on one single thought-image as Steiner teaches? Is there anything that Steiners concentration gives, which this Bardon exercise does not give, in your view? And why do we have, in Steiner, separate exercises for will-discipline and for thought-discipline, if they are so synonymous?

I would be surprised if Steiner does not comment on something very similar in one of his lectures, and perhaps we can search for a relevant quote. But we can also easily understand the inner relationship ourselves and we gain very little by asking "did Steiner say this is right or not?" As we have discussed before, everything that humanity does which leads to insight into the lawful flow of experience is also a form of meditation-concentration (from natural science to prayer). There is no need to separate these things out and place them into different buckets, they all exist along a unified gradient of intuitive activity. What imaginative concentration on a single thought-image provides is simply a much more intense and purified form of that activity. Yet for a similar reason that Cleric introduced the physical ignition exercise, broadening out to certain associative thought-fields can be a useful preparatory stage and bridge to the imaginative concentration we are familiar with. It is somewhat less demanding for the intellect and its familiar habits, to begin with (although it is still quite difficult for our erratic modern condition). We can gradually gain trust and confidence in our inner ability to concentrate spiritual activity if we experience ourselves remaining within a certain thought-field for longer and longer durations.

The point about will- and thought-discipline is simply that they are complementary and that we can't neatly separate them. Again, we can investigate this ourselves. Attaining discipline in any inner activity implicates a strengthened will, does it not? Just like we need strengthened will to resist scratching the physical rash, we need it to resist scratching the soul rashes that express themselves in wildly oscillating thoughts. And educating any form of inner activity implicates a strengthened and enlivened thinking, right? Yes, certain exercises can be leveraged to focus more on the will or on thinking, but the idea is that none of them can be effectively done in isolation from the others, and many such exercises implicate both at the same time.

[Federica]

I take a different view. Surely the associative linkages in our fourth intellectual-sensory convolution are not simple and straightforward, and the example you gave may very well be valid for some souls - that linking from client A to the Australian flatlands is a somewhat proximate move, no less so than linking to client B. So we should be careful not to define the proximity along any simple linear axis, which is why I have been saying it is not a definitional/computational inquiry but an intuitive one that should be gradually elucidated by each soul's concentrated efforts.

Agreed, but when Bardon speaks of home versus workplace, isn't it precisely that kind of liner axis you are cautioning against? In my intuitive inquiry, for example, I surely feel more 'working' while trying to grasp an anthroposophical text than I do while working on client files A, B, or C, when the client work doesn't seem part of any ancestral traditional rhythm at all.

Yet we are going to the other extreme when we say it is all arbitrary. The general work rhythm is probably as old as human civilization itself, tied closely with the rhythm between daylight and nighttime. It is a given rhythm that we have inherited from being Earthly humans, in that sense. Moreover, our particular career, work tasks, and the colleagues, clients, etc. that we interact with are the reflection of various personal and collective karmic entanglements, related to our temperament, our inner capacities, our life mission, our national mission, etc. All of these are curvatures of destiny that are given to us in a structured and lawful way, they are not arbitrary. Everything we think about, feel, and do within our work rhythm points back to these lawful curvatures. Thus, it is not arbitrary to consider this 'associative thought-field' as a given nested rhythm that is relevant to our inner efforts and the 'phase-relation' between our intentional activity and our mental contents.

If we make this all into some intellectual-computational exercise of dissecting the thought-linkages and 'figuring out' which particular distracted thoughts are better than others, then all of your objections about the infinite associative axes and so forth hold. That is not the proper purview of the intellect and there is indeed too much room for arbitrariness to creep in based on personal assumptions, opinions, and preferences. Yet the objections don't hold if we approach it as it is meant to be approached in the context of spiritual development, as an organic and intuitive process of sensitizing to the underlying soul patterns. Our intuitive thinking can truly probe these infinite axes and gain a concrete sense of orientation within them, without conjuring up any rigid definitions or rules. The intellect then only serves to loosely anchor our intuitive process. By 'spectrum analyzing' the total intuitive potential into these characteristic nested rhythms of experience, like the work and non-work rhythms, we establish a basis to more effectively resonate with the higher karmic intents that structure their unfoldment. If we keep everything smeared together, as in most mystical approaches, it becomes more difficult to attain that resonance. We need a refined differentiation of the experiential flow to gain consciousness within the deeper strata.

I understand from how you describe it that you see things in a more structured and traditional way than I do. Historical rhythms constantly evolve. In fact, these seemingly immutable work rhythms you speak of have gone from being fused with private life in ancient times, to being formalized, boxed, and institutionalized in modern times, to becoming deconstructed and highly fragmented today, with rapidly decreasing connection with the rhythm of day and night. Additionally, in our times, individual variability is becoming, and will continue to become, more and more significant. I agree that the activities which occupy our life are not random and arbitrary. Again, what I mean when I say arbitrary is that drawing the associative linear line 'workplace-home' is arbitrary, not that what happens in our worldly life is arbitrary. And, in this type of exercise, where we design ahead a perimeter of thought-field, we inevitably succumb to arbitrariness, because we are forced to trace nothing other than a definitional-computational perimeter in advance. That’s the spirit of the exercise itself. It’s like a sports field. The ball will fall either within, or without. There's no much room left for the intuitive approach you recommend.
In this context, I agree that “our intuitive thinking can truly probe these infinite axes and gain a concrete sense of orientation within them, without conjuring up any rigid definitions or rules”. But I doubt this is best pursued within the framework of this exercise, relying on activities that I don’t see as a “characteristic nested rhythm of experience”.

Don’t you think you are working, when you are in the process of having ideas for an essay, then writing it, then posting it and following it? Is that a traditional nested rhythm of experience, or is it a rhythm heavily intertwined with and melted into many other rhythms, decomposed and superposed with much else in your life flow, making it very difficult, or near to meaningless, to discriminate if a thought you have while navigating in that process is related or not related to that work?

I would be surprised if Steiner does not comment on something very similar in one of his lectures, and perhaps we can search for a relevant quote. But we can also easily understand the inner relationship ourselves and we gain very little by asking "did Steiner say this is right or not?" As we have discussed before, everything that humanity does which leads to insight into the lawful flow of experience is also a form of meditation-concentration (from natural science to prayer). There is no need to separate these things out and place them into different buckets, they all exist along a unified gradient of intuitive activity. What imaginative concentration on a single thought-image provides is simply a much more intense and purified form of that activity. Yet for a similar reason that Cleric introduced the physical ignition exercise, broadening out to certain associative thought-fields can be a useful preparatory stage and bridge to the imaginative concentration we are familiar with. It is somewhat less demanding for the intellect and its familiar habits, to begin with (although it is still quite difficult for our erratic modern condition). We can gradually gain trust and confidence in our inner ability to concentrate spiritual activity if we experience ourselves remaining within a certain thought-field for longer and longer durations.

The point about will- and thought-discipline is simply that they are complementary and that we can't neatly separate them. Again, we can investigate this ourselves. Attaining discipline in any inner activity implicates a strengthened will, does it not? Just like we need strengthened will to resist scratching the physical rash, we need it to resist scratching the soul rashes that express themselves in wildly oscillating thoughts. And educating any form of inner activity implicates a strengthened and enlivened thinking, right? Yes, certain exercises can be leveraged to focus more on the will or on thinking, but the idea is that none of them can be effectively done in isolation from the others, and many such exercises implicate both at the same time.

Right, I do not intend to separate and box cognitive activities either. Yes, they are all on a gradient. But not “synonymous”, which is the characterization that I commented on. I agree with the gradient you describe here. I don’t agree with the synonyms from your previous post. As it can be noticed, above you have argued for not smearing everything together, keeping the nested rhythms separate (when I say that separation is arbitrary). Now in this paragraph, you are arguing for not separating things, keeping all cognitive activity continuous on a gradient (since I objected to your synonyms, noticing that Steiner separates will and thought exercises). Of course, a case can be made for both of these attitudes, and both have their justification, but could it be that your leaning here tends to simply go opposite to mine?

We can put it like that: we agree on the essence, there is a higher view point from which our flow is crystal clear and we can exercise our inner activity in various ways to progressively uncover some of that meaning. Nothing is arbitrary at that level. I simply do not have the same affinity with this exercise as you have to build trust and confidence in the inner powers of thought. I can take it as a will exercise, like the third subsidiary exercise.

[AshvinP]

I take a different view. Surely the associative linkages in our fourth intellectual-sensory convolution are not simple and straightforward, and the example you gave may very well be valid for some souls - that linking from client A to the Australian flatlands is a somewhat proximate move, no less so than linking to client B. So we should be careful not to define the proximity along any simple linear axis, which is why I have been saying it is not a definitional/computational inquiry but an intuitive one that should be gradually elucidated by each soul's concentrated efforts.

Agreed, but when Bardon speaks of home versus workplace, isn't it precisely that kind of liner axis you are cautioning against? In my intuitive inquiry, for example, I surely feel more 'working' while trying to grasp an anthroposophical text than I do while working on client files A, B, or C, when the client work doesn't seem part of any ancestral traditional rhythm at all.

I don't think so, Bardon is (a) an initiate who would have overcome such mental habits and (b) presented the exercise in a few short words. I think that was just one of several characteristic rhythms that could be used. For most people, of that time especially (1950s), the differentiation of a day into work and personal life would be an undeniable landmark of experience. We may feel a bit differently today, but I think for most people there is still quite a different inner 'texture' to the experiences of work and personal life, different sort of obligations, interests, ways of communicating, ways of relating socially, etc.

But if you agree our lives are broadly characterized by nested rhythms, and work-personal is not a natural differentiation for you, maybe you can say a few words about what would be a more useful one to focus on. Do you think such an exercise can be useful for any characteristic rhythm, any 'thought-field'?

I understand from how you describe it that you see things in a more structured and traditional way than I do. Historical rhythms constantly evolve. In fact, these seemingly immutable work rhythms you speak of have gone from being fused with private life in ancient times, to being formalized, boxed, and institutionalized in modern times, to becoming deconstructed and highly fragmented today, with rapidly decreasing connection with the rhythm of day and night. Additionally, in our times, individual variability is becoming, and will continue to become, more and more significant. I agree that the activities which occupy our life are not random and arbitrary. Again, what I mean when I say arbitrary is that drawing the associative linear line 'workplace-home' is arbitrary, not that what happens in our worldly life is arbitrary. And, in this type of exercise, where we design ahead a perimeter of thought-field, we inevitably succumb to arbitrariness, because we are forced to trace nothing other than a definitional-computational perimeter in advance. That’s the spirit of the exercise itself. It’s like a sports field. The ball will fall either within, or without. There's no much room left for the intuitive approach you recommend.
In this context, I agree that “our intuitive thinking can truly probe these infinite axes and gain a concrete sense of orientation within them, without conjuring up any rigid definitions or rules”. But I doubt this is best pursued within the framework of this exercise, relying on activities that I don’t see as a “characteristic nested rhythm of experience”.

Don’t you think you are working, when you are in the process of having ideas for an essay, then writing it, then posting it and following it? Is that a traditional nested rhythm of experience, or is it a rhythm heavily intertwined with and melted into many other rhythms, decomposed and superposed with much else in your life flow, making it very difficult, or near to meaningless, to discriminate if a thought you have while navigating in that process is related or not related to that work?

This is a good example to hone in on the issue. The rhythm of consciously exploring supersensible intuition and painting that intuition in concepts is not given in the same way as other Earthly natural-cultural rhythms. It is not conscious experience that will unfold without our continual efforts to rekindle it and condense it along the intuitive gradient into metaphorical concepts. A key part of higher development is precisely to distinguish this sort of experience, of mental contents, from what we experience in our usual given rhythms, where we feel to be active but are usually stumbling into them in an instinctive way and dreaming through the contents. We should get a more and more refined sense of our 'location' when perceiving various mental contents.

At the same time, the higher development is not necessarily inventing brand new rhythms. It is new in the sense that we are fully conscious of the inner movements, in which we feel active as individuals, but it is also a retracing of all the instinctual rhythms of cultural and natural life. We reach the deeper intentional curvatures that structure those rhyrhms. So evolution has certainly brought our experience of the rhythms into a decomposed, individualized, fragmented, etc. state, to the point where we hardly even acknowledge our exepriential flow is characterized by them, but that is not their spiritual essence. The continuation of evolution is restoring our intuitive sensitivity for how their intentional depth is still structuring our daily flow of inner contents.

Right, I do not intend to separate and box cognitive activities either. Yes, they are all on a gradient. But not “synonymous”, which is the characterization that I commented on. I agree with the gradient you describe here. I don’t agree with the synonyms from your previous post. As it can be noticed, above you have argued for not smearing everything together, keeping the nested rhythms separate (when I say that separation is arbitrary). Now in this paragraph, you are arguing for not separating things, keeping all cognitive activity continuous on a gradient (since I objected to your synonyms, noticing that Steiner separates will and thought exercises). Of course, a case can be made for both of these attitudes, and both have their justification, but could it be that your leaning here tends to simply go opposite to mine?

We can put it like that: we agree on the essence, there is a higher view point from which our flow is crystal clear and we can exercise our inner activity in various ways to progressively uncover some of that meaning. Nothing is arbitrary at that level. I simply do not have the same affinity with this exercise as you have to build trust and confidence in the inner powers of thought. I can take it as a will exercise, like the third subsidiary exercise.

We can keep things on a continuous gradient, as we indeed we must if reality is One, while still precisely differentiating how various aspects structure our experience. Thinking-Will is the fundamental carrier wave ryhthm, yet in the 4th convolution the two poles are experienced most orthogonally. The various spiritual exercises help us realize more and more of their unity, to bring the immediacy and concreteness of the will into our thinking and the intuitive insight of thinking into the will. So perhaps it is better to say they become more and more synonymous on the spiritual path, yet that realization of unity only happens through precise intuitive differentiation of the experiential flow, delamination of inner rhythms that are normally merged together and flattened.

[AshvinP]

PS - I know I mentioned we don't need to consult Steiner, but this is a fascinating lecture cycle to explore relevant to the evolving work rhythm, particularly this one.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA172/En ... 12p01.html

Spiritual science will certainly not be in a position to do this. It will often be compelled to set forth as something significantly great for the evolution of the world the very thing that people would prefer not to hear. It will therefore be inevitable that some people today who consider themselves exceedingly bright because their philistinism has crept into their brains will glibly declare, “Oh, professional life is a prosaic, mundane matter.” The way vocational life appears to true spiritual science compels us to declare that through the very fact that this life becomes detached from human interests, it contains the necessity to develop relationships possessing a cosmic significance. Many people might think that a depressing view of the future results from this: increasingly people are caught in the treadmill of life and spiritual science cannot even console them that this has happened.

It would, however, be a great deception should one draw such a conclusion from what has been said since the nature of the universe requires things to be unified through polar opposites. Just consider how these polarities thrust themselves upon you in the world! It is, for example, in their mutual relationship that positive and negative electricity produce their unified effects. Positive and negative electricity are necessary to each other. Male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. It is from polarities that unity evolves in the evolution of the world.

Now, the same principle is at the bottom of what has been said. When vocational labor is separated from the human being, we necessarily create the first cosmic potentiality for a far-reaching cosmic evolution. Everything that happens in the evolution of the world is related to the spiritual, and in what we create within the sphere of our vocations, whether by bodily or by mental labor, there lies the possibility for the incarnation of spiritual beings. At present, during this earth stage, these spiritual beings are, to be sure, still of an elemental kind; we might say an elemental kind of the fourth degree. But they will have become elemental beings of the third degree during the Jupiter evolution, and so on. The labor in the objective vocational process is detached from us and becomes the external sheath for elemental beings who thereby continue their development. But this occurs only under a certain condition.

If it be said that we must first begin to understand the meaning of what is often belittled as the prosaic part of life, we must also understand that this meaning is not clarified until we comprehend it completely in its comprehensive cosmic connection. What we produce in our vocational life can become meaningful for the Vulcan evolution, but something else is prerequisite to this. Just as positive electricity is necessary for negative, and the male necessary for the female, so also what will be released continuously from humanity as activity will require an opposite pole. A polarity of opposites was also present for humanity in its earlier evolutionary stages. Something absolutely new, of course, does not come into existence here because something similar was already present before. But when you look back at earlier cultural periods, if only two or three centuries ago, you will find that the human being was still far more immersed in his professional life with his feelings and passions, in fact with all his emotions, than today. When you compare the joy that a human being could still experience in his or her profession even a hundred years ago with the dissatisfaction of many people today who have nothing but their profession, you will be able to form an impression of what really needs to be said.

[Federica]

I take a different view. Surely the associative linkages in our fourth intellectual-sensory convolution are not simple and straightforward, and the example you gave may very well be valid for some souls - that linking from client A to the Australian flatlands is a somewhat proximate move, no less so than linking to client B. So we should be careful not to define the proximity along any simple linear axis, which is why I have been saying it is not a definitional/computational inquiry but an intuitive one that should be gradually elucidated by each soul's concentrated efforts.

Agreed, but when Bardon speaks of home versus workplace, isn't it precisely that kind of liner axis you are cautioning against? In my intuitive inquiry, for example, I surely feel more 'working' while trying to grasp an anthroposophical text than I do while working on client files A, B, or C, when the client work doesn't seem part of any ancestral traditional rhythm at all.

I don't think so, Bardon is (a) an initiate who would have overcome such mental habits and (b) presented the exercise in a few short words. I think that was just one of several characteristic rhythms that could be used. For most people, of that time especially (1950s), the differentiation of a day into work and personal life would be an undeniable landmark of experience. We may feel a bit differently today, but I think for most people there is still quite a different inner 'texture' to the experiences of work and personal life, different sort of obligations, interests, ways of communicating, ways of relating socially, etc.

But if you agree our lives are broadly characterized by nested rhythms, and work-personal is not a natural differentiation for you, maybe you can say a few words about what would be a more useful one to focus on. Do you think such an exercise can be useful for any characteristic rhythm, any 'thought-field'?

How have you determined that he was an initiate? By the way, isn't the fact of presenting an exercise in very few words perplexing, given that one is writing a book with the intention of spreading a certain esoteric path for the use of the many? In my opinion, a more useful rhythm for this exercise would be for example nutrition. To bring conscious attention to the food eaten, while eating it, would be a more clear exercise.

Don’t you think you are working, when you are in the process of having ideas for an essay, then writing it, then posting it and following it? Is that a traditional nested rhythm of experience, or is it a rhythm heavily intertwined with and melted into many other rhythms, decomposed and superposed with much else in your life flow, making it very difficult, or near to meaningless, to discriminate if a thought you have while navigating in that process is related or not related to that work?

This is a good example to hone in on the issue. The rhythm of consciously exploring supersensible intuition and painting that intuition in concepts is not given in the same way as other Earthly natural-cultural rhythms. It is not conscious experience that will unfold without our continual efforts to rekindle it and condense it along the intuitive gradient into metaphorical concepts. A key part of higher development is precisely to distinguish this sort of experience, of mental contents, from what we experience in our usual given rhythms, where we feel to be active but are usually stumbling into them in an instinctive way and dreaming through the contents. We should get a more and more refined sense of our 'location' when perceiving various mental contents.

At the same time, the higher development is not necessarily inventing brand new rhythms. It is new in the sense that we are fully conscious of the inner movements, in which we feel active as individuals, but it is also a retracing of all the instinctual rhythms of cultural and natural life. We reach the deeper intentional curvatures that structure those rhyrhms. So evolution has certainly brought our experience of the rhythms into a decomposed, individualized, fragmented, etc. state, to the point where we hardly even acknowledge our exepriential flow is characterized by them, but that is not their spiritual essence. The continuation of evolution is restoring our intuitive sensitivity for how their intentional depth is still structuring our daily flow of inner contents.

Again, I don't think that the work rhythm is given. Natural rhythms are given in a given epoch, like waking and sleeping, thinking and becoming distracted, breathing in and out. I wouldn't bundle them together with culture as you do. Regarding the bold: work for me means doing meaningful activities, not succumbing to a supposedly given, natural-cultural rhythm. Therefore, I would definitely call the sort of willed experiences involved in, for example, writing an essay, a work. I get that you don't want to call it work, but why? Why keep an artificial separation between a "given traditional rhythm" of work, when we supposedly execute mundane tasks, and a meaningful activity that expresses higher development and "involves mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result" (what work is according to the dictionary)? Only because it goes in the higher development bucket and needs to be kept separate? Why do you want to separate it?
I think the opposite: that all aspects of life - within the reach of one's current capacities - are to be imbued with the intentions characterizing one's choice to walk a spiritual path. You say: "We reach the deeper intentional curvatures that structure those rhythms". Yes, and there we may find that the restoration of sensitivity into the depth of the rhythms of experience will lead to a completely different social life, where "work" as traditionally executed so far is entirely transfigured, and with it money, community, and social relations. So that what is "still structuring our daily flow" is in the process of becoming something completely different that doesn't require that we keep up an artificial distinction between 'dull work' done by habit and cultural convention, and actually meaningful activity done with full presence of cognitive capacities (which you say should be kept distinguished from usual rhythms to be good at higher development )


As Steiner says in the lecture that you have just quoted:
"in our fifth post-Atlantean period, all human relationships will be essentially modified in comparison with those that prevailed in earlier periods of the earth. They will be so modified that man must, out of his own freedom, bring more with him than in earlier ages when his mission in the evolution of earth could be carried out almost instinctively; that is, when he received by inspiration the direction into which he had to go."
Being so traditional in the views about immutable, given work rhythms, destined to remain the same, is not recommended.... as I noted yesterday, the will of the individual in shaping these cultural rhythms will become more and more decisive.

[AshvinP]

Agreed, but when Bardon speaks of home versus workplace, isn't it precisely that kind of liner axis you are cautioning against? In my intuitive inquiry, for example, I surely feel more 'working' while trying to grasp an anthroposophical text than I do while working on client files A, B, or C, when the client work doesn't seem part of any ancestral traditional rhythm at all.

I don't think so, Bardon is (a) an initiate who would have overcome such mental habits and (b) presented the exercise in a few short words. I think that was just one of several characteristic rhythms that could be used. For most people, of that time especially (1950s), the differentiation of a day into work and personal life would be an undeniable landmark of experience. We may feel a bit differently today, but I think for most people there is still quite a different inner 'texture' to the experiences of work and personal life, different sort of obligations, interests, ways of communicating, ways of relating socially, etc.

But if you agree our lives are broadly characterized by nested rhythms, and work-personal is not a natural differentiation for you, maybe you can say a few words about what would be a more useful one to focus on. Do you think such an exercise can be useful for any characteristic rhythm, any 'thought-field'?

How have you determined that he was an initiate? By the way, isn't the fact of presenting an exercise in very few words perplexing, given that one is writing a book with the intention of spreading a certain esoteric path for the use of the many? In my opinion, a more useful rhythm for this exercise would be for example nutrition. To bring conscious attention to the food eaten, while eating it, would be a more clear exercise.

Don’t you think you are working, when you are in the process of having ideas for an essay, then writing it, then posting it and following it? Is that a traditional nested rhythm of experience, or is it a rhythm heavily intertwined with and melted into many other rhythms, decomposed and superposed with much else in your life flow, making it very difficult, or near to meaningless, to discriminate if a thought you have while navigating in that process is related or not related to that work?

This is a good example to hone in on the issue. The rhythm of consciously exploring supersensible intuition and painting that intuition in concepts is not given in the same way as other Earthly natural-cultural rhythms. It is not conscious experience that will unfold without our continual efforts to rekindle it and condense it along the intuitive gradient into metaphorical concepts. A key part of higher development is precisely to distinguish this sort of experience, of mental contents, from what we experience in our usual given rhythms, where we feel to be active but are usually stumbling into them in an instinctive way and dreaming through the contents. We should get a more and more refined sense of our 'location' when perceiving various mental contents.

At the same time, the higher development is not necessarily inventing brand new rhythms. It is new in the sense that we are fully conscious of the inner movements, in which we feel active as individuals, but it is also a retracing of all the instinctual rhythms of cultural and natural life. We reach the deeper intentional curvatures that structure those rhyrhms. So evolution has certainly brought our experience of the rhythms into a decomposed, individualized, fragmented, etc. state, to the point where we hardly even acknowledge our exepriential flow is characterized by them, but that is not their spiritual essence. The continuation of evolution is restoring our intuitive sensitivity for how their intentional depth is still structuring our daily flow of inner contents.

Again, I don't think that the work rhythm is given. Natural rhythms are given in a given epoch, like waking and sleeping, thinking and becoming distracted, breathing in and out. I wouldn't bundle them together with culture as you do. Regarding the bold: work for me means doing meaningful activities, not succumbing to a supposedly given, natural-cultural rhythm. Therefore, I would definitely call the sort of willed experiences involved in, for example, writing an essay, a work. I get that you don't want to call it work, but why? Why keep an artificial separation between a "given traditional rhythm" of work, when we supposedly execute mundane tasks, and a meaningful activity that expresses higher development and "involves mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result" (what work is according to the dictionary)? Only because it goes in the higher development bucket and needs to be kept separate? Why do you want to separate it?
I think the opposite: that all aspects of life - within the reach of one's current capacities - are to be imbued with the intentions characterizing one's choice to walk a spiritual path. You say: "We reach the deeper intentional curvatures that structure those rhythms". Yes, and there we may find that the restoration of sensitivity into the depth of the rhythms of experience will lead to a completely different social life, where "work" as traditionally executed so far is entirely transfigured, and with it money, community, and social relations. So that what is "still structuring our daily flow" is in the process of becoming something completely different that doesn't require that we keep up an artificial distinction between 'dull work' done by habit and cultural convention, and actually meaningful activity done with full presence of cognitive capacities (which you say should be kept distinguished from usual rhythms to be good at higher development )


As Steiner says in the lecture that you have just quoted:
"in our fifth post-Atlantean period, all human relationships will be essentially modified in comparison with those that prevailed in earlier periods of the earth. They will be so modified that man must, out of his own freedom, bring more with him than in earlier ages when his mission in the evolution of earth could be carried out almost instinctively; that is, when he received by inspiration the direction into which he had to go."
Being so traditional in the views about immutable, given work rhythms, destined to remain the same, is not recommended.... as I noted yesterday, the will of the individual in shaping these cultural rhythms will become more and more decisive.

Yes, the given rhythm of eating and non-eating is also characteristic and we can work on remaining concentrated in the experience of nutritive substance.

What is missing here is the process of how this unification of meaningful activity across the spectrum will happen. The modern mystical approach is to smear things together from the outset, i.e. merely contemplate how "work" as any meaningful activity can be extended across the life spectrum. But the intuitive thinking path starts from an honest assessment of what is given in our flow of experience, how we have awakened into a state of conditioning by natural-cultural rhythms which we have inherited. Even if we vaguely feel like our relationship to them is unique, we need to be honest that these are greater and mysterious intuitive curvatures that are 'placed' in evolution for higher purposes. Thus Steiner devotes an entire lecture cycle to the karma of vocational experience. He could have just defined "vocation" as practically anything we do including spiritual work, from the outset, but this would do nothing to help us delaminate the inner structure and dynamics of the personal and collective flow. This rhythm of differentiation and integration, of course, is seeded by Steiner in all the early works. It is a question of how we attain the higher unities of evolution, the practical inner techniques by which we can consciously commune with the differentiated hierarchies in the navigation of life toward integrated ideals.

Anyway, I get that you want to exclude vocational rhythm as a given experiential curvature, which itself seems very arbitrary to me, so one does not need to focus on that differentiation. As long as the underlying principle of the exercise is grasped, the conscious setting of intentions to remain present and concentrated in tasks or spheres of experience, it can be applied in whatever ways that are optimal for our personal situation, and that's what is important.

[AshvinP]

Why keep an artificial separation between a "given traditional rhythm" of work, when we supposedly execute mundane tasks, and a meaningful activity that expresses higher development and "involves mental or physical effort done in order to achieve a purpose or result" (what work is according to the dictionary)? Only because it goes in the higher development bucket and needs to be kept separate? Why do you want to separate it?

I just want to add a brief comment addressing these questions. I hope it's clear that there is a phenomenological distinction between our ordinary experience of 'mental effort to achieve a purpose-result' and that which we experience in higher development, the imaginative effort to explore supersensible intuitions. This is a subtle distinction because, normally, we indeed feel like we are quite active, intentional, and in control when we are in the midst of work tasks, for example. Just as we can say that a math problem won't do itself without our mental struggle, we may say that the work tasks won't complete themselves without that struggle. Yet there is a distinction insofar as the latter can unfold quite habitually and automatically, based on etched memory images of how we have done the same tasks and run through the same logical chains of thought that are necessary to complete the tasks, many times before.

All of that shifts as we approach the threshold of supersensible perception and experience ourselves trying to hone in on the proper intuitions and condense them into metaphorical concepts. Every time we write a phenomenological essay on spiritual activity and its depth, for example, we cannot rely on etched memory images of 'how it all works' in quite the same way. We can't start our thinking with certain premises that will logically lead us to the proper concepts to use with strict necessity, like we experience in standard academic or philosophical writing. Instead, it is like we need to do mini-meditations throughout the writing process, we need to continually concentrate on the flow of experience, purified of as many standard assumptions and habits as possible, and locate the relevant intuitions that can then be illustrated through more or less familiar examples and concepts. So when I say, "A key part of higher development is precisely to distinguish this sort of experience, of mental contents, from what we experience in our usual given rhythms", I have in mind something very similar to what Cleric described in relation to our soul grooves:

When our soul is gnawed at by dark feelings, it is as if we’re traveling through a correspondingly shaped curvature of the World groove. In our normal consciousness, we don’t see this environment but it continually shapes our mood and steers the direction of our thinking. Our needle vibrates accordingly to the greater groove and we experience the finer vibrations as correspondingly dark thoughts. Even if we try to override this by scribbling with our needle “Everything is great”, we still can’t help but feel the surrounding cold and darkness. In order to step into a different environment, our thinking has to be amplified such that it can give an impetus to a force in the depth of our feeling-life. Then something in the curvature of the World groove alters and new moods, and new thought-images flow into our consciousness. This is rarely a one-time switch. For a long time, we may need to accumulate this soul force that will allow us to switch tracks. And even then, the two grooves may meander closely together, now going apart, then intertwining again. In general, everything of the nature of sympathies and antipathies can be understood as dim perceptions of the deeper soul groove that we flow through.

We could also apply a similar experienced distinction to what I am speaking of above, especially the bold part. Any of us who write on this forum have probably experienced how much amplified thinking effort it takes to write a somewhat lengthy post about supersensible realities. We have probably experienced how many of our old habits based on normal intellectual life meander into and intertwine with those efforts. Yet, as we persist, the feeling of how they differ from one another grows clearer and starker. This is a very important differentiation to attain in our life experience, unlike any other. It is true that more and more of this higher effort should spiral into our ordinary work and personal lives over time (as individuals and communities), but again, that higher unity will only manifest if we first clearly differentiate the domains of imaginative activity in our experience, as in the image above. It is through that experiential differentiation that "all aspects of life - within the reach of one's current capacities - are to be imbued with the intentions characterizing one's choice to walk a spiritual path", as you put it.