findingblanks wrote: ↑Mon Sep 23, 2024 1:37 am
In re-reading my last comments, I realized I might need to be more clear: I'm not suggesting that anything you said warrants an accusation of being overly intellectual. No. I merely was observing, while reading, how this is the kind of conversation that often leads to such claims. Perhaps, compared to the norm, I spend more time speaking to different groups doing intense and highly detailed phenomenologies. I've grown very sensitive to how easy it is for folks to hear other language modalities and instantly translate/experience it as disconnected from felt experiencing. I am absolutely clear that you are digging into your experience and simply generating a lexicon as precise as possible from there. I am nearly daily accused of speaking from abstractions, so I was enjoying the observation of how and why this accusation is generated. I think I probably made my point, but upon re-reading I saw how the opening comment contained some pocket of ambiguity that could be taken in different directions. Take care.
Right, I understood this to be your point and completely agree. Many people quickly tune out of such discussions precisely for that reason, which is perhaps another way of saying they project their own intellectualizing habits onto the phenomenological exploration and then dismiss the latter as "too intellectual" for that reason. Things get flipped quite upside down in this way, where what is highly abstract spiritual discussion is conceived as "concrete" while what is the concrete artistic depiction of inner realities is conceived as "abstract intellectualism". I think this happens in the context of many of Steiner's books/lectures as well.
Continuing on, we can try to get a more solid orientation to what is referred to, at first abstractly, as 'intuitive curvatures' that comprise the totality of our experience between overlapping perceptual content 'given to me' and 'given by me'. As a strictly phenomenological matter, we only experience a single 'now' state of being comprised of perceptual content and attentional activity, which we tried to sensitize through previous exercises of 'zooming out' and 'zooming in'. It is much easier to get a grasp on the perceptual content since we can encompass it as receded memory pictures. Even when imagining all our knowledge, skills, etc. that form our 'intuitive context', we are focusing on the sphere of receded as memory perceptual content. For the sphere of not-yet-manifest attentional activity, we need to
intuitively feel our way into it. Metaphors can act as portals that give us an imaginative anchor point for such an intuitive journey into 'the future', i.e. the unmanifest sphere of potential states that meets the already etched psychic-bodily curvatures and continually condenses as receding perceptual content. They can help us continually refine our inner orientation and make ideas that must necessarily start as abstract, become more and more concrete.
Here is one such imaginative metaphor for the 'intuitive curvatures' from Cleric:
Consider a rail track and a small cart that can move back and forth along it. Imagine that we are shown only a photograph of it. Can we tell whether the cart was moving or stationary when the photograph was taken? We can’t tell (assuming the photo is perfect, no motion blur, etc.). The only thing we know is that at the time of photographing the cart was at a particular place along the track. Our guess about its previous or future positions would be as good as any other. Let’s imagine that it has been stationary. This can be depicted as (a) on the following graph:
The horizontal line means that in the past and in the future, the cart is at the same position along the track. Now imagine that, together with the photograph, we’re told that, at the moment of the snapshot, the cart was moving at a particular speed (distance per time) in the upward direction. Now at least we know that the cart would have been below its present position a tiny amount in the past and it will be above a tiny amount in the future. If this speed has been constant then the trajectory would be (b). But what if the speed was not constant? What if it was itself changing? In other words, what if the cart may have been slowing down or accelerating? Then we can be told that, at the time of photographing, the speed has been changing at a certain amount of distance per time, per time. If this acceleration/deceleration rate was itself constant the result would be (c).
This can go further. The acceleration itself can also be changing at a certain rate. The rate of change of the acceleration can be changing at yet another rate and so on. The more of these rates (in mathematical terms – derivatives of a function) we know, the better we can know where the cart has been and will be in close vicinity to the position of the snapshot.
Now consider our first-person experience. If all we could know was a single frame of existence, we would never have any consciousness of continuity through time. Even if these frames were changing, our conscious experience would consist of completely disconnected frames of existence, it would be like quickly flashing completely random states of existence... Clearly, we can picture this only abstractly since we are suggesting to grasp in a stream of consciousness something that we claim simply can’t be grasped in that way. Nevertheless, it can be a useful stretch of our minds. Things become more realistic precisely when we begin to add these ‘rates of change’. In our context, these are simply a symbol for our intuitive orientation within the flow of existence.
Experientially, we live in an ever-metamorphosing state of existence. We only know that because we intuitively grasp that this state was one thing just an instant ago and it will be another thing very soon. But our intuition of this metamorphosis can be even richer. For example, imagine that we explain something to somebody or simply tell a story. Then the way our experiential states transform is intuitively known. We know what we are trying to explain, we know what the story we are telling is. It’s all a matter of this intuitive knowing, which is only vaguely felt, to become the groove curvature through which our thought-states and speech are sequenced. In a sense, we have a dim intuitive awareness for the way the movie of our existence unfolds. We feel that, with our needle of spiritual activity, we modulate the thought and speech phenomena into the general movie flow. We don’t do that randomly as if inscribing noise, but the frames follow a meaningful intuitive curvature.
Another useful example is singing. Even if we sing only in our mind, with our inner voice we still inscribe something in the stream of the movie. And once again this is not random. We have an intuitive orientation to the groove through which our voice vibrates. In our intuitive context, we have the dim awareness of the song as a whole, where along the song we are, how our voice curves, and so on.
So we have seen that our attentional activity can form intuitive curvatures that contribute mental pictures and certain sensory states to the World flow while, at the same time, being constrained by other intuitive curvatures of that flow. Some constraints on our activity can most easily be intuited as a receded context of previous activity. For ex., when a song gets stuck in our head, that is because we
previously directed our attention to its particular qualities when experiencing the song. That previous activity and its receding memory images then became a context that attracts our current activity around its meaning. We may intend to think about something else, to focus on some other question, but our activity is constrained by this etched context and forced to iterate over its meaning for some interval of time.
When we previously directed attention to the song, we would have been performing subtle inner movements along with the rhythm, melody, and lyrics. It is like our soul life was being led through an inner dance by the song. Many times we may notice these passively experienced movements were associated with selfish qualities, like maybe we envisioned ourselves performing the song we were listening to in a packed theater in front of family, friends, colleagues, or other people we desire to impress with our imagined skills and talents. That would have made the entraining effect of the perceptual experience even more potent. In any case, there were inner movements associated with the perceptual experience of the song. Later, something stimulates the
same inner movements without our explicit intent, the song pops back into attentional consciousness, and it drags our attention along for the ride.
When we passively flow along with the intuitive curvatures stimulated by perceptual experience, we have no basis to become more sensitive to their characteristic patterns. Instead of that passive flowing, we can consciously and freely replicate similar inner movements with the express aim of becoming sensitive to their ever-receding flow. We try to intuitively 'wriggle inside' the inner process by which songs get stuck in our head, for example, i.e. how the inner movements associated with the perceptual experience of the song become a receded contextual constraint. Of course, this applies to not only experiences of songs, but the entire flow of perceptual experience that we have moved through instinctively since infancy, which has now become the receded memory context of subconscious constraints that mostly define our sense of "me" or "who I am". In this way, we begin to know ourselves as attentional activity that is more than the sum total of its etched constraints, that can resist these constraints and work creatively with the 'incoming' condensation of potential.
