On the Given World-Picture (or 'sensuous manifold')

[AshvinP]

As an aside, when you say, "So again, is it faithful to experience to say the subtle inner movements of keeping attention on the leaves was 'always there', as some kind of metaphysical reality..."

I'm not sure what I said that implies noticing the leaves movement is some kind of metaphysical reality. I was merely pointing to an experience of watching the leaves.

........

I'm not thinking of intentional states as competing for authenticity in a way that would make me say they are all equal. If I'm going to be fired by not finishing a project in the next 15 minutes, I'm happy to say that the intentional states necessary to finish are of 'higher' value; but it's relative. Some people might say that a higher being has been nudging me out of the job because that's the only way I'm going to meet my future wife next week. I definitely don't want that last example to have us go into metaphysics. I only used it because I want to stress that my willingnesss to talk about which intention state is more important will always need to be tentatively held within a wider context that doesn't carve them up via that critiera.

But, that said, let's assume that the trail of associations that take me away from my intention to read carefully are NOT related to some deeper value that I've been neglecting. In other words, as great as this book might be, let's not assume that I start being distracted by thoughts of an argument with my wife earlier in the day and how that is connected to some bigger conflicts that I've been avoiding in myself. We can assume that I get distracted by random thoughts about what color to paint the walls.

Yes, to be clear, I'm not pointing to what we evaluate as 'more important' or 'more valuable', but what we feel more causally united with along the spectrum of 'intentional states'. Even if we get distracted by thoughts of an argument that could potentially lead to deeper insights about our life situation, the most important phenomenological fact is that of being pulled away from an intuitive curvature quite independently of what was consciously intended. The content of our attentional activity doesn't matter so much as how that activity is modulated by varied inner factors which are quite unknown to us, to begin with. They can't be equated with our mental pictures of them.

This is important because, to gain inner sensitivity to the inner factors that pull us away (like those entangled with our relationships that we have been avoiding), we have to resist the thought-distractions that lead us to iterate over the meaning of the argument. In other words, we have to renounce our focus on the mere content of those thoughts. We can indeed follow the meaning of these thoughts, analyze them, figure out some conflicts that we were avoiding, gain a few insights, etc., but this will never take us deeper than the first-order content, the tapestry of mental pictures. To know the inner factors that give rise to the thoughts as living soul forces (second-order processes), the intentional activity needs to try and make itself an unmovable pillar (or 'laminar flow', as Cleric put it) and experience what inwardly feeds back.

I would say that the first microsecond that my mind shifted from 97% focus to 94% was spontaneous, and probably so subtle that I didn't consciously notice it. And any shifts that finally then opened the door to the color of the walls could be similar. And, as you say, I might spend a few paragraphs mainly focused on thoughts about the walls. Now, I'm in those thoughts. The first microsecond shift back towards "Oh, wait, the book!", agian, I would say could be a 'slower' process of moving back a few percentage points, or it could just jump right back as a powerful thought, mixed with frustration at my lack of will and excitement to get back to the text. I would not have designed the texture of how it comes. Because it could have come with a lot more frustration or maybe not much at all. It could have come with a, "Probably should keep reading...but...maybe I do need to put down the book and figure this out..." My point is that I won't have consciously designed the mesh of implicit and explicit textures that are there when it comes.

"Only now, once awakening from this dreamy associative chain, you can intend your attentional activity to retrace back to where the distraction occurred and try to faithfully fulfill your original intent again."

The most interesting part of that sentence for me is the 'can.' When I think of what it is like when I suddenly am jerked back into my task at hand, I think of the wide varieity of ways that new intentional state can come. Often, it's much like it was when it first arose, and I just grip the book and focus. Although, I notice that I don't design that curvature, even when part of what I'm doing is something like, "Okay, I need to focus more than I just want" and I really 'push' inwardly to ramp up my focus. That isn't always what happens. Even when it does, it is hardly a gaurantee that I'll stay on track. Sometimes a very light 'get back on track' is powerful. Sometimes ramping it up seems to do the trick. Sometimes, I realize that the distractions were showing me that it really isn't time to be reading. Sometimes I ignore that intuition and keep distracting myself by focusing on the book. In that case, I guess we could say that now there is a more important set of intentions that are being sublimated to what was the most important one (at least what I thought was) when I decided to have some very focused reading. In fact, I might say that what appeared as a clean intention to read is now discovered to be 44% distraction from other implicitly functioning experiences.


Gendlin created a technical phenomenological concept of 'occuring-into-implying' which points to how any subjective (not in the not-objective sense) event as always both an occuring component and an implying. I say this because, our typical concepts force us to think of things like 'intentional states' as if they are always acting as themselives alone and we lose sight of how when they are functioning implicitly in the shaping of the experience that is currently occurring they are 'more' than themselves. So, even when my intention to read in a focused manner arose, it crossed with a mesh of intentional (and other states) to becomes exactly what it was in first arising. My conscious mind might flatten it out in a simple meta-conscious explication like, "I strongly intend to read this book", leaving out all of the felt-implicit aspects that are already pushing in other directions. What might be discuraging about my view is that I precludes the possibility of a meta-conscious grasping of a pure state in which I am aware of all of the very real and active implictly functioning other states. This doesn't at all deny the significance of developing practices that help us become more and more clear and senstive to the relation between intentional states and the wide variety of phenomena that they can produce and that can arise and fade within them.

Right, but I think we should also try to notice how a critical part of the practices that lead to inner sensitivity is the renouncing of focusing on the first-order content of our states and their endless phenomenal varieties. This is like trying to move a railway car by pushing on it from the inside. By spreading our attention through the wide variety of phenomenal details within the implicit mesh that accompanies each state, we negate the force of attention needed to resist the inner factors that comprise the implicit mesh and become more inwardly sensitive to them. This is why it's so important to develop the intuitive feeling of causal responsibility within those intentional states that comprise our actively willed imaginative thought-movements, in distinction to those that follow impulses, feelings, distracting thoughts, or sensory impressions.

"Do you agree that we can phenomenologically speak of an overarching intent here in which the thought-states unfold, and that it would be pretty untruthful if, after the fact, we told ourselves the dreamy associative chain was also our intent? In other words, if we say the intentional state of faithfully following the meaning of the text and the 'intentional' state of wandering into other thoughts before we retrace the text to try again, are equally 'intentional states' even though they are mutually exclusive?"

I've addressed this above from a different angle, but I think much of what I said relates to this. I think they are both 'equally' intentional states in that they meet the minimum requirement for noticing that they contain intentional activity. The distractions about painting the walls could be a function of other very important ideas/needs implicitly functioning in their formation. And, this is just from my view and experience, the experiencings that are implicitly functioning are occurring to the extent that they are shaping the texture of what is now unfolding. But, to your point, yes they are mutually exclusive in that I can't focus strongly on the text and focus on the need to paint the walls in a way that allows each to maximize its purpose. In other words, I can agree that intentional states can come into conflict.

They come into conflict, but as also suggested above, more important is why they come into conflict. I think it is precisely because they are not equally 'intentional', in the sense of feeling causally united with the intentional acts. Our house is divided, so to speak, between what is 'given by me' (the concentrated intent to read) and what is 'given to me' (the distracting thoughts). When we unite our concentrated activity within the former, that doesn't necessarily mean we feel like the sole agency and power involved in the activity and its results, but that we feel fully present and conscious within the intentional state and its unfolding in an unbroken way. Clearly, when we are reading through a text and mining its meaning, we are interacting with at least one other agency and its intuitive movements, the author. To be fully present and conscious within this interaction is to be both active in our attentional movements and receptive to the meaning that feeds back on those movements in a relatively unbroken way (of course this is the ideal and will take much practice to enlarge the unbrokenness).

Cleric gave another probably more helpful metaphor for this dynamic to work with (the total interference of intuitive intents that modify our concentrated state is the 'implicit mesh' of that state):

To put that into an analogy, imagine that we are doing pottery on a turntable.





Imagine that we don’t see our hands but only intuitively will their movements and observe the resulting changes in the clay. The latter is an image for the condensing Tetris pieces – the concretizing phenomena of our inner life. Normally we accept the pot for what it is, no matter how sloppy it may be. We say “my pot” just like we say “my thoughts, my feelings”. In reality, however, what is being impressed in the clay is an interference of many forces. We can only know them if we try to focus and sustain a perfect shape through time. Only then do we begin to recognize all the forces that bend the movements of our hands. Initially, we feel the forces only dimly but we certainly recognize how they modify the impressions in the clay since the impressions differ from what we intend. As an analogy, if we suffer from shaky hands, we may be used to the fact that our pots turn out wobbly. Maybe we consider this to be our unique style and even take pride in it. Yet if we attempt to make a smoothly shaped pot, we quickly recognize that the wobbly shape does not reflect our intents and thus there must be other forces interfering that are barely moved by our intended intuitive curvature. It is in this sense that we speak of a ‘negative’ image – we don’t see the forces as things in themselves but recognize how they modify our intents and this is perceptible in the impressions of the total interference. And in fact, we will never find the reality neither of our own, nor of other forces, as contained in the clay Tetris pieces. What happens is that gradually we begin to resonate with and comprehend the intuitive intents that work through the forces, just like we intimately know the intuitive intents of our own hand movements. Initially, we can conceive of such intuitive intents only as far as we feel how the human world impinges on our flow. For example, we can hardly conceive of bodily sensed pressure or heat as having anything to do with intuitive intents. Initially, we can only find such intents in relation to other human beings because we are familiar with the scales of their intuitive activity by virtue of the fact that we experience a human condition too. When we resist the World flow, we begin to grasp in images how our existence is shaped and constrained by the inner activity of other human beings, starting from our closest family and friends, going through acquaintances, colleagues, our nation, and ultimately the whole Earthly humanity. As said, we should by no means imagine that we’re striving for asceticism here, as if we try to extricate ourselves from human life. On the contrary, our meditative resistance to the World flow only serves to make us more conscious of it, and then we can use these insights to seek even greater harmony in our life’s conduct. This meditative resistance attains to a whole new level when we begin to recognize that even the flow bent within the ever greater spheres of our sympathies, antipathies, opinions, temperament, religious sentiments, and so on, can also be considered to be an intrinsic part of the World flow, instead of imagining all these factors as unquestionable and atomic attributes of our ‘self’.

[findingblanks]

"By spreading our attention through the wide variety of phenomenal details within the implicit mesh that accompanies each state, we negate the force of attention needed to resist the inner factors that comprise the implicit mesh and become more inwardly sensitive to them."

I just want to bookmark that I do not agree with this, but I think it mainly rests on the fact that I haven't taken time to share how I distinguish a felt-implying from an explicated content. I would agree that if all experience was explicit, it certainly would be a 'spreading of attention through a wife variety of phenomenal details.' So I understand why you make that point.

"Our house is divided, so to speak, between what is 'given by me' (the concentrated intent to read) and what is 'given to me' (the distracting thoughts). When we unite our concentrated activity within the former, that doesn't necessarily mean we feel like the sole agency and power involved in the activity and its results, but that we feel fully present and conscious within the intentional state and its unfolding in an unbroken way. Clearly, when we are reading through a text and mining its meaning, we are interacting with at least one other agency and its intuitive movements, the author."

I worry that we might be subtly begging the question if we start off by assuming our originally arising intentional state (I will read with focus) is somehow freer or more pure or less of an impulse to avoid something than any of the intentional states that arise during the reading. Because if we start by granting it that, then I think maybe the question we are exploring evaporates by that very presupposition. To avoid this, it might help if I simply agree that I know what it is like when a strongly formed intention to do something arises and how this state is only maintained by concentration. I won't assume that this state isn't itself funtioning as a distraction, but I certainly can grasp the phenomenology of working to maintain it. As with the basic concentration exercise, the content becomes so relatively meaningless that we get to notice the process. That said, I think many people have almost no sense of the implicit motivations that are helping them maintain a very focused practice, thereby attributing their increased concentration to something free from those factors. Again, this isn't at all denying that a muscle of concentration is being developed regardless of any attributions or understandings of the nature of what is happening.

Side-side note. I'm not sure I'd want to say that when we read we are interacting with the author, but I understand why that might be a way to talk about it, and I certainly know of spiritual models and experiences that would say it is the case. Just noticing my first response to taking that for granted.

....................

But I wonder if we can condense this conversation down into the core point: If we aren't tacitly making assumptions about what it means when I feel the intention to begin focusing my attention on a given theme, I'm very okay with the phenomenology that has been described so far.

[AshvinP]

"By spreading our attention through the wide variety of phenomenal details within the implicit mesh that accompanies each state, we negate the force of attention needed to resist the inner factors that comprise the implicit mesh and become more inwardly sensitive to them."

I just want to bookmark that I do not agree with this, but I think it mainly rests on the fact that I haven't taken time to share how I distinguish a felt-implying from an explicated content. I would agree that if all experience was explicit, it certainly would be a 'spreading of attention through a wife variety of phenomenal details.' So I understand why you make that point.

"Our house is divided, so to speak, between what is 'given by me' (the concentrated intent to read) and what is 'given to me' (the distracting thoughts). When we unite our concentrated activity within the former, that doesn't necessarily mean we feel like the sole agency and power involved in the activity and its results, but that we feel fully present and conscious within the intentional state and its unfolding in an unbroken way. Clearly, when we are reading through a text and mining its meaning, we are interacting with at least one other agency and its intuitive movements, the author."

I worry that we might be subtly begging the question if we start off by assuming our originally arising intentional state (I will read with focus) is somehow freer or more pure or less of an impulse to avoid something than any of the intentional states that arise during the reading. Because if we start by granting it that, then I think maybe the question we are exploring evaporates by that very presupposition. To avoid this, it might help if I simply agree that I know what it is like when a strongly formed intention to do something arises and how this state is only maintained by concentration. I won't assume that this state isn't itself funtioning as a distraction, but I certainly can grasp the phenomenology of working to maintain it. As with the basic concentration exercise, the content becomes so relatively meaningless that we get to notice the process. That said, I think many people have almost no sense of the implicit motivations that are helping them maintain a very focused practice, thereby attributing their increased concentration to something free from those factors. Again, this isn't at all denying that a muscle of concentration is being developed regardless of any attributions or understandings of the nature of what is happening.

Side-side note. I'm not sure I'd want to say that when we read we are interacting with the author, but I understand why that might be a way to talk about it, and I certainly know of spiritual models and experiences that would say it is the case. Just noticing my first response to taking that for granted.

....................

But I wonder if we can condense this conversation down into the core point: If we aren't tacitly making assumptions about what it means when I feel the intention to begin focusing my attention on a given theme, I'm very okay with the phenomenology that has been described so far.

Sure, the meaning of focusing attention on a theme will arise entirely from within the experience. We can condense concepts to artistically explore and orient to that inner flow of experience, as we have been doing to some extent. To begin with, I think it is difficult for us to distinguish between what concepts are naturally condensing as symbolic testimonies in this way and what concepts, on the other hand, we are adding to the experience as something more like a personal commentary on its meaning. One sign of the latter is if we start expecting something other than the concentrated attentional experience to 'explain' its meaning. We feel like there should be some idea or model that should elucidate 'what's going on' with the experience. So I just want to bookmark that difference as we continue - there's a subtle difference and it's not very easy to discern when we are in one conceptual mode vs. the other to begin with.

I understand why it's usually helpful to agree and continue in these discussions, but I think it's necessary that we explore this particular discrepancy some more because the lingering doubt about it can act as a numbing agent to our inner sensitivity. On the one hand, I discern an undeniable inner gradient to our intentional states and feel that bringing this inner reality into clearer focus is exactly the starting point of a deeper intuitive elucidation of the 'implicit mesh' that we seeking inner knowledge of. You seem to exhibit significant hesitation here, on the other hand, and perhaps feel that there could be hidden assumptions or incomplete observations at work that make us over-confident in this intentional gradient. So I would like to use what follows as a means to explore this discrepancy further.

In my view, the relative freedom of the originally intended concentrated state, compared to practically all other states we experience during life, can be phenomenologically established without any lingering doubt. In this context, I am no longer pointing to the intentional state of reading, but more like the intentional state of becoming conscious of our attentional activity when reading, i.e. more like what we did with the basic attentional movement exercise. I want to share some previously written passages in which the concepts should be taken as symbols pointing to a more holistic pattern that characterizes our living flow of experience. I think it is very important to try and step back and sense this holistic pattern.

One way to approach this question is to think about how often things happen to us independently of our agency, such as the actions of other beings, the weather, illnesses, etc. Clearly, this is not feedback for our present activity. We can also reflect on how often we simply stumble into various experiences in a dreamlike way. We do many things on autopilot, like brushing our teeth, taking a shower, drinking coffee, etc. Even going from home to work can become so habitual that we end up at work and awaken saying, "oh great, I'm at work now." These dreamy habits carried out in the sensory domain cannot be considered feedback for our present activity either. Similarly, we often get carried away on impulsive trains of thoughts and feelings and have little idea how we end up immersed in them. It is just like awakening in a dream and not remembering how we ended up in the dreamscape. In fact, we don’t even think to ask the question of how we got there.

As we see, our spiritual agency isn't present and active in most of our daily experiences. These cannot be called ‘free’ experiences but rather must be considered experiences that result from the spirit flowing through the previously etched channels of its mental, psychic, and physiological spaces... Did our current human perspective consciously choose its birthplace, the climate of its geography, its family (heredity), its native language (in which its inner voice thinks), its temperament (which also influences its career choice and social relationships), its various inclinations, and so forth? Clearly not – rather, it initially feels as if it was thrown into these circumstances. (see Martin Heidegger on Geworfenheit or ‘Thrownness’)
...
It is only when the spirit actively wills its thinking movement... that it begins to experience freedom for the first time. The free act of concentration, which we briefly experimented with in the previous parts, is the natural continuation of the principled phenomenological explorations we have been engaging. It is the means for the spirit to further extricate from its habitual thinking activity and ascend along the gradient of free and lucid consciousness. We can never stumble into the act of concentration, awaken, and say, 'Oh great, it appears I am concentrating now!', like we can with most other sensory activities. The spirit must be deliberate, present, and active the whole way - if it is truly concentrated, it will always know exactly how it reached its current state. In other words, it can always retrace the contextual rhythms that are constraining and funneling its current experiential state.

This sort of inner activity has been referred to as 'creation ex nihilo' by the initiates. It is an act of the spirit that cannot be traced back to any causal chain of necessity, rather emanating from the intuitive and inexhaustible depths of superimposed potentiality. It is an act independent of past karmic factors which condition the spirit’s experience; independent of all the various riverbeds etched through the instinctive spaces. Nevertheless, the experience of the act is still constrained and formatted by those contextual rhythms and, by concentrating the ray of its imaginative activity, the spirit grows ever-more sensitive to the latter’s inner dimensions. It bumps up against the inner constraints and remains fully awake in the process, learning about their inner ‘geometry’, i.e. their temporally patterned configurations.

I think it's clear that setting aside time to concentrate the ray of our attention on a mostly uninteresting or at least unfamiliar theme already cuts against most of the etched pathways of soul life, the dozens of other things that attract us based on likes, sympathies, preferences, desires, etc. Most people will feel a general aura of hesitation to devote such time to concentration exercises when they have the choice to watch their favorite TV show, read their favorite book, attend a study group with some of their favorite people, etc. Then to sustain that concentration as a laminar flow even more intensely confronts the etched pathways as the latter continually threatens to break the concentration. I hope we can agree that fact is also evident from within the inner experience of concentration itself. This inner difficulty to approach and maintain concentration already suggests a relatively more free state, since states that are more free generally require more creative responsibility to maintain (we can no longer rely on passive sensory impressions, like the leaves falling, or easily accessible memories, like the argument with our wife, to support our attentional activity).

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (G.B. Shaw)

That is kind of a mantra for the imaginative concentrated state, or as Cleric put it - "By trying to sustain our meditative song, in a sense we aim to artificially impose a perfectly laminar flow to the perspective of the World flow that we experience." At the same time, I know we can feel our way into endless shades of meaning that accompany such concentrated states, before we approach concentration, during concentration, and after concentration. We can compare those shades of meaning to the shades of meaning experienced during other ordinary states, finding many similarities and overlaps. That's why it helps to get the holistic intuitive feeling for the characteristic patterns that emerge from these symbolic discussions. In other words, we should try to sense the musical structure of our intentional states.





We can approach this musical clip in two equally valid phenomenological ways. We can try to sense the felt-meaning of each particular note - its qualities, intensities, variations, etc. We can form endless connections between these felt characteristics of the notes, noticing their innumerable relations. All of that is genuine phenomenological experience, yet it tends to obscure an even higher-order phenomenological experience. That is the experience of the contextual hierarchy between the notes, the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm. We can intuitively sense how the rhythm and certain harmonies act as a 'carrier wave' in which all the other experiential flows unfold, the subsequent melodies and notes. At all times, the Whole is implicitly felt in the perceptual flow and that's exactly what allows us to experience the contextual hierarchy in which the notes experience their stream of patterned development. In the musical experience itself, the qualities and intensities of each note are, in a sense, abstractions - they can never be experienced in isolation but only as belonging to the whole note, which in turn can only be experienced as belonging to the whole melody, etc.

Our intentional states should likewise begin to feel like notes and melodies within a lawful contextual structure that is always implicit in our states and to which we can become more inwardly sensitive. Even now, when we are concentrating on the artistic conceptual symbols of these inner experiences (and, as mentioned before, chopping the phenomenology up into so many segments can be a hindrance for this reason), we should feel like we are not simply modeling 'another reality' that we may or may not experience later through meditation, but rather living in and experiencing the very same reality through which our conceptual symbols are condensing, unfolding, and orienting us back toward the inner experiences. This same experience will simply be intensified and purified through more 'formal' meditation. With that, I want to see if we have made any progress toward resolving the discrepancy that arose. Ultimately, what we are seeking through this living exploration is very much what Steiner expressed in the 1894 preface to PoF:

The separate sciences are stages on the way to that knowledge we are here trying to achieve. A similar relationship exists in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. This theory is a collection of rules which one has to know in order to compose. In composing, the rules of the theory become the servants of life itself, of reality. In exactly the same sense, philosophy is an art. All real philosophers have been artists in the realm of concepts. For them, human ideas were their artists' materials and scientific method their artistic technique. Abstract thinking thus takes on concrete individual life. The ideas become powerful forces in life. Then we do not merely have knowledge about things, but have made knowledge into a real self-governing organism; our actual working consciousness has risen beyond a mere passive reception of truths.

How philosophy as an art is related to human freedom, what freedom is, and whether we do, or can, participate in it—this is the main theme of my book. All other scientific discussions are included only because they ultimately throw light on these questions, which are, in my opinion, the most immediate concern of mankind. These pages offer a “Philosophy of Freedom”.

[findingblanks]

Lots up there, so I'll need to just chunk it down and then maybe we'll focus on a specific question you have for me that might help us go forward.

"I understand why it's usually helpful to agree and continue in these discussions, but I think it's necessary that we explore this particular discrepancy some more because the lingering doubt about it can act as a numbing agent to our inner sensitivity."

What are you referring to as 'the lingering doubt about it?" Your next comment might indicate that you refer to what you find a hestiation in me:

"On the one hand, I discern an undeniable inner gradient to our intentional states and feel that bringing this inner reality into clearer focus is exactly the starting point of a deeper intuitive elucidation of the 'implicit mesh' that we seeking inner knowledge of. You seem to exhibit significant hesitation here, on the other hand, and perhaps feel that there could be hidden assumptions or incomplete observations at work that make us over-confident in this intentional gradient."

This might just be a result of language and schema slippage that is working behind the scenes of both of our experiences. I don't experience a 'hesitation'. The reason I'm pausing to reexpress myself as I go through your exercises and comments is not to argue that you are saying wrong things or missing something. I'm hoping that you can see that in terms of the intensity and clarity of experience, I can find a big 'yes' to the experience of the practice. I only pause in the spots where I would personally need to frame or describe it a bit differently. I don't think that means we necessarily have to stop. I'm fine doing so, but in your response above, I realize there may be a second order confusion going. I'm already seeing the ways in which my comments have created the impression that I'm imposing some other ideas onto the pure experience. I knew that was a possibility when I brought in the implicit aspects of the experiencing, but I don't think it is necessary for me to try to point to what I mean in this context. All I can say is that if I expressed myself more clearly, I think you'd see that my questions regarding 'pure intention' and such don't come from popping away from the experience but from the experience itself. Again, I don't think it will ultimately be necessary for us to dive into my work/experience in this context.

"I am no longer pointing to the intentional state of reading, but more like the intentional state of becoming conscious of our attentional activity when reading, i.e. more like what we did with the basic attentional movement exercise."

Yes, there is a way in which we can focus on the gesture of the intentional state itself, free of any content.


"I think it's clear that setting aside time to concentrate the ray of our attention on a mostly uninteresting or at least unfamiliar theme already cuts against most of the etched pathways of soul life, the dozens of other things that attract us based on likes, sympathies, preferences, desires, etc. Most people will feel a general aura of hesitation to devote such time to concentration exercises when they have the choice to watch their favorite TV show, read their favorite book, attend a study group with some of their favorite people, etc. Then to sustain that concentration as a laminar flow even more intensely confronts the etched pathways as the latter continually threatens to break the concentration. I hope we can agree that fact is also evident from within the inner experience of concentration itself. This inner difficulty to approach and maintain concentration already suggests a relatively more free state, since states that are more free generally require more creative responsibility to maintain (we can no longer rely on passive sensory impressions, like the leaves falling, or easily accessible memories, like the argument with our wife, to support our attentional activity)."

I know people who have used the concentration exercises to build up a massive capacity to focus without distration. Many of them also have the often accompanied experience of the "I" versus the 'me' or as Kuhlewind calls it, "Self experience." I had my original version of that back in the day.

While I absolutely agree that it takes hard work and requires pushing against other instincts towards passivity, I do not believe that this freer state isn't already tangled in other kinds of givens that he simply hasn't noted. This does not deny that it is gaining strength or that the experience of growing more capable of directing attention is an illusion. But we all know there are people who are very unfree but who have incredible will power to focus and do hard, unsatisfying work each day of their lives. We know of those who can't hold a thought for longer than three seconds who blow us away with their capacity to listen inwardly and only act from places of real authenticity. I don't bring this up as counterexamples to anything you've said. I'm in full agreement that there is a very significant experience of developing a concentrated attention that can resist distractions and grow more and more strong, and how this experience is coupled with a growing distinction between a more passive/greedy 'me' and the actual agent of the growing capacity itself.


"Our intentional states should likewise begin to feel like notes and melodies within a lawful contextual structure that is always implicit in our states and to which we can become more inwardly sensitive. Even now, when we are concentrating on the artistic conceptual symbols of these inner experiences (and, as mentioned before, chopping the phenomenology up into so many segments can be a hindrance for this reason), we should feel like we are not simply modeling 'another reality' that we may or may not experience later through meditation, but rather living in and experiencing the very same reality through which our conceptual symbols are condensing, unfolding, and orienting us back toward the inner experiences."

Yes, this matches my experience and it seems to resonate with the kind of experience I hear from people who begin to do inner work of various kinds. Tonight my friend's Rumi reading group is meeting. My hunch is that if I ask him to share this quote with the group, their will be many people who will agree with it deeply.

Steiner expresses in those quotes something that he loved from many of his philosophic heroes. And, I'm sure, they had the same experience of theirs. Yes, his words resonate deeply. They are not words I've ever picked out in my exploration of details concerning Steiner's starting point. In fact, even in cases when Steiner disagrees with a great philosopher's starting point -- even when he thinks that a logical misstep at the beginning collapses the entire edifice -- I believe he would recognize the artistic nature and power of that great thinker's work.

For me, the phenomenology you've brought is wonderful and I'm happy to keep going. I don't need this work here to bring us back to why I continue to explore the various ways Steiner talked about the first thing we actually experience before we apply concepts to it. In fact, my hope was that in giving myself over to your process, I'd be able to enjoy going into your way without the need of taking us back to those specific issues. If you are wanting to go there, I'd be open to it; but it certainly isn't what I'm aiming at as I enjoy these explorations.

[findingblanks]

The intense experience of holding an increasingly concentrated state, noticing the causal connection to the cognitive activity itself, and the growing clarity of a 'self experience' distinct from the typical center-of-gravity 'me' experience -- these are all aspects of what I find happens (and others report) as we stay committed to practices that explore in detail the second-order aspects of developing this capacity to both be incredibly strong and increasingly open/fluid. A growing sense of 'freedom' is one way of putting it that I think really works.

[AshvinP]

Lots up there, so I'll need to just chunk it down and then maybe we'll focus on a specific question you have for me that might help us go forward.

"I understand why it's usually helpful to agree and continue in these discussions, but I think it's necessary that we explore this particular discrepancy some more because the lingering doubt about it can act as a numbing agent to our inner sensitivity."

What are you referring to as 'the lingering doubt about it?" Your next comment might indicate that you refer to what you find a hestiation in me:

"On the one hand, I discern an undeniable inner gradient to our intentional states and feel that bringing this inner reality into clearer focus is exactly the starting point of a deeper intuitive elucidation of the 'implicit mesh' that we seeking inner knowledge of. You seem to exhibit significant hesitation here, on the other hand, and perhaps feel that there could be hidden assumptions or incomplete observations at work that make us over-confident in this intentional gradient."

This might just be a result of language and schema slippage that is working behind the scenes of both of our experiences. I don't experience a 'hesitation'. The reason I'm pausing to reexpress myself as I go through your exercises and comments is not to argue that you are saying wrong things or missing something. I'm hoping that you can see that in terms of the intensity and clarity of experience, I can find a big 'yes' to the experience of the practice. I only pause in the spots where I would personally need to frame or describe it a bit differently. I don't think that means we necessarily have to stop. I'm fine doing so, but in your response above, I realize there may be a second order confusion going. I'm already seeing the ways in which my comments have created the impression that I'm imposing some other ideas onto the pure experience. I knew that was a possibility when I brought in the implicit aspects of the experiencing, but I don't think it is necessary for me to try to point to what I mean in this context. All I can say is that if I expressed myself more clearly, I think you'd see that my questions regarding 'pure intention' and such don't come from popping away from the experience but from the experience itself. Again, I don't think it will ultimately be necessary for us to dive into my work/experience in this context.

The 'lingering doubt' was referencing how it seemed that you felt we were imposing some other ideas on the experience, like how some intentional states are 'more pure' or 'more free' than others. Based on your last post, it seems you agree that we experience the imaginatively concentrated act as relatively freer than other acts we engage in ordinary experience. That doesn't mean the former is completely unconstrained by any givens, but that it puts us in the best position to gain insight into the 'other kinds of givens' constraining it, and thereby to expand degrees of freedom from within those constraints. This begins most noticeably with our thinking degrees of freedom but can also expand deeper into our feeling states and will impulses over time.

What you mention about people who do tough, unsatisfying work each day can also help us further triangulate this intuition of relative freedom in the imaginatively concentrated state. The big difference is that the former is still motivated by 'given' factors like the need to earn a wage and feed the family, to be respected as a hard-working member of society (instead of a lazy bum), to get the social benefits of coworkers, etc. When we sit down to concentrate, on the other hand, there isn't any sense in which our laser-like focus will bring us money, food, reputation, status, social benefits, etc (and could even hamper those things, for ex. if we need to avoid certain social gatherings to carry out the inner work properly). For most people, it won't even be clear at first why focusing inwardly should lead to the greatest practical benefits in life - nothing in ordinary experience suggests this connection. In fact, if we have any desires and expectations our concentration will swiftly bring us spiritual capacities and gifts, those will act as numbing agents to the inner gestures. At first, we probably can't help but carry some such expectations, but eventually, we need to decondition from those to realize the deeper fruits of concentration. So the very nature of concentration and its pursuit invites us to decondition from the ordinary etched soul pathways.

"I am no longer pointing to the intentional state of reading, but more like the intentional state of becoming conscious of our attentional activity when reading, i.e. more like what we did with the basic attentional movement exercise."

Yes, there is a way in which we can focus on the gesture of the intentional state itself, free of any content.

Steiner expresses in those quotes something that he loved from many of his philosophic heroes. And, I'm sure, they had the same experience of theirs. Yes, his words resonate deeply. They are not words I've ever picked out in my exploration of details concerning Steiner's starting point. In fact, even in cases when Steiner disagrees with a great philosopher's starting point -- even when he thinks that a logical misstep at the beginning collapses the entire edifice -- I believe he would recognize the artistic nature and power of that great thinker's work.

For me, the phenomenology you've brought is wonderful and I'm happy to keep going. I don't need this work here to bring us back to why I continue to explore the various ways Steiner talked about the first thing we actually experience before we apply concepts to it. In fact, my hope was that in giving myself over to your process, I'd be able to enjoy going into your way without the need of taking us back to those specific issues. If you are wanting to go there, I'd be open to it; but it certainly isn't what I'm aiming at as I enjoy these explorations.

Alright, so just to solidify our orientation here and make sure we are on the same page, let me know what you think about the following. A part of the reason I am quoting Cleric often is that he has put much time and creative effort into refining these phenomenological presentations over the years precisely to mitigate against the second-order confusions that often arise in this domain. ("World groove" is a synonym for what we have been calling 'intuitive curvatures' and 'contextual depth'). As always, I recommend to vividly experiment with what is described as much as possible, either in imagination or even physically (for the relevant examples), since this is the best way to become more inwardly sensitive to the phenomenological realities.

Thinking is the part of our spiritual activity that is most agile. We can metaphorically say that here our intuitive intents gently vibrate the needle and thus modulate thoughts and images over our base experience. Initially, these mental images are quite ethereal, almost ghostly, but at the same time, this is the part of our experience where we can grasp in the clearest way how our intentional intuitive curvature orders the inner flow. There’s almost no ‘distance’ or ‘phase delay’ between our intuitive intents and the flow of mental phenomena.

When saying that we modulate mental images, we should remember that the World state always transforms as something whole. As such, corresponding changes in the nervous system are also part of the process. This is clearly evident from the way head trauma or certain chemicals can alter the groove of thoughts and images. Yet when we speak of thinking, the characteristic thing is that our focus is on the experience of the mental images. When we think abstractly, we have very little concern about the full spectrum of the World flow that makes this thinking possible.

The feeling aspect of our existence is as if proceeding from deeper furrows of the World groove. We need much greater inner strength if our needle is to modulate these curvatures. For example, when we’re angry with someone, in our thinking we may be inscribing the stream of words “There’s no point to be angry, stop it!”, yet still fail to override the deeper playback of the actual feeling of anger. Our fleeting thinking modulations do not go deep enough to change the shape of the World groove. Here there is a greater leeway between our intuitive intents and the actual transformations of the feeling-depth of the groove. Everything of the nature of sympathies and antipathies can be considered to be such deeper furrows that most of the time determine the direction of our flow quite unknowingly to us. This greater leeway is also evident in the way our emotions are related to breathing and heart rate, of which normally we don’t have much conscious control.

Through willing we seek to penetrate the full depth of the movie flow. We no longer only try to inscribe mental images, nor do we only want to modulate our sympathies and antipathies, but we try to amplify our intuitive curvature to such an extent that it faithfully impresses in the World groove. In thinking we have little concern about what exactly happens in our body when, for example, we imagine stretching our arm, but when we try to do that through our bodily will, it is our primary concern that our imagined movement should match the one we perceive in the full spectrum of the World state.

Now it may be tempting to imagine thinking, feeling, and willing on a scale from easy to hard, since in thinking we only inscribe ‘lightweight’ mental images, while in will we have to overcome the full resistance of the World groove. Yet this could be misleading since it makes it seem that in our thinking we’re completely unconstrained. However, developing a new mental skill can be just as challenging as developing a new motor skill. Seeing things in this way helps us realize that what is hard is to transform the curvature of the World groove instead of freefalling through the usual channels. Changing our thinking habits requires persistence and determination, just as building muscle does.

Thinking, feeling, and willing shouldn’t be taken as some fundamentally distinct spiritual forces. In a deeper sense, they are all forms of a unitary intuitive activity. They all augment the curvature of the existential flow and they all feel effortful if these changes need to be more pronounced. In this sense, thinking is also willed. Yet we are also justified in acknowledging their differentiations. In thinking we’re concerned that our willed intuitive curvature becomes the riverbed in which mental images flow, while in willing we strive that this intuitive curvature modulates the full depth of the World flow. The latter clearly requires greater orchestration. For the first, we need only a well-functioning brain. For the latter, we need also our full body and maybe also the orchestration of phenomena beyond our skin. For example, a movie director first works on the idea, he develops the movie as a storyboard of mental images. A brain is enough for this task. But to impress the movie idea into the wider World flow, he needs to communicate the ideas, to organize the stage crew, logistics, actors, props, and so on. This doesn’t necessarily need to be more difficult. If all goes well, it might as well require less effort than the purely ideal development. Yet it is still true that realizing the idea requires the orchestration of a much wider volume of the World groove.

In thinking, we’re at the center. When we think we don’t do that to make our inner orientation more confusing. It’s the opposite – the intuition that we try to focus through our mental images only serves a purpose if it integrates our understanding, if everything that we think finds its place in a greater intuitive panorama. Even if we think of completely trivial daily problems, we still implicitly strive towards a mental image that fits like a puzzle piece in the curvature of our more encompassing goal. That’s why in thinking we feel like an inner kernel around which intuition of the World integrates.

In willing we need to go beyond ourselves. The images that we have integrated ray out and curve the flow of becoming to a much greater extent. As we ray out, however, we also encounter the curvature willed by many other beings. Thus, it’s not a question of tyrannically impressing our own intuitions in the World groove, but continually receiving thinking and feeling feedback from the way our impressions harmonize or clash with the greater flow. This feedback works back on our life in mental pictures, where we seek even more encompassing intuitions, which when rayed in the full depth of the flow, will better harmonize with it.

As we already said, thinking also reaches into the full depth of the World state, even though we’re not immediately concerned with it. However, we are not the complete master of the World curvature in either thinking or willing. We’re still only modulating it. In other words, there’s no such conscious phenomenon for which we can say “This is entirely my own creation and nothing else plays a part in it” (remember the analogy with the movie projector and the brick wall).

This needs to be mentioned because, otherwise, we can easily imagine that our spiritual activity – in the way we experience it in our present Earthly form – can be the singular master over the curvature of the World groove. But we need to develop the sensitivity that there’s a much greater depth of the World groove for which we normally have no direct experience. For example, we may have intuitive clarity about the movement of our hand, but we have no clear experience of what happens in the nerves, the muscle fibers, the cells' biochemistry, and so on. This is also apparent through the fact that our intents can’t do much in the case of a paralyzed limb. Many idealistic philosophies present things as if the contents of experience are just a thin dream picture – the World is imagined. From that perspective, it seems that our intuitive intents should be able to completely override the dream contents, much like a painter could redraw part of a painting. However, we should also consider the materialistic intuition which may go astray in many ways, but not about the fact that there’s a mysterious depth of the World groove that we currently only modulate with our intuitive intents without any clear consciousness of what happens there.

In that sense, in our lucid consciousness, it is as if we’re in the ‘middle’. The world below, towards the small, and that above, towards the Cosmic, we only grasp by projecting mental images over them. In this context, ‘below, above, and middle’ should be grasped qualitatively. Clearly, they are not spatially separated – there's small everywhere and there’s large everywhere. In a sense, our conscious life is fully superimposed with both the small and the large, but presently we can only resonate with particular ‘wavelengths’ of the intuitive curvatures. Through our will, our mental images surely modulate the depth but still in a way that we can’t trace in full detail. Our intuitive intents can directly override neither the curvature through which particles flow nor that of the planets. In that sense, when we speak of the depth of the World groove, we should conceive that it goes in both directions – towards both the small and the large. Of course, speaking about the curvature through which particles and planets flow is only for illustration. We’ll see that we need to speak about the curvature of the small and the large differently when we deal with their inner intuitive reality.

Lastly, an interesting reciprocity can be observed when we take thinking and willing as the two poles of our spiritual activity. In willing we try to modulate the full depth of the flow, yet we can only do that from our strictly personal bodily perspective. On the other hand, in thinking, intuition integrates around our personal kernel but at the same time here we live in something universal. The mental images that we experience are surely personal but in the ideas that we think we live beyond the confines of the strictly personal. For example, if a friend and I think about the Earth, our concrete thoughts are unique to ourselves but we surely feel that we are speaking of the same general curvatures of the World groove that constrain our existence. Seen in this way, in willing our spiritual activity rays from within the personal and impresses in the World state as if from the center towards the periphery, while in thinking we strive to reach universal intuition and integrate it into our personal kernel from the periphery towards the center. It is very important that this dynamic is grasped correctly. In our age, it is considered that thinking is something strictly personal. This, however, seems so only if we focus entirely on our cerebral experience of thought images. If we strive for a more encompassing view, we’ll easily see that it is precisely in thinking that we live together in the common intuition of the depths of the World groove.

[findingblanks]

Hey there,

I've led men's groups of guys in jail for violent crimes and had them take up the basic concentration exercises. So I've gotten to experience a wide range of people vividly describing (those who don't quit in week one) the changes in their capacity to focus and notice the distinction between their will attentional activity and the impulses that work against it. Many of these people have pretty profound 'self experiences', as Kuhlewind calls them, and describe the typical ways these exercises start to spread into daily life. Their new found 'will power' seems to be immediately arising within a wider context of experience that informs its very nature and shape and direction. So I'm not merely pointing to examples of people who have strong will power and yet haven't done exercises that have them start on the groundfloor of boring themes and no egoic payoff. That said, I think we should definitely be aware that there is some huge egoic payoff that goes on when people do the basic Steiner exercises and begin to notice any changes. First of all, they are doing them in a context of deep reverence for Steiner, often in hopes that they will become capable of higher perception, and they have already read brilliant and rich descriptions of why these practices are important for so many different reasons. Many times they are in a community of friends and new acquaintances who also deeply treasure this work and its wider context.

Part of the fun of getting some of my men's groups to do the exercises is that I could track what happens when so much the prior emotional/aspirational/intellectual environment isn't tied to many of the factors mentioned above. But, even when stripped of the power of loving Steiner (and I fell in love HARD), there is a very significant egoic payoff that happens fairly early in making progress. Which isn't a bad thing at all. We can notice that too. What else is there to do

"At first, we probably can't help but carry some such expectations, but eventually, we need to decondition from those to realize the deeper fruits of concentration. So the very nature of concentration and its pursuit invites us to decondition from the ordinary etched soul pathways."

Yeah, and the assessment of how deconditioned anybody becomes will be very personal and open for opinion. I certainly have met highly respected meditators who would 'humbly' make it clear that they have worked through massive conditioning....and, well, leave a lot to be desired when you observe them in their day to day interactions. Of course, they can always justify when they fly off the handle or passive aggressively take a person down. And their acolytes of course perceive such things as tough love and firm compassion. That's beside the point.

We agree that there is so much wonderful stuff to gain from doing these exercises.

I'll have to come to the Cleric materials when I can. I give your words priority in terms of how I approach my time in this conversation. If I get a chance later to read Cleric's pages, I'll do so. I don't find his way of putting things as phenomenological as yours, so that is one reason I also am prioritizing your words.

At this point, in terms of doing the exercises and noticing attentional activity in the context you are framing, I feel like we are pretty good.

[AshvinP]

I'll have to come to the Cleric materials when I can. I give your words priority in terms of how I approach my time in this conversation. If I get a chance later to read Cleric's pages, I'll do so. I don't find his way of putting things as phenomenological as yours, so that is one reason I also am prioritizing your words.

At this point, in terms of doing the exercises and noticing attentional activity in the context you are framing, I feel like we are pretty good.

Well, I know his descriptions are more phenomenological than mine since many of these things still feel somewhat abstract for me, and certainly difficult to condense into artistic symbols. My words are mostly just pale and unrefined shadows of things that he has already expressed more faithfully to the first-person experience.

I don't think this is just a matter of different preferences for styles or terminologies, either, but points to a deeper discrepancy in how we are approaching the content expressed. I think it would be most useful for you to go through the last quote, or perhaps even the entire essay, and elaborate on what if anything you find to be straying from first-person phenomenological experience. Most of the core points we have already explored in this discussion are also in the essay, so I don't think we would be straying away from the former at all. To be honest, this entire time I have been concerned that the way I am 'framing' the context of attentional activity has been too vague, with not enough supporting metaphors and examples, leaving too much room for misaligned intuitions between us to slip through the cracks unnoticed.

[AshvinP]

Hey there,

I've led men's groups of guys in jail for violent crimes and had them take up the basic concentration exercises. So I've gotten to experience a wide range of people vividly describing (those who don't quit in week one) the changes in their capacity to focus and notice the distinction between their will attentional activity and the impulses that work against it. Many of these people have pretty profound 'self experiences', as Kuhlewind calls them, and describe the typical ways these exercises start to spread into daily life. Their new found 'will power' seems to be immediately arising within a wider context of experience that informs its very nature and shape and direction. So I'm not merely pointing to examples of people who have strong will power and yet haven't done exercises that have them start on the groundfloor of boring themes and no egoic payoff. That said, I think we should definitely be aware that there is some huge egoic payoff that goes on when people do the basic Steiner exercises and begin to notice any changes. First of all, they are doing them in a context of deep reverence for Steiner, often in hopes that they will become capable of higher perception, and they have already read brilliant and rich descriptions of why these practices are important for so many different reasons. Many times they are in a community of friends and new acquaintances who also deeply treasure this work and its wider context.

Part of the fun of getting some of my men's groups to do the exercises is that I could track what happens when so much the prior emotional/aspirational/intellectual environment isn't tied to many of the factors mentioned above. But, even when stripped of the power of loving Steiner (and I fell in love HARD), there is a very significant egoic payoff that happens fairly early in making progress. Which isn't a bad thing at all. We can notice that too. What else is there to do

Without getting too much into this right now, I just want to briefly note that I think it's of vital importance for us to complement concentration/meditation with rigorous conceptual study (not in dry schematic way, but artistic and imaginative way) of spiritual science. It doesn't necessarily need to be Steiner's lectures, but could also be various other philosophers, scientists, and spiritual thinkers who have explored the ideal fabric of our existence. That ever-widening artistic conceptual palette is what fills our inner states with higher-order content, without which we may perfect the technique of concentration but never gain intimate insights into the intuitive curvatures that modulate our existence.

I think this is probably one of the core discrepancies between our intuitions of the phenomenological method. You may say, for ex., that it makes no difference if we are atheists, materialists, agnostics, etc. who have no interest whatsoever in spiritual realities and 'curvatures of destiny', as long as we do the phenomenological exercises and concentration we will develop our inner capacities and find many interesting and creative ways to understand ourselves in a wider context. Is that a somewhat fair characterization? If not, maybe you can help me better orient to your perspective on this issue. If so, we can bookmark it and maybe return to it later.

Of course, this is not to denigrate attempts to bring concentration exercises to violent criminals or anyone else, which will surely be more helpful than what they are usually provided (usually more techniques to live as criminals), but I think we should also strive to understand what is realistically attainable in the absence of artistic conceptual exploration and why the latter is so important. This relates intimately with understanding our thinking faculty as a real living process within the full depth of the World flow.

[findingblanks]

"Without getting too much into this right now, I just want to briefly note that I think it's of vital importance for us to complement concentration/meditation with rigorous conceptual study (not in dry schematic way, but artistic and imaginative way) of spiritual science. It doesn't necessarily need to be Steiner's lectures, but could also be various other philosophers, scientists, and spiritual thinkers who have explored the ideal fabric of our existence. That ever-widening artistic conceptual palette is what fills our inner states with higher-order content, without which we may perfect the technique of concentration but never gain intimate insights into the intuitive curvatures that modulate our existence."

This is a big and interesting jump from where your exercises started. At first, it seemed clear that any human with good will and a healthy appetite to explore experience would be on the same footing. Now it seems that it would only be those who begin with certain thought-content that will make discoveries about reality as it actually is. That said, as I'll say in a bit, I agree fully that our prior intentions/experience matters. It opens up a lot of new questions which I find interesting. Maybe we are at the point your exploration where we just dive in to what we find interesting?

"I think this is probably one of the core discrepancies between our intuitions of the phenomenological method. You may say, for ex., that it makes no difference if we are atheists, materialists, agnostics, etc. who have no interest whatsoever in spiritual realities and 'curvatures of destiny', as long as we do the phenomenological exercises and concentration we will develop our inner capacities and find many interesting and creative ways to understand ourselves in a wider context. Is that a somewhat fair characterization? If not, maybe you can help me better orient to your perspective on this issue. If so, we can bookmark it and maybe return to it later."

I think that any mental images or representations (concepts, notions, hunches, wishes, hopes...) that are there in the beginning will certainly shape

1) the perceptual lens being crafted
2) the form of percepts observed once crafted

Yes, I would say that anybody who exercises their attention in the way you have described so far, can have very important experience. But, no, I would not say that these experiences are free from countless prior variables that will shape the form of later experiences.

I know for certain that people who already have representations of, say, angelic beings will begin to have different kind of experiences than those who have notions of, say, Goethe's archetypal phenomena. Somebody who is a dogmatic atheist yet practices these exercises can certainly experience a profound change in the quality of thinking and perception, but his experience will be as shaped by his dogmatisim (and all the represenations that make it up) as much as the person who assumes angels or who is working to develop Goethean observations. All can experience very vital openings, and what comes through will be in part a function of their personal starting points (most of which would not be fully conscious).

So, yes, I agree with you that a person *probably* won't get to what they would consider to be spiritual scientific experiences unless they start with them as representations or, at some point, take them up very seriously.

But I think your main question to me was if I believe that regardless of a person's prior expectations/experience, they discover many interesting and creative ways to understand themselves as human beings. Yes, I think dedication to these exercises often leads to profound experiences of that nature. And, yes, all spiritual traditions demonstrate that when exercises are done in the context of that particular system of initiation, the practitioner's experience will be shaped into those already represented forms. You don't tend to see an initiation method pop out folks experiencing realities from other practices. I do agree that if somebody wants to heighten their experience of the representations of the material they value in spiritual scientific texts, doing these exercises will be the best way to experience those in more fluid and focused and experiential ways. For instance, my eventual rich imagination of how Steiner experienced angels was only possible by a combination of my intention to have that experience, my careful reading of his lectures, and my hard work at these basic exercises, and many others as you know. Without all of that context, if I had never come across Steiner or had my own clairvoyant experiences, I probably would have used the development from these exercises in the context of elaborating Gregory Bateson's work in the context of human development via therapeutic conversation. I like Bateson, but I'm glad my destiny had other ideas