Philosophical Speculations

Thanks for engaging in this!

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 8:16 pm OK, I get your point, so to reiterate, we can approach the same questions in two scenarios:
- the iterated mental reflection of imagining the sphere or a child looking at a picture, OR
- the actual living experience of you imagining a sphere right now, or you being a child looking at a picture.

I was actually meant the second scenario, but it is also interesting to look at the first one and find out how it is different from the second and how it affects the conclusions. But let's return to imagining a spere in the 2-nd scenario (your own living experience).

In fact, in a strong sense, these two scenarios are the same scenario. It’s as if you were telling me: “Let’s not wait until the killer kills the second or third person. I am talking about the very first person. Nobody has been killed yet”. But as long as we are not taking care of the killer, we are not yet prompting the one key shift that needs to happen. “The actual living experience” as a “scenario” is still something we see receding. This is because we are talking about it, not doing it. Either we aim to unite with the experience, or we discuss it here on the forum. In this latter framework, we necessarily operate an intellectual split of reality. Other disincarnated beings don’t have to go this detour of the separating intellect, but we have to. Eventually, by virtue of a thinking-first approach, we become intimately aware of that, and begin to know ourselves in that reunion, as described. But there’s no way around our two-phase nature, and in this sense, to the extent of what we can achieve through discussion here, the two scenarios boil down to the same. Still, as we become more sensitive to the constant threat of resting in the vantage point and looking at mental pictures from the side, we can try and approximate direct knowing through concepts.

You said:

Q: Is the imagined sphere Real?
A: We can't tell

Q: Is the mental picture that contains the sphere real?
Q: Is the living experience of the creation and inner perception of the mental picture that contains the sphere real?
Yes (and I agree with you here)

Q: Where is the demarcation line?
there is no demarcation line

Well, based on your answers there is some kind of demarcation or difference in existential status: the imagined sphere has some kind of "deficient" or indeterminant modus of reality ("We can't tell") as compared to the other two (mental picture itself and the living experience of it).

The only demarcation to be discerned here is the one that denotes our growth in consciousness when we go from Kantian outlook to realization of direct first-person experience of the universal world process of thinking. In “we can’t tell” we should emphasize “we”. Just because we can't tell, doesn't mean a higher being couldn’t tell either, for instance. They could surely tell, free as they are from the detour of the splitting brain. It’s only due to our limitations in this epoch that we can’t tell. Luckily, though, we can overcome those limitations, if we freely exercise for that, for example through the efforts that we are doing. So in the first instance, as long as we are still Kantian, we can’t tell. To be clear: mental pictures alone, while they are a real experience of the individual, can't inform us about the reality/unreality of things (contrary to what Kant thought).

how and why is it that the "content" of the mental pictures, reflections or ideas have a different existential modus compared to the actual imaginations, reflections and ideas and compared to their actual living experience? Why is the living imagination of a sphere more real than the sphere itself that this imagination "carries"?

The living imagination of the sphere is not more real than the sphere itself. The fact that we initially can’t tell (as long as we haven’t awakened to spiritual science) doesn’t imply that the sphere is less or not real. The sphere is indeed Real, but we need to come to that realization in another way, other than reasoning on our receding mental pictures (in the post above, I tried to signify that by changing real into Real, in your question).

Why a living experience of tasting an apple is more real than a reflection on a memory of tasting an apple sometime in the past? Having a reflection is also a living experience of thinking, then why is it any less real?

These are both equally real facts of our inner experience (one is more vivid than the other since it can rest of the dense physicality of sensory experience, but let’s not digress). However, our endeavor here is to make contact with Reality at large, not only with what we initially know as our individual reality of inner experience? I am sure we agree that our ambition here is to explore the whole depth of Reality above and beyond the limits of our individual perspective?

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 8:45 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 8:03 pm This is what is meant by lucid observation and investigation of our living spiritual activity to discern how it is inwardly structured, shaped, steered, etc. In what sense can we reach these insights via vipassana meditation? Why haven't modern mystical practitioners reached them? You may say that they are simply focused on other things, on attaining other insights into our living experience that are neglected by spiritual science. What are examples of those other insights and neglected areas? If all first-person experience flows through our living spiritual activity, why would we be missing those other insights when we retrace into its structured flow? Again, I hope these questions will be really wrestled with so we can at least make some progress beyond the usual standstill we reach in these situations.

A simple answer is that those practices have different purposes, and as a consequence, utilize different techniques and emphasize different insights. It's like when a musician aims to prefect his performance to convey a certain aesthetic state or meaning through his music. Then knowing the science (whether natural or spiritual) may (or may not ) help him to achieve this goal, but in general such scientific knowledge is not so relevant. What he is actually doing is having a lucid living experience of performing the music and directly experiencing its aesthetic content, which is exactly what would spiritual scientist also do, but nevertheless the musician does not necessarily need to know anything about Steiner's philosophy in order to perform well. Would it help him to improve his performance if he is also trained in the theory and practice of SS and applies it in his performance practice? Very likely yes. But would not being familiar with SS necessarily make him a bad musician? Definitely not. So, I'm all for SS, but the fact that the practitioners of spiritual or mystical practices are or were not familiar with Steiner's SS does not invalidate their experiences and insights. What I can say for sure is that many of their genuine experiences and insights are founded in real first-person living experiences (as opposed to academic philosophers). Also, Steiner developed the methodology of SS, but did not have enough opportunity and time to apply it in all areas of human experience, such as different kinds of spiritual practices, artistic, natural-scientific and so on. But nothing prevents us to apply his approach to the area of our activity, in music for musicians, in spiritual practice for meditators etc. So, I don't see any contradiction here, but rather an opportunity for a future synergy and integration of SS in all areas of human activity where it has yet not been applied.

There is much that I could respond to the above, for example, that the SS method has been applied in practically all areas of human experience, leading to new spiritual forms of education (Waldorf), new forms of agriculture, of metallurgy, of art, music, and dancing, of medicine, of mathematical research, of religious practices, and so on. The opportunity for expanding and integrating these domains even further is already there and unfolding to the extent that people are continuing to pursue the SS method and develop higher cognitive capacities. But I don't want to get sidetracked into abstract discussions.

I provided a concrete example of the kind of insights that are reached through Imaginative cognition, which elucidates how our ordinary cognitive experience unfolds in a much more direct and profound way than what is currently being attempted by NDE research and people like Levin. We could endlessly delve into the living and practical implications of that one example and explore many more such examples as well. I suspected you would agree with that and simply point attention to how 'different insights' can be gained through 'different techniques'. So I asked for concrete examples of that, so we don't remain in mere abstractions. What kind of insights can we reach beyond those of higher cognitive development which will elucidate our ordinary living flow of experience in a similar way?

The fact is that any spiritual practice which doesn't provide such insights must be suffering from the Kantian transcendental split. It is only through the latter that we began imagining that a living craft could be perfected independently of understanding its "scientific" basis, i.e. the living curvatures of our intuitive be-ing which make the craft possible. This was not possible in ancient times (of course the initiatic science came in much different form) and it won't be possible in the near future. This is exactly why science and spirituality (and art) diverged most extremely in the wake of Kantian epistemology, and people felt they could adequately pursue one without the other. In the near future it will be revealed that the aesthetic and moral curvatures of our intuitive depth must be properly oriented to and understood in order to make any further innovating progress in ordinary thinking pursuits, whether art, science, economics, politics, or whatever.

Federica wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 9:48 pm These are both equally real facts of our inner experience (one is more vivid than the other since it can rest of the dense physicality of sensory experience, but let’s not digress). However, our endeavor here is to make contact with Reality at large, not only with what we initially know as our individual reality of inner experience? I am sure we agree that our ambition here is to explore the whole depth of Reality above and beyond the limits of our individual perspective?

Don't get me wrong, Federica, I'm not arguing against you here, it's actually a question that I have been puzzled with for a long time and asked on this forum a few times before without getting a satisfactory answer. It's a problem that exists in any flavor of idealism, including the living-thinking idealism of SS. In materialism there is a claim of the existence of a "reference" material reality with respect to which all our ideas and imaginations can be referenced and against which they can be validated (or invalidated) to prove them right or wrong, or real or not real. In idealism there is no such "external" reference reality and the only reality we have is the reality of the activity of thinking in our first-person conscious experience. Then having any idea or any mental reflection or imagination (like Santa Claus, or unicorn) is also part of our first-person living experience. Then, how can we tell or claim if they are true or not and real or not?

For example, let's consider this scenario and do it in a living experience scenario. Let's say there is a higher-order being or a group of beings who with their imaginative-intuitive cognition imagine and manifest an intuitive pictorial idea of a flower (as a part of the wholeness of their creation of the world). From the perspective of their living experience, the flower is the content of their imagination. But I am having a perceptual living experience of this flower through which the intuitive idea is being communicated to me. Through such perception the experience of this flower-idea is shared between them and me.

Now, let's say I'm a mathematician imagining another intuitive visual idea of "something" that has never been imagined before (some kind of weird geometrical manifold). This is not yet a shared experience, no one else has ever experienced it yet. For now, this "something" only remains a part of my individual perspective and not yet part of Reality at Large. We may argue that "we can't tell if it's yet real or not". But when I share this idea with others and it propagates through the hierarchy to the higher-order beings, and they may even implement it into the structure of Reality at Large, then this visual idea now becomes a shared living experience. Will it make it more "real" or "true"?

So, what makes the ideal content real and true? Do they become real when higher-order beings implement these ideas in a harmony with the laws of the wholeness of the created structure? After all, they are simply the products of their intuitive-imaginative thinking, aren't they? Or do they become real when they are shared and not simply remain a part of the individual living experience? What is the criterion of "reality" and "truth" in the world of living thinking and of ideations that the living-thinking produces, whether individually or collectively?

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:17 pm In the near future it will be revealed that the aesthetic and moral curvatures of our intuitive depth must be properly oriented to and understood in order to make any further innovating progress in ordinary thinking pursuits, whether art, science, economics, politics, or whatever.

I cannot disagree with you here. What I'm saying is just that this does not invalidate the insights and achievements of spirituality or art that were created before the methods SS were applied. and it this does not mean that all these achievements were always the outcome of the Kantian split. A direct living mystical experience of Atman of an Advaita practitioner, or a living experience of Bach composing Chaconne had nothing to do with "Kantian split" of which they had no idea. Neither they can be invalidated by the fact that those people were not familiar or not applying SS in their living experience.

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:21 pm ...

I'm afraid I'm asleep on my feet in CET! Maybe Ashvin will comment, for my part I'll be back tomorrow.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:17 pm What kind of insights can we reach beyond those of higher cognitive development which will elucidate our ordinary living flow of experience in a similar way?

I can give you such example - a living experience of awakening described by the Buddha in Lalitavistara sutra. Many practitioners can validate the same experience in their actual living direct experience (me included). I can assure you that this is a first-person living direct experience and not any kind of mental reflection or abstraction. Can you give me a quote from Steiner describing the same kind of living experience?

But even if Steiner or any of his followers never had such experience, that does not mean that it's incompatible or contradicting with SS, it just means that SS was not yet applied in this area of spiritual exploration, and nothing would prevent it from being applied there. So, I really do not see any opposition or contradiction here.

Lalitavistara Sutra

25.­2
“Alas! This truth that I realized and awakened to is profound, peaceful, tranquil, calm, complete, hard to see, hard to comprehend, and impossible to conceptualize since it is inaccessible to the intellect. Only wise noble ones and adepts can understand it. It is a state of complete peace, free of clinging, free of grasping, undemonstrable, uncompounded, beyond the six sense fields, inconceivable, unimaginable, and ineffable. It is indescribable, inexpressible, and incapable of being illustrated. It is unobstructed, beyond all references, a state of interruption through the path of tranquility, and imperceptible like emptiness. It is the exhaustion of craving and it is cessation free of desire. It is nirvāṇa. If I were to teach this truth to others, they would not understand it. Teaching the truth would tire me out and be wrongly contested, and it would be futile. Thus I will remain silent and keep this truth in my heart.”

25.­3
“Profound, peaceful, stainless, lucid, and unconditioned‍—
Such is the nectar-like truth I have realized.
Were I to teach it, no one would understand,
So I will silently remain in the forest.

25.­4
“I have discovered the supremely sublime and astonishing absolute,
The ineffable state, untainted by language,
Suchness, the sky-like nature of phenomena,
Completely free of discursive, conceptual movement.

25.­5
“This meaning cannot be understood through words;
Rather it is comprehended through reaching their limit.
Yet when sentient beings, whom previous victorious ones took under their care,
Hear about this truth, they develop confidence in it.

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:21 pm So, what makes the ideal content real and true? Do they become real when higher-order beings implement these ideas in a harmony with the laws of the wholeness of the created structure? After all, they are simply the products of their intuitive-imaginative thinking, aren't they? Or do they become real when they are shared and not simply remain a part of the individual living experience? What is the criterion of "reality" and "truth" in the world of living thinking and of ideations that the living-thinking produces, whether individually or collectively?

Continuing on that, I can give my perspective on this:
- Being-Experiencing-Thinking-Willing-Feeling (BETWF) is undoubtedly real and true as a direct fact of our living experience (and I'm referring here to the actual experience of BETWF and not to the idea or a linguistic token of it)
- the activity of BETWF produces ideal content. The experience of all of this content is real by the fact of being directly present and experienced in the context of BETWF
- Now, what can we say about the reality of the content of these ideas and imaginations? We can say that it is equally real as being part of the reality of the BETWF direct experience. However, saying that it is real is not sufficient for practical purposes and not really relevant. There is another criterion that we can apply here: the criterion of relevance to the wholeness of the world content. And such relevance is not a black-and-white criterion, but rather a spectrum. For example, an experience of schizophrenic hallucination is real, however, the content of such hallucination has little relevance with the rest of the world content. An experience of an idea or imagination of a Sun has more relevance to the world content, and a sensual experience of the Sun has even more relevance, even though all of these experiences are equally real in the experiential sense. But we can sense here that this criterion of relevance is rather relative and simply a matter of the common consensus, as it is simply a criterion of fitness of the parts of the whole world content to the wholeness of the world content itself. And one can argue that everything automatically becomes part of the world content anyway, including the content of hallucinations, dreams and drug trips. It's just that some of the pieces of this content fit together more harmoniously than some others.

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:53 pm

AshvinP wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:17 pm What kind of insights can we reach beyond those of higher cognitive development which will elucidate our ordinary living flow of experience in a similar way?

I can give you such example - a living experience of awakening described by the Buddha in Lalitavistara sutra. Many practitioners can validate the same experience in their actual living direct experience (me included). I can assure you that this is a first-person living direct experience and not any kind of mental reflection or abstraction. Can you give me a quote from Steiner describing the same kind of living experience?

But even if Steiner or any of his followers never had such experience, that does not mean that it's incompatible or contradicting with SS, it just means that SS was not yet applied in this area of spiritual exploration, and nothing would prevent it from being applied there. So, I really do not see any opposition or contradiction here.

Lalitavistara Sutra

25.­2
“Alas! This truth that I realized and awakened to is profound, peaceful, tranquil, calm, complete, hard to see, hard to comprehend, and impossible to conceptualize since it is inaccessible to the intellect. Only wise noble ones and adepts can understand it. It is a state of complete peace, free of clinging, free of grasping, undemonstrable, uncompounded, beyond the six sense fields, inconceivable, unimaginable, and ineffable. It is indescribable, inexpressible, and incapable of being illustrated. It is unobstructed, beyond all references, a state of interruption through the path of tranquility, and imperceptible like emptiness. It is the exhaustion of craving and it is cessation free of desire. It is nirvāṇa. If I were to teach this truth to others, they would not understand it. Teaching the truth would tire me out and be wrongly contested, and it would be futile. Thus I will remain silent and keep this truth in my heart.”

25.­3
“Profound, peaceful, stainless, lucid, and unconditioned‍—
Such is the nectar-like truth I have realized.
Were I to teach it, no one would understand,
So I will silently remain in the forest.

25.­4
“I have discovered the supremely sublime and astonishing absolute,
The ineffable state, untainted by language,
Suchness, the sky-like nature of phenomena,
Completely free of discursive, conceptual movement.

25.­5
“This meaning cannot be understood through words;
Rather it is comprehended through reaching their limit.
Yet when sentient beings, whom previous victorious ones took under their care,
Hear about this truth, they develop confidence in it.

I have no doubt that the above described experience is real, non-abstract, beautiful, and profound. Yet notice there is a subtle performative contradiction - it is claimed the experience can't be described in words yet our attention is clearly being pointed to its vicinity through words and the inner movements and intuitions these words evoke. Yes, I realize this is a negative description, just like JW's description of the primal quantum reality. In fact, JW would probably say whoever wrote these words had tapped into this primal energy source which is entangled with our consciousness. In any case, the words are used because we desire to generate mental pictures which act as an absolute boundary to higher knowledge. Again, the mental pictures point to a very real inner experience, but the only reason for using them is to create a transcendental split (I'm not saying that's why they were used back when the Sutra was inscribed, but that's how they are used today).

So we see this pattern emerging again and again when dealing with the transcendental split - some people keep the split closer to home, so to speak, saying the boundary of the primal reality is our discursive reasoning and beyond the latter, there can be no precise and lucid knowledge of how the primal reality structures our ordinary flow of experience. The best we can do is some nebulous 'esthetic perception'. Others push the split farther back to whatever mystical state they have attained. They say "Sure, you can use your spiritual science to explore all these intermediary states above the level of discursive reasoning, but once you reach my ineffable mystical state, that higher knowledge has no relevance and cannot provide the kind of insight I get from my mystical state." In both cases, the boundary of ineffable primal reality always seems to coincide with the person's current boundary of experience. We have discussed all of this before many times.

There is no reason to take the real experience of this state negatively described above and absolutize it. Instead it can be taken exactly as you say in your last post - "There is another criterion that we can apply here: the criterion of relevance to the wholeness of the world content. And such relevance is not a black-and-white criterion, but rather a spectrum... It's just that some of the pieces of this content fit together more harmoniously than some others." If you are tempted to immediately say this does not apply to the state because it is not "content" but 'pure Nirvanic realization' or something similar, then that just goes to show how often we are willing to discard our own reasoning to absolutize some portion of experiential content if that fits with our preferred narrative. We are willing to find portions of experiential content that fall outside or beyond the spectrum i.e. that are transcendent.

Steiner has pointed to this same state in many places, a state of profound inner peace, bliss, and silence, but the difference is that he doesn't absolutize it. He realizes that concealed within this state is the symphonic activity of the contextual Minds which can be endlessly explored. For example:

Well, it can be the same with quiet, with silence. From the noise of the world complete silence can be restored, equal to zero. This can even become less; it can become more silent than the silence that equals zero, more and more silent, negative silence, negative quiet. And that is really the case when the strengthened soul-life is blotted out, when the silence in the soul becomes deeper than zero silence, if I may express it so. A quiet is established in the soul-life that tends toward the minus side, a stillness that is deeper than the mere silence of the ordinary consciousness.

And when we have penetrated to this silence, when the soul feels that it is removed from the world—not only when the world around it is still, but when the soul feels that the world-quiet can only equal zero, but that the soul itself is in a deeper silence than the silence of the world—then, when this negative silence sets in, the spiritual world begins to speak, really to speak, from the other side of existence.

The problem is that those maintaining the split will always thrust the Logos-speech of the spiritual world down below their absolutized state, and imagine we are dealing with some other kind of knowledge/insights that we can gain from the absolutized state. They then fail to realize the Speech of the spiritual worlds is exactly what provides more of the wholeness of the World content that fleshes out the spectrum and allows us to fit our mystical experiences into the facts of sensory life and imaginative life in a harmonious way. The higher knowledge of spiritual science elucidates why we are so tempted to absolutize such states, what such a tendency prevents us from realizing about the meaning of our existence and our responsibilities to the Cosmic organism.

Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain. We come to feel that the world is built on a foundation of cosmic suffering—of a cosmic element which can be experienced by the human being only as pain. We learn the penetrating truth, so willingly ignored by those who look outside themselves for happiness, that everything in existence has finally to be brought to birth in pain...

Indeed, the whole human organism has been brought forth out of an element which for present-day consciousness would be an experience of pain. At this stage of knowledge we have a deep feeling that, just as the coming forth of the plants means pain for the Earth, so all happiness, everything in the world from which we derive pleasure and blessing, has its roots in an element of suffering. If as conscious beings we could suddenly be changed into the substance of the ground beneath our feet, the result would be an endless enhancement of our feeling of pain.

When these facts revealed out of the spiritual world are put before superficially-minded people, they say: “My idea of God is quite different. I have always thought of God in His power as founding everything upon happiness, just as we would wish.” Such people are like that King of Spain to whom someone was showing a model of the universe and the course of the stars. The King had the greatest difficulty in understanding how all these movements occurred, and finally he exclaimed: “If God had left it to me, I would have made a much simpler world.”

Strictly speaking, that is the feeling of many people where knowledge and religion are concerned. Had God left the creation to them, they would have made a simpler world. They have no idea how naive this is!

Genuine Initiation-knowledge cannot merely satisfy men's desire for happiness; it has to guide them to a true understanding of their own being and destiny as they come forth from the world in the past, present and future. For this, spiritual facts are necessary, instead of something which gives immediate pleasure. But there is another thing which these lectures should indeed bring out. Precisely by experiencing such facts, if only through knowing them conceptually, people will gain a good deal that satisfies an inward need for their life here on Earth. Yes, they will gain something they need in order to be human beings in the fullest sense, just as for completeness they need their physical limbs.

Stranger wrote: ↑Sun Nov 17, 2024 10:21 pm Don't get me wrong, Federica, I'm not arguing against you here, it's actually a question that I have been puzzled with for a long time and asked on this forum a few times before without getting a satisfactory answer. It's a problem that exists in any flavor of idealism, including the living-thinking idealism of SS. In materialism there is a claim of the existence of a "reference" material reality with respect to which all our ideas and imaginations can be referenced and against which they can be validated (or invalidated) to prove them right or wrong, or real or not real. In idealism there is no such "external" reference reality and the only reality we have is the reality of the activity of thinking in our first-person conscious experience. Then having any idea or any mental reflection or imagination (like Santa Claus, or unicorn) is also part of our first-person living experience. Then, how can we tell or claim if they are true or not and real or not?

OK, let’s see. I am pretty sure the question has been addressed from various angles here (if someone has a specific post in mind, please link it) but let’s see.

First I’d say that, as long as we see the phenomenological critique of Kant's idealism as yet another flavor of idealism, we are not in the best position to consider the question you bring up. I think we have seen that the old distinction “material versus ideal” nature of reality doesn’t cut it anymore, for all the reasons Güney brought in, that were discussed at the beginning of this thread. The true distinction that helps understanding is between dated outlooks that can’t explain the relation between mental pictures and reality - hence imagine some form of illusion of perception - and the phenomenological outlook, that altogether logically solves the problem of the disconnect between perception/experience on one side, and things/reality on the other. No higher cognition is needed to apprehend this shift. It’s enough to use rigorous and unprejudiced philosophical reasoning to find out that critical idealism doesn't hold up, simply because it can only derive the “illusory screen of perception” under the self-contradictory condition of starting from the real “eyes in themselves”, the real “brain in itself” and the real “ego-in-itself” like a naïve realist would. So it uses in its train of thought the very thing it aims to oppose, and if it doesn’t, the whole reasoning collapses like a house of cards.

For some reason - Ashvin called it a mystery - this logical point is much more difficult to get than one would anticipate. Therefore, if so far this part has not attracted your attention in particular, I guess we should go there first. Because once one has that clearly in mind, it’s easy to see that the external frame of reference is indeed there, in the phenomenological approach, and it also doesn’t have the various fatal problems the materialistic frame of reference has. Thinking is the external frame of reference. Not thinking in our brain or in our individual mind, but thinking at large, the spiritual nature of reality with which our own spiritual activity is concentric. That’s how we break free from our limited mental pictures, and realize that mental pictures, as expressions of thinking activity, are limited and static as they are because our activity gets squeezed in spacetime, through the medium of our physical body and brain. Under the constraints of the spacetime environment, we get mental pictures, but the medium of spiritual activity at large in which our own activity is immersed, is not of the same nature. At a first basic level, it is teeming with life and movement, unlike the sequential mental pictures we are familiar with. So we need to refer to thinking, and how it operates in us - not to mental pictures, like everyone else does - in order to grasp anything about Reality, in order ot discriminate what is Real from what is not.

This spiritual scientific exploration of spiritual facts is indeed a slow progression, and does require to work at developing higher congition, but the initial understanding of the real possiblity of starting the journey on such solid, factual, and objective bases is completely at hand, it's accessible before higher cognition is developed, and that changes everything, compared to the old approaches. Thinking at large, as spiritual foundation of all reality not submitted to the meannesses our spacetime Earthly environment, is a logically derivable understanding. That’s what is meant by living thinking, as opposed to intellectual, mental-picture thinking. Living thinking doesn't mean that we should care to really experience things. Of course, we should also care to really experience things in first person, but we're talking of something else here, when we say “living thinking". Does that match your current idea of living thinking? Coming to your flower example in the next post.

AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Nov 18, 2024 2:18 pm Again, the mental pictures point to a very real inner experience, but the only reason for using them is to create a transcendental split (I'm not saying that's why they were used back when the Sutra was inscribed, but that's how they are used today).

The practical reason to use the mental pictures is to inspire practitioners for that actual attainment of this "X" experience (let me call it like that), and to use these descriptions as hints or pointers to that direction. Using a famous analogy, it's a finger pointing to the moon. the finger itself should not be conflated with the moon and does not resemble or describe the moon, it only redirect our attention towards the direction of movement towards the moon.

There is no reason to take the real experience of this state negatively described above and absolutize it. Instead it can be taken exactly as you say in your last post - "There is another criterion that we can apply here: the criterion of relevance to the wholeness of the world content. And such relevance is not a black-and-white criterion, but rather a spectrum... It's just that some of the pieces of this content fit together more harmoniously than some others." If you are tempted to immediately say this does not apply to the state because it is not "content" but 'pure Nirvanic realization' or something similar, then that just goes to show how often we are willing to discard our own reasoning to absolutize some portion of experiential content if that fits with our preferred narrative. We are willing to find portions of experiential content that fall outside or beyond the spectrum i.e. that are transcendent.

Steiner has pointed to this same state in many places, a state of profound inner peace, bliss, and silence, but the difference is that he doesn't absolutize it. He realizes that concealed within this state is the symphonic activity of the contextual Minds which can be endlessly explored.

This "X" state is actually very relevant to the wholeness of the world content, it's kind of a "glue" that brings the brokenness, dualities and confrontations in the world to harmony and unity. The experience of peace and bliss are rather side effects of this primal experience, but this experience in no way denies or suppresses the activity of the contextual Mind, it only makes it more harmonious and takes this activity to the next developmental level.

Directly this peace is achieved in the empty consciousness, what I have described as an inwardly experienced, all-embracing, cosmic feeling of happiness gives way to an equally all-embracing pain.

The emptying of consciousness may be a trigger for this "X" experience, but it may not. This is why in some traditions people practice the empty state of consciousness, but unfortunately often confuse it with the "X" state. The "X" state itself has nothing to do with empty consciousness, it is perfectly compatible with both empty-quiet and active states of consciousness, simply because it is unconditioned.