Thank you, Ashvin! I appreciate your 'two-arm pendulum' analogy, as well as your indication of the possibility to "streamline our thoughts to exert less of a chaotic pull on our soul context." Experiencing this "chaotic pull" seems possible once we have chosen to unfold the capacities that would, by their very natures, distance us from it. For example, equanimity, openness, and the quality of attention capable of withstanding distractions or concepts that would otherwise 'frame' our experience. The distancing from these thoughts allows us to experience their previous effect upon our perception, like isolating a variable on one side of an equation: we can understand more clearly its inherent workings.
I am also thinking about the tendency to add more arms to the pendulum in our desire to understand reality. Meta-level theories of religion and physics can create seemingly endless layers of abstraction between our perception of the world and the understanding from which it is always connected. Since only the intuitive point is the intuitive point, and intuitive experience is something we can only ever point to, the closest our 'explanations' of reality can get is the description of intuitive experience itself. This then brings us to realm of contemplative activity, or "retracing" spiritual activity, as you've called it. Is this what you're seeing as well?
Thanks for these observations, Michael, and 'isolating the variable' is a great image for what we aim! It is exactly about exercising concentrated resistance of the ordinary chaotic flow, by developing those soul qualities you mention and corresponding strengthened thinking. That provides cognitive distance on the soul context which we are normally merged with, i.e. isolating the variables. It is exactly the same principle used in natural scientific experiments, it is why such methods actually work. I discuss the nature of this 'resistance' more in the next parts.
I was just observing my cat on the porch and she couldn't help but allow her attention to be dragged by practically every sensation in the vicinity, as usual. As humans, we have naturally developed a certain intellectual resistance that distances us from the sensory flow, so we can selectively ignore sensations, isolate them, and try to understand them or contemplate other questions about our existence, but still our attention is often reactively dragged by the flow of thoughts which ends up being little more than a *commentary* on sensory experiences. Through spiritual exercises, including these phenomenological explorations, we can resist the ordinary thought-flow as well and thereby direct our attention to understanding that flow.
On the other hand, the 'meta-level theories' you reference only provide the illusion of understanding the flow, because actually we are still passively flowing with thoughts derived from sensory experience (the imaginative replicas). It's only that we have found clever ways of contorting those sensory replicas into the most varied configurations., i.e. models and theories. You are exactly correct that the only way forward from this conundrum is to make our thoughts, our models, doctrines, theories, etc., artistically recursive such that they point back toward the intuitive experience itself, retracing the imaginative process by which the thoughts were formed.
How do I distinguish spiritual insights from mere hallucinations? I mean, spiritual beings can and do lie after all. I believe Steiner did say something on it, but I don't know where and what.
There are many ways to address this question and Steiner has indeed comments on it in various lectures. It is possible to make the distinction and large part of spiritual training consist exactly in accustoming our inner organization to do this. It all starts with the strengthening and enlivening of thinking, which is the faculty we always use to attend to and discriminate experiences, to evaluate how they fit into the harmony of the facts we have accumulated. Even by working through these essays, we are probing the etheric-life strata of spiritual activity with our thinking and accustoming the latter to discriminate experiences there.
So the means for making the distinction between objective knowledge and personal fantasy are certainly there, just as we can distinguish between the subtitles in a movie from our thoughts (inner voice) when we read them. Just as we have the means to recognize if we are inventing our own words and disregarding the subtitles, so we have the means to recognize fantasy pictures from genuine perception of the life forces that animate our thinking, which we experience in Imaginations propelled by relatively autonomous spiritual activity. In other words, we learn to *read* the images and discern how they point to meaning we could not have personally invented from our subconscious memory associations.
To use another example, if I intend to count backward from 10, implicit in that intent is the overarching mood in which I am doing this exercise. This may be something I carefully crafted, but usually it's quite autonomous of my local intents, it is simply given to me from 'beyond' my intentional gestures. When we concentrate into the flow of spiritual activity and purify the experience of the original intent, we can get flashes of intuitive insight into the living forces that structure our 'moods'. Already this is known as something independent of the original intent to count backward.
During normal sensory experience, I can tell that my visual field at any given time is tied to my intentional gestures - whether to turn my head this way or that way, to close my eyes or squint, etc. But I also recognize that the colors I perceive are not dependent on those gestures - if I imagine a red surface over a white wall, the sensory color 'outweighs' the imagined color. In a similar way we can distinguish the receding content of our inner gestures from from that of more autonomous intents within the imaginative (etheric) spectrum. I can tell there are living forces reflected in this spectrum that are modulating its receding content and are relatively independent of my local gestures.
Thank you, Ashvin! I appreciate your 'two-arm pendulum' analogy, as well as your indication of the possibility to "streamline our thoughts to exert less of a chaotic pull on our soul context." Experiencing this "chaotic pull" seems possible once we have chosen to unfold the capacities that would, by their very natures, distance us from it. For example, equanimity, openness, and the quality of attention capable of withstanding distractions or concepts that would otherwise 'frame' our experience. The distancing from these thoughts allows us to experience their previous effect upon our perception, like isolating a variable on one side of an equation: we can understand more clearly its inherent workings.
I am also thinking about the tendency to add more arms to the pendulum in our desire to understand reality. Meta-level theories of religion and physics can create seemingly endless layers of abstraction between our perception of the world and the understanding from which it is always connected. Since only the intuitive point is the intuitive point, and intuitive experience is something we can only ever point to, the closest our 'explanations' of reality can get is the description of intuitive experience itself. This then brings us to realm of contemplative activity, or "retracing" spiritual activity, as you've called it. Is this what you're seeing as well?
Thanks for these observations, Michael, and 'isolating the variable' is a great image for what we aim! It is exactly about exercising concentrated resistance of the ordinary chaotic flow, by developing those soul qualities you mention and corresponding strengthened thinking. That provides cognitive distance on the soul context which we are normally merged with, i.e. isolating the variables. It is exactly the same principle used in natural scientific experiments, it is why such methods actually work. I discuss the nature of this 'resistance' more in the next parts.
I was just observing my cat on the porch and she couldn't help but allow her attention to be dragged by practically every sensation in the vicinity, as usual. As humans, we have naturally developed a certain intellectual resistance that distances us from the sensory flow, so we can selectively ignore sensations, isolate them, and try to understand them or contemplate other questions about our existence, but still our attention is often reactively dragged by the flow of thoughts which ends up being little more than a *commentary* on sensory experiences. Through spiritual exercises, including these phenomenological explorations, we can resist the ordinary thought-flow as well and thereby direct our attention to understanding that flow.
On the other hand, the 'meta-level theories' you reference only provide the illusion of understanding the flow, because actually we are still passively flowing with thoughts derived from sensory experience (the imaginative replicas). It's only that we have found clever ways of contorting those sensory replicas into the most varied configurations., i.e. models and theories. You are exactly correct that the only way forward from this conundrum is to make our thoughts, our models, doctrines, theories, etc., artistically recursive such that they point back toward the intuitive experience itself, retracing the imaginative process by which the thoughts were formed.
Hello, Ashvin. I wonder though:
How do I distinguish spiritual insights from mere hallucinations? I mean, spiritual beings can and do lie after all. I believe Steiner did say something on it, but I don't know where and what.
Hello,
There are many ways to address this question and Steiner has indeed comments on it in various lectures. It is possible to make the distinction and large part of spiritual training consist exactly in accustoming our inner organization to do this. It all starts with the strengthening and enlivening of thinking, which is the faculty we always use to attend to and discriminate experiences, to evaluate how they fit into the harmony of the facts we have accumulated. Even by working through these essays, we are probing the etheric-life strata of spiritual activity with our thinking and accustoming the latter to discriminate experiences there.
So the means for making the distinction between objective knowledge and personal fantasy are certainly there, just as we can distinguish between the subtitles in a movie from our thoughts (inner voice) when we read them. Just as we have the means to recognize if we are inventing our own words and disregarding the subtitles, so we have the means to recognize fantasy pictures from genuine perception of the life forces that animate our thinking, which we experience in Imaginations propelled by relatively autonomous spiritual activity. In other words, we learn to *read* the images and discern how they point to meaning we could not have personally invented from our subconscious memory associations.
To use another example, if I intend to count backward from 10, implicit in that intent is the overarching mood in which I am doing this exercise. This may be something I carefully crafted, but usually it's quite autonomous of my local intents, it is simply given to me from 'beyond' my intentional gestures. When we concentrate into the flow of spiritual activity and purify the experience of the original intent, we can get flashes of intuitive insight into the living forces that structure our 'moods'. Already this is known as something independent of the original intent to count backward.
During normal sensory experience, I can tell that my visual field at any given time is tied to my intentional gestures - whether to turn my head this way or that way, to close my eyes or squint, etc. But I also recognize that the colors I perceive are not dependent on those gestures - if I imagine a red surface over a white wall, the sensory color 'outweighs' the imagined color. In a similar way we can distinguish the receding content of our inner gestures from from that of more autonomous intents within the imaginative (etheric) spectrum. I can tell there are living forces reflected in this spectrum that are modulating its receding content and are relatively independent of my local gestures.