Some Analogies for Spiritual Analogies

How analogies recursively redeem the truth-killing function of verbal thinking.

Those who diligently seek the Spirit in its native essence know all too well the limitations of concepts and language. We can sense that intuitive Truth dies in the sounds of our inner voice or, even more so, on our lips when it becomes outer speech. It then only remains as mere husks of intuitive meaning; it feels like the fragmented grunts of cavemen trying to express the secrets of the Cosmos. Truth always seems to become an entity less profound, less serious, and less intimate when it is verbalized. For this reason, many spiritual seekers turn away from clearly cognizing and verbalizing their deeper intuitions of reality. The precise verbalization of spiritual experience becomes anathema and is conceived as a fool’s errand.

But is that an intrinsic property of verbal thinking or, rather, does it also depend on how we are approaching and utilizing the verbal concepts? Can two people approach or utilize the same verbal concepts in entirely different ways, with significantly different meaningful results for the elucidation and orientation of spiritual life? The answers to these questions cannot be found in abstract definitions, but only in the experience of using verbal concepts in imaginative and symbolic ways. Only in this way can verbal thinking be redeemed from its truth-killing function, becoming one of our greatest assets rather than a liability.

“Show me the net with which you are fishing and I will tell you what you are not going to catch.”

The net of our ordinary intellectual thinking is constellated from the spatiotemporal formatting of our neurosensory system. It perceives objects separated from one another with neatly defined boundaries and acting on each other through mechanical contact or hypothesized energies and forces. It is a thinking net heavily reliant on definitions that seek to delimit the qualities of phenomena to number, weight, measure, or some even more abstracted properties like spin, momentum, etc. These properties have been stripped of all qualitative significance, i.e. of all the functional meaning we actually experience with the objects and processes in our environment, for example, the meaning of ‘sitting place’ when I see a couch or ‘renewal and refreshment’ when I feel a cool breeze on a hot day.

All too often people use this same net to fish for spiritual phenomena - they imagine more ethereal floating forms and beings that act on each other in mechanical ways. Yet it isn’t possible to catch spiritual phenomena with that type of net. No definitional boundaries can be drawn around intents, ideas, and emotions. In reality, no such boundaries can be drawn around sensations either, i.e. there is never any clear-cut boundary between where the meaning of one color stops and another begins in my visual perception, but it became necessary to assume that there is such a boundary for accomplishing various physical and mental tasks. In reality, the meaning of any color I perceive only arises in the context of all other colors in my surrounding environment, along with the context of my emotional and ideal states. The ‘blue’ sky is not perceived with the same meaning if I am in a solemn devotional mood versus a joyous and ecstatic mood.

Neither can spiritual phenomena be caught as mechanical processes acting from our relative reference point of intellectual time, i.e. as processes unfolding from one moment to the next in a series of causes and effects. We can’t understand how our moods or emotions influence our thoughts, for example, if we try to intellectually frame the whole process as a linear sequence of causes and effects. The mood is rather an overarching aura that clothes my state of being and contextualizes my sequence of thoughts. The temporal relation between the mood and my thoughts is vertical and qualitative, not horizontal and quantitative. How I conduct my spiritual activity at any given time is continually becoming the auric context that simultaneously enables and constrains how it will be conducted at a later time, while my anticipation of conducting my spiritual activity at a later time also informs the auric context at present time.

Max Leyf

discusses this same principle in a recent article:

But time is perhaps best conceived not through likeness to any spatial phenomenon at all, but to music. The intelligibility of any melody depends on the prior tonal moments “hanging in the air of consciousness,” as it were, like smoke of incense, to colour the experience of each note that follows. An interval cannot really be experienced except through time, in this way. If we imagine looking at a scene displayed in a mirror, we can further conceive of the internal shift in intentionality necessary to perceive the glass instead of the phenomena reflected in it.
…
Time forms a similar backdrop to experience as such, howbeit a similar shift in intentionality is necessary to grasp it to the one that was required to transition from a perception of objects in a mirror to a perception of the mirror in which they are being reflected. I’m not sure about this, but when I attempt this shift, it seems to me that pure time is also pure consciousness.¹

For these reasons and others, the intellect needs to seek out many different and normally unsuspected kinds of nets to go fishing for its understanding of spiritual experiences, since the old sensory intellectual nets are too rigid and porous to filter out the subtler intuitions. Instead, the latter passes right through our intellectual concepts unnoticed. Abstract and convenient definitions will no longer do, nor will any universal ‘laws’ or rules by which we frame spiritual reality. We must continually circumambulate the latter with our mobile and qualitatively vertical thinking from varying perspectives.

One can never look at the truths about the higher worlds from too many aspects. One should realize that from any one aspect it is possible to give only the poorest sketch. And when one looks at the same thing from the most diverse aspects, the impressions one receives in this way only gradually complement each other to form an ever more animated picture. Only such pictures, not dry, schematic concepts, can help the man who wants to penetrate into the higher worlds. The more animated and colorful the pictures, the more can one hope to approach the higher reality.²

Perhaps the most critical conceptual arrow in the spiritual seeker’s quiver for surveying spiritual phenomena from multiple angles is the analogy. It allows the spiritual thinker to leverage relatively known conceptual-sensory experiences in the act of meaningfully orienting toward relatively unknown spiritual experiences. Through the portal of the analogy, established through our living conceptual activity, the spirit can fluidly move between the manifest and the unmanifest, the known and the unknown, bringing the experiential fruits of the former to the latter and returning the ideal impulses and insights of the latter to the former. In other words, “All knowledge of what is visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve.”³ Analogies therefore serve an immanently evolutionary function.

Let’s use the following analogy for this evolutionary function of analogies.

With the application of electrical current at the cathode and anode, water sublimates into hydrogen and oxygen gases. The qualitative properties of the gases cannot be said to resemble those of fluid water in the least. Hydrogen is one of the most flammable gases, which is the polar opposite quality of water that is used to quench flames. The same relation holds between our sensory perceptions and sense-based concepts (water), which are generally interwoven with one another like the H2 and the O in our normal experience, and our imaginative perceptions and ideas (gases) which can be experienced as distinct streams of fiery spiritual activity that are focused and ‘cooled off’ through the lens of our “I” bound up with the neurosensory system. Once that condensation takes place, they appear as fixed perceptions that are already united with some meaning. It is because we normally only awaken at the water stage that we start to assume the meaning was ‘always there’ independently of our spiritual activity.

This function of the spiritual analogy is to help us understand the difference between sensory concepts and more integrated ideas, not by defining that difference for us, but by allowing us the opportunity to become more sensitive to how we accomplish the condensation of intuitive gases into conceptual-sensory water, or the sublimation of the latter into the former, through inner electrolysis. In other words, by vividly working through such analogies, our verbal thinking is redeemed from its ‘truth-killing’ function. The analogical verbal thinking is understood as pointing right back at the intuitive and imaginative activity that is doing the analogizing. In that sense, the spiritual analogy is a recursive imaginative tool that serves to awaken thinking to the ascending and descending, sublimating and condensing, movements of its subtle activity. These deeper fruits of analogies usually don’t ripen until well after they have been worked through - they germinate as seeds within the soil of our imaginative soul life.

Yet all the conceptual nets we use to fish for spiritual understanding, including spiritual analogies, also come with limitations that we should remain conscious of at all times. For one, as Steiner discussed above, all spiritual experiences can be explored from infinitely different angles because spiritual reality is qualitatively infinite and eternal, so any given analogy will necessarily exclude infinite angles on the particular experience at issue. If we become wedded to any particular analogy as the analogy for spiritual reality, then we will end up restricting our spiritual perception rather than expanding it. Another limitation is that any particular analogy can only hone in on a few aspects or dimensions of the underlying spiritual experience. If we try to extend the scope of the analogy too far beyond these limited aspects, then it will become utterly misleading.

In the case of electrolysis, for example, we are only using it to explore the function of analogies in moving between qualitatively distinct ideal perceptions, between mental representations and imaginations or intuitions, that are otherwise continuous in their cognitive essence, just as water in its fluid and gaseous states. It helps point to a concrete process of sensitizing (electrifying) our spiritual activity to its vertical movements. If we imagine that analogies generate some electrical current within our headspace that separates mental representations from higher ideal perceptions of their own accord, then it becomes utterly misleading. That brings us to the next limitation - certain types of analogies can invite too much inner passivity and therefore negate their potential value.

Consider the following technology:

Sometimes short scenes (such as GIFs) are quite helpful as analogies since they can point to the movement of spiritual activity rather than only static properties. Continual movement (in time) is characteristic of all spiritual processes. On the other hand, static images or brief scenes also allow enough of a ‘gap’ between the sensory and the spiritual so that we can bring our imaginative activity into movement to bridge the meaning of the former with that of the latter. Our moving activity then complements the perceptual content with deeper meaning and helps make the analogy a true bridge to supersensible realities. Analogies should always invite imaginative effort from the reader or listener. Otherwise, it becomes simply another form of marketing. Buy this Corona beer and you will start to look and feel like these other people relaxing on the warm and breezy beach.

There is spiritual marketing, too. I can ask you to watch a long clip of The Matrix and then set about explaining how the concepts are analogous to spiritual realities. But this leaves you in a passive state and therefore deprives you the opportunity of intuitively sensitizing to how you are ‘the Matrix’ through the condensing functions of your spiritual activity. It might make you eager to consume more spiritual concepts passively, but it won’t help resurrect and redeem your conceptual activity from its immobile existence. In that sense, a technology like Sora AI, where one can develop one-minute or longer videos from text prompts, probably won’t be any more helpful for developing analogies than a long YouTube clip. It becomes a passive perceptual experience and this negates much of the analogical value coming from the content of the video.

These aren’t intended as rigid rules, though, and it’s always possible for the human spirit to make the most unlikely of experiences into a useful analogy under the right circumstances. A lot of that will depend on complex evolving relations between the sensory, the soul, and the spiritual. The most important thing is that we always keep our thinking flexible and mobile when approaching spiritual analogies. We should understand that we bring life to the analogy just as much as it can bring life to us. Most importantly, we should approach all spiritual analogies in the mood of humility and reverence for their redemptive functions. Through the portal of the analogy, we are dialoguing with concrete beings who are always structuring and animating our spiritual activity so that we can have meaningful experiences and grow from them.

The Major Arcana of the Tarot are authentic symbols. They conceal and reveal their sense at one and the same time according to the depth of meditation. That which they reveal are not secrets, i.e. things hidden by human will, but are arcana, which is something quite different. An arcanum is that which it is necessary to "know" in order to be fruitful in a given domain of spiritual life. It is that which must be actively present in our consciousness —or even in our subconscious —in order to render us capable of making discoveries, engendering new ideas, conceiving of new artistic subjects. In a word, it makes us fertile in our creative pursuits, in whatever domain of spiritual life. An arcanum is a "ferment" or an "enzyme" whose presence stimulates the spiritual and the psychic life of man. And it is symbols which are the bearers of these "ferments" or "enzymes" and which communicate them —if the mentality and morality of the recipient is ready, i.e. if he is "poor in spirit" and does not, suffer from the most serious spiritual malady: self-complacency.⁴

We can understand why arcana concurrently conceal and reveal spiritual meaning only when we understand our active participation in approaching their analogical forms. The symbolic water reveals its fluid nature yet conceals its gaseous nature from all those who do not undergo inner electrolysis, also known as modern initiation. We must start walking the first steps on such an inner path before the spiritual analogy becomes truly fruitful for our meaningful orientation to higher realities. A path of intuitive thinking, such as we find in the Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, is exactly such an inner electrolysis. It helps us delaminate the normally fused-together components of our mental-sensory representations into their more subtle streams of activity through logically precise imaginative exercises. Such a text is the epitome of redeemed conceptual thinking.

Eventually, through such intuitive development, analogical perception becomes second nature when interacting with the sensory environment. We begin to discern the more purified inner meaning of experiences before we adulterate that meaning with too many reflective concepts tied to our personal preferences and reactions. When a cat takes a strong whiff of a pungent odor, its whole body will display the odor’s meaning by jumping and shaking. Through analogical sensitivity, we remain still outwardly, but our whole inner life begins to ‘jump and shake’ with meaningful insight as it encounters the rich tapestry of sensations. These sensory events begin to speak intimately to how we can purify our soul life and perfect our spiritual activity in the context of overarching spiritual intents that wisely guide the evolutionary process from Alpha to Omega.

1. stubbornly-persistent illusions

2. Rudolf Steiner, GA 11 (XVII)

3. Rudolf Steiner, GA 13 (III)

4. Valentin Tomberg, Meditations on the Tarot (Letter I)