(if I reply directly, the button to "reply" gets cut off)
Hi Don,
Thanks for the quick (!) comment.
1) The references to JP can be ignored if they distract one's thinking, the underlying ideas remain the same. I'm not trying to associate exposure therapy exclusively with JP, but the latter often speaks of it and associates it very closely with imagination and thinking, which is the most important part.
Apart from that, we can agree to disagree on his philosophy (psycho-spiritual phenomenology) and theology (closely aligned with the Christ impulse)!
2) Yes, the personality is quite malleable IF we devote our efforts to inner transformation, which is a big IF these days. And even those who pursue inner transformation often become comfortable after working on a few areas, assuming they are brand new people while certain ingrained habits of thinking, feeling, and willing still lurk beneath the surface. On the path of spiritual exposure therapy (as outlined here), we become intimately aware of how resistant our soul constitution is to such transformation. We are rarely willing to confront the depths of fear, hatred, antipathy, etc. that lives in our hearts.
Thanks for the anecdote on the psychologists' list of the "impossible". As long as attention is only fixated on receding mental pictures of intuitive intents, we are merely reacting to events around us, and our anticipation of future events is merely an extrapolation of past events. We literally cannot imagine the unsuspected degrees of freedom that exist for inner activity. That is why people are so quick to declare things impossible and never learn the lesson, even though the impossible is continually revealed as possible for those who start resonating with the domain of future potential, i.e. the deeper scales of intuitive intents.
(1) I am not sure why you would refer to Jordan Peterson in connection with exposure therapy, except that his name is well known? Exposure therapy is, for the most part, part of the most basic repertoire of the vast majority of the 500,000 or so counselors (including social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists) in the US. It may be a bit misleading to associate this simple, scientifically supported process with someone like Peterson who peddles so much confused, and often pseudo or anti-scientific ideas, along with confused philosophy and theology.
(2) To the best of my knowledge (as a psychologist who has conducted research) most if not all of the studies regarding stability of personality are conducted on people who have not devoted their lives to personality transformation. Since such transformation appears to rest on at least initial stages of awakening, the research seems either irrelevant or contrary to some basic facts regarding the potential malleability of human nature.
As far as the possibility of change in general, I've been amused for decades to see the ever lengthening list of what psychologists believe is impossible to achieve, regularly having to be updated by someone achieving the allegedly impossible, but never accompanied by even the least degree of lessening of psychologists' arrogance. Did any of the dream researchers who insisted lucid dreaming was impossible show even the slightest hesitation to declare other things impossible after 1981, when lucid dreaming was proven to be an empirical reality?
“ mentioned above, psychedelics, Eastern meditative practices, and many similar spiritual practices still rely on this latter support, only the bodily life and corresponding perceptions may express themselves in a more ethereal and transformed way. So these cannot be said to confront and overcome this foundational phobia either. The latter is best exemplified in the philosophical, scientific, and religious lines of thinking that emerged in the wake of Kant's 'critical philosophy”
Are you familiar with TIbetan Buddhist analytic meditation? Or the Kashmiri shaivism meditation on the 36 Tattwas? Or the Vedantic meditation in the Bhagavad Gita?”
These all involve going far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Steiner’s or Goethe’s works that they refer to as “Thinking’ and tracing all phenomena from the outermost manifestation, beyond life or prana, beyond mind and thinking, beyond infinite Intelligence (Nous, Logos, Vijnana) to the very root in the Supreme Divinity (Purushottama)
So I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that Asian meditative practices rely on the bodily life and corresponding perceptions- unless I’m misreading your comment.
There is a simple test of whether our spirit is truly growing into intuitive resonance with more expansive ideal 'curvatures' of existence, asymptotically approaching the Supreme Divinity. In the essay, I used the example of growing into attunement with the voice of our close one such that we can distinguish their speech in a place with loud noise, i.e. we can resonate with their speech (and not others) because we have cultivated interest and sympathy for their first-person experiential perspective, their ideas, feelings, hopes, ambitions, goals, etc. Likewise, if our imaginative concentration is bearing fruit, we should grow into resonance with the first-person experiential perspectives that animate the 'Speech' which shapes deeper psycho-physical processes in our daily experience (individual and collective).
You seem to be pointing to something similar when you say the spiritual exercises you mention all "trace phenomena from the outermost manifestation...". Fundamentally, we are tracing these phenomena to the inner life and activity of higher-order Beings. Yet I haven't come across any MODERN (not ancient, but modern) personalities who follow only Eastern practices and who can precisely elucidate the spiritual processes at work in our biological life, for example. In the essay, I also quoted Steiner about the imaginative memory panorama that we can retrace, which otherwise only emerges after death or for those who have gone through NDEs (and even then it only emerges in a much less intuitive form, since there is no preparation beforehand). Can you refer me to any similar descriptions from those who practice the exercises you mentioned?
I would honestly be glad if you could, because I am in no way claiming that Steiner's path is the only one for reaching lucid intuitive experience of higher realities. However, from many interactions with those who pursue the modern Eastern practices, I have so far not come across any evidence of those experiences being reached.
Vast ranges of experience never even suspected in any Anthroposophical works I’ve come across. I first came across Steiner in 1971, and have had hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations with Anthroposophists (including Arthur Zajonc, former president of the American Anthroposophical Society) and during the 5 years I was writing a book on the yogic psychology of Sri Aurobindo, looked for analogues of vast ranges of psycho-cosmology that Sri Aurobindo wrote of, and couldn’t find any in Steiner. I also spoke at length about this with Robert McDermott, who as a scholar specialized in Sri Aurobindo and later on Steiner and pretty much agreed about much of it - though of course there are details about biodynamics and education and a few other external areas that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never addressed.
Satprem’s ’Adventure of Consciousness is pretty much the universal recommendation to start. I actually rather rarely suggest my own book as a starting point, but for the kinds of things you’re looking for, I drew many parallels in our book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity.
Marco Masi is a physicist with decades of research experience. He has written what I consider by far the single best book ever written on the integration of spirituality and science, “Spirit Calls Nature.” He is an expert on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, and quite deftly weaves in the most up to date findings from physics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He was a Waldorf teacher for some years in Germany and retains a strong affinity to Goethean science, with of course much familiarity with Steiner.
So I would say if you want to investigate it:
#1. Satprem
#2. Our book on yoga psychology
#3: Marco’s book
Then with Sri Aurobindo, probably Synthesis of Yoga, Part IV (The Yoga of Self PErfection)
Then I would read short excerpts from Letters on Yoga and definitely look into the Record of Yoga. Debashish Banerji is said to have a good commentary and guidebook to the Record of Yoga, “Seven Quartets of Becoming,” though I haven’t read it yet.
For specific information on evolutionary biology and Sri Aurobindo’s view, a quick glance through Marco’s book should be a good place to start. We have more general information about the evolution of consciousness and biology. I was actually surprised, even though I had studied Sri Aurobindo for 25 years before I started the book, how astonishingly his broad picture of the evolution of consciousness filled in so many enormous gaps that exist throughout biology. Ulrich Mohrhoff, a resident of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram for over 50 years and an excellent physicist, has filled in enormous gaps in the understanding of order in teh universe by looking at physics in the light of Sri Aurobindo. And I would dare say between my book and “Consciousness Based Psychology” by Drs. Soumitra Basu and Michael Miovic, gaps in neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and the whole world of psychotherapy have been filled in in a way you just won’t find anywhere else.
I have gone through some of the texts you mentioned and could immediately tell Sri Aurobindo had developed some Imaginative cognition, which allowed him to perceive the broad structure of spiritual evolution. Yet there are no indications he was able to remain spiritually active across the *threshold of death*, where we transition from being consumers of past spiritual Wisdom to participating in fashioning the intuitive curvatures along which future stages of evolution will unfold.
It's disappointing to hear about your conversations with modern Anthroposophists, because that just goes to show how little such people have absorbed the phenomenological foundations of spiritual science. I am no clairvoyant myself, but I know enough to see the ways in which modern Anthroposophy has failed to properly understand Steiner's work. It's very hard for me to work through any Anthroposophical books written over the last few decades (Zajonc isn't bad), so instead I focus mostly on Steiner's lectures and independent phenomenological investigations.
Anyway, as long as we speak in generalities, I don't think any progress can be made in such discussions. This is why I asked for a specific spiritual revelation or spiritual scientific claim of Sri Aurobindo (or anyone else) that we cannot find more fully fleshed out in Steiner. I can point to something that is conspicuously missing from Aurobindo's work, which is the deeper significance of the Christ events and the manifestation of his Impulse in our own time. Anyone who had attained to Inspired cognition would not have been able to circumvent this Central supersensible axis of spiritual evolution, which quite literally renders the rest of historical evolution comprehensible. As Owen Barfield put it,
"I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two."
He came to this knowledge through phenomenological exploration (mostly philology), independently of Steiner or any other spiritual teacher.
"In ‘Philology and the Incarnation’ — his own version of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici — Barfield explains how his own thinking on the evolution of consciousness, in particular his study of language as a record of that evolution, eventually required his acceptance of the teachings of Christianity. The raised-as-an-agnostic Barfield had no Damascus, no moment of conversion. The facts of the evolution of consciousness logically required him to become a Christian."
Only later did he encounter Steiner and realize that the spiritual scientific revelations greatly enriched, enlivened, and deepened his orientation to this Central axis of evolution. It allowed him to make it more of a living reality experienced from within, instead of simply a logical conclusion from the historical facts. To be clear, I am not speaking about exoteric Christian religion, but the esoteric reality of Christ that can only be discovered within through sense-free and body-free cognition. I find all of the profound implications that stem from this Inspired revelation to be conspicuously missing from modern Eastern teachers.
Hi Ashvin. Returning once more to this interesting and lengthy article, this time I am reminded of that mysterious and somewhat lengthy paragraph number 9 from the original preface to the PoF. I propose that it conceptualizes what you have written in a remarkably succinct manner. Of course 9 needs to be read in the context of the preceding paragraphs, most especially number 8.
If we as imaginary 2D beings begin the synthetic process of combining 2D projections we begin to shatter the restrictions of our 2D world. We enter, initially with much effort, into the reality of a 3D world and are amazed that what is now so obvious was so difficult to imagine previously. This is the fruit of experience.
The realms of life are many. For each of these, particular sciences evolve. But life itself is a unity, and the more the sciences strive to deepen themselves in the individual realms, the more they distance themselves from a view of the living wholeness of the world. There must be a knowledge which seeks within the individual sciences the elements needed to lead man back again into full life. The scientific researcher in a particular field wants to acquire through his knowledge a consciousness of the world and its workings; in this book the goal is a philosophical one: the science itself is meant to become organically living. The individual sciences are preparatory stages of the science striven for here. A similar relationship holds sway in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. This last is a sum of knowledge whose acquirement is a necessary prerequisite for composing music. In composing, the laws of composition serve life, serve actual reality. In exactly the same sense philosophy is an art. All real philosophers were artists in concepts. For them human ideas become the artistic medium and the scientific method became the artistic technique. Abstract thinking thereby gains concrete individual life. Ideas become powers of life. We have the not merely a knowing about things, but rather we have made knowing into a real self-governing organism; our actual active consciousness has lifted itself above a merely passive taking up of truths.
Exactly! In a certain sense, our intellectual scale of thinking has always been about working with our conceptual gestures to become more sensitive to intuitive consonances and dissonances within the perceptual landscape. We condense the intuitive meaning we are steering through into conceptual form to anchor and refine that intuition, just as the artist condenses intuitive meaning into sculpture, pictorial, musical, etc. form. This inner sensitivity then prepares us to extend our intuitive activity into novel domains of more integrated supersensible meaning, where our knowledge of intuitive reality simultaneously becomes a creative force in reality. By intuitively knowing our more integrated astral (soul) structure, for example, our desires, passions, antipathies, etc., we also gain the basis to 'torque' the rhythms of that structure such that they 'rotate' in greater harmony with each other and the wider World flow.
"The second is the development of feeling. Nobody should train the feeling, before he has not brought the thinking free from sensuousness to a certain level. That who knows how it looks in these higher worlds tells you: if you ascend to the higher worlds, you come to the astral world and then to the spiritual or devachanic one. The impressions are completely different there than the human being can imagine who knows the physical world only. *Even if all experiences are different, one thing remains: the logic, the healthy thinking*. The human being who appropriates the healthy thinking who is a reasonable person firmly standing on his legs cannot go astray if he ascends to the worlds that offer many surprises. That who develops this self-assured thinking working from the origin of the soul has a sure leader also beyond that border where one can hardly distinguish between the physical and the supraphysical." (GA 56, V)
Thank you for stimulating my thinking! When you say "Nobody should train the feeling, before he has not brought the thinking free from sensuousness to a certain level. That who knows how it looks in these higher worlds tells you: if you ascend to the higher worlds, you come to the astral world and then to the spiritual or devachanic one. " I am reminded of the 5th meditation in GA16 where Steiner wakes us up to how it is the activity of the astral body that can awaken consciousness within the Etheric body. With emotions of love, interest, reverence and devotion our astral bodies can stimulate the formation of organs of perception in the etheric realm. This is a beautiful picture if we imagine that through our starry wisdom filled body we are able to enliven our life bodies so that they can reveal this wisdom in their structures which we can know in our thinking.
Serendipity lead me to want to read chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gita this week. In my mind it is intimately linked to your text in the context of finding a path beyond fear:
Bhagavad Gita 9.2
This knowledge is the king of sciences and the most profound of all secrets. It PURIFIES those who hear it. It is directly realizable, in accordance with dharma, easy to practice, and everlasting in effect.
Bhagavad Gita 9.16 – 9.17
It is I who am the Vedic ritual, I am the sacrifice, and I am the oblation offered to the ancestors. I am the medicinal herb, and I am the Vedic mantra. I am the clarified butter, I am the fire and the act of offering. Of this universe, I am the Father; I am also the Mother, the Sustainer, and the Grandsire. I am the PURIFIER, the goal of knowledge, the sacred syllable Om. I am the Ṛig Veda, Sāma Veda, and the Yajur Veda.
Bhagavad Gita 9.20
Those who are inclined to the fruitive activity described in the Vedas worship Me through ritualistic sacrifices. Being PURIFIED from sin by drinking the Soma juice, which is the remnant of the yajñas, they seek to go to heaven. By virtue of their pious deeds, they go to the abode of Indra, the king of heaven, and enjoy the pleasures of the celestial gods.
Wonderful essay, Ashvin—thank you for sharing. I particularly enjoyed the Tetris and 'thought-Asanas' metaphors. Very helpful.
I have two questions regarding the following passage: “The receding frames anchor that intuitive intent to count backward, focusing the latter into clearly perceptible experiences. Yet the receding frames don’t contain the intuitive meaning of ‘counting backward’. The latter continually incarnates from the ‘opposite direction’, i.e. what we commonly think of as ‘the future’ of potential experience. The receded images can only kindle our inner activity and bring it into the ideal ‘vicinity’ where it is more or less likely for new intuitive meaning to incarnate against the continually imploding perceptual frames.”
(1) When you say that the intuitive meaning of 'counting backwards' "continually incarnates from the 'opposite direction', i.e. what we commonly think of as 'the future' of potential experience", are you referring to the idea of 'final causality'? If so, is this just another way to describe the Logos nature of the world? My sense is that when we recognize anything in experience, whether its, say, a physical 'chair' in the kitchen, or the perceptual frames of 'counting backwards' in our mind, our thinking hosts an intuitive intent (i.e. a function, future potential, or possibility) that makes itself known to our attention in waking consciousness through perceptual artifacts (e.g., the look and feel of the chair, or the numbers "10, 9, 8, 7 ..." experienced within). We come to know the Logos nature of the world (or experience as a field of 'final causalities') when we trace perceptions back to their intuitive essence, which has a nature of distilled potentials, functions, and purpose.
(2) Can you elaborate on what you mean by “The receded images can only kindle our inner activity and bring it into the ideal ‘vicinity’ where it is more or less likely for new intuitive meaning to incarnate against the continually imploding perceptual frames.”? I am assuming when you say 'receded images' you're referring to perceptual frames ("10, 9, 8, 7, ...") and not intuitive intent ('counting backwards'). If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying here that perceptual frames themselves serve to point us towards the inner activity responsible for their incarnation, and it's precisely our focused engagement of intuitive intents, such as devoting our thinking to 'counting backwards', that creates the conditions for new intuitions to potentially arise. If that's correct, how have you learned to discern whether the new intuitions that appear against experience arise from the original, engaged intuitive meaning or from a different yet related intuitive intent?
Thanks for these great questions, Michael! I'm glad you found the essay helpful.
Actually I felt that part of the essay was the most rushed and unclear, so this gives me a chance to flesh it out more. The counting backward example is not great to heighten our sensitivity to the intuitive meaning (intentional gestures, inner movements, etc.) incarnating from the 'opposite side' of the receding mental pictures. In all cases, I am trying to point attention to the entirely phenomenological experience of this distinction, rather than philosophize about how the intuitive intents are final causes. On the other hand, once we grow sensitivity to this ever-present distinction within the flow of experience, I think the relation to such philosophical notions becomes clear as well. The spiritual intents that the ancients experienced more as structuring the phenomenal spectrum from 'beyond' their intimate thought life as final causes, we now experience from within, in the very intentional act of thinking.
Let's imagine writing a letter ✉️. We can write down on a sheet of paper certain ideas and even some intimate things from our feeling life. Then we put the paper in an envelope and seal it. Now we can place this ✉️ somewhere and anytime our gaze glances over it, it acts as a rich symbol that anchors our intuition of everything that we have expressed there. We should really try to feel how practically none of that inner richness can be seen by just staring at the sealed ✉️, for example if someone else were to look at it.
From this perspective, we can see how the vividness in which we imagine the ✉️, or if the image becomes quite colorful, exotic, and visionary, is mostly irrelevant. Even if we can visualize it in photorealistic vividness, we still can't see anything of what is written inside. What's inside comes from the opposite direction. For example, we may struggle with some deep question about our life. We can imagine that the answer is already in the ✉️ but it will become apparent to us only if it descends from the periphery, through us, toward the center where the image is. The answers arrive in a way similar to the way we know the ideas that are expressed in the sealed letter that we wrote.
Our whole phenomenological experience is one such ✉️. The secrets of the living Universe are concealed in it. They are written and continue to be written by all the hierarchies. We should not expect those secrets to emerge from the image of the envelop itself, but from the opposite direction. Everything we experience perceptually is but a parable for the rich inner tapestry of archetypal ideas, feelings, and moral impulses that have been, are being, and will be written.
At the same time, this doesn't mean the perceptual content is irrelevant. Not only do we need it to anchor the intuition of our inner movements, but the way in which those gestures recede as mental pictures also allows us to conduct new inner movements that wouldn't otherwise occur. Concentrating on the ✉️ is not simply an unnecessay intermediary step for rekindling the intuition, but creates a new objective 'mapping' of that intuition which allows for new kinds of intuition to incarnate against this perceptual mapping. This is also why we always need some kind of theme at the center of our concentrated imaginative meditation.
(2) yes that's exactly right. With regards to new intuitive intents, I think we can say these are always implicit in the original intent. For example, if I intend to count backward, 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 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 (thought) 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.
One exercise I do occasionally to live into this backward experience which is also happens to have ancient Egyptian heritage.
Every time you walk through a door ask yourself the following question. Why am I here? This will force you to identify the question, urge etc etc that was living in you prior to arrival at the door. It is even better if we try to walk back pictorially how we arrived at the door.
The other question is: Where is the next door I will walk through? This question stimulates the experiencer to wake up to a future desire that will awaken in him.
As with all good exercises the fruits become greater the more it is practised.
I am curious, what is the ancient Egyptian connection?
As Steiner often mentions, inner soul experiences often approach us from 'without' in the astral world. Therefore, an exercise I like to do to heighten sensitivity for that, is to survey the items in any given room, the layout and configuration, etc., and use that as an anchor for the inner desires, preferences, ideas, motivations, etc. that are reflected in this external perception. I don't analytically dissect it too much, but just get a holistic feeling for the soul constitution reflected in the room configuration.
The short answer is that there is Ankh above practically doorway / threshold at the Temple of Luxor. The novices and initiates alike when seeing this symbol were supposed to perform the exercise I described.
If you are familiar with the series "Magical Egypt" with John Anthony West you can find it described in more depth there along with the spectacular imagery.
@Don Salmon
(if I reply directly, the button to "reply" gets cut off)
Hi Don,
Thanks for the quick (!) comment.
1) The references to JP can be ignored if they distract one's thinking, the underlying ideas remain the same. I'm not trying to associate exposure therapy exclusively with JP, but the latter often speaks of it and associates it very closely with imagination and thinking, which is the most important part.
Apart from that, we can agree to disagree on his philosophy (psycho-spiritual phenomenology) and theology (closely aligned with the Christ impulse)!
2) Yes, the personality is quite malleable IF we devote our efforts to inner transformation, which is a big IF these days. And even those who pursue inner transformation often become comfortable after working on a few areas, assuming they are brand new people while certain ingrained habits of thinking, feeling, and willing still lurk beneath the surface. On the path of spiritual exposure therapy (as outlined here), we become intimately aware of how resistant our soul constitution is to such transformation. We are rarely willing to confront the depths of fear, hatred, antipathy, etc. that lives in our hearts.
Thanks for the anecdote on the psychologists' list of the "impossible". As long as attention is only fixated on receding mental pictures of intuitive intents, we are merely reacting to events around us, and our anticipation of future events is merely an extrapolation of past events. We literally cannot imagine the unsuspected degrees of freedom that exist for inner activity. That is why people are so quick to declare things impossible and never learn the lesson, even though the impossible is continually revealed as possible for those who start resonating with the domain of future potential, i.e. the deeper scales of intuitive intents.
Two reflections, one brief and one a bit longer:
(1) I am not sure why you would refer to Jordan Peterson in connection with exposure therapy, except that his name is well known? Exposure therapy is, for the most part, part of the most basic repertoire of the vast majority of the 500,000 or so counselors (including social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists) in the US. It may be a bit misleading to associate this simple, scientifically supported process with someone like Peterson who peddles so much confused, and often pseudo or anti-scientific ideas, along with confused philosophy and theology.
(2) To the best of my knowledge (as a psychologist who has conducted research) most if not all of the studies regarding stability of personality are conducted on people who have not devoted their lives to personality transformation. Since such transformation appears to rest on at least initial stages of awakening, the research seems either irrelevant or contrary to some basic facts regarding the potential malleability of human nature.
As far as the possibility of change in general, I've been amused for decades to see the ever lengthening list of what psychologists believe is impossible to achieve, regularly having to be updated by someone achieving the allegedly impossible, but never accompanied by even the least degree of lessening of psychologists' arrogance. Did any of the dream researchers who insisted lucid dreaming was impossible show even the slightest hesitation to declare other things impossible after 1981, when lucid dreaming was proven to be an empirical reality?
Not really!
To be identified with the body as ones presumed identity is to be hell-deep afraid.
Please find a very interesting perspective of the ego's fear of death via this reference.
http://beezone.com/adida/ego-fear/index-47.html
Also
http://www.consciousnessitself.org
http://www.integralworld.net/reynolds18.html The Miracle of Conscious Life
Hi again:
I don’t understand this passage:
“ mentioned above, psychedelics, Eastern meditative practices, and many similar spiritual practices still rely on this latter support, only the bodily life and corresponding perceptions may express themselves in a more ethereal and transformed way. So these cannot be said to confront and overcome this foundational phobia either. The latter is best exemplified in the philosophical, scientific, and religious lines of thinking that emerged in the wake of Kant's 'critical philosophy”
Are you familiar with TIbetan Buddhist analytic meditation? Or the Kashmiri shaivism meditation on the 36 Tattwas? Or the Vedantic meditation in the Bhagavad Gita?”
These all involve going far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in Steiner’s or Goethe’s works that they refer to as “Thinking’ and tracing all phenomena from the outermost manifestation, beyond life or prana, beyond mind and thinking, beyond infinite Intelligence (Nous, Logos, Vijnana) to the very root in the Supreme Divinity (Purushottama)
So I’m not quite sure where you got the idea that Asian meditative practices rely on the bodily life and corresponding perceptions- unless I’m misreading your comment.
Hi Don,
There is a simple test of whether our spirit is truly growing into intuitive resonance with more expansive ideal 'curvatures' of existence, asymptotically approaching the Supreme Divinity. In the essay, I used the example of growing into attunement with the voice of our close one such that we can distinguish their speech in a place with loud noise, i.e. we can resonate with their speech (and not others) because we have cultivated interest and sympathy for their first-person experiential perspective, their ideas, feelings, hopes, ambitions, goals, etc. Likewise, if our imaginative concentration is bearing fruit, we should grow into resonance with the first-person experiential perspectives that animate the 'Speech' which shapes deeper psycho-physical processes in our daily experience (individual and collective).
You seem to be pointing to something similar when you say the spiritual exercises you mention all "trace phenomena from the outermost manifestation...". Fundamentally, we are tracing these phenomena to the inner life and activity of higher-order Beings. Yet I haven't come across any MODERN (not ancient, but modern) personalities who follow only Eastern practices and who can precisely elucidate the spiritual processes at work in our biological life, for example. In the essay, I also quoted Steiner about the imaginative memory panorama that we can retrace, which otherwise only emerges after death or for those who have gone through NDEs (and even then it only emerges in a much less intuitive form, since there is no preparation beforehand). Can you refer me to any similar descriptions from those who practice the exercises you mentioned?
I would honestly be glad if you could, because I am in no way claiming that Steiner's path is the only one for reaching lucid intuitive experience of higher realities. However, from many interactions with those who pursue the modern Eastern practices, I have so far not come across any evidence of those experiences being reached.
Sri Aurobindo:
The Life Divine
Synthesis of Yoga
Letters on Yoga
MIrra Alfassa (his spiritual partner)
Questions and Answers (1950-1958)
The Agenda (13 volumes)
Vast ranges of experience never even suspected in any Anthroposophical works I’ve come across. I first came across Steiner in 1971, and have had hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations with Anthroposophists (including Arthur Zajonc, former president of the American Anthroposophical Society) and during the 5 years I was writing a book on the yogic psychology of Sri Aurobindo, looked for analogues of vast ranges of psycho-cosmology that Sri Aurobindo wrote of, and couldn’t find any in Steiner. I also spoke at length about this with Robert McDermott, who as a scholar specialized in Sri Aurobindo and later on Steiner and pretty much agreed about much of it - though of course there are details about biodynamics and education and a few other external areas that Sri Aurobindo and the Mother never addressed.
Satprem’s ’Adventure of Consciousness is pretty much the universal recommendation to start. I actually rather rarely suggest my own book as a starting point, but for the kinds of things you’re looking for, I drew many parallels in our book, “Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity.
Marco Masi is a physicist with decades of research experience. He has written what I consider by far the single best book ever written on the integration of spirituality and science, “Spirit Calls Nature.” He is an expert on Sri Aurobindo’s philosophy, and quite deftly weaves in the most up to date findings from physics, evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He was a Waldorf teacher for some years in Germany and retains a strong affinity to Goethean science, with of course much familiarity with Steiner.
So I would say if you want to investigate it:
#1. Satprem
#2. Our book on yoga psychology
#3: Marco’s book
Then with Sri Aurobindo, probably Synthesis of Yoga, Part IV (The Yoga of Self PErfection)
Then I would read short excerpts from Letters on Yoga and definitely look into the Record of Yoga. Debashish Banerji is said to have a good commentary and guidebook to the Record of Yoga, “Seven Quartets of Becoming,” though I haven’t read it yet.
That should keep you going for a few decades!!
For specific information on evolutionary biology and Sri Aurobindo’s view, a quick glance through Marco’s book should be a good place to start. We have more general information about the evolution of consciousness and biology. I was actually surprised, even though I had studied Sri Aurobindo for 25 years before I started the book, how astonishingly his broad picture of the evolution of consciousness filled in so many enormous gaps that exist throughout biology. Ulrich Mohrhoff, a resident of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram for over 50 years and an excellent physicist, has filled in enormous gaps in the understanding of order in teh universe by looking at physics in the light of Sri Aurobindo. And I would dare say between my book and “Consciousness Based Psychology” by Drs. Soumitra Basu and Michael Miovic, gaps in neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry and the whole world of psychotherapy have been filled in in a way you just won’t find anywhere else.
I have gone through some of the texts you mentioned and could immediately tell Sri Aurobindo had developed some Imaginative cognition, which allowed him to perceive the broad structure of spiritual evolution. Yet there are no indications he was able to remain spiritually active across the *threshold of death*, where we transition from being consumers of past spiritual Wisdom to participating in fashioning the intuitive curvatures along which future stages of evolution will unfold.
It's disappointing to hear about your conversations with modern Anthroposophists, because that just goes to show how little such people have absorbed the phenomenological foundations of spiritual science. I am no clairvoyant myself, but I know enough to see the ways in which modern Anthroposophy has failed to properly understand Steiner's work. It's very hard for me to work through any Anthroposophical books written over the last few decades (Zajonc isn't bad), so instead I focus mostly on Steiner's lectures and independent phenomenological investigations.
Anyway, as long as we speak in generalities, I don't think any progress can be made in such discussions. This is why I asked for a specific spiritual revelation or spiritual scientific claim of Sri Aurobindo (or anyone else) that we cannot find more fully fleshed out in Steiner. I can point to something that is conspicuously missing from Aurobindo's work, which is the deeper significance of the Christ events and the manifestation of his Impulse in our own time. Anyone who had attained to Inspired cognition would not have been able to circumvent this Central supersensible axis of spiritual evolution, which quite literally renders the rest of historical evolution comprehensible. As Owen Barfield put it,
"I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two."
He came to this knowledge through phenomenological exploration (mostly philology), independently of Steiner or any other spiritual teacher.
"In ‘Philology and the Incarnation’ — his own version of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici — Barfield explains how his own thinking on the evolution of consciousness, in particular his study of language as a record of that evolution, eventually required his acceptance of the teachings of Christianity. The raised-as-an-agnostic Barfield had no Damascus, no moment of conversion. The facts of the evolution of consciousness logically required him to become a Christian."
Only later did he encounter Steiner and realize that the spiritual scientific revelations greatly enriched, enlivened, and deepened his orientation to this Central axis of evolution. It allowed him to make it more of a living reality experienced from within, instead of simply a logical conclusion from the historical facts. To be clear, I am not speaking about exoteric Christian religion, but the esoteric reality of Christ that can only be discovered within through sense-free and body-free cognition. I find all of the profound implications that stem from this Inspired revelation to be conspicuously missing from modern Eastern teachers.
Hi Ashvin. Returning once more to this interesting and lengthy article, this time I am reminded of that mysterious and somewhat lengthy paragraph number 9 from the original preface to the PoF. I propose that it conceptualizes what you have written in a remarkably succinct manner. Of course 9 needs to be read in the context of the preceding paragraphs, most especially number 8.
If we as imaginary 2D beings begin the synthetic process of combining 2D projections we begin to shatter the restrictions of our 2D world. We enter, initially with much effort, into the reality of a 3D world and are amazed that what is now so obvious was so difficult to imagine previously. This is the fruit of experience.
Paragraph 9
https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA004/English/AP1986/GA004_appendix2.html
The realms of life are many. For each of these, particular sciences evolve. But life itself is a unity, and the more the sciences strive to deepen themselves in the individual realms, the more they distance themselves from a view of the living wholeness of the world. There must be a knowledge which seeks within the individual sciences the elements needed to lead man back again into full life. The scientific researcher in a particular field wants to acquire through his knowledge a consciousness of the world and its workings; in this book the goal is a philosophical one: the science itself is meant to become organically living. The individual sciences are preparatory stages of the science striven for here. A similar relationship holds sway in the arts. The composer works on the basis of the theory of composition. This last is a sum of knowledge whose acquirement is a necessary prerequisite for composing music. In composing, the laws of composition serve life, serve actual reality. In exactly the same sense philosophy is an art. All real philosophers were artists in concepts. For them human ideas become the artistic medium and the scientific method became the artistic technique. Abstract thinking thereby gains concrete individual life. Ideas become powers of life. We have the not merely a knowing about things, but rather we have made knowing into a real self-governing organism; our actual active consciousness has lifted itself above a merely passive taking up of truths.
Thanks for these additional thoughts, Angus.
Exactly! In a certain sense, our intellectual scale of thinking has always been about working with our conceptual gestures to become more sensitive to intuitive consonances and dissonances within the perceptual landscape. We condense the intuitive meaning we are steering through into conceptual form to anchor and refine that intuition, just as the artist condenses intuitive meaning into sculpture, pictorial, musical, etc. form. This inner sensitivity then prepares us to extend our intuitive activity into novel domains of more integrated supersensible meaning, where our knowledge of intuitive reality simultaneously becomes a creative force in reality. By intuitively knowing our more integrated astral (soul) structure, for example, our desires, passions, antipathies, etc., we also gain the basis to 'torque' the rhythms of that structure such that they 'rotate' in greater harmony with each other and the wider World flow.
"The second is the development of feeling. Nobody should train the feeling, before he has not brought the thinking free from sensuousness to a certain level. That who knows how it looks in these higher worlds tells you: if you ascend to the higher worlds, you come to the astral world and then to the spiritual or devachanic one. The impressions are completely different there than the human being can imagine who knows the physical world only. *Even if all experiences are different, one thing remains: the logic, the healthy thinking*. The human being who appropriates the healthy thinking who is a reasonable person firmly standing on his legs cannot go astray if he ascends to the worlds that offer many surprises. That who develops this self-assured thinking working from the origin of the soul has a sure leader also beyond that border where one can hardly distinguish between the physical and the supraphysical." (GA 56, V)
Thank you for stimulating my thinking! When you say "Nobody should train the feeling, before he has not brought the thinking free from sensuousness to a certain level. That who knows how it looks in these higher worlds tells you: if you ascend to the higher worlds, you come to the astral world and then to the spiritual or devachanic one. " I am reminded of the 5th meditation in GA16 where Steiner wakes us up to how it is the activity of the astral body that can awaken consciousness within the Etheric body. With emotions of love, interest, reverence and devotion our astral bodies can stimulate the formation of organs of perception in the etheric realm. This is a beautiful picture if we imagine that through our starry wisdom filled body we are able to enliven our life bodies so that they can reveal this wisdom in their structures which we can know in our thinking.
Thanks Ashvin
Serendipity lead me to want to read chapter 9 of the Bhagavad Gita this week. In my mind it is intimately linked to your text in the context of finding a path beyond fear:
Bhagavad Gita 9.2
This knowledge is the king of sciences and the most profound of all secrets. It PURIFIES those who hear it. It is directly realizable, in accordance with dharma, easy to practice, and everlasting in effect.
Bhagavad Gita 9.16 – 9.17
It is I who am the Vedic ritual, I am the sacrifice, and I am the oblation offered to the ancestors. I am the medicinal herb, and I am the Vedic mantra. I am the clarified butter, I am the fire and the act of offering. Of this universe, I am the Father; I am also the Mother, the Sustainer, and the Grandsire. I am the PURIFIER, the goal of knowledge, the sacred syllable Om. I am the Ṛig Veda, Sāma Veda, and the Yajur Veda.
Bhagavad Gita 9.20
Those who are inclined to the fruitive activity described in the Vedas worship Me through ritualistic sacrifices. Being PURIFIED from sin by drinking the Soma juice, which is the remnant of the yajñas, they seek to go to heaven. By virtue of their pious deeds, they go to the abode of Indra, the king of heaven, and enjoy the pleasures of the celestial gods.
Wonderful essay, Ashvin—thank you for sharing. I particularly enjoyed the Tetris and 'thought-Asanas' metaphors. Very helpful.
I have two questions regarding the following passage: “The receding frames anchor that intuitive intent to count backward, focusing the latter into clearly perceptible experiences. Yet the receding frames don’t contain the intuitive meaning of ‘counting backward’. The latter continually incarnates from the ‘opposite direction’, i.e. what we commonly think of as ‘the future’ of potential experience. The receded images can only kindle our inner activity and bring it into the ideal ‘vicinity’ where it is more or less likely for new intuitive meaning to incarnate against the continually imploding perceptual frames.”
(1) When you say that the intuitive meaning of 'counting backwards' "continually incarnates from the 'opposite direction', i.e. what we commonly think of as 'the future' of potential experience", are you referring to the idea of 'final causality'? If so, is this just another way to describe the Logos nature of the world? My sense is that when we recognize anything in experience, whether its, say, a physical 'chair' in the kitchen, or the perceptual frames of 'counting backwards' in our mind, our thinking hosts an intuitive intent (i.e. a function, future potential, or possibility) that makes itself known to our attention in waking consciousness through perceptual artifacts (e.g., the look and feel of the chair, or the numbers "10, 9, 8, 7 ..." experienced within). We come to know the Logos nature of the world (or experience as a field of 'final causalities') when we trace perceptions back to their intuitive essence, which has a nature of distilled potentials, functions, and purpose.
(2) Can you elaborate on what you mean by “The receded images can only kindle our inner activity and bring it into the ideal ‘vicinity’ where it is more or less likely for new intuitive meaning to incarnate against the continually imploding perceptual frames.”? I am assuming when you say 'receded images' you're referring to perceptual frames ("10, 9, 8, 7, ...") and not intuitive intent ('counting backwards'). If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying here that perceptual frames themselves serve to point us towards the inner activity responsible for their incarnation, and it's precisely our focused engagement of intuitive intents, such as devoting our thinking to 'counting backwards', that creates the conditions for new intuitions to potentially arise. If that's correct, how have you learned to discern whether the new intuitions that appear against experience arise from the original, engaged intuitive meaning or from a different yet related intuitive intent?
Thanks for these great questions, Michael! I'm glad you found the essay helpful.
Actually I felt that part of the essay was the most rushed and unclear, so this gives me a chance to flesh it out more. The counting backward example is not great to heighten our sensitivity to the intuitive meaning (intentional gestures, inner movements, etc.) incarnating from the 'opposite side' of the receding mental pictures. In all cases, I am trying to point attention to the entirely phenomenological experience of this distinction, rather than philosophize about how the intuitive intents are final causes. On the other hand, once we grow sensitivity to this ever-present distinction within the flow of experience, I think the relation to such philosophical notions becomes clear as well. The spiritual intents that the ancients experienced more as structuring the phenomenal spectrum from 'beyond' their intimate thought life as final causes, we now experience from within, in the very intentional act of thinking.
Let's imagine writing a letter ✉️. We can write down on a sheet of paper certain ideas and even some intimate things from our feeling life. Then we put the paper in an envelope and seal it. Now we can place this ✉️ somewhere and anytime our gaze glances over it, it acts as a rich symbol that anchors our intuition of everything that we have expressed there. We should really try to feel how practically none of that inner richness can be seen by just staring at the sealed ✉️, for example if someone else were to look at it.
From this perspective, we can see how the vividness in which we imagine the ✉️, or if the image becomes quite colorful, exotic, and visionary, is mostly irrelevant. Even if we can visualize it in photorealistic vividness, we still can't see anything of what is written inside. What's inside comes from the opposite direction. For example, we may struggle with some deep question about our life. We can imagine that the answer is already in the ✉️ but it will become apparent to us only if it descends from the periphery, through us, toward the center where the image is. The answers arrive in a way similar to the way we know the ideas that are expressed in the sealed letter that we wrote.
Our whole phenomenological experience is one such ✉️. The secrets of the living Universe are concealed in it. They are written and continue to be written by all the hierarchies. We should not expect those secrets to emerge from the image of the envelop itself, but from the opposite direction. Everything we experience perceptually is but a parable for the rich inner tapestry of archetypal ideas, feelings, and moral impulses that have been, are being, and will be written.
At the same time, this doesn't mean the perceptual content is irrelevant. Not only do we need it to anchor the intuition of our inner movements, but the way in which those gestures recede as mental pictures also allows us to conduct new inner movements that wouldn't otherwise occur. Concentrating on the ✉️ is not simply an unnecessay intermediary step for rekindling the intuition, but creates a new objective 'mapping' of that intuition which allows for new kinds of intuition to incarnate against this perceptual mapping. This is also why we always need some kind of theme at the center of our concentrated imaginative meditation.
(2) yes that's exactly right. With regards to new intuitive intents, I think we can say these are always implicit in the original intent. For example, if I intend to count backward, 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 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 (thought) 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.
One exercise I do occasionally to live into this backward experience which is also happens to have ancient Egyptian heritage.
Every time you walk through a door ask yourself the following question. Why am I here? This will force you to identify the question, urge etc etc that was living in you prior to arrival at the door. It is even better if we try to walk back pictorially how we arrived at the door.
The other question is: Where is the next door I will walk through? This question stimulates the experiencer to wake up to a future desire that will awaken in him.
As with all good exercises the fruits become greater the more it is practised.
That is a great exercise, thanks!
I am curious, what is the ancient Egyptian connection?
As Steiner often mentions, inner soul experiences often approach us from 'without' in the astral world. Therefore, an exercise I like to do to heighten sensitivity for that, is to survey the items in any given room, the layout and configuration, etc., and use that as an anchor for the inner desires, preferences, ideas, motivations, etc. that are reflected in this external perception. I don't analytically dissect it too much, but just get a holistic feeling for the soul constitution reflected in the room configuration.
The short answer is that there is Ankh above practically doorway / threshold at the Temple of Luxor. The novices and initiates alike when seeing this symbol were supposed to perform the exercise I described.
If you are familiar with the series "Magical Egypt" with John Anthony West you can find it described in more depth there along with the spectacular imagery.