waywithwords

Month: January 2023 (Page 1 of 2)

The Exceptional State: Wordsworth: Perceiving Immortality

January 23, 2023 /

This time I would like to approach the vista offered by the Exceptional State using the poetic imagery created by William Wordsworth, more especially “Ode to Immortality”

Wordsworth: Perceiving Immortality — Figure 1

On discovering the principle of mechanical leverage (law of lever and balance) Archimedes (287-212 BC) is reported to have said “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world”. In this simple image we can sense the enormous potential power of this simple principle. If we could find said lever and fulcrum, then the apparently impossible would be possible. The Exceptional State is a method of knowledge which leads to an experience of the self and the world and our relationship to it way beyond the current atomic paradigm. The fruits of this state are literally unimaginable for the matter bound mind. Instead it leads us safely and inexorably into a realm where many commonly held truths are seen from a different perspective.

One of the first hurdles that we have to overcome as we start on this path is a strong tendency in culture to treat the inner life as less real than that content given to us by our senses. Invariably and for understandable reasons what our eyes see, ears hear and other senses smell or feel is considered more real than fleeting inner impressions of light, sound or feeling. These experiences are all invisible to external observation and are often deemed less real. As we strengthen the inner life it dawns on us with gentle warming rays how the outer life is merely a stimulus to the inner life. This inner life finds itself based in truths beyond those of natural science and consequently lead to insights way beyond what is considered the leading edge of science. Christ told Pilate that his kingdom is not of this world (John 18:36). The Exceptional State is the healthy state whereby a person can consciously and with increasing ease move between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. We can listen to people who have had near death experiences, mystical experiences or psychedelic experiences and realize that they are giving their own testimonies of what it is like to see life from the other side of the veil. Research in the field of NDE shows that such a strong and traumatic experience invariably leads to decades of inner work as the individual tries to reconcile living in a world where most people are afraid of the very thing they know is only the beginning of a new stage of life. There are lots of interesting scientists that examine the continuation of consciousness beyond life. Pim van Lommel is one of those voice and in his book Consciousness Beyond Life (https://pimvanlommel.nl/en/consciousness-beyond-life/ > ) collates a lot interesting and convincing data points from 20+ years of systematically studying the phenomena to give an overview of this field. The book also paints a very clear picture of the way in which a brush with death, perhaps counterintuitively for many, in the vast majority of case has a hugely positive transformative effect on people’s lives. Ervin Laszlo had this to say about the book.

“We have been confusing our radio receiver with the symphony on the air. When our receiver shuts down, the symphony continues on the air, only it’s no longer manifest to our ear. Pim van Lommel shows that the symphony of human consciousness does continue and also remains accessible in the non-ordinary states of consciousness that in our culture occur most frequently at the portals of death. His evidence is robust, and can no longer be ignored either by the science community, or by society at large.”

Concerning psychedelics the field is large, extremely large and I feel under qualified to say anything of substance other than to mention the interesting work of Rick Strassman as documented in “DMT: The Spirit Molecule”. Amanita dreamer (https://www.youtube.com/@AmanitaDreamer) is also an interesting cultural phenomena with her use of the agaric mushrooms to heal her own mental problems. I am not advocating this, only recognizing its existence. One thing is clear, when you listen to the testimonies these people it is obvious that the inner life has been intensified, but also that the results can often be confusing and difficult to reconcile with living a normal life (Whatever that might be). I recently heard it described as opening the door to the spirit worlds, but not knowing what it is that you have let in. The Exceptional State properly understood means opening this door in full possession of consciousness and being able to decide whether or not to let these influences, these beings, these active forces into our being. Research into the fields of multiple personality /
dissociative disorders as well as the voluminous research into the placebo/nocebo effect are also mentioned in passing here as they also provide evidence of the non-material nature of our soul lives.

There is nothing we know that is not the product of our thinking. This spiritual activity of thinking impacts our feeling and willing life, but even these inner activities can only be known through thinking. Thus it is no exaggeration to say that thinking is the essence of our being because it is that by which we know ourselves. We experience ourselves in feeling and willing, but only know ourselves through thinking. The thoughts we produce are a revelation of our essential nature.If we can recognize this central nature of thinking in our being we can also understand that by investigating this activity of thinking we can study its behaviour, its characteristics, its field of action and by doing so we are also increasing our self-knowledge. The exceptional state is nothing other than an investigation of that which lives and creates in us every waking moment of the day.

As I sit here writing these words I hear the rain pounding on the roof and the windows. With that sound I am drawn, by my thinking, out of the chair I am sitting and for a brief period of time I am the rain pounding on the tiles. My thinking can put me anywhere I am capable of imagining and this activity of thinking can be intensified to ever greater levels so that instead of being a momentary shadowy experience it becomes an experience where I feel the roof, I feel the rain. I feel the raw power of nature and live in the wind. Of course, my body never leaves the chair, but my consciousness was not in the chair, it was free of its body limits. For a short while consciousness forgot that it is usually tied to the body, just like happens when we fall asleep. Except that I can recall the experience and know the cause of it. In reviewing this activity of my thinking using my memory I am experiencing an aspect of myself which takes me beyond myself. As I consider the richness of this line of thought I am reminded of John Donne expressing this reality in the line

“It is the mind itself that make a heaven of hell and hell of heaven”.

Thomas Traherne expressed it like this “

“You never enjoy the world aright, till the Sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars: and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more than so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.”

To the best of my knowledge Wordsworth did not live briefly on a roof on a rain swept night, but he was with his intensified soul filled thinking able to wander lonely as a cloud floating high o’er vales and hills, at once see a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. However, a liberated thinking capacity does not need to limit itself to what is knowable through the senses. Thinking, like Christ, is not of this world, though it can shed its understanding light on this world. A liberated, intensified thinking can lead us to experience our essential nature in ways not possible if it remains tethered in slave like fashion to impressions originating in the physical body. In Wordsworth’s Ode to Immortality we can feel running through this poem a locus of consciousness which clearly, at least initially, feels itself unfettered.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45536/ode-intimations-of-immortality-from-recollections-of-early-childhood >  

Wordsworth: Perceiving Immortality — Figure 2

Some literary critics may remain content with an interpretation that reduces this to an allegory or a metaphor for the loss of innocence. However, someone more familiar with the experiences to be attained through the exceptional state will sense how Wordsworth, simply by linking our birth to a state of sleep, has experienced something far more profound. He is telling us that he remembers a time when he was a being without a body. He knows that he left this state, he left this spiritual home, to sojourn in the world of the senses. Furthermore, his own personal experience was that during his infancy this state persisted for a while because in infancy he did not entirely forget his origins. He is also convinced that this is not unique to him because he speaks of our infancy, rising with us and our home.

Wordsworth: Perceiving Immortality — Figure 3

He then drops the use of we and us and replaces it with individual experience of a boy, who whilst still feeling connected is more conscious of his experience of self rather than in a universal we. As the impact of the life of the senses intensifies, so also the youth sees this inner life die away and superseded by common day experience. It is through inner work that we become capable of seeing the former glory from which we originate, yet also retaining individual consciousness. This aspect of not having to sacrifice individual consciousness is a large topic and will be left for another article.

Wordsworth: Perceiving Immortality — Figure 4

And so the poem continues like a pendulum alternating between reflections on the immensity of the inner life of the soul and the joy and the suffering to be found in this state of forgetfulness. This dual nature of reality is visible to the philosopher, the lover of wisdom and the true, but remains unseen by the blind until the eternal sleep which will again remind us of the eternal nature of the mind. Those who see truth in Wordsworth feel, like the Seer, blessed. This blessedness, as well as immense awe, is also one of the feelings that intensifies as we work more consciously on strengthening the inner life to experience in ever greater intensity the exceptional state.

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The Exceptional State – Dostoyevsky’s Double

January 23, 2023 /

 

The Exceptional State - Dostoyevsky's Double — Figure 1

As we dig deeper into the exceptional state we inevitably becoming more aware of how the content of our thinking directly impacts our experience of life. As Hegel tells us, thinking turns the soul, with which beasts too are gifted, into spirit. In TPOF we are reminded that thinking, in the conceptual life, is that which when added to perception restores a reality that was
sundered by our own organization.

Let us consider a wolf and a few of the concepts that we might connect with it (fur, speed, hunting, pack animal, vicious, dog like, Fenris, acute sense of smell, night vision, camouflage, cunning, intelligence etc etc). Unbiased thinking will recognize that all of these concepts that
describe the wolf are present in its being whether we are aware of them or not. Nature doesn’t care whether we know about the concepts that are active in her, that determine her content. However, when observing nature we complement observation with thinking we restore a unity that was only broken because of an insufficiency on our part. When we undo this sundering we feel the pleasure, a re-establishing of wholeness, that accompanies understanding something that previously was opaque and not permeated by reason.

But where does this thinking, this other half of reality come from? In the exceptional state it becomes a direct inner experience that concepts are birthed within us, we intuit them, some unknown being breathes them into us. We can show a dog a million ABC books, but it will never arrive at the concept of a letter, let alone what various arrangements of these letters are capable of achieving. The point here is that observation does not lead to concepts. Instead a concept must be intuited in us, born in our spirit through the activity of thinking. This concept is then recognized in the outside world. Our responsibility is to create a state in which these concepts can be consciously received. The concept lights up in our spiritual activity of thinking and completes what is observed with the senses

This intuition or birthing of concepts is something that becomes ever clearer to a person who practices entering the exceptional state. In this experience we catch glimpses of a being living within us which is of a purely spiritual nature. This point needs to be highlighted, we are not hypothesizing this being, but directly experience its being in our souls. I no longer merely believe in spirit because I experience it directly. In a similar way I don’t need to say I believe in tables because they are a direct experience. As this state is intensified we become less inclined to perceive ourselves as the creators of thoughts, but instead experience how a thought might live in us. We are inspired. We become less possessive of (our) thoughts. Thinking is experienced as the outflowing of a being and that being is your own I. The
exceptional state means that I observe what I previously created out of my own being. I can never observe this activity directly. Instead, it must occur within me and then using the power of will and memory this activity can also become the substrate which can become the new stimulus for thinking activity, ie deeper conceptual understanding. A deeper permeation of nature with truth and love.

It is useful to remind ourselves time and time again of the dimension that clear thinking and clear concepts add to our lives. The more personal examples we can think of the less we experience thinking as something abstract and merely theoretical and realer the experience becomes. With that in mind here is another example before proceeding to Dostoyevsky’s double. Let us imagine that we grew up around the Mediterranean and
we never learnt at school (or we imagine a time when humanity hadn’t even
conceptualized the idea) about tidal waters and never noticed that the level of
the sea regularly change by a few centimeters.

The Exceptional State - Dostoyevsky's Double — Figure 2

Life then leads us to live on the northern coast of Devon, England. Here, all of a sudden, we are confronted by a sea that behaves completely differently to everything we had previously experienced. Inevitably we are confused and astounded because here the height of the sea can vary at certain times of the year by 7-8 metres and several times a day. This lives as mystery in us for a long time and eventually we feel compelled to ask around and see if anyone can explain why the sea moves so much. We find such a person and we learn about lunar cycles, land formations and other key concepts that remove the mystery and allow us to understand why it happens and when the next high or low tide will be and its amplitude. Now imagine explaining all of that to a dog. I believe he will be as unimpressed as he was with our attempts to get him to learn his ABC. There is another fundamental difference worth pointing out here, namely that the dog doesn’t even know it doesn’t understand. The dog is blissful in its ignorance, human beings often experience this ignorance as painful or troublesome. The concepts that we birth in the inner activity of thinking not only act as a medicine against this pain, they also, concept by concept, remind us that the world is reasonable. The confidence in the potential of thinking is strengthened as we experience time and time again how life isn’t a product of random events and chance. There is order in the universe and thinking will reveal that order. This was the credo of the period of enlightenment, only later did it divorce itself from its Christian roots to become a materialistic science incapable of connecting the spirit with the material.

A disadvantage with the above example is that the reader is likely already familiar with the concepts that are described so can is forced to use the imagination. Therefore, I offer up a 2 part question and a point of departure which can, if followed some distance, lead to a picture of the solar system that goes way beyond the lifeless picture of the solar system so common in academic text books. The question is: Why is the surface of the sun hotter than its centre, which is the supposed source of the heat? What does this have to do with the end of the last ice age? Suggested point of departure https://www.youtube.com/@Suspicious0bservers. Enjoy the experience and feel the energy of rediscovering the world from an alternative vantage point, ie observing the world together with thinking. Learning about life is invigorating because the ideas that create in nature also become alive in us.

When we recognize that intuitive thinking is itself spiritual activity we can also follow the reasoning when Steiner tells us that using this spiritual activity to investigate itself will lead to a deepening of our understanding of our own spiritual essence. In this process navel gazing converts itself into a contemplation of the divine umbilical cord from which we cut ourselves when we were born. Wordsworth’s poem an Ode to Immortality receives an added dimension when viewed through this lens. In the appendix to the 1918 edition of TPOF (Steiner had suggested the English title “The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”) he writes: “A living comprehension of what is meant in this book by intuitive thinking will lead quite naturally to a living entry into the world of spiritual perception.”

What though does this have to do with Dostoyevsky’s double?

The more we enter into contact with our own spiritual nature through living in the exceptional state the more we come to experience it as a real entity, instead of as just a thought or idea as it might expressed in everyday language.. Through the intensification of the experience of thinking we understand how through our own spiritual practise we have brought about a healthy split in our being. It is healthy because it is something over which we have conscious control. Schizophrenia would be an example of an unhealthy split. Due to the exercises we have an increasingly conscious relationship to the spiritual aspect of our being. We become increasingly adept at consciously connecting with our spiritual essence whilst not losing our connection with physical reality. The soul has learned though direct experience, rather than a given teaching, that it can choose and either turn its attention to the realm of the senses and the intellect or it can turn to the realm of the spirit and start taking its first baby steps to understand this new world. In the middle stands the soul, strengthened by the exercising.

In the Double we find Dostoyevsky encountering this question of the duality of the self. This meeting with a Dopplegänger describes what according to spiritual science is a truth of our human constitution. We have a lower and a higher self. When we seek to achieve goals we are at present not capable of we are already in touch with something higher than ourselves. The more we can connect with this state the more likely we are to achieve what is lacking. Conversely, when from this higher perspective we look at what we currently are we see a less perfect, less intelligent, less…… ( choose your adjective) being.

It was a little before eight o’clock in the morning when Yakov Petrovitch Golyadkin, a titular councillor, woke up from a long sleep. He yawned, stretched, and at last opened his eyes completely. For two minutes, however, he lay in his bed without moving, as though he were not yet quite certain whether he were awake or still asleep, whether all that was going on around him were real and actual, or the continuation of his confused dreams. Very soon, however, Mr. Golyadkin’s senses began more clearly and more distinctly to receive their habitual and everyday impressions.

However, as the novel proceeds we realize that Golyadkin becomes increasingly incapable of distinguishing the real and actual with the inner life of his confused dreams. Dostyevsky’s magic consists, at least in part, in letting us live in soul of someone who experiences at a level far more intensely than the average person this split that lives in all of us. That which is and that which wants to be. Golyadkin understands that he is not well and seeks the help of Krestyan Ivanovitch Rutenspitz, Doctor of Medicine and Surgery. He is at a complete loss on how to help Golyadkin and it is no better 170 years later in your average doctor’s surgery. The best modern medicine can do is to dampen down the inner life so that the duality of the self is not experienced so strongly. The name Golyadkin (го́лый – naked, bare, unmixed, pure) could be taken to mean that in its naked state, the human being is a split being as was discussed above. This dual nature of the human being is a topic often explored in literature. What is so poignant in Dostyevsky is the starkness of its description and this is especially so for people interested in spiritual science, because according to this science we are moving towards a future where the experience of the double will become both more common and more intense for ever greater numbers of people.

Golyadkin is extreme in the sense that he experiences the truth of the dual nature of the soul in a way that many don’t. Let us again create an example of a phenomena that happens dozens or perhaps even hundreds of times a day in each and every one of us without us recognizing the dual nature of what is occurring. I am sitting on the sofa, my mind is focused on a train of thought. This inner life is interrupted by a soft scratching sound which reaches me through my ears (outer life). My inner life through the capacity of thinking adds to these sounds the picture of a door and cat’s paws and despite not being able to observe knows with 100% certainty that our cat is outside and wants to come in. 15 minutes later my ears hear a soft scratching sound. However, whilst similar it is slightly different. I listen much more attentively and my inner life tries to find an image or set of circumstances. This time the inner life is incapable of giving that 100% certainty. Even though I can’t see it I have located the origin of the noise spatially. It is coming from the hall. I get up slowly listening attentively. My thinking (inner life) begins to present more details. The hall, our dog, unusualness of sound. Before I have seen the cause (outer life) the activity of thinking (inner life) suggests that I don’t let my presence disturb what is causing the noise otherwise I might not find out that cause. I approach slowly and see our dog pawing at her rug in the hall. I have never witnessed her doing this before, but if at sometime she does this in the future my thinking (inner life) will add itself to the auditory sensation (outer life) and I will see the whole situation without actually seeing it with my eyes (outer life). These 2 simple examples are given only as concrete experiences of how the inner and the outer life are in continuous interaction, but often thinking inserts itself into our outer life without us being fully conscious of the fact that it comes from an inner life that is always active, always taking stimuli from the outside world and adding its own activity to add missing details.

The Exceptional State - Dostoyevsky's Double — Figure 3

In the picture we have in the outer world (red) which receives the inner life (blue). Through practice we come to experience that the inner activity is not caused deterministically by the outer. Instead the outer is merely a stimulus for this inner activity. The clearer we become about the separateness through direct experience the clearer becomes the duality of our character. We are soul beings, the crossover part in a lemniscate, who can direct attention to the outer world of the senses. Without the capacity to think we would never be able to say anything about this outer world. Conversely if we live exclusively in thinking we lack the sense of reality and form and appear to live in a dream. In this dream our ability to reason and act takes place entirely in an inner world of our own making, though how we make it and who we are, we have no idea. If our physical bodies were not there to wake us up, we would continually live in world of thought with little or no consciousness of self. Put in impossible (from a non-dreaming perspective) situations and left to experience them at an emotional level, ie with pain or pleasure, happiness or sadness, love or hate or frightening or inspiring.

A topic for a future article is how this duality can be confronted in a healthy way. Golyadkin was not able to find a centre that could hold the tension of these 2 polarities. Steiner, Nietzsche, Jung amongst many others pointed towards the forceful way in which the inner life can explode into outer life if it is suppressed, if it is not dealt with at a conscious level. The same is true at both a societal, group and individual level.

The Exceptional State - Dostoyevsky's Double — Figure 4

 

The Exceptional State – Walking in the forest with Dante.

January 23, 2023 /

Why is this concept so important in TPOF?

In this state the observed and the observer become one. In this state subject and
object are transcended and experienced in a living way. However, this is a
perspective that must be fought for, just like a person desiring to have a panoramic
or bird’s eye view must climb to the top of a mountain to gain this new, yet
fully justified, relationship between the self and the world, the inner and the
outer.

In natural science we study the forces that break down nature, they are the forces of entropy,
ie. that measurable physical property of disorder, randomness or uncertainty.
Yet we are also surrounded by living beings in which an opposite force lives. These
living beings create order and whilst living transcend the destructive physical
forces. They negate the universal laws of entropy for their allotted time, but
as soon as these life forces leave then the formerly living object submits to
the laws of disintegration. An oak for example manifests its order in the structure
of its leaves, bark, acorns, crown and root system. Each and every plant is
proof that life is something beyond the mere natural scientific laws.

In the exceptional state we are capable of directly experiencing an essential part of
our being that transcends itself. Initially this exceptional state is
experienced as something foreign to everyday life. It can be reasoned that thinking about thinking leads us away from life, distancing us from what is real. At a superficial level this argument is a valid description of the problematic relationship the exceptional state can appear to have with leading our lives. Some minds will judge it to be navel gazing with all the associated negative connotation. However, a more careful reading of the statement opens up at least 2 interesting
questions.

  1. Might something also be gained from leading us away from life?
  2. There is an assumption that thinking about thinking distances us from the real, but what is meant by the word real and how does it relate to thinking.

As can be intuited from these questions there is also a perspective which, far from
distancing us from life, can enrich life in a way that re-evaluates and redefines
the limits of reality in an expansive direction. This is so as all that was previously
held to be real is still real, yet in a context where it is not the only real.

It is a normal reaction to be somewhat cautious or even afraid of thinking about thinking. As already indicated arid thoughts hardly seem like an area where I might find a life enhancing transcendent state. This fear or trepidation can come from 2 general directions and one of them will be more dominant in each and every one of us.

  • People who have a rich inner life of feeling and or strong inclinations to act will often experience thinking as a weak barren soul faculty and feel a natural aversion to deepening this in the hope of finding something that transcends their current way of living. Let’s call these people Lovers of Lucy
  • People who have a strong desire for knowledge and understanding will often abhor the lack of certainty that accompanies leaving the world of the senses that has been enriched through a better understanding of it. They will feel as if the certainty and sense of order and control on which they based their lives is too valuable to warrant leaving it. Let’s call these people Adorers of Harry.

However, there are some people who “Halfway along the journey to life’s end find
themselves astray in a dark wood.”(Canto 1 1-2) At the beginning of the divine
comedy Dante similarly feels the understandable dread of Lovers of Lucy and Adorers of Harry yet also the allure of something light filled, inspiring and fear
squelching. He then encounters the leopard, angry lion and she-wolf, which he
recognizes “Just so inside my mind, which was still fleeing” (Canto 1, 25)  as aspects of himself, of his inner life, which will try to devour him before a path out of the dark forest can be found.

But when I came beneath a steep hillside –
Which rose at the far end of that long valley
That struck my stricken heart with so much dread –
I lifted up my eyes, and saw the height
Covered already in that planet’s rays
Which always guides all men and guides them right.
And then the fear I felt was somewhat less

(Canto 1, 13-18)

The Exceptional State - Walking in the forest with Dante. — Figure 1

Then suddenly, as I went slipping down,
Someone appeared before my very eyes,
Seemingly through long silence hoarse and wan.
When I caught sight of  him in that wide
waste, “Take pity on me,” I shouted out to him,
“Whatever you are, a real man or a ghost!

(Canto 1, 61-66)

Are you a real man or a ghost? These 2 terms viewed from a “common sense” perspective are
mutually exclusive. However, they don’t need to be so because as above the tricky
word here is the word real . How do we define what is real and not real?
This can only be done with thinking. We are still dancing around the concept of
the exceptional state here, but this is a useful process in creating clarity. If
we investigate further the “common sense” reasoning concerning the differences
between the real man and the ghost we realize that “real” means something that
can be seen by the common sense of sight. However, real does not need to be limited
to this feeble notion of reality. After all we would not deny gravity because we
cannot see it, nor for that matter radio waves, ultraviolet or infrared light. Again
normal reasoning would concur that whilst we cannot see these, we can infer
their existence because of their effects.

Now let us investigate this train of thought. Real things can be seen by the common sense
of sight. Somethings are real that cannot be seen, but we know they are real
because they cause something to happen that can be seen with the common sense
of sight. I.e. these real things are invisible to sight and indirectly perceptible
through their effects. Let’s stick with the electromagnetic spectrum for this example.
When we view the world without this concept, given to us in thinking, we become
incapable of explaining what the common sense of sight reveals to us (light,
the enabler of sight, itself is also a spectrum of frequencies that belong to
the entire electromagnetic spectrum). Another way of describing this would be
to say that an invisible concept given to us in the capacity to think is being
used to describe something else invisible yet that invisible something can be considered
real because it produces a visible effect. Following this line of reason if an
invisible ghost has the effect of assuaging and removing  “the pain…so terrible…. the terror coming from her sight, the loss of all hope”(Canto 1, 52-54) then why should this be
considered any less real. I am labouring this point, because anybody who considers
thinking to not be real can only do so by being completely asleep to forces in
the inner life, be they Lovers of Lucy or Adorers of Harry.

To defeat the she-wolf, the evildoer whose avid appetite is never slaked Virgil tells
Dante that:

This hound will not be fed with land or pelf,
But rather feed on wisdom, love, and valour.
He will originate in folds of felt.

(Canto 1, 103-105)

Wisdom imbued thinking, love imbued feeling and a valient willing can deliver him from the
dark forest. With the exceptional state the focus is initially on the thinking
aspect of this trinity, though as will be seen the life of feeling and will are
essential components of this path.

If we are to make thinking the object of our thinking then this cannot be done without
the active participation of the will and memory. Already here we stumble upon
facts that are deeply inconvenient for lazy people. There is nothing in outer
life that compels me to remember for example the train of thoughts that passed
through my consciousness whilst for example eating breakfast. However, it is
exactly this type of exercise that we need to perform if we are to get to know
this activity that is with us in every waking moment. Again we are presented
with a paradox here, because we are being encouraged to remember something that
is of no consequence for the rest of the world and also exert our will to do
something that seems in no way to contribute to the outer life. This all seems so
unreasonable, yet the promise of the exceptional state is that it will slowly lead
us to an experience of the inner life that is beyond the possible experiences
of the Lucys and Harrys of this world.

We need to start asking ourselves the question: What is it that is thinking in me? And then seek to experience this being and how it reveals it essential nature. Here we use
the scientific method of observing phenomena to build an increased awareness
and understanding of this being.

If we practice prayer, meditation, contemplation or concentration then we have to use
our will to hold a chosen thought, prayer or image. Also here we have a direct
experience of how something beyond me lives in me. Despite the efforts of our
will another kind of thinking seems to insert itself as a foreigner into our mental
exercises, distracting us from the chosen mental content. Through practice and
application we gradually become better at sticking with the chosen content,
though even this can fluctuate greater depending on what has happened during
the rest of the day, especially if it engaged the feeling life. This process is
similar to applying thinking to an everyday situation and allowing the
essential nature of thinking to illuminate it, improve understanding whilst not
being distracted by other thoughts presenting themselves to my consciousness in
what could be described as a weird type of attention competition. However, the exceptional
state refers specifically to submitting the process of thinking itself to the
activity of thinking to illuminate it and reveal aspects of its nature. As this
process matures we begin to sense the invisible rays of a light filled being. In
the exceptional state we can come to know the essential part of our being that
transcends itself and that is not subject to the entropy that ensues at the
time of death The spiritual science of Rudolf Steiner offers us the being of
Anthroposophia and a vision of the Etheric Christ in the astral worlds as
further stages along this path of development towards rediscovering the
universal I, the Logos in everyday experience.

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Conversations with Higher Beings – Anthroposophia

January 1, 2023 /

 

“Whence came you hither?” asked the golden king.

“Out of the clefts where gold dwells,” replied the serpent.

“What is more glorious than gold?”

“Light!”

“What is more quickening than Light?”

“Conversation!”

Goethe: The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily

Conversation can be the birthplace of something new, something invigorating, something the world is in need of to heal. This is not to deny that the same ability can give live to something that should have died, something that undermines well-being or indeed something is directly injurious to our physical and mental health.

There is a genre in literature which could be called “Conversations with Spiritual Beings”. This is a profoundly interesting phenomena which I will briefly describe from 2 perspectives. Indeed, one is tempted to call them the two extremes on a polarity. This can then lead us into the sense in which conversation can be more quickening than light, indeed how it might reveal the grandeur of the project of life, evolution and history.

The first perspective might be called a negative perspective. This vantage point sees all such conversation as delusional. I am merely inventing things in my mind which have nothing to do with the reality and the certainty of self that is given me by immersing myself in the certainties of mathematical and natural scientific thinking. Such conversations are merely the strange inexplicable experience of the firing of neurons in our grey matter and chemical reactions that accompany this electrical activity in the cave of the mind. This negative perspective is the same one that satisfies itself with the trope that a group of monkeys sat in front of a typewriter and given an infinite amount of time could produce the works of Shakespeare, if you are English, Goethe, Cervantes, Dante or Dostoevsky if you are German, Spanish, Italian or Russian respectively. This negative perspective argues that the mind itself is an illusion caught in the illusion that it is real. It is the dream of a dream. It is the reflection believing itself to be the living being it is reflecting. Conversations with God are symptomatic of a mind that has become completely unhinged. A mind that deceives itself about its true nature and then claims that this self-same interlocutor is the creator of all life. It is egotism in its most powerful and dangerous expression for the simple reason that it is resistant to any experiences based in shared experience. Those that chose this perspective will draw on all Kantian and neo-Kantian thinking, especially materialism, to deliver convincing, yet one sided, arguments as to why this negative perspective is the true perspective. And as Gandhi informs us:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts, Your thoughts become your words, Your words become your actions, Your actions become your habits, Your habits become your values, Your values become your destiny.”

The second perspective, that is not without its problems, can be called the positive perspective. The history of humanity is replete with these experiences and yet the modern mind struggles to consider them as being anything more than the product of a fertile imagination and therefore having little to do with reality. However, if we take just 3 dramatic examples from history, namely Boethius seeing and conversing with Lady Philosophy in his cell, Arjuna talking to Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita or Saul meeting Christ on the road to Damascus then these are not metaphors, but instead related to us as real events, because that is how they were experienced.

In religious traditions we find practises that assume the second perspective to be a truth for the human experience. In these practises prayer, contemplation or meditation are used to awaken and strengthen the inner life. This cultivation of the inner life can lead to the experience that something wiser, more insightful or more powerful is beginning to manifest itself in the calmness of the devotional practise. As this fertile inner life grows in strength images can present themselves, sentences can be heard. A seeker can enter this deepened state and witness the answer to a question, an explanation to a previously poorly understood phenomena or even the experience of being in communion with a being that is the source of these thought images or series of images or thought sentences or dialogues.

All of us seem to be endowed at least in germinal form with capacity to create images or words, but fewer sense the strong need to cultivate this shadowy inner life into a life full of colours, sounds and beings.

Rudolf Steiner: Riddles of Philosophy (intro to pII)

January 1, 2023 /

On Sunday we are doing a livestream with the opportunity to ask myself, Jeff or Jonathan questions about RoP or Steiner related questions.

The focus will be on chapter 10 which leads to some soul deepening questions. These could include:

  1. What do we think he means when he says: The last sixty years represent the age in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy formerly stood.
  2. What do we think the significance of these “natural scientific views” is: The significance of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one realizes for oneself the tendencies of scientific thinking according to which they were developed.
  3. How do we understand the necessary evolution he refers to: …….. [the] book has attempted to supply the foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as a necessary phase of its evolution.
  4. What are the consequences of this observation: A conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the observation of the external world that it does not show any inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences in its inner world.
  5. To what extent is the following true: The view expressed in this book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture.
  6. The most intriguing question from my perspective. How should philosophy understand itself? : What this book means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is, to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it.

Article 105: Physics - Aether Units - Part 10 - Harold Aspden & Walter ...

Walter Russell might represents the entirety of the human experience in this picture of becoming and dissolving, the eternal breathing of the universe also reflects itself in the life of thinking, feeling and willing.

Or like this

The Secret Of Light, Part 2: Ch. 16: The Life Principle, by Walter ...

How might we deepen this coming together of minds?

January 1, 2023 /

Concerning the brief comment about Russia I would encourage people to look at Terry Boardman or Adriana Koulias for an interesting perspective on the spiritual nature of the battle between the anglosphere and the central-european sphere.

http://threeman.org/?p=3040

I am not able to share the Adriana’s facebook page so have added the beginning of a very interesting article from her.

Events in the Ukraine these last months show quite clearly the lengths that the western powers will go to to control Russia and the Sixth Epoch. But as they strive to harness Russia and use it for their own aims the Jesuits strive to control the other contender for the Sixth Epoch, Brazil. The Control of the Sixth epoch is for the control of clairvoyance. The Western Brotherhoods know that the sixth epoch, the Russian epoch will begin the development of the Spirit Self. To control this ‘Spirit Self’ they must control Russia. They have already managed to spread a super materialism throughout the world, and are close to extending this materialism in the soul to the physical body as well. In this way they hope to unite the ego with the physical body by way of the consciousness soul – whose elaboration is the task of the west. The human soul would then be completely cut off from higher spiritual worlds and would be connected only to the lower spiritual worlds giving rise to an Ahrimanic clairvoyance – a school of black magic. We already have the school it is called ‘the internet’. The internet will become the source of all knowledge and if the western brotherhoods have their way, the source of all Clairvoyance. This binding of ego to the physical body will destroy the connection of the Russian people with their angels and finally their folk soul. The folk soul will then desert its people, leaving the Western Brotherhoods in control, with Ahriman as a ‘folk soul’.This is how the Western Brotherhoods wish to control the 6th epoch.Sergei O Prokofieff spoke regarding this danger and said that in a personal conversation, Rudolf Steiner communicated that,’In the event of Eastern Europe being unable to fulfil its mission in the 6th Epoch (which would in itself be a great misfortune, not only for it but for humanity as a whole) this mission would be passed on to South America and especially to Brazil.'(Sergei O Prokofieff, The Spiritual Origins of Eastern Europe and the Future Mysteries of the Holy Grail, note 125 page 509.)Why is this so?

The article “2022 The Ukraine War” in this edition of The Present Age will also be an eye opener for those who limit themselves to mainstream media

The Present Age Volume 6 / No. 9/10 May/June 2022

and the video referenced in the article

The article I referred to concerning Fichte, Steiner and the personality of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. It is a good example of how the conceptual life that we create in ourselves together with higher beings allows us to revitalize, re-enchant and re-imagine the world.

https://southerncrossreview.org/99/wood-johannine-question-2.html

Sharing a few links related to the talk this evening.

The story that John references is here on Soundcloud. There is a wealth on insight multiple issues confronting the times we live in.

Angus, I understand The Philosophy of Freedom as a gym for those whose minds are so intellectuised that entry into Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and iIts Attainment is not immediately possible. That is to say some already have that tone of soul that b can go to KoTHW immediately, but many of us require a kind of purging and softening first, that PoF can effect if sincerely and faithfully followed. I only realised this quite late – it would have saved alot of time if it was clearer earlier! What to you think?

Jonathan, you make several interesting points. TPOF is definitely the gym that I was destined to go to :). Like many others I have also put considerable efforts into KoTHW and much other anthroposophical literature without any obvious fruits until quite recently. The fruits of these esoteric efforts are now harmonizing with the fruits of digging even deeper into TPOF.

Furthermore, by being blind we have been spared the painful experience of having spiritual visions/experiences in an age almost incapable of conceptualizing them. By recognizing my blindness I am forced to confront the reality of living in a physical world. Many years ago I did a deep dive into the Near Death Experience literature and many of those people then had to spend decades processing their beautiful, but also traumatic experiences that made them feel that the world did not understand them, that they did not belong here. This was one of the interesting fruits of listening to the talk with Dawn Langman (linked above)

The Seven Life Processes & The Riddles of Philosophy

January 1, 2023 /

I have been engaging heavily with Steiner’s Riddles of Philosophy (up to chapter 9 so far) with a group called Footnotes2Plato run by Matt Seagall (Youtube). I want to try and communicate some of the transformational processes that are bubbling up inside me. It is my hope that other people will also recognize these processes inside themselves and feel the nourishing effect they can have on the soul.

The Seven Life Processes & The Riddles of Philosophy — Figure 1

The video (linked below) is warming from many aspects and here I am choosing to only focus on one aspect and then link it to the Riddles of Philosophy.

Let us call to mind an open secret of perception. We only experience things in the light of our own inner being. To make this seemingly abstract sentence more pregnant with meaning we shall focus on the sense of sight and sound and imagine that we are video cameras. Now choose any event from life and imagine being that camera that records exact impressions of the light and sound environment. The camera makes a faithful copy of reality, but it will have no emotional reaction to the content. The same camera will not be stimulated to think about the content of what it is seeing, let alone try to interpret the light and sound stimuli. Nor will it feel a desire or will like substance awaking in it that accompanies the experience of light and sound hitting its CCD sensors and microphone. The idea that words could have meaning, that thoughts are being expressed or that an individual human being is a world unto itself is completely foreign our camera. It has no conception of touch. It registers movement, but does not recognize this as being so, it just faithfully reproduces that movement. Smell, taste and temperature are non-existent to this technological wonder. The myriad of emotions that music can create in us cannot live in the camera, they live in our inner life. Let us furthermore imagine it were recording something happening in a place of worship were immaterial realities are treated as real. It is true that the camera conveys images of life yet it does this with process that are as dead as minerals and it has the consciousness of a mineral whilst doing so. The camera is without doubt a miracle of technology, but it has no inner life in the human sense. No amount of wizardry will cause it to feel the joy and wonder to be experienced when being around a baby. No amount of wizardry will cause it to feel the bliss of accomplishment after achieving a goal. No amount of wizardry will cause it to understand that it is creating content which might then go on to stimulate us human beings to entertain a seeming infinity of thoughts, feelings and impulses of will

How different this is from the human being! The camera is capable of faithfully reproducing elements of reality, just like our eyes and ears, but there is a whole inner realm that we add to these sensory stimuli. This is our soul life. As we deepen into this open secret through meditation or contemplation we come to a point where the inner life starts to become conscious of itself, experience directly how its own life is something essential and not contingent on the senses. It is a substance that exists out of its own nature. This is a momentous event in the soul life as it experiences directly, as opposed to through inductive reasoning or dogma, that it is something beyond the world of the senses. This is a second birth. The soul experiences a life that is merely stimulated by the outer world, but not created by the outer world.

The deeper we penetrate into this open secret the clearer it becomes experientially clear that I am responsible for any thinking, feeling or willing activity that associates itself with this outer world. If I remain at this level of insight I become a Max Stirner or Georg Lichtenberg capable of sublime expressions of this (apparent) freedom.

I am no antagonist of criticism, that is to say, I am
no dogmatist and feel that the teeth of the critic that tear the flesh of the
dogmatist do not touch me. If I were a dogmatist, I should place a dogma, a
thought, an idea, a principle, at the beginning, and I should begin this process
as a systematic thinker by spinning it out into a system that is a thought
structure. If, on the other hand, I were a critical thinker, that is, an
opponent of the dogmatist, then I should lead the fight of free thinking against
the enslaved thought. I should defend thinking against the result of this
activity. But I am neither the champion of thought nor of thinking

In reality, no thinking can approach what lives within
me as “I.” I can reach everything with my thinking; only my ego is an exception
in this respect. I cannot think it; I can only experience it. I am not will; I am
not idea; I am that no more than the image of a deity. I make all other things
comprehensible to myself through thinking. The ego I am. I have no need to define
and to describe myself because I experience myself in every moment.

Was Lichtenberg not right when he maintained that one really should not say, “I think,” but, “It thinks”? If, indeed, the “I think” now distinguishes itself from the body, does that force us to conclude that the process that is expressed in the words, “It thinks,” the involuntary element of our thinking, the root and the basis of the “I think,” is also distinct from the body? How is it, then, that we cannot think at all times, that the thoughts are not at our disposal whenever we choose? Why do we often fail to make headway with some intellectual work in spite of the greatest exertion of our will until some external occasion, often no more than a change in the weather, sets our thoughts afloat again? This is caused by the fact that our thought process is also an organic activity. Why must we often carry some thoughts with us for years before they become clear and distinct to us?

Indeed, once we start to think in these terms the Riddles of Philosophy reveals itself in an even more nourishing perspective. Here are a few examples that I encourage the reader to delve into. I am only skimming the surface and simplifying with this list and as such just giving possible signposts. Hegel represents a supreme example of what the soul life can experience if it deepens itself in the life of thinking. If we read Schopenhauer who is immersed in the will aspect of the soul life we experience the deeper mysteries of the will life that lives in all of us .
Fichte and Stirner helps us dig into and experience what it means to be an I, to be an ego-consciousness. Schelling, being an idealist like Hegel, is a clear manifestation of the forces of imagination that live in our souls waiting to be awakened, nourished and cultivated. There are many more such faculties of the inner life to be found in these chapters. However, there is Goethe, hovering in the background of all of these chapters. The consummate artist capable of marrying these faculties of the inner life into masterpieces. (This train of thought could be expanded on immeasurably by connecting it to the 12 Worldviews, but that is for another time)

Let us use an image from Goethe’s fairytale of the green snake and the beautiful lily to encapsulate what I have tried to communicate in the above. Goethe presents us with three kings made of gold, silver and brass and a tired and weary “mixed” fourth king with a faltering voice and an unpleasant aspect. The mixed king was also made of the metals of his brothers, but in such a way that it weakened him. The Green Snake when the “time is at hand” manages
to bring the 3 metals in the fourth king into a harmonious working and the temple is restored. The three kings are our thinking, feeling and willing life that weaken us until we start to bring them into an inner harmony and this process must be achieved consciously.

Now we are in a position to perhaps understand the 7 life processes also from a higher perspective. When we work with a book like the Riddles of Philosophy we first breathe in the content with varying degrees of comprehension. This content can then become, if we choose to let it be, something that warms us. By this I mean that it begins to influence our inner
life in a certain way. The thoughts of these philosophers go beyond just being breathed in, they start to move things, like the warmth of the sun moves the air. This warming process which sets in motion inner activity can in turn lead to an experience of the enriching effects of these philosophical perspectives. This is a nourishing process that strengthens our inner life in one direction or another, giving it vital life forces. Then in the crucible of the heart we must start the “absonderung” process. This is the process of extracting what it useful and healthy. That which does not sustain the soul forces must be expelled or excreted. That which destroys harmony in the inner life must be consciously secreted out of the body of the inner life. Once this process begins to be managed consciously the soul also becomes capable of maintaining, growing and generating in way which Stirner was incapable of conceiving of.

The Universality of Thinking

January 1, 2023 /

20220831 – Morning Meditation

The light of thinking casts the world in a different light when I turn the activity of thinking back on itself. I have been looking inside for an image that captures the spiritual essence of thinking.

1st picture: Normally we experience thinking as immediately connected with the things that enter our field of experience. We use thinking to make sense of things we see, hear, feel and want (not an exclusive list). Using the trivial example of thunder and lightning, it is thinking that reveals to us the connected nature of these 2 experiences separated in time. Thinking is that activity that knits together disparate percepts (light, sound, sentiment or volition). Prior to thinking thunder and lightning were separate experiences, in thinking we find how they form a unity. This is the essential nature of thinking. It is a universal activity that seeks to overcome separateness. The process that performs this unifying requires our input, but the actual spark that unifies always appears to us as an intuition, a type of revelation. We can battle with trying to understand something for a long time and then suddenly something clicks and we understand it. Equally strange is then trying to imagine a state prior to not knowing it. We know that the state exists, but in our example 2 minutes prior we didn’t understand that particular relationship. The inner experience, beyond any talk of brain physiology, is that suddenly we were given an insight. Imagining this artistically we might view the activity of thinking as something that lives beyond us, outside us. This activity is omniscient. It understands the interconnectedness of everything in the universe and when we let this activity unfurl in us we temporarily enter into communion with it. Continuing artistically we might choose to go beyond the word “activity” and called it an omniscient being that knows everything. This being presents on the mirror of our consciousness the relationship between thunder and lightning. We did not create this relationship, it was revealed to us. A picture for this relationship might be:

The Universality of Thinking — Figure 1

The magical nature of thinking usually escapes us because we focus on the union of Percepts and not the activity that unites. This draws all the activity of thinking towards to the world of percepts, predominantly sensory in nature.

However, it is also possible to use the activity of thinking to understand itself. If we contemplate this situation long enough we come to experience how “something thinks in us” instead of the normal “I think about something”.

In meditation, contemplation or prayer it is possible to intensify this experience so that thinking reveals to us ever deeper aspects of its essential nature. Previously my consciousness was only aware of how thinking connects diverse percepts. Consciousness was like a conduit, a pass-through-zone where 2 worlds met. However, now I begin to experience how thinking is its own activity and if I avert my gaze from sensory experience, I am now longer a pass-through-zone instead I become a mirror in which the universal activity grows and expands my own sense of what I am. The activity of thinking creates its own new revelatory content, which can then in turn be used to further deepen the relationship to this universal thinking activity. What am I? I am a receptacle capable of entering into contact with the all-knowing being of thinking. Religious people will feel comfortable using the word God here. People who have followed my train of thought will understand why people make this connection, yet they will also understand the advantages and disadvantages of using the word God. Understanding, experiencing and deepening this direct relationship to the universal activity of thinking is of key importance here.

The Universality of Thinking — Figure 2

Three magpies paid me a visit this morning.

Magpie Wallpapers - Wallpaper Cave

Earlier meditation on thinking

January 1, 2023 /

As I dive into the activity of thinking, leaving behind all the “things”, the world of “10,000 distractions” that I could think about, I find myself in a world where my being sees everything. In this activity I am that being that can live in a body, but I am not restricted to the body. I appear out in space looking around me and there I find a body that I specifically identify with and the rest of the world. Thinking is beyond object and subject, but can nevertheless live in a subject. It can live in any and every corner of the universe. It can live in any and every percept. I am this universal activity.

This universal activity seems to have a character of will. In the normal waking state its universe becomes more restricted and focuses on the impressions given by the senses. However, it is also capable of deploying its thinking activity on feelings. When we choose to go beyond merely feeling things to understanding them thinking is also there with its activity, revealing a deeper level of connectedness between the feeler (person doing the feeling) and the world. Thinking can also think about its own activity and what is written here is a fruit of this universal activity contemplating itself.

None of the above was consciously known before I wrote it, before this universal activity started thinking about itself. Yet, here it stands now as a mini-image of the divine activity that lives in us. I am inclined to think that this might be why Steiner added the biblical reference to a philosophical text, when he reminds us: “This is recognized even in the First Book of Moses. In the first six days God is represented as creating the world, and only after the world is there is it possible to contemplation it: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” The same applies to our thinking. It must first be there before we can observe it. Ch. 3

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