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 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.

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 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.

Three magpies paid me a visit this morning.

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

January 22, 2023 / Angus / 0 Comments / Edit

How might we understand the warmth of Saturn in Esoteric Science?

In this video Max helps us, without even mentioning Steiner, to understand how fire/heat/warmth is a true universal and far more than that as well. The beauty for me in this presentation is that I can find a way of understanding in an intuitive way how heat can be the source of everything that can then become air, liquid and mineral matter. Steiner’s axioms given to us as a result of spiritual science have become direct sense experiences and I am
able to view all sensory experience through this paradigm. This in turn brings me a bit closer to experiencing world history as my own history. This new description allows me at a still deeper level than before to experience how the Promethean story is also my story. This also coincides with another paradigm which I share, namely that mythology can be understood at multiple and ascending levels. These are literal, allegorical, moral and anagogical.

One of the questions that arises in my mind in watching this: Where does the inspiration
comes from that enables him to create such clarity in thinking? I mention this
because I felt the same on watching his video on the reality of thinking as
well as the science/religion series, which is a lucid description of the I vs anti-I,
centeredness vs dissolution. Whole vs nothing.

I have only scraped the surface of many beautiful descriptions of our common world re-imagined in the light of this paradigm that arise on watching this video. It reminds me of the re-enchantment (in the sense of being moved by divine sound again) of life talked about by Owen Barfield.

There are so many interesting aspects to this video. What stuck out for you?

This lecture is particularly interesting in the context of gaining a deeper insight into a spiritual scientific perspective on heat.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/19111031p01.html

“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.

Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God, as misers do in gold, and Kings in sceptres, you never enjoy the world.Till your spirit filleth the whole world, and the stars are your jewels; till you are as familiar with the ways of God in all Ages as with your walk and table: till you are intimately acquainted with that shady nothing out of which the world was made: till you love men so as to desire their happiness, with a thirst equal to the zeal of your own: till you delight in God for being good to all: you never enjoy the world.”

I couldn’t participate in the group this week, but enjoyed listening in afterwards. Several topics were touched upon, but the one that resonated most strongly in me was the participants trying to imagine and experience how the ancient Greeks felt connected with the world in an experiential way. However, as we know from other Steiner writings this must be accomplished with full I consciousness. To do otherwise would be to become re-enslaved by nature, to act out of unknown impulses and lose any possibility of freedom. It would mean to cede power, possibly to some fallen angel. I must consciously choose the harmony of the spheres to strum on the chords of my inner being and join the choir of like minded musicians.

I am drawn to the word re-enchantment to describe this superior state of re-connection. To become enchanted can be likened to the falling under the spell of a song (these are the etymological roots). Consequently some people might prefer to avoid the use of this word as it can have negative connotations. However, if I am the chooser of the song, if I am the chooser of the paradigm through which I view the whole of creation. If this choice has been made in full consciousness then I am a knowing doer to paraphrase a key concept from the philosophy of freedom/spiritual activity. Other candidates for words to describe this process might be re-magification, re-connection, re-turn. I will stick to re-enchantment for the time being and continue to emphasize that it is I who chooses the song that will make my soul sing. And with that I’ll leave it to Sade

We are going to try in this video to join some dots to understand the biography of the Being Sophia-Philosophia-Anthroposophia”. This video shall only be understood as an overview of a few salient aspects. My main reference has been Sergei Prokofieff’s “The Heavenly Being Sophia and the Being Anthroposophia”

In case I don’t get to make the point in the video strongly enough I encourage people to do their own studies on Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy. The video lecture below was of especial value in relation to depicting the historical framework of the event, the soul of Boethius as the receiver of the Being Lady Philosophy and also contrasting her with Lady Fortune. The final bit of the video with an address by Manly P Hall are words around which I believe any lover of Anthroposophia would warmly congregate.

I referenced an interview about addictions with Dawn Langman:

On the artwork from the cupola of the Goetheanum I found this video from David Hafner also very illuminating.