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.