You explained that beautifully, and I was able to follow along without getting lost once (quite an achievement). I really appreciated your pace and real-time piecing together of thoughts and ideas here, many thanks.
Karen Swassjan: “Every material thing is nothing other than a cross on which the thought is crucified.” Worth meditating on! Even non-material percepts might apply.
Thanks Matt! So nice to have a trained philosopher weighing in on our thoughts with his own clear thinking. It adds so much value to view the same question from multiple vantage points (worldviews). Very much appreciated! Your description of Feynman saying Nature is absurd is strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer.
So happy, yesterday I listened to one of your TH-cam for the first time on the Metamorphosis of light (it was wonderful) and Now you are posting on my favourite topic, this and the threefold social organisation. Thank you.
this is greatly clarifying for me personally! I've only just started my philosophical journeying, and these thoughts have slid some important puzzle pieces into place, thanks :)
Guys it's really simple. The structure of thought is about narratives. A concept of a chair entails that the conceptualizer has a general feel for the story of chairs. The concept of my grandmother's chair entails quite a different collection of narratives, but they are all surely present when I focus on conceptualizing my grandmother's chair. The object is nihilistic if without it's narrative. The field of study which defines objects strictly as themselves will create problems, because the totality of potential narratives swirls about each attempt. When I am in an environment that I a familiar with, I am also familiar with the potential narratives of the objects within that environment. If I have a name for snakes attached to the story of the snake biting a human, then I will respond defensively or with caution when spotting any snake, unless other in-depth counter-narratives soften the prevalence of the snake-biting narrative. With the narrative structure in mind, the sense of the 'I' requires a sort of story-generation, stories of the 'I' which we feel and which we can adapt to each new moment-to-moment circumstance or frame of reference. Albeit the most common adaptation is to not adapt, but the frame of self-notion must constantly redefine itself through each moment nonetheless. The exceptional state of being must be one where the being never has severe gaps in the active adaptations of narratives surrounding oneself or about oneself. Only when that narrative space stands as empty or brutal do we even experience a state which is not exceptional. Right off the bat, this explains the popularity of novels and modern movies. Emptiness denotes the lack of the narrative structure, and terror denotes the destruction of the narrative structure. The object of life is story. And the exceptional state will be adept at stories and the creation of. Has no philosopher described this yet?
I think this resonates with Bergson’s idea of perception being memory and also the concept of duration. Check it out! I think it would be right up your alley
Is imagination thinking? It is not a stretch to think of imagination as mind reaching out. Could thinking then be mind reaching in? Is Goethe effectively doing a non-dual move, where both are conjoined to create something new?
It seems to me that these two parts were never severed, but are joined by the matrix of the Self: Do others exist? Yes and No. What is another? It is one like but apart from this one, for example Myself. So the identification of some one as 'another' begins with a self-concept. The notion 'another' is not referring directly to an essence in the 'other' but is referring to the percept (e.g. a 'third person') by analogy to oneself. Hence, a Concept may be the contextualization of a Percept with respect to one's self. E.g. I see an Apple, a Fruit, a Macintosh, a ball, a bit of food. On one level or another, these are all conceiving of the percept as 'What they can be for me'. Hence, Concept is a utility of the mind to focus only on aspects of a Percept that are relevant us. So in a sense, the essence... ...of a concept is the self- perceived relationship between us and a percept ...of a percept is the relationship between our body and mind and our senses.
I've read Barfield talk about the "residue of unresolved positivism" but I have not come across him speaking of the 'residue of unresolved clairvoyance.' That said, it is an incredibly useful term! In fact, it applies to some aspects of my concerns regarding some of the taboos around Steiner and PoF by my fellow students of PoF. Per usual, Matt is one of the best articulators of difficult concepts I've ever come across. Which can make it easy to see where you're questions for him lie. If we agree with Matt's summation of Steiner/Barfield that the more modern shift in evolution of consciousness is that we moved from a state in which truth (to some degree) came permeated in our perceptions of the world (which I would agree with) to a situation in which we 'have to create concepts rather them receive them...", shouldn't we at least see clearly that this new situation/state is grounded in unknown assumption that IT itself is making about the nature of things? If so, then we should ask ourselves if the first philosophical explications of this new situation spelled out the nature and influence of IT'S (not the previous) assumptions. I think that is very reasonable. If that is true, then there should be a fairly rigorous portion of PoF that we can say dives explicitly into the modern notions of a finished out world that is need of individual concepts to be understood. Is there? I think a little bit, there is. But I think a lot of bit, there is not. If I'm even a tiny bit correct, what are the implications in regards to really grasping Steiner's starting point? Please know that I'm starting from the assumption that PoF is a deeply serious and new articulation of the necessity for a starting point grounded in direct experience. I have a question for anybody who feels they know what they are talking about when they say that we modern people have now split concepts from percepts... Can you give me at least some example of humans from, say, 13,000 years ago who were deep into particpation but yet would have had daily experiences of the so-called 'split' between concept and percept? And then I'd like to balance these (this will help me) of your examples of situations in which a typical modern person has united a concept with a percept in a natural manner that did not require great conscious effort? Thanks!
Good questions TLS. Let's have a chat. I think reading the Upanishads you can find reference to the type of people you want to meet, just as one example. Re the second question. I seems to me (though I might have misunderstood you) that you are talking about intuition, the act of creation. What is strange about intuition is that the effort seems to have more to do with preparing oneself for the bolt of lightning that comes from inside and illuminates what was previously obscured. Having a question seems to me to be a pre-condition. This question creates a painful tension, a sense of confusion and if we dedicate conscious attention to this pain inducing hole in our understanding then the I can step to fill that hole. People who don't ask question don't consciously experience these holes, even though they are there.
Seems to me that both Steiner's own "Riddles of Philosophy," as well as Barfield's "Saving the Appearances," provide some of the background assumptions (or interpretations of history/the evolution of consciousness, which I can only assume are enhanced by clairvoyance but that can also be garnered through a kind of archeology of language as Barfield does). It would have been nice if PoF were more self-contained than it is... No doubt it can be read alone and still carry one far, but you have definitely helped me see the ways that it is not as presuppositionless as Steiner may have hoped and intended it to be. I appreciate your questions here, though it may require another video to lay out some examples. I think immediately of Jean Gebser's cultural phenomenology in "The Ever-Present Origin" wherein he discusses the "magical" structure of consciousness using an example of Paleolithic hunting rituals, which he imagines (extrapolating from anthropological studies of tribal peoples of the time) involved first performing the hunt as a ritual symbol by drawing a boar in the sand and shooting it with an arrow. The idea Gebser wants to get across is that the symbolic kill magically resonates with or is synchronistically causal of the real kill. To contemporary ways of thinking, the relationship between "concept" and "percept" exemplified here can only be described as "irrational."
@@Footnotes2Plato Gebser's work is very very helpful for me in exploring these questions. I was reading him very carefully back when my PoF road first became rather bumpy, throwing up new questions and confusions. In A Process Model, Gendlin sometimes pauses to show how new concepts that are formed from the process of concept formation itself can be very powerful when applied to empircal findings in all fields of science. In this sense, he will pause and momentarily show examples. Some of the basic concepts allow us to understand why there would have been a period of time that the hunting tools were left at the hunt, not taken into other life contexts of the peoples. And then, after the development of proper universals, tools (and everythign) becomes cross-contextual and there is an explosion of increasingly self-conscious meaning. These basic concepts also help see why there would have been a period before art was distinguished from proto-symbolic communication. These would be, often, deeply ritualistic appearing events, that our modern mind would tend to see as including an 'art' element, a 'practical' element, a 'planning', etc., But that were an intricate mesh of all of that pre-separated. Anyway, I won't say this very clearly, but it might be clear enough to get the idea rolling. The core Steiner Narrative really hasn't budged since his death. I'm always asking and looking online and calling up old buddies to get evidence that it is growing or diversifying or crumbling or...anything. But it is STURDY. From that Narrative (which I lived deeply for at least 7 years), Steiner had spontaneous clairvoyant experiences starting very young. And then, most likely shortly after his work with his first esoteric Master, Steiner self consciously chose to eliminate all sembelence of his atavistic clairvoyance. From there, he slowly and meticulously developed, step by step, an objective entry into the spiritual worlds, generating very careful ways of testing and retesting his experiences until he could be nearly certain that they were purely objective. He often spoke of his 'exact clairvoyance' and occasionally made clear that he would not speak of any research until he had tested it for up to a decade (I've heard various reports). I have no problem with the general outline. The boy Steiner saw spirits. Imagine how confusing this would be. He speaks of his deep loneliness as a child. And his joy. But how alone he was with most of his core experiences. Hence, just learning geometry was a healing experience of genuine communion. He met a master who was deeply acquainted with nature spirits. I imagine his clairvoyance took on new shapes because of this. Now, let's pause. Since my primary claim is that Steiner, like every human being, had a lens through which his experience was seen, we know this lens had to develop. And we should assume, I think, that it wasn't some perfect lens from 'birth.' No, even Steiner denies such things. So do we have reason to believe that his first master had a 'perfecte lens' that was not introducing both new aspects of objectivity and also blind-spots, warps and woofs. The distortion of a lens is not a bad thing, either morally or objectively. It is a given. You still gain incredibly important knowledge from the first telescopes, even if you later find all the ways they were distoring some aspects of the image. I didn't start looking at this presuppositions in PoF as 'gotcha's' or as any proof that Steiner wasn't brilliant or that the book couldn't still be a great first step into one's own core experiencing. But, I did begin to see that these probably weren't simply 'dressing' on his TRUE insights. That is typically the first response. But that they were, to some extent (not in a totalizing way), pictures of some of the grains of sand that were in the very earliest stages of his developing clairvoyance. I think his clairvoyance had to have developed with his changing understandings of the nature of Nature and all the other foundational subjects he was working on. There would have to be a reciprocal relationship in which they each influenced how the other began to increasingly take shape. We know this dynamic is profoundly tricky even for those of us who are simply trying to understand basic empirical phenomena with basic reasoning processes. Imagine the order of magnitude of compelxity when you introduce a new kind of 'scientific objectivfely' that necessarily relies on a process of Imagination which does come from the individual and must be, over time, seen through and not mislead by, as Steiner describes. Anyway, young Steiner should not be expected to the both the first modern person to initiate geniune spiritual science and also the epitome of perfection in cleaning up any early blind-spots being baked into the cake. I'll shut up once I say that even if I'm only 20% correct, the implication are huge in terms of question regarding the supposed coming of many spiritual scientists working together, examining each other reserach and highly amplifying what Steiner threw at as the first indications. In some lectures, Steiner felt is it was 'obvious' that by 2000 there would be groups working in this way. Whenever he is wrong about what is 'obvious' typically the fault is laid solely at the rest of humanity's feet, especially his students. At most, you will hear people say that even Steiner knew his greatest fault was that he overestimated people. Ugh. I know that is true and beautiful on some level, but it's also a hedge to keep in place some core taboos around the Steiner Narrative. He did overestimate people, this could include himself. If that is the case, he was also correct that his students will be responsible for starting to discover the ways his own self-estimation effected his findings, even if in seemingly small ways. Otherwise, everybody will be trying to apply a tool to their own development that didn't even come from the given kind of faculties that Steiner was born with! This MIGHT explain some of the stuck spots in the movement. Not all. I know, I know. Back to PoF: I think it is a massive text. Hugely significant. I think it can't be most deeply grasped if part of that grasping isn't causing a fairly intense disturbance to the fossilizing aspects of the grand narrative. That sounds so dramatic! :) No, it will have to come in small ways, in small groups of people who cherish PoF while also not simply assuming their struggles reflect their own inadequacy in understanding Steiner. It can be both. "Steiner" might need us in this way much more than in the way the book begins to take on a sacred glow of a holy text. I don't think PoF is the first text to instance early final-participation, but I do think it might be the first philosophical text to attempt to frame final participation in an explicit way, as practice even more than explication.
@@TheExceptionalState I'm with you on most of that, for sure. I sometimes fear that I place limits (or a group or culture does) on what counts as 'questions', both at the level of content and at the level of experience. In fact, I know I must do this, and I can't imagine it isn't inherent to what culture is to do this. It certainly doesn't seem like a bad thing. But, in the old consciousness soul era, it probably serves us well to become highly senstive to the fact that we will necessarily miss the way all sorts of other experiences are being had. Often we miss them simply because they use a different set of metaphors to describe them, in different contexts, with different purposes. That can be all it takes to lose sight of the same archtype moving through them. And I appreciate what you say about asking questions. The more we can see that we limit ourselves by assuming there aren't at least 12 new ways per day of asking new kinds of questions (Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic), the more quickly we will learn how to invite the hopefully coming streams of Anthroposohia out the woods, out the chains they are bound in via The Grand Steiner Narrative. Or, I'm wrong and it will be only when more people more forcibly enact that grand narrative, grasp it even more deeply that we will unchain Her. But I am very biased against that option these days. Which I need to constantly check myself for.
Symballos. Entwinement. Within the throws of. Living totem? Your clarity here gives rise to inspiration to be careful as a lay person untrained in formal philosophy while also encouraging the importance of the philosophical process for the everyman.
@@jeffbarney3584 I agree. One of the many things I love about PoF is that it gets across a very humble and democratic sense of anybody jumping in and trying to notice and then describe what their daily (and not-so-daily!) experiences are like.
Since you all will be talking about chapter 5 later today, I thought I'd share what I consider to be one of the most 'deadly' claims made in all of PoF. I think a few people might enjoy kicking this one around in their phenomenology: "The very existence of this craving for knowledge about the relation of Man to the world shows that this naive point of view must be abandoned. If the naive world view yielded anything that we could acknowledge as truth, we could never experience this craving." Even if he hadn't chosen to underline the "anything," this one has massive implications. I won't immediately poison the well by saying what this claim brings up for me, but I'd love to hear others riff on it.
Thanks for this. Of course, even if we could say a concept 'was the essence of things' or whatever, we are still not saying what it is. What is the essence of things? What is that which we say a concept Is? Whatever they are we 'know' it for in thinking it we are one with it, but we cannot actually conceive nor speak it. I take it to indicate that old chestnut. We might be God/Nature/Self/Whatever name, but we just can't corner what that is. We can say what it/we do, we can point to the products, but none of these are it. I gather Steiner to be showing that our thinking activity begins to re-knit and re-complete the incomplete world our perception brings. We are both the source of the incompleteness we experience and the activity that recomplete ( or is rather a recompleting for it seems a project that never can end since it is somehow also creative and not just reconstitutive). We are thinking and the situation which requires it. I beg more on what we as symbol, or symbolic-ing are...!
One interpretation of Genesis 2 is: God asked Lucifer to name the animals as a test of his knowledge and understanding. God had created all the animals and brought them before Lucifer and Adam, and asked them to name the animals. While Adam was able to name them all, Lucifer was unable to do so. .... Let's say Lucy wasn't very happy after that :)
"I am" is folk etymology for God's proper name, I've been told. The all-inclusive meaning of I.E.U.E, through the etymology of its root word(s) is something like this: Befaller
@@TheExceptionalState In biblical poetry, I noticed that God's proper name tends to be semantically reflected in the other half-verse with words related to: Rising or falling, dropping or picking up, creating or destroying, giving birth or killing, and maybe bestowing or consuming.
@@Yamikaiba123 Sounds interesting. Can you post a couple of examples? One of the aspects that comes from reading TPOF multiple times is that there seem to be symmetries and intensifications in the text, somewhat akin to metre in medieval poetry.
@@TheExceptionalState Befaller's my shephard, nay shall I lack. In pastures green, he makes me lay down. Beside waters still he leads me. My Life he restores He leads me in paths right for the sake of his name Yea though I walk through valley shadowed like Death Nay will I fear wrong for You are with me this rod of yours and staff of yours it is they that comfort me. You prepare before me a table In presence of my enemies You anoint with oil my head My cup overflows I know: Goodness and Mercy shall pursue me all the days of my life And will dwell in the House of Befaller to the extent of my days. Here: you can catch some of the kinds of symmetries that you're talking about here, in general. I've been learning how to sing this psalm in pre-exilic Hebrew rhythm.
Here’s Mom. I can’t compete with your philosophical advanced deep studied degrees… however you say “I Am”…. You’re all going to come back to our Lord… The trinity.
You explained that beautifully, and I was able to follow along without getting lost once (quite an achievement). I really appreciated your pace and real-time piecing together of thoughts and ideas here, many thanks.
Karen Swassjan: “Every material thing is nothing other than a cross on which the thought is crucified.” Worth meditating on! Even non-material percepts might apply.
Thanks Matt! So nice to have a trained philosopher weighing in on our thoughts with his own clear thinking. It adds so much value to view the same question from multiple vantage points (worldviews). Very much appreciated! Your description of Feynman saying Nature is absurd is strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer.
Thanks Matt!
So happy, yesterday I listened to one of your TH-cam for the first time on the Metamorphosis of light (it was wonderful) and Now you are posting on my favourite topic, this and the threefold social organisation. Thank you.
this is greatly clarifying for me personally! I've only just started my philosophical journeying, and these thoughts have slid some important puzzle pieces into place, thanks :)
Thank you for this insightful piece. This sounds to me like Latour in his An Inquiry into The Modes of Existence.
Guys it's really simple.
The structure of thought is about narratives. A concept of a chair entails that the conceptualizer has a general feel for the story of chairs. The concept of my grandmother's chair entails quite a different collection of narratives, but they are all surely present when I focus on conceptualizing my grandmother's chair. The object is nihilistic if without it's narrative. The field of study which defines objects strictly as themselves will create problems, because the totality of potential narratives swirls about each attempt. When I am in an environment that I a familiar with, I am also familiar with the potential narratives of the objects within that environment. If I have a name for snakes attached to the story of the snake biting a human, then I will respond defensively or with caution when spotting any snake, unless other in-depth counter-narratives soften the prevalence of the snake-biting narrative.
With the narrative structure in mind, the sense of the 'I' requires a sort of story-generation, stories of the 'I' which we feel and which we can adapt to each new moment-to-moment circumstance or frame of reference. Albeit the most common adaptation is to not adapt, but the frame of self-notion must constantly redefine itself through each moment nonetheless.
The exceptional state of being must be one where the being never has severe gaps in the active adaptations of narratives surrounding oneself or about oneself. Only when that narrative space stands as empty or brutal do we even experience a state which is not exceptional. Right off the bat, this explains the popularity of novels and modern movies. Emptiness denotes the lack of the narrative structure, and terror denotes the destruction of the narrative structure. The object of life is story. And the exceptional state will be adept at stories and the creation of.
Has no philosopher described this yet?
I think this resonates with Bergson’s idea of perception being memory and also the concept of duration. Check it out! I think it would be right up your alley
I am interested in what the solution or position a person committed to process ontology would take when trying to solve the Ship of Theseus paradox? 🤔
Sounds as though the eating of good and evil is moralization; the judgment of good and bad separates oneself from direct experience of life.
Is imagination thinking? It is not a stretch to think of imagination as mind reaching out. Could thinking then be mind reaching in? Is Goethe effectively doing a non-dual move, where both are conjoined to create something new?
It seems to me that these two parts were never severed, but are joined by the matrix of the Self:
Do others exist? Yes and No.
What is another? It is one like but apart from this one, for example Myself.
So the identification of some one as 'another' begins with a self-concept. The notion 'another' is not referring directly to an essence in the 'other' but is referring to the percept (e.g. a 'third person') by analogy to oneself.
Hence, a Concept may be the contextualization of a Percept with respect to one's self.
E.g. I see an Apple, a Fruit, a Macintosh, a ball, a bit of food.
On one level or another, these are all conceiving of the percept as 'What they can be for me'.
Hence, Concept is a utility of the mind to focus only on aspects of a Percept that are relevant us.
So in a sense, the essence...
...of a concept is the self- perceived relationship between us and a percept
...of a percept is the relationship between our body and mind and our senses.
I've read Barfield talk about the "residue of unresolved positivism" but I have not come across him speaking of the 'residue of unresolved clairvoyance.' That said, it is an incredibly useful term! In fact, it applies to some aspects of my concerns regarding some of the taboos around Steiner and PoF by my fellow students of PoF.
Per usual, Matt is one of the best articulators of difficult concepts I've ever come across. Which can make it easy to see where you're questions for him lie.
If we agree with Matt's summation of Steiner/Barfield that the more modern shift in evolution of consciousness is that we moved from a state in which truth (to some degree) came permeated in our perceptions of the world (which I would agree with) to a situation in which we 'have to create concepts rather them receive them...", shouldn't we at least see clearly that this new situation/state is grounded in unknown assumption that IT itself is making about the nature of things? If so, then we should ask ourselves if the first philosophical explications of this new situation spelled out the nature and influence of IT'S (not the previous) assumptions. I think that is very reasonable. If that is true, then there should be a fairly rigorous portion of PoF that we can say dives explicitly into the modern notions of a finished out world that is need of individual concepts to be understood. Is there? I think a little bit, there is. But I think a lot of bit, there is not. If I'm even a tiny bit correct, what are the implications in regards to really grasping Steiner's starting point? Please know that I'm starting from the assumption that PoF is a deeply serious and new articulation of the necessity for a starting point grounded in direct experience.
I have a question for anybody who feels they know what they are talking about when they say that we modern people have now split concepts from percepts...
Can you give me at least some example of humans from, say, 13,000 years ago who were deep into particpation but yet would have had daily experiences of the so-called 'split' between concept and percept?
And then I'd like to balance these (this will help me) of your examples of situations in which a typical modern person has united a concept with a percept in a natural manner that did not require great conscious effort?
Thanks!
Good questions TLS. Let's have a chat. I think reading the Upanishads you can find reference to the type of people you want to meet, just as one example. Re the second question. I seems to me (though I might have misunderstood you) that you are talking about intuition, the act of creation. What is strange about intuition is that the effort seems to have more to do with preparing oneself for the bolt of lightning that comes from inside and illuminates what was previously obscured. Having a question seems to me to be a pre-condition. This question creates a painful tension, a sense of confusion and if we dedicate conscious attention to this pain inducing hole in our understanding then the I can step to fill that hole. People who don't ask question don't consciously experience these holes, even though they are there.
Seems to me that both Steiner's own "Riddles of Philosophy," as well as Barfield's "Saving the Appearances," provide some of the background assumptions (or interpretations of history/the evolution of consciousness, which I can only assume are enhanced by clairvoyance but that can also be garnered through a kind of archeology of language as Barfield does). It would have been nice if PoF were more self-contained than it is... No doubt it can be read alone and still carry one far, but you have definitely helped me see the ways that it is not as presuppositionless as Steiner may have hoped and intended it to be.
I appreciate your questions here, though it may require another video to lay out some examples. I think immediately of Jean Gebser's cultural phenomenology in "The Ever-Present Origin" wherein he discusses the "magical" structure of consciousness using an example of Paleolithic hunting rituals, which he imagines (extrapolating from anthropological studies of tribal peoples of the time) involved first performing the hunt as a ritual symbol by drawing a boar in the sand and shooting it with an arrow. The idea Gebser wants to get across is that the symbolic kill magically resonates with or is synchronistically causal of the real kill. To contemporary ways of thinking, the relationship between "concept" and "percept" exemplified here can only be described as "irrational."
@@Footnotes2Plato
Gebser's work is very very helpful for me in exploring these questions. I was reading him very carefully back when my PoF road first became rather bumpy, throwing up new questions and confusions. In A Process Model, Gendlin sometimes pauses to show how new concepts that are formed from the process of concept formation itself can be very powerful when applied to empircal findings in all fields of science. In this sense, he will pause and momentarily show examples. Some of the basic concepts allow us to understand why there would have been a period of time that the hunting tools were left at the hunt, not taken into other life contexts of the peoples. And then, after the development of proper universals, tools (and everythign) becomes cross-contextual and there is an explosion of increasingly self-conscious meaning. These basic concepts also help see why there would have been a period before art was distinguished from proto-symbolic communication. These would be, often, deeply ritualistic appearing events, that our modern mind would tend to see as including an 'art' element, a 'practical' element, a 'planning', etc., But that were an intricate mesh of all of that pre-separated.
Anyway, I won't say this very clearly, but it might be clear enough to get the idea rolling. The core Steiner Narrative really hasn't budged since his death. I'm always asking and looking online and calling up old buddies to get evidence that it is growing or diversifying or crumbling or...anything. But it is STURDY.
From that Narrative (which I lived deeply for at least 7 years), Steiner had spontaneous clairvoyant experiences starting very young. And then, most likely shortly after his work with his first esoteric Master, Steiner self consciously chose to eliminate all sembelence of his atavistic clairvoyance. From there, he slowly and meticulously developed, step by step, an objective entry into the spiritual worlds, generating very careful ways of testing and retesting his experiences until he could be nearly certain that they were purely objective. He often spoke of his 'exact clairvoyance' and occasionally made clear that he would not speak of any research until he had tested it for up to a decade (I've heard various reports).
I have no problem with the general outline. The boy Steiner saw spirits. Imagine how confusing this would be. He speaks of his deep loneliness as a child. And his joy. But how alone he was with most of his core experiences. Hence, just learning geometry was a healing experience of genuine communion. He met a master who was deeply acquainted with nature spirits. I imagine his clairvoyance took on new shapes because of this. Now, let's pause. Since my primary claim is that Steiner, like every human being, had a lens through which his experience was seen, we know this lens had to develop. And we should assume, I think, that it wasn't some perfect lens from 'birth.' No, even Steiner denies such things. So do we have reason to believe that his first master had a 'perfecte lens' that was not introducing both new aspects of objectivity and also blind-spots, warps and woofs.
The distortion of a lens is not a bad thing, either morally or objectively. It is a given.
You still gain incredibly important knowledge from the first telescopes, even if you later find all the ways they were distoring some aspects of the image.
I didn't start looking at this presuppositions in PoF as 'gotcha's' or as any proof that Steiner wasn't brilliant or that the book couldn't still be a great first step into one's own core experiencing. But, I did begin to see that these probably weren't simply 'dressing' on his TRUE insights. That is typically the first response. But that they were, to some extent (not in a totalizing way), pictures of some of the grains of sand that were in the very earliest stages of his developing clairvoyance.
I think his clairvoyance had to have developed with his changing understandings of the nature of Nature and all the other foundational subjects he was working on. There would have to be a reciprocal relationship in which they each influenced how the other began to increasingly take shape. We know this dynamic is profoundly tricky even for those of us who are simply trying to understand basic empirical phenomena with basic reasoning processes. Imagine the order of magnitude of compelxity when you introduce a new kind of 'scientific objectivfely' that necessarily relies on a process of Imagination which does come from the individual and must be, over time, seen through and not mislead by, as Steiner describes.
Anyway, young Steiner should not be expected to the both the first modern person to initiate geniune spiritual science and also the epitome of perfection in cleaning up any early blind-spots being baked into the cake.
I'll shut up once I say that even if I'm only 20% correct, the implication are huge in terms of question regarding the supposed coming of many spiritual scientists working together, examining each other reserach and highly amplifying what Steiner threw at as the first indications. In some lectures, Steiner felt is it was 'obvious' that by 2000 there would be groups working in this way.
Whenever he is wrong about what is 'obvious' typically the fault is laid solely at the rest of humanity's feet, especially his students. At most, you will hear people say that even Steiner knew his greatest fault was that he overestimated people. Ugh. I know that is true and beautiful on some level, but it's also a hedge to keep in place some core taboos around the Steiner Narrative. He did overestimate people, this could include himself. If that is the case, he was also correct that his students will be responsible for starting to discover the ways his own self-estimation effected his findings, even if in seemingly small ways. Otherwise, everybody will be trying to apply a tool to their own development that didn't even come from the given kind of faculties that Steiner was born with! This MIGHT explain some of the stuck spots in the movement. Not all. I know, I know.
Back to PoF: I think it is a massive text. Hugely significant. I think it can't be most deeply grasped if part of that grasping isn't causing a fairly intense disturbance to the fossilizing aspects of the grand narrative. That sounds so dramatic! :) No, it will have to come in small ways, in small groups of people who cherish PoF while also not simply assuming their struggles reflect their own inadequacy in understanding Steiner. It can be both. "Steiner" might need us in this way much more than in the way the book begins to take on a sacred glow of a holy text.
I don't think PoF is the first text to instance early final-participation, but I do think it might be the first philosophical text to attempt to frame final participation in an explicit way, as practice even more than explication.
@@TheExceptionalState
I'm with you on most of that, for sure. I sometimes fear that I place limits (or a group or culture does) on what counts as 'questions', both at the level of content and at the level of experience. In fact, I know I must do this, and I can't imagine it isn't inherent to what culture is to do this. It certainly doesn't seem like a bad thing.
But, in the old consciousness soul era, it probably serves us well to become highly senstive to the fact that we will necessarily miss the way all sorts of other experiences are being had. Often we miss them simply because they use a different set of metaphors to describe them, in different contexts, with different purposes. That can be all it takes to lose sight of the same archtype moving through them.
And I appreciate what you say about asking questions. The more we can see that we limit ourselves by assuming there aren't at least 12 new ways per day of asking new kinds of questions (Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic), the more quickly we will learn how to invite the hopefully coming streams of Anthroposohia out the woods, out the chains they are bound in via The Grand Steiner Narrative. Or, I'm wrong and it will be only when more people more forcibly enact that grand narrative, grasp it even more deeply that we will unchain Her. But I am very biased against that option these days. Which I need to constantly check myself for.
@@SymbolsPatternsGnosis
Inexorably
Killer. Will comment more later as time and kids allow. Thank you
Symballos. Entwinement. Within the throws of. Living totem? Your clarity here gives rise to inspiration to be careful as a lay person untrained in formal philosophy while also encouraging the importance of the philosophical process for the everyman.
@@jeffbarney3584
I agree. One of the many things I love about PoF is that it gets across a very humble and democratic sense of anybody jumping in and trying to notice and then describe what their daily (and not-so-daily!) experiences are like.
What is that camera? So high quality. awesome
Since you all will be talking about chapter 5 later today, I thought I'd share what I consider to be one of the most 'deadly' claims made in all of
PoF. I think a few people might enjoy kicking this one around in their phenomenology:
"The very existence of this craving for knowledge about the relation of Man to the world
shows that this naive point of view must be abandoned. If the naive world view yielded
anything that we could acknowledge as truth, we could never experience this craving."
Even if he hadn't chosen to underline the "anything," this one has massive implications.
I won't immediately poison the well by saying what this claim brings up for me, but I'd love to hear others riff on it.
@@SymbolsPatternsGnosis
It's looking immaculate today.
Thanks for this. Of course, even if we could say a concept 'was the essence of things' or whatever, we are still not saying what it is. What is the essence of things? What is that which we say a concept Is? Whatever they are we 'know' it for in thinking it we are one with it, but we cannot actually conceive nor speak it. I take it to indicate that old chestnut. We might be God/Nature/Self/Whatever name, but we just can't corner what that is. We can say what it/we do, we can point to the products, but none of these are it. I gather Steiner to be showing that our thinking activity begins to re-knit and re-complete the incomplete world our perception brings. We are both the source of the incompleteness we experience and the activity that recomplete ( or is rather a recompleting for it seems a project that never can end since it is somehow also creative and not just reconstitutive). We are thinking and the situation which requires it. I beg more on what we as symbol, or symbolic-ing are...!
One interpretation of Genesis 2 is: God asked Lucifer to name the animals as a test of his knowledge and understanding. God had created all the animals and brought them before Lucifer and Adam, and asked them to name the animals. While Adam was able to name them all, Lucifer was unable to do so. .... Let's say Lucy wasn't very happy after that :)
"I am" is folk etymology for God's proper name, I've been told.
The all-inclusive meaning of I.E.U.E, through the etymology of its root word(s) is something like this:
Befaller
You are on to something important there. Keep digging!
@@TheExceptionalState In biblical poetry, I noticed that God's proper name tends to be semantically reflected in the other half-verse with words related to: Rising or falling, dropping or picking up, creating or destroying, giving birth or killing, and maybe bestowing or consuming.
@@Yamikaiba123 Sounds interesting. Can you post a couple of examples? One of the aspects that comes from reading TPOF multiple times is that there seem to be symmetries and intensifications in the text, somewhat akin to metre in medieval poetry.
@@TheExceptionalState Befaller's my shephard, nay shall I lack.
In pastures green, he makes me lay down.
Beside waters still he leads me.
My Life he restores
He leads me in paths right
for the sake of his name
Yea though I walk
through valley shadowed like Death
Nay will I fear wrong
for You are with me
this rod of yours and staff of yours
it is they that comfort me.
You prepare before me a table
In presence of my enemies
You anoint with oil my head
My cup overflows
I know: Goodness and Mercy shall pursue me
all the days of my life
And will dwell in the House of Befaller
to the extent of my days.
Here: you can catch some of the kinds of symmetries that you're talking about here, in general. I've been learning how to sing this psalm in pre-exilic Hebrew rhythm.
Here’s Mom. I can’t compete with your philosophical advanced deep studied degrees… however you say “I Am”….
You’re all going to come back to our Lord… The trinity.
My mom says the very same. So..... there must be something to it.
Damn talking snakes! Just can't trust em!