Would you push someone off a bridge to save five others? According to researchers, your moral choice may be determined by the health of your brain's ventromedial prefrontal cortex. The constant flow of these scientific reports demonstrates how dominate the scientific mode of thinking is today. Even ethics is now considered a brain function. The Philosophy of Freedom path was developed to raise scientific thinking to the experience of moral intuition.

(WebMD) Scientists may have pinpointed the area in the brain where morality and emotions clash in dicey situations. The area is the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), report the researchers. Koenigs and colleagues studied six people who suffered VMPC damage as adults. The VMPC is involved in emotional responses and social emotions such as compassion, shame, and guilt, Koenigs' team notes. For comparison, the researchers also looked at 12 healthy adults with no brain damage and 12 adults with brain damage that didn't affect the VMPC or other emotion-related areas.

In the study, participants read fictional scenarios that presented dilemmas, such as sacrificing one person's life to save the lives of others. For example, one scenario featured a runaway boxcar careening towards a crowd. Study participants were asked if they would push one person off a bridge to save five other people from the boxcar.

Those with VMPC damage were the most likely to agree with that action and similar choices in other personal, emotional, life-and-death scenarios. They also made such decisions faster than other participants. However, these VMPC-damaged participants handled impersonal, low-stakes scenarios much like the other study participants. The researchers aren't calling the VMPC-damaged participants cold or immoral. But they say the findings support the theory that the VMPC is involved in making personal, emotional, intense moral decisions.
By Miranda Hitti,  WebMD Health News

After I produce a Video typos get pointed out. So I am posting the text for the Chapter 12 Part 2 video "Moral Imagination" now when corrections can be easily made.

Moral Intuition: the capacity to experience for yourself the particular moral principle for each single situation.

Moral Imagination: the ability to imaginatively condense a moral principle into a concrete mental picture of the action to be carried out.

Moral Technique: the ability to transform the world according to a moral imagination without violating the natural laws by which these are connected.

Ethical Norms
Some people have tried to retain the standardized character of moral laws.

They seek out moral laws already existing in the world, inherited from the past, and apply them.

As individuals we create our own moral laws. We cannot apply them until we have created them.

The content of moral laws are newly created for each situation, not inherited.

As a moral being, I am an individual and have laws entirely my own.

Traditional Moral Doctrine
Later moral ideas evolve out of earlier, but ethics cannot draw forth a single new moral idea out of earlier ones.

The ethical standard cannot start, like a law of nature, by being known,… but only by being created.

It is absurd to measure what we produce through our ‘moral imagination’ against the standard of Traditional Moral Doctrines.

Ancestral Moral Ideas
It is true that an individual’s ethical ideas have evolved out of those of their ancestors,…

but it is equally true that individuals are ethically barren if they lack moral ideas of their own.

Supernatural Influence
Absolutely new ethical ideas are developed by moral imagination.

The moral essence of an individual’s will cannot be explained by supernatural influence like divine world rule from without.

Individual morality cannot be fully explained by a particular revelation in time.

Individual morality cannot be fully explained by the appearance of God on earth (Christ).

What happens in a human being, through all this, becomes ethical only when, in experience, individuals make it their own.

Free Moral Life
What is natural in us cannot be limited to human organic urges, for spirit is found within nature.

The life of moral self-determinism is the spiritual continuation of organic life.

Whether an action is a free one, we determine by observing the action and discovering the ethical idea.

Image Of Ideal Intuition
The perfect form of human action has freedom as its characteristic quality.

Freedom must be attributed to the human will, in so far as the will brings to realization purely ideal intuitions.

Such intuitions arise not from an external necessity, but are grounded in themselves.

We feel the action to be free when we find it is the ‘reflection’ of an ideal intuition. In this characteristic feature lies its freedom.

Determine Our Motives
Whether I am able to transform my idea into reality depends on external circumstances and my technical skill.

To be free means being able to determine, by moral imagination, those mental pictures (motives) which underlie the action.

I am free only when I produce these mental pictures myself, not when all I can do is carry out motives which someone else has implanted in me.

Free beings are those who can ‘will’ what they themselves hold to be right.

Those who do anything other than what they want must be driven to do it by motives that do not lie within them. Their action is unfree.

The true freedom: to determine for ourselves the motive of our will.

Enslaved Spirit
External powers may prevent me from doing as I will, but that is only to condemn me to do nothing.

Not until they enslave my spirit, drive my motives out of my head, and replace them with their own, do they really intend to make me unfree.

This is why religious institutions attack not only my actions, but especially the ‘impure’ thoughts, that is, the motives of my action.

A church makes its followers unfree when it declares all motives impure which it has not authorized.

A church or any other community produces genuine slaves when its priests or teachers make themselves into advisers of conscience.

The followers become slaves when they depend on their leaders for the motives of their actions.

The right to call an act of will ‘free’ is established by the awareness that your ideal intuition is realizing itself in the deed.

Cascade Format

Here is part of an article from VentureBeat about a new text format designed according to the natural field of focus of the eye. It is claimed to improve reading comprehension. If true it could be very beneficial for the reading of The Philosophy of Freedom.

VentureBeat

Did you know our primitive brains weren’t wired very well to read this paragraph? Scientific research conducted by Walker Reading Technologies, a small Minnesota startup that has been studying our ability to read for the last ten years, has concluded that the natural field of focus for our eyes is circular, so our eyes view the printed page as if we’re peering through a straw. And a very bad-behaving straw at that, because not only do our eyes feed our brain the words we’re reading, they’re also uploading characters and words from the two sentences above and below the line we’re reading. Every time we read block text, we’re forcing our brain to a wage a constant subconscious battle with itself to filter and discard the superfluous inputs.

This mental tug of war slows reading speed and diminishes comprehension. When our ancestors first invented written language about 5,000 years ago, they unfortunately didn’t have armies of neuroscientists standing by to tell them block type was the wrong way to format their papyrus rolls. But fret not. Help is on the way. Walker Reading Technologies’ CEO and co-founder, Randall Walker MD, believes he and his team have developed a solution with a product called Live Ink that allows online publishers to improve reading speed and comprehension. Live Ink works by analyzing written language for meaning and language structure, and then applies algorithms that reformat the text into a series of short, cascading phrases. It breaks complex syntax into simpler syntax, which makes it easier for the brain to absorb the material.

George O'Neil wrote a work book on the Philosophy of Freedom in which he was able to articulate many things very well in regards to right reading. I don't consider his work with finding certain patterns in the book significant but he was able to study the book in a way similar to myself. I used to call the first step basic reading comprehension. To experience the special way the thoughts are organized you need to rethink the thoughts with understanding. This is achieved in the same way you would study any book, looking up words in the dictionary, maybe doing some searches on key words at the RS Archive to find references of Steiner using them, and reading slow enough to absorb the thought. It is very helpful to "boil" a paragraph down to a few words.

O'Neil calls this Mastering the Content. It is a prerequisite for the next step of Contemplative Comparison. Each thought in the book has a relationship to all the other thoughts. Contemplation of these relationships lead to deeper meaning. You can go back to a passage indefinitely and gain new insights each time.

The simplest approach is to enter into the thoughts very closely while reading with focussed concentration. And then when you start having interesting experiences of insight you will know the book has lifted you to another level of comprehension and you are likely experiencing the thought-training development. It will carry over into improved everyday thinking in your life. Regular study can develop into a passion for study as this study lifts you and becomes like a spiritual food that sustains your spiritual nature.

Master of Content
To achieve this living in thought, as distinct from building in logical thought-units and letting the personal feelings determine the pattern of words, we first must become master in the highest degree of content, utterly eliminating the arbitrariness of personal preference and emphasis. Says Goethe: To have the whole in your heart, you must have conned its every part. To which Rudolf Steiner has added: First read for substance, then read again for form.

Contemplative Comparison
In contemplating the totality of a living thought-organism, correspondences and symmetries, previously unseen, begin to emerge, each illuminating the other. Meanings come forth, never before expected, revealing interdependence and mutual support. The whole is experienced as weaving interplay of single thoughts, each reflecting the whole as experiencable from its single aspects.

These are a very worthwhile group of lectures to read.  Especially for those looking to build a larger and stronger anthroposophical movement in our world, as these lectures were given after the burning of the first Goetheanum and before the refounding of the Anthroposophical Society at Christmas 1923 and New Year 1924.  All of us truly interested in seeing Steiner's concerned gift flowing out into the larger world, should read these series of lectures.  Herein Rudolf Steiner calls for a "searching of conscience." He explains that in anthroposophical communities we can experience our first awakening to the spirit in our encounters with others, and describes how the "reversed cultus" (returning to Spirit in community) forms the foundation for a new community life.

Best regards to all,
Patri

A groundbreaking study performed by the St. Paul, Minnesota-based Institute for Cranial Research has determined that human brains are capable of generating only a finite number of thoughts before becoming "utterly expended or depleted". The ICS study is expected to have profound implications on many aspects of human endeavor that involve thinking, pondering, or cogitation. "The neural structures simply aren't designed to produce thoughts for an entire lifetime," Dr. Sulcus said.

According to Dr. Sulcus' calculations, a typical human brain is capable of "between 411,000 and 436,000 thoughts before neural degradation makes the further generation of original thoughts impossible. Thoughts of higher complexity may use the brain up faster than trivial ones. For example, thinking 'I think I'll go get a sandwich' extracts a fairly baseline price of one. An in-depth mental consideration of the origin and structure of the universe might cost the equivalent of one hundred thousand trivial thoughts."

"Luckily, what we've seen in our follow-up is that many human beings instinctively spend a very high percentage of their conscious life actively suppressing original thought," Dr. Sulcus said. "Some of the thought suppressants we've found most effective in following our rationing proposal already form much of the bases of Western culture. These include most television programs, in particular so-called reality television, most modern pop music, American political discourse, mainstream fiction, and video games. Any individual who immerses him or herself in these forms of media for an extended period will suppress virtually all original thought generation, thereby retaining nearly full brain capacity for use in later life."

•  What is "special" about the book's thoughts and thought structure?
• What is the "proper" way to study this book?
• What are the results of study or what is "sense-free" thinking?

I hope to compile material on these questions and make them a part of the site over the next year. If these questions are examined it is discovered that Steiner gave a clear freedom path with thought training that has been for the most part missed or misunderstood by his students.

Steiner's Promise Of Results
“The book is a living organism, and to work one’s way through the thoughts it contains is to undergo an inner training. A person to who this has not happened as a result of study need not conclude what I am saying is incorrect, but rather he has not read it correctly or worked hard and thoroughly enough.” -RSteiner

Stephen Hawking (1942- ), who has been paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease, is confined to a wheelchair and requires a voice synthesizer to speak. One of the world's top mathematical physicists, he has sought to link quantum mechanics and relativity, the two major theories of modern physics. He is one of the most prominent scientific minds of our time, and his handicap makes his great contributions to his field even more exceptional. Despite being unable to use pen and paper, he can develop and manipulate complex equations and theorems in his head. These are difficult equations, numbers and symbols that describe concepts like radiating black holes, gravitational collapse, and quantum cosmology.

Most physicists scribble down all their thoughts and calculations on paper, but a good deal of Stephen Hawking's thinking must go on entirely within his head . One of Hawking's colleagues, Kip Thorne (a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech ) stated that, "As Stephen gradually lost the use of his hands, he had to start developing geometrical arguments that he could do pictorially in his head. He developed a very powerful set of tools that nobody else really had." Physicists from around the world agree that the complex equations that flow from Hawking's brilliant mind are both elegant and inspired. They demand creativity of the highest order.

Was Hawking born this way? Stephen Hawking's mother, Isobel Hawking has her doubts: "He says himself, that he wouldn't have got where he was if he hadn't been ill. I don't know that he'd ever have applied himself in the same way if he'd been able to get around.” This ability to live in his head has allowed Hawking to make some of the most significant advances in theoretical physics in his generation.