Hi R.Lunderg, Great questions: You point out that Steiner says:

"The way I am organized for apprehending the things has nothing to do with the nature of the things themselves. The gap between perceiving and thinking exists only from the moment that I as spectator confront the things. Which elements do, and which do not, belong to the things cannot depend at all on the manner in which I obtain my knowledge of these elements."

Do you think the following formulation still carries enough of what Steiner is saying:

The gap between what I encounter and what I think about what I encounter exists only when I encounter it.

And we can say: so the "it" that I encounter is the result of this gap; the "it" is brought about by the encounter itself. so, therefore:

what is the "it" before it becomes of the object of an encounter?

This begs us to resolve (or at least try to) the question of the spectator-"I" that does the encountering. Steiner says that so called "things" exist only in the encounter of a spectator "I".

I think we have the tendency to imagine that the thing is still around when it is not being generated by a spectator. We almost imagine a grander version of the thing being what is there when the spectator "I" is not generating the flat and thingafied thing. This is my question:

Does Steiner give us any reason to imagine that the spectator "I" is any less generated by the gap as the object of attention? Does Steiner give us any reason to imagine that on "the other side" of the gap there is some other type of "I", working behind the gap to evolve us past the gap.

At the beginning of PoF Steiner makes clear that he does not want the reader to assume the reality of the "I". He goes on to use the word "I" throughout the text, never pointing to the place in which he has derived it as anything beyond a mere convention of language (he does speak of it's nature in two places and often implicity refers to it as well). In fact, he provides the often quoted passage about the "subject" living by the grace of thinking, not visa versa. I think that we live in our daily lives in the results of the gap, so we imagine via developing this spectator "I" we will unify all these objects (out there) with all there concepts (in here).

You ask,

 I think we must experience our direct and ongoing role in creating the split, moment to moment. Until we make the Split our own, it remains an abstractions, a philosophical intrigue mentioned by our Teacher. We must individuate the split by re-cognizing it as our primary activity. Not something we did way back on Old Saturn or something we will resolve when we get to future Jupiter. Jesiaha Ben-Aharon's "The New Experience of the Supersensible" is one instance of how somebody described such a process of individuation.

My interest is in what goes on as we approach this process of reclaiming responsibility for the split. It's not pretty. It's not philosophical (although we can tidy it up later with books and charts and diagrams)...It's the knowledge-drama. What I see in myself, friends and clients, is that as we approach our moment to moment commitment to maintaining the Split, we become terrified (ashamed, angry, dissociated, manic, heroic) and we engage in some type of defense mechanism to avoid what lies beneath. We get mental. We get emotional. We react. Anything but watch the primary and ongoing gesture of Ego.

And the Work is to stay on that edge and be ok with not-knowing what to do next, only drawn increasingly into our responsiblity for the Split right now. I really appreciate how you wrote your question at the end but then let us see how you wanted it to be modified. And you can imagine how it might look after a next step. But only you can. That's why I value this site; because now and then we each share a picture of individuation, a glimpse of our dance towards responsibility. Thanks. Jeff

Hey Roger,

You say,

“The gap is only in us”

I agree with that as long as we are referring to the not-real self. I say not real because I’ve always been so grateful that Steiner blasted into PoF the comments about how disconnected things don’t actually exist. I think it’s in 5-10{26}. But this gets into my deeper problems with the way people talk about percepts as if they aren't always already concepts, as if they actually stand outside somewhere that is uncognitive waiting to be grabbed and attached to something that is not perceptible- that's another story.

You said:

“Without our consciousness freedom could not arise in this universe.”

This is where I find things get tricky. I have no problem with your statement. In fact, I probably agree. But I think that it’s so easy to imagine that your word “universe” refers to something not generated by the split in which human conscious can arise. Because of our habits of thought it is conventually assumed that freedom is something that the spectator "I" generates in its confrontation with a "unverse". PoF. to me, is the reverse: the universe is only "contacted" in our prior and always transcended state of being IT. This gets into what Steiner calls the World-All-Being.

The idea that freedom arises might be like the feeling you get in a stationary car with the one next to you moves; you suddenly feel as if your car is moving. I think that from the perspective of the separated “I” it does, indeed, seem that freedom arises and fades, or is cultivated and attained. However, our inherency as freedom, as the free activity which always trancsends the split, establishes that the only thing that ever arises and fades are the various conditions of our unfreedom.

Roger you said:

Of course, the spectator "I" is generated by the gap.

For me it's been far from obvious. Maybe intellectually and abstractly, but I resist it as an experience or reality quite strongly. In fact, I'm very aware of how deeply I wish to believe in a separitive and independent "I" that is somehow my "higher self". And when I enter into "special" states of consciousness, the spectator self wishes to claim those as part of itself. I think this is the area where anthroposphists tend to not even look at the logic Steiner is laying out; just as the sense of an object-apart is not real to him, so is the sense of a separate "I". But the sepctator "I" resists and gives us mental pictures of a "higher self" that is really just a more powerful and benevelant spectator "I".

And, finally, you said:

"Who am I?" has significance as a question just because we don't know the answer.

Here, here!!!! And I think that the not-having-an-answer is reflected quite clearly in PoF in a way that isn't very often mentioned by anthroposophists. In fact, it isn't often that you come across discussions of PoF that look at what Steiner said about not assuming the reality of an "I" yet then he often assumes the activity of an "I". I think there is a lot of future anthro work to be done in that space.

Respect back at you,

Jeff

Great question as usual Lori,

I think the key part of the passage about the parabola is where Steiner says:

The spirit described above who has no need of the detour of thinking would find itself presented not only a sequence of visual percepts at different points but, as part and parcel of these phenomena, also with the parabolic form of the path which we add to the phenomenon only by thinking.

To me, Steiner is reminding me of the inner work I have to do to really call up the concept of a parabolic path - for it is not only a perception, it is also the thinking implied in the mathematical statement that every point on the parabola obeys the formula y=x2 (anyway that's one way of expressing it).

So I think back to my halcyon days in high school... plotting out parabolas point by point until I had enough points to sketch in a reasonable attempt at the whole of the curve.  One thing that is missing in a "mere" perception is that work of inwardly connecting one thing to another (x=1, y=1 for example), then manifesting it outwardly (draw a dot on the grid paper), then inwardly connecting again (x=2, y=4), then manifesting that (another dot) and so on.  I don't think Steiner means the spirit would perceive passively in the way we are able to (as in just staring for example) but that it would have to also inwardly participate in the actual realisation of the concept parabola in a particular case. 

I connect this with the later part of this passage where Steiner says:

If our existence were so linked up with the things that every occurrence in the world were at the same time also an occurrence in us, the distinction between ourselves and the things would not exist. But then there would be no separate things at all for us. All occurrences would pass continuously one into the other. The cosmos would be a unity and a whole, complete in itself. The stream of events would nowhere be interrupted.

This sounds very much like Steiner's much later descriptions of how elemental beings, members of the spiritual hierarchies and so on participate in the being of the cosmos...  not incarnated physically in the same sense that human beings are, but nevertheless participating in the essence of things as they actually are.  And also his description of how our own experience of the cosmos and of the beings around us is completely changed between death and a new birth, and during sleep every night.

Hi Lori,

I think Jeff is referring to Chapter 2 - to quote Steiner there:

Investigation of our own being must give us the answer to the riddle. We must reach a point where we can say to ourselves, “Here we are no longer merely ‘I’, here is something which is more than ‘I’.”

And from earlier in that same chapter:

The most extreme spiritualist — or rather, the thinker who through his absolute idealism appears as extreme spiritualist — is Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He attempts to derive the whole edifice of the world from the “I”. What he has actually accomplished is a magnificent thought-picture of the world, without any content of experience. As little as it is possible for the materialist to argue the spirit away, just as little is it possible for the spiritualist to argue away the outer world of matter.

You may recall he then goes on to talk rather amusingly of Lange and Baron Munchhausen holding himself up in the air by his own pigtail.

I think Jeff and Roger's discussion is very good and the rough way I would try and describe what is being pointed at here is that we have our own limited individual "I" which has the possibility of realising itself as a free spirit... and as I conceive it there are increasingly more all-encompassing "I"s (which I relate to Steiner's descriptions of the spiritual hierarchies) right up to the All-One Being - that's relevant because that quote in PoF which Jeff has reminded us of is coming up very soon in this chapter.

As for your question at the end:

Is it that, having broken something apart and put it back together again, having caused the concept of the thing to unfold, which it never could have done without our breaking it apart with our perceiving/thinking, we start to love it?

Well that seems really profound to me, thank you very much for that!  I think I will have to reflect on what you seem to be saying there for a while.  Isn't it a truism that "we always hurt the one we love"?  You're almost saying that "we always love the one we hurt (afterwards...)?".  Now that is really paradoxical!

Hi Lori,

My reading of 3-0{2} is that Steiner wants to put on hold any assumptions as to whether or not there really is an entity that independently initiates and sustains the act of thinking about something. He says it might be true that the sense of such initiation and maitience is an illusion, but he wants to start from observing the way it appears. In a strange way, he is acknowledging that he wants to begin with the presumption of the independent self. I had thought of it before as him asking us to not make an assumption, but I see that it is more congruent with the rest of the text to see that he is making himself transparent by saying that he will start is analysis from what appears to be the case. In 3-10{28) it is an example of how Steiner will assume the reality of "I".

The end of 3-7{19} is very interesting when you hold it up against what he later says quite emphatically about how we should never say that thinking results from a subject. He wants to flip that around. I'm not sure that he sticks with that flip. As we can see in chapter 3 and the rest of the text, Steiner stays with his original presumption of an independent "I".

Everytime he talks about our experience of being responsible for the act of thinking, we might remember what he says in 3-0{2} so that we can keep in mind our own relationship to that presumption.

Jeff

Hi Gerald

Thanks for another succinct summary of what is going on at a certain level in these two sections. I've been thinking about the second section and how it's as if the whole situation is being presented in terms of philosophical Categories. Now, I don't know too much about those, even though like everybody else I use them all day long. They seem like one of those things that are so obvious they're staring you right in the face, yet you're so used to them that you can't see them.

When I looked up space and time in relation to Kant, I found space and time listed both as "forms of sensibility" and as "categories." I also found this, which was interesting because it touches on your quesion about "Buddha Mind," and also because the first sentence seems to capture the spirit of this secion of Chapter Five.

Kant and the limits of space and time.

"One's whole experience is conditioned in the sense of being limited. If one thinks of oneself as a perceiving subject, if one thinks of oneself as perceiving, an objective world, a universe, out there, then that perception would seem to take place under certain conditions or limitations. One would seem to perceive, not the thing directly, but to perceive it through veils, in accordance with the nature of the perceiving instrument.

It's generally agreed in Western philosophy, since the time of Kant, that space and time are not objective realities, but part of the apparatus of perception itself. This would certainly be the Buddhist point of view, that space and time are concepts and not entities. You don't see space and time. Space and time are part of the way in which you see things, primarily. So your mind, your individual consciousness, is of such a nature, is so structured, so constituted, that it perceives things through that particular medium. Not that the medium is separate from the perceiving mind itself, but it's part of your apparatus of perception. Space and time are built into your perceiving process. So when you think of things, you cannot but think of them in terms of space and time because you cannot but perceive them in terms of space and time. So even when you're thinking about the spiritual life, even when you are thinking about Reality itself, you cannot but envisage it either in terms of space, or in terms of time. Either by way of an analogy with space or by way of an analogy with time.

The Buddha himself seems to have done both, and oscillated between the two modes of expression. So you can have the Absolute with a capital A. You can think of this Absolute in terms of space, or you can think of it in terms of time. When you think of it in terms of space, it is static, it exists out there. It is a sort of object, even a sort of ground. And it's thinking of it in that way, envisaging it in that way, that the Buddha said;

There is, O monks, that sphere of Reality which is permanent, fixed, unchanging, where there is no earth, no water, no fire, no air. If it were not for that sphere of Reality, O monks, there would be no release from this Samsara.

The Absolute is envisaged in terms of space. It is static. It is unchanging.

But then again the Buddha also speaks in terms of conditioned co-production, of even the series of transcendental states or stages, of which there seems to be no definite end, it goes on and on. So here you have got a conception of the Absolute not as something static, not as something fixed, not as something conceived in terms of space, but as something conceived in terms of time. That is to say what I've called a process of irreversible creativity, which also corresponds to the unchanging Absolute."

This is the full text of the article, which lives at: http://centrebouddhisteparis.org/En_Anglais/Sangharakshita_en_anglais/Th...