It is not clear to me that the Principle of Tolerance is a real a priori condition on conversation. It just doesn't seem necessary to the concept of conversation. It seems more of an ad hoc principle, necessary only to prevent undesirable social patterns like cliquism, cultism and socialism.

A preference for cultural and social uniformity, and the abhorrence of alien groups is an instinct we see throughout human cultures and history. It seems to be rather natural. Certainly it is a pattern in education and in esotericism. The expedient thing in these institutions is to welcome those who meet a certain standard and to relegate those who do not to other circles.

But the fact remains, without tolerance the human world tends toward the extreme of inhumanity.

Hi Carl,

Thank you for your interesting journals.

Shortly about me: I was born in Soviet Union, baptized as an orthodox, my children are catholic, and my way is anthroposophy… Yesterday we were glad to celebrate the beginning of the Holy Month of Ramadan with our Muslim friends.

More about Ramadan : www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramadan

All the Best

Olga

Metaphor, metaphor on the wall, who is the fairest one of us all?

Relegation is a great big phobia among football fans in the UK. It means that your team did their best and lost. It is not good to lose. Go and play with the rubbish teams where you can win. You are supposed to win when you play football.

I have a more tolerant attitude and like to let everyone who wants to join in. When it is football I am really happy to ignore it mostly. I often learn more from a position of loss than from a position of gain or winning.

As you question the tolerance issue, Carl, so do I question if it is primary. I wonder if tolerance is not in itself what love does of itself. Is love the principle that fosters our ability to be tolerant? When I am being intolerant, I ask myself if I am loving enough.

You have promoted the word disinterest, which implies less connectedness than tolerance in my usage. I wonder if you see something like respectful tolerance alongside disinterest?

I would like to relegate disinterest because it sits so close to apathy and disconnection. Respect for the integrity of another's contribution means that I will listen while they speak. Disinterest means that I will arrogantly think of what I want to say next while they are speaking. Such a contribution is instantly lost without even being heard by a disinterested and intolerant person who is not really participating in the conversation... This does not sound like what you are demanding from us Carl. You have a specific definition that you use in a disciplined manner, but that disinterest is a loser that shoots you in the foot in my mind. It is capable of being replaced. Is there a more winning alternative?

 I was typing while Olga arrived - yes, I was not listening properly! What an eloquent contribution Olga!

Hello Olga, thanks for writing. And thanks for the reminder of Islam.

Islam has always seemed to me the best recipe for human happiness available among the worlds great traditions. It really is a magnificent cultural achievement. The principles are all basically correct: abjure lust and indecency, be generous, sacrifice the self, trust others, pray to God. There are some problems with it, but at its core it is wonderful.

John, by disinterest I mean without regard for personal loss or gain. A good scientist is a disinterested investigator. A saint is a disinterested worldly actor. A good conversationist is disinterested vis a vis the contents that bubble up from within, or that impinge from without. It's a very important attitude for the spiritual aspirant to cultivate. It represents a mastery of impulses toward sympathy and of impulses toward antipathy.

Disinterest, it seems to me, is going to be neutral on tolerance and intolerance. A disinterested person remains free to reject improper actions or incorrect judgments. Similarly, a disinterested person may find it necessary to exercise a very broad tolerance in a certain circumstance. I don't think there is a connection between the attitude of disinterest and the attitude of tolerance, although both appear necessary, albeit in two different ways, for good conversation and good society.

The necessity of disinterested conversation is logical. If one succumbs to self-interested attitudes and expressions, one becomes anti-social on one's manifestations. Both sympathy and antipathy in these manifestations are anti-social. Since conversation is pro-social, self-interest more or less short circuits conversation before it starts, and leads only to the degenerate forms we see in common culture.

The necessity of tolerant conversation is practical. Intolerance limits the scope of social and even ontological possibility. It seems connected with the notion of a closed society, wherein people not only limit the scope of their thoughts, but actually become limited in the scope of their perceptions. The anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1902-1973) describes a powerful equatorial African people, the Azande, who appear unable to perceive certain simple modus ponens relations in the world because of their commitments to cultural practices having to do with witchcraft.

The relationships between tolerance, rationality, perception, culture, individuality, collective intelligence and spiritual impulses in the mind are not very clear-cut, but there does appear to be an important set or relationships among them that we might want to try to understand.

Carl - I appreciate this reiteration of your commitment to the internal integrity and logic of your use of the word disinterest. It is churning up some essential questions in me. Be assured that I am listening carefully.

I throw in one dictionary definition of DISINTEREST: Tolerance attributable to a lack of involvement. As eurythminded as I am, I notice that the word includes 2 colours of "i" and 2 colours of "e". These reveal variants of the experienced separation of inner identity in twice "i" and differing engagement in twice "e". This is a very abbreviated comment.

It seems that the quality of involvement is what I am exploring here. I want to link to your vision of centre and periphery on the APPLES thread. Centre and periphery are inseparable in spatial experience. In the field of inquiry, whatever lives in the observer's awareness is related to the attention and interest given to the object/subject of attention. There is a paradox here that hampers us all if we are not impeccable in our self-awareness.

What lives in my awareness is firstly our relationship and secondly the awakening of the observer within the observed. In my mental picturing of the unfolding process of conscious converse the observed moves closer to the centre of attention while the the observer withdraws to the periphery. This is not congruent with my experience. I perceive that the periphery withdraws - out of perception in my case - and all activity of speaking and listening becomes a pulsating centre. It feels like being in the heart. I am not disinterested or separate from the speaker as listener as WE ARE simultaneously co-active at the centre. I am not peripheral to self as the awakening one. There are various levels of differerentiated awareness of this unbinding and alchemy of self.

It may be that at the root of the differing values invested in one word are our different experiences in converse. I would like to encourage you to share more of your personal experiences on the path to the conceptualisation of the/your principles of converse. Do you do this in your book? It is the implied lack of involvement that lives in the general useage of the word disinterest that I wish to underline for you. I experience a surrender of self to the substance of attention. I am not disinterested; I am very interested. Is this against the rules? I do not want to let you down.

Returning to centre and periphery, I challenge my perception of your view that we are at the periphery of anthroposophical activity. I may be misreading your contribution and I will study it again. For example, the Vorstand are ever more at the periphery as implicated witnesses of multiplying centres of development. They are also at the centre of controversy that we are witnessing and embodying more or less consciously. In the field of our endeavours, the concepts of centre and periphery are increasingly estranged and superimposed upon each other. Disinterested?

Well, both of these posts are very good, and I'm not sure I can come up to the standard they set. No John, it is not against the rules to be interested, deeply interested, in the content of someone else's consciousness. That interest is sine qua non for achieving something extraordinary, and I sense that you are able to express it and to explore it very well.

I think perhaps we may just be talking about words when we puzzle, on the one hand, about the attitude of disinterest and on the other about the attitude of deep, instantaneous and burgeoning interest in what or who another person in our presence actually is. Disinterest, from my point of view, just means we are not putting our self-interest ahead of anything in the relationships we express and maintain toward others. Yes, there is a sense of disinterest that means uninvolved, but that is not the sense I mean. I just mean careful not to impose self-interest, either sympathetically or otherwise, on a prior and more impressive possibility.

Tim, the passage from Steiner is likewise remarkable. If we keep to this attitude in our work together, it should be possible to acheive real clairvoyant impressions, and perhaps eventually, who knows, an extended and participatory knowledge of higher worlds. Remember that whenever we meet another person in ordinary life, we try to put him to sleep (he tries to do the same thing to us). But what is described here is a step beyond that, it seems to me. Here we have learned to perceive another dimension entirely, and I think we will have to say that this is what we want to be doing in each other's presence as an inner work in general.

Let's continue with this, because we will want this to spill over into social moments circumscribed by space and by time, when we meet as self-conscious, thinking figures and volumes supported by bones and soothed by blood.

When Steiner writes about the dissolving/quenching of a percept he is describing an aspect of the functioning of the Sense of Thought. I have to qualify my caution here by noting that at the time he wrote this Steiner had not completed his exploration of 12 senses. He was at least 2 short until circa 1914.

Now I notice in yours truly that there are existential assumptions/egregores/prejuces/masks/intruders that get between my entry into another's thinking and my perception of another's thinking. It is possible to overcome this (verified). My uncertainty - Steiner may be correct here (not verified) - is born of my experience of so much misunderstanding in face to face converse. Online converse can be discounted from Steiner's experience.

So if Steiner is correct, does he describe the ideal best possible process? Does he describe a process that is usually preconscious and that goes astray so often at a later stage?

Pardon the forwardness of my questioning but I have not thought about it enough and I need a 'bookmark' to pick up from later. If others are moved to contribute, may I beg for experiences rather than hypothetical discourse. Pretty please...

1918 Appendix John... :-\

Hi John,

These are good questions you raise - I am certainly not saying that Steiner's passage is the last word on this topic.

As an invitation to further reflection/conversation/discussion here are a few points:

When I listen to someone, don't understand them and have to question them further how does this relate to the passage from Steiner above?

When someone is explaining a difficult technical topic I may have the experience that I feel that I understand totally the topic being explained at the time but can remember almost nothing of it afterwards.

When I am not interested in someone else's conversation I may be thinking of something else and not really listening at all.

Online converse can of course be discounted from Steiner's experience as you say however I'm sure he knew what misunderstanding was from personal experience regardless of the medium!

Despite the rather intimidating nature of the above passage, if you work your way into it I think you will find that Steiner is characterising an experience (the experience of thinking along with another, as it were) rather than abstractly defining and making absurd pronouncements about it. 

Characterisations always need to be re-enlivened and supplemented by our own experience as they only form part of a living whole.  Dogma and abstract rigid theoretical frameworks just sit there and waits for a slave to come and worship them, there is certainly some benefit to be gained from working through them as it were in a mental gym but there is no real output whereas characterisations let us create our own understanding through living thinking.

The mistake we can sometimes make is to be put off by an excess of abstract language and thus believe that there is no flexibility, no human element present in what is presented.  Steiner deliberately throughout his lifetime made use of abstract conceptual frameworks but as it were leapt from one to the next quite freely, he was not imprisoned by them.  In PoF he makes us work quite hard and in this way I think the book is a prototype for his approach throughout his life.

Thank you for these contributions.

I am not intimidated by Steiner's assertions, nor by my own fallibility. Both constitute current challenges. The latter ensures that I do not conceive my self as capable of judging Steiner for accuracy, only for value. This leaves a large acreage to be explored about the nature of knowing.  I am currently groping on my hands and knees in one corner of that field.

My relationship to Steiner is as pilgrim in contact with an experienced traveller.  I cannot assume that I will find exactly similar experiences at the places that we travel through. We do not even speak and think the same language! I am grateful for the useable bridges that Steiner left us in his writings and lecturing. There is much value for me in PoF - if I could only understand it more fully.

Other commitments lead to other means of travel for me just now.

Thanks John that is well put as usual.  Apologies for the tone of the above posts, I think I was in a cranky and preachy mood this morning.  I appreciate your tolerance of my imperfect attempts at communication very much!