I understand this a little differently in that I don't think we are the things we notice to the extent that we know of them.  That would imply that I am more the tree than somebody who lives far from the tree, who, perhaps, has never seen a tree.  Are we suggesting that i was less the tree when I was in my mother's womb? 

Steiner says:

Therefore I really am the things; not, however, "I" in so far as I am a percept of myself as subject, but "I" in so far as I am a part of the universal world process. The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my I. This universal world process produces equally the percept of the tree out there and the percept of my I in here.

If I am trying to understand how I am the tree and I make my starting point the "percept of subject" and the tree as this other independent entity out there, then I will be forced to somehow make the supposed unity a function of some way in which I "connect" to that tree; from that perspective we could say that my being the tree is due to my ability to think it. 

But I think it is different if we read Steiner's quote while keeping in mind the wider claim of PoF.  In so far as I think, I am the World-Process. Again, we could easily slip into the habit of interpreting this "I" as the perception/sensation of myself as an independent entity, thereby taking it to mean that I am the world process when little-"I" am thinking.  But, to me, Steiner is letting the word "thinking" take on an entirely new sense.  Everybody believes they are in charge of their thinking (even those who claim thinking is just reflex chemistry)....Steiner is showing that thinking is not something the percept of self does....thinking is the only activity that I AM.  When I am not re-cognizing myself as thinking, I am believing myself to be in the world of cut-up percepts as an independent subject ("percept of myself as subject").

As self-percepts we can think our way into identifying with the moon.  There could be countless ways, probably, for self-percepts to make sense of themselves as all that they percieve.  But when Steiner says:

but "I" in so far as I am a part of the universal world process. The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my I. This universal world process produces equally the percept of the tree out there and the percept of my I in here.

I worry that we read "a part" from the point of view that understands "parts" to be self-contained units of reality.  If we read "part" in that way, it allows us to justify reading PoF in a manner that does not challenge the presumption of the self-percept.  Without challenging (psycho-physically) the self-percept, we get to make reality a function of the self-percept using "thinking" to connect together percepts and concepts.  The truth is that reality is prior to the temporary formation of this illusion (Steiner's words) of separateness.

The moon and I are one because of what we actually are, not because we can be connected together by a self-percept. 

The moon and I are one long before we appear to become percepts that exists outside each other for an extremely brief jot of time.

The moon and I are one even after the blink of our apparent separateness.

The moon and I will never not be one; except if either one of us identify with the blip of separation and try to connect from inside the blip.

This must be abstract and/or mystical to the degree that thinking is concieved as a function of the 'percept of subject'.   Finally:

"The percept of the tree belongs to the same whole as my I."

As a 'pecept of subject ' we are almost forced to imagine this "whole" as something that exists in space and time, something that the moon and I are plugged into.  But PoF can let "whole" say something very different as well as "belong".  My memory of grandma's cookies and my hopes for a new car can be said to "belong" to the same "whole" that I am.  My ability to imitate voices and my fear of snakes do as well.  They each fade, they are all conditional and temporary expressions. Even the anger I will feel next week could be said to belong just as much to this whole.  The percept of the moon and I belong to the same whole. always have, always will. My daughter was the moon just as much as 'me', even before she took her first breath. She won't know that, of course, until she remembers who she really is. Maybe we are saying the same thing, but as usual, I'm wondering about what it means to start from identification with percepts rather than the intuitive occurence.  The idea of "connect" takes on reverse meanings depending on your starting point, I think. 

Jeff

This is dangerously addictive ground - I know as much from long travels through it. I am still disorientated here.

Firstly, who says I to the universal world process, or to the moon?

If I could I would. There would be no more discussion because I would know who I am. When I say I, I know I am a lot larger than the sum of my experiences. Much of IAM is pretty cloudy and the edges are far far away, mixed up with you in so many interesting ways...

The conundrum of knowing  - picked over at my journal a couple of weeks ago - has led me to adopt the position that if I cannot experience it I have only thought it. Therefore if my hand is not hurting I am only thinking of pouring boiling water on it. Even if I think my hand hurts I notice that I still have 2 that don't. So if I do not experience that I am the moon, I am only thinking it. The initiatory step would be to wake up as moon and stars and the universal process... I think...

My way in anthroposophy is a little bit strange ( may be it is normal, I don’t know) – first I have some experience or thoughts (without suggestions before), and after that answers begin to come, sometimes for many months – mainly through the Steiner’s books or bible or some life’s events or people. I know what is meaning that I’m tree or something else.  I experienced it many times. As Jeff wrote it is from the unity. But first I feel the unity (in my opinion unity cannot be illusion - you are unite with something or not, you feel it, you know that) and next I try to understand. I look at  the tree and all plants, grass and I see in them myself, I feel that I am this tree, plants, grass…. It is so difficult to explain. I don’t feel like that all the time, but in the special state of inner harmony, while touching “I AM”. I think that first important step is the sincere admiring world around what is open us and make our I AM wider and wider until….moon or farther (?) It is a mystery.

For a few years I experience the same with the people, usually (but not always) after talking ( special kind of conversation, probably, a goeteanistic). It comes to me first and after I try to understand, but in deeper me probably I know what it can be. I see the person’s face in front of me (in imagination) and I see in it myself and  at the same time I feel that I am that person. It looks like exchange. Is it connecting with the taking karma from another people? Perhaps, I don’t know.

What do you think about it? Does anybody experience the same?

Tim says:

So in what sense am I really the moon?  Precisely in this sense, that to know the moon at all I must connect percepts to concepts in thinking.  This activity is not merely subjective but is a part of the universal world process.  The moon does not exist apart from thinking, thinking is an activity of my I, therefore I am the moon precisely to the extent that I know the moon.

Chapter 6 is building on Chapter 5, and this part is particularly important I think:

p69 MW I am enclosed within the sphere which I perceive as that of my personailty, but I am also the bearer of an activity which, from a higher sphere, defines my limited existence. Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling; it is universal. It receives an individual stamp in each separate human being only because it comes to be related to his individual feelings and sensations. By means of these particular colourings of the universal thinking, individual men differentiate themselves from one another. There is only one single concept of "triangle". It is quite immaterial for the content of this concept whether it is grapsed in "'s consciousness or in "B's. It will however be grasped by each of the two in his own individual way.

My sense is that you do not connect percepts to concepts in thinking.  Rather, percepts and concepts are connected in thinking.  The connection is not an act of your will,, but rather, one could say, it is an act of the will of the object.  That connecting is possible because we are connected to the universal and that is accessible to us through our I.  The sense of separateness is only within us.

I agree with Jeff that Steiner is drawing our attention to the nature of thinking and challenging us to know it more deeply.  The universality of thinking allows communication. That things have meaning that is communicable is due to the universality of thinking.  At the mundane day to day level this is so ordinary that we take it completely for granted. I experience Steiner asking me to see something that I think of as ordinary with new eyes, eyes that discover something quite extraordinary.

The consequences of there being only one concept of a triangle take us all the way to the moon.  Through thinking it is possible to penetrate the moon, to experience being the moon, just as Olga describes, and experience it from within.  We thus become a flash of self-consciousness of the universal whole.

S-)

Both of your posts are tremendously helpful to my own tail-chasing Sebastian. I struggle to come so cleanly to expression.

I have a vague dawning that has been stimulated through the resolving of a work related misunderstanding yesterday. If I awaken in my soul the moon experience of the sun of the soul of another, then I only think of what has lived in my soul. Then all my personal assumptions, mis-perceptions and prejudices colour my percepts and precepts. So there the moon process engenders my experience of the other which is an extension of my experience of selfhood.

Olga has beautifully described what I now recognise as the impeccable awakening of the sun experience of another soul in her soul. This is the Goethean ideal as far as I am able to understand it. Olga, you have helped me to better differentiate between the moments when I lose another person in myself and when I find the other present in me. I do not experience what you have described in full. I do share a part of it through the inner activity of cradling the other in the soul in order to prepare for my curative educational work. I sense that such an act as this is a seed of true forgiveness and love. It certainly acts within the other who may begin to change, or raise resistance to change. At the onset of resistance I feel it best to release the other in freedom.

Between my Who...? post and this one, I have realised more clearly that Steiner does not mean the moon in the sky any more than he means the tree in the field. He means the here and now treeness, the present and active moon. For some reason I had thought of the moon differently to the tree...

I hope I am more than the sum of 'my' concepts! If I take on an idea as an ideal, then I integrate intention with world concepts in freedom.  A good karmic head-wash indeed - I thank you all for your support in resolving some personal knottage.

Thank you very much Sebastian and John. You both helped me understand myself better. For last 2 days, while trying to continue this subject, my computer fought with me like lion.

Valdi! Help! I suspect that it is your topic. I realized that I am (unfortunately ;) not yet a my computer....

Best Wishes to all :)

Olga

Many good comments, thank you all, I don't see anything that is in radical disagreement with what I was suggesting and it helps to clarify my own poor attempts at expressing what I find is a very difficult insight to put into words (but thankfully not impossible)!

I see the moon... instantly I connect it with all kinds of recollections and concepts.  The moon influences the tides...  the particular feeling when the moon rises full on a spring evening... the moon possesses a certain mass and its motion can be calculated from Newton's theory of gravitation... and so on.

Now how about a radical concept... if I love the moon then I am never satisfied with the knowledge I have had of it up till now.  I have a sense that the moon is something that is presenting its being to me anew in every moment.  A fragment of poetry about the moon... a scientific treatise on its past, present and future evolution... A lecture by Steiner on the influences of the planetary forces... all of this is something which presents the moon to me ever anew.

It is this ceaseless striving for an ever deeper and more comprehensive knowledge (not just abstract but a full and human knowledge including fully conscious thinking) of the being of the moon that I had in mind. 

This is not merely a unity that was "already there" in some theoretical unity of reality that I can never know.  Neither is it merely a unity that is to be realised in some far distant future when I have evolved through the seven epochs of earth evolution.  Neither is it a unity that is realised merely by living "in the moment".  All of those concepts point to it but it is not limited by them.  It is something that is beyond or prior to the concepts of past, present and future.  Nevertheless, it is something that is fully known by me because it is fully my own activity.

So Jeff has asked "are we suggesting that I was less the tree when I was in my mother's womb?".  I think the answer to that question depends what the word "I' means in the context of that sentence.  My attempt at an answer is that PoF makes me realise that "I" as a thinking being am not essentially limited to any percept, whether as a baby in the womb, a 44 year old typing on a website or what I conceive of as a lifeless rock floating in far distant space.  The significance of my "I" as a subject, as a percept, and how it relates to the being of thinking, is precisely what we are working through at the moment in PoF.

As Steiner says elsewhere in PoF, it's important to allow ourselves to extend a concept's original meaning sometimes to get at the truth.  If by "I", I continue to mean only this particular person who has lived for so many years on the earth's surface I may never get at the truth that is waiting to reveal itself to me.

I see that my knowledge of the moon evolves if I conceive of myself as a limited subject evolving over time.  I can conceive that this knowledge can become ever more perfect over time.  But perhaps the more perfect my knowledge becomes in a true sense the closer I approach this unity that is being pointed to.  And that unity is something that I can experience at any moment in the very being of thinking.  How that unity presents itself in any particular moment (in the womb, during the time of the Caesars, at the end of the world) may or may not be a meaningful question to me personally - that will depend on how I connect a more comprehensive concept of "I" with the relevant concepts and percepts.

Perhaps to sum up... 

I "was" united with the moon (as when "I" was a baby in the womb and even before that)...

I "am" united with the moon (as you are all saying when we have an intuitive experience of the moon's being, for example)...

I "will be" united with the moon (as I am emphasising, that true knowledge is evolving)...

Because the "I" I live in thought with is prior to the concept that "I" and "moon" are separate.  And the connection of percepts and concepts in this as in every other case is not vague, it is only known through thinking.  And thinking itself is also not limited by or to my subjective "I". 

I am active in thinking at any moment, but this I reveals itself to my own observational participation as being not restricted to any particular moment or situation, past, present or future.

Fascinating post Tim.

Probably because I have been thinking about Plato at Carl's place, I am now reminded of the cave with its inhabitants staring at the shadows on the wall, which they (we) call reality.

It seems that you are concerned with the ever renewing IAM experience. That partial-disc-in-the-sky percept can come to belong to the place my IAM experience was in before the womb through intuitive thinking that reveals the pre-birth conceptual memory inhabiting my ether body. 

My personal path is an attempt to enter the content of thinking and inwardly experience it through sensing-feeling.  This is part of an attempt to bring feeling and will into the field of thought. This appears to add to the totality of my experiences which still fall short of the future IAM. The experience of the future IAM has yet to blossom from an infinite experience.

Perhaps you are way ahead and I am merely stumbling to keep up!

Hi  Tim,

Thank you so much for your Knowing the Moon... I would like to share with you one of Rumi's poem, which I discovered this summer:

Close the Language-Door

There is some kiss we want

with our whole lives,

the touch of Spirit on the body.

Seawater begs the pearl

to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately

it needs some wild Darling!

At night, I open the window

and ask the moon to come

and press its face against mine.

Breathe into me.

Close the language-door,

and open the love-window

The moon won't use the door,

only the window.

Mevlana Celaleddin-i RUMI (1207 - 1273)

And only one more thing - the last ( from Matthew) Christ' words: ...I AM with you until end of the world.

Thanks Olga yes I love the spirit in Rumi, he is quite unique and the kind of knowledge he experienced was I think very much the kind of thing we're getting at here.

We recently had a performance here of some Rumi stories and poetry by a fellow named Ashley Ramsden from Emerson College in England - very special!