Wonderful writing John,  the dead crystallised assumptions becomes the marble vault whereas the spirit cannot be crystallised - so true.  The Song of Michael says it all.  This is from Occult Science pg. 52

'The Spiritual Soul is connected with the Universal Spirit which is the hidden reality within all things manifest'

Thanks for your inspirations and insights.

:)

Author Unknown

I will start anew this morning with a higher, fairer creed;
I will cease to stand complaining of my ruthless neighbor's greed;
I will cease to sit repining while my duty's call is clear;
I will waste no moment whining, and my heart shall know no fear.

I will look sometimes about me for the things that merit praise;
I will search for hidden beauties that elude the grumbler's gaze;
I will try to find contentment in the paths that I must tread;
I will cease to have resentment when another moves ahead.

I will not be swayed by envy when my rival's strength is shown;
I will not deny his merit, but I'll strive to prove my own;
I will try to see the beauty spread before me, rain or shine;
I will cease to preach your duty, and be more concerned with mine.

Synchronicity from http://www.meaning.ca/archives/poetry/poem_a-new-start_Annon.htm 

Prayer for Courage by Louis Untermeyer

Why should I long for what I know
Can never be revealed to me?
I only pray that I may grow
As sure and bravely as a tree.

I do not ask why tireless grief
Remains, or why all beauty flies;
I only crave the blind relief
Of branches groping toward the skies.

Let me bring every seed to fruit,
Sharing, whatever comes to pass
The strong persistence of the root,
The patient courage of the grass.

Heartened by every source of mirth,
I shall not mind the wounds and scars,
Feeling the solid strength of earth,
The bright conviction of the stars.

More synchronicity from http://www.meaning.ca/archives/poetry/poem_prayer-for-courage_L_Untermeyer.htm 

John thankfully wrote:

Our recently excavated percepts of dinosaurs are leading us towards concepts that have feathers, according to a recent newspaper report. Concepts that speak to us of spiritual ideals will grow wings for our souls.

I’m not sure yet what that means to me, but I know it deserves an award. I love reading how you put that, John!

You said:

“A concept may represent an ideal.”

And then you presented concepts that may indeed represent ideals:

“The region of the ideal is the habitat of archetypes. There they may live and grow as long as they are not dragged down to earth by materialistic thinkers that wrench the leaves from spirit trees as they amble past.”

You see, I am interested in knowing the actual reality of an ideal.  Regardless of how well a concept is representing it, the ideal actually must function and its actual functioning must be directly observable.  As always, my concern is that a subtle misdirection has us attempting to capture reality in mental pictures.  The other option is watching how mental pictures (elaborated concepts in PoF) function by carrying forward the reality that moves through them.  

My question to you is this: when you write about “the region of the ideal” is it there for you in the writing?  Is it concretely something you can directly refer to that is independent of how you will conceptually elaborate it? If yes, the real fun starts: if we can directly refer our attention to something that is “more” than the way we will specify it, we are in the midst of a modern miracle of attention.  This concrete, bodily “more” can be studied directly without losing it to the effect of our elaborations. We can let our elaborations elaborate as opposed to represent.  What do they elaborate?  They elaborate reality, they Are reality as it steps into form.  If you can write about “the region of the ideal” while directly referring to the very thing that will select different words next week, to the very thing that might someday decide that “region” isn’t the right word at all (or not)…..if you can study the intricacy of that hard-working “more”, then I feel that we can talk about ideals without getting lost in any type of idealization of them.  

So far there are powerful writings that conceptually elaborate “ideals”. Various thinkers will be attracted to various elaborations. This is a good thing. But it isn’t new. What is new is a practice of actually studying the bodily intricacy (or intuiting) that is the working of an ideal.  

But I must close with my favorite:

Our recently excavated percepts of dinosaurs are leading us towards concepts that have feathers, according to a recent newspaper report. Concepts that speak to us of spiritual ideals will grow wings for our souls.

I can ramble along with you here, Jeff, but I am puffing hard to keep up. I needed additional support to comprehend your profound posting, so I did the seriously playful let go – let come practice (its source is Otto Scharmer, referenced below). Towards me came your post, About the eternal search, which I missed at the time. The Jeff of the moment wrote: [Steiner] talks about this in the preface of 1918. There isn’t an endless search for truth on level 2 because the Truth is the condition of all conditions, it’s The Freedom, It’s I Am. This snippet does no justice to Jeff, so please read the whole of that thread to follow this connection fully. This is probably a demanding walk for us all. I wish that I had studied PoF more thoroughly. Life and good friends have taught me its true value. 

Yes, the region of the ideal is everlastingly present and constantly unnoticed. How can we learn to notice its ineffable presence? Perception in the region of the ideal is ultimately an intuited star-struck view of divinity in progress. This takes us way beyond mental pictures into what Steiner calls Imagination Consciousness. There is a springboard in Goethe’s practice of developing his mental picture so that it could be perceived as clearly as the plant in the ground. Moral imaginative perception can disclose plants that have never been seen in the ground. Such imaginations are archetypal realities and here I reach a precipitous edge for my fledgling perception. 
 
How can we cultivate the requisite rigorous wide-open selflessness?  Yes, we can develop our thinking capacities, although we can become disoriented in thinking if we are not resilient enough to avoid becoming totally lost. How can we circumnavigate the risks of ending up as missing persons, or demented ghosts in limbo? Can we learn to utterly surrender ourselves to ideal SELF? Our love for the Good of the Earth will find us our way. The School of Spiritual Science offers us substantial help for such emboldened endeavour. 
 
Beethoven’s music seems to have begun as moral imagination that he crafted into a symphony – or other musical form – to the fullest extent of his musicality while deaf to worldly sounds. Another composer, perceiving the same imagination, would craft another work. All creative work is imbued with the signatures of its inspiring spirit ideals and our personal karma. A masterpiece is a transcendent realisation that is pure spirit signature, and most clearly reflects truth as ideal. In Imagination Consciousness we directly perceive the masterpieces of the spirit.
 
All our mental pictures are rooted in past experience. Steiner explains that the reason we cannot remember true spiritual experience is that we cannot take the bearer of memory into the spirit realm. Jeff, you have written about turning towards the ever present region of the ideal, which is the observation of becoming where the observer’s sense-and-memory based mental representations may be the most limiting factor. You wrote: if we can directly refer our attention to something that is “more” than the way we will specify it, we are in the midst of a modern miracle of attention.  Otto Scharmer has an impressive take on this. The crux is letting go – letting come. Near the end of his challenging book Theory U, Scharmer encourages us to consciously presence the IAM of the whole situation. He proposes that we regard the percept of the present situation as a mantram on which to meditate. Let the seed be planted in us. This is why Goethe’s moral imagination is so important. Only then can we freely say yes to creative purpose and resolve to serve some aspect of present future potential. Free spiritual creative activity makes real the ripe ideal.   That is the work of yessing the partially conceived ideal in the face of the reality of the products of the past in the present. Yes is a powerful process. If you are still reading, you will be able to reap tremendous benefit from Scharmer’s book. He is a student of PoF.
 
What are we thinking of? What are we thinking for? I see no real reason to anthroposophise but the love to participate in world becoming where the true ideal in the NOW becomes the evolutionary leverage point of the NEXT. What else would lovers do with thinking?  Healthsome freedom is found through love expressed in the musical reciprocity between what I will to do and what ideally wills to happen.
 
Thus I return to a point that Jeff picked me up from earlier: It is my conviction that without such ideals the Philosophy of Freeing Spiritual Activity loses its ultimate purpose. Through some tough reworking this conviction has died and been remobilised into new life. I apologise for stumbling through so many syllable-rich words and oblique terminology. It feels like clambering through mind jungle. Your patience is appreciated.
 
PS: Glossary
 
I neglected to characterise the Lower Guardian earlier. The Lower Guardian appears when we begin to migrate our identification from isolate self and gradually integrate with transcendent self, which I wrote as SELF. This inner work involves putting our karma in order. The pilgrim of spiritual development seeks to redeem the ugly reality of the Lower Guardian and liberate its beautiful ideal.  In terms of thinking activity, the Lower Guardian is the sum of all the individualised mental pictures that we need to transform in order to conceive truth in its ideal reality.

Karma is a causative process that can be characterised as: “the eye by which I see God is the same as the eye by which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye are one and the same”. Thank you Caryn for supplying this synchronous quotation from Meister Eckhart. This may be a bit airy for some readers, but I hold to the consequential thought that escaping from all karma implies losing all access to the spirit: becoming a ghost in limbo (see above).

Keep it up guys this is a great read! Nothing to add...

I am thinking that I may not have understood your question, Jeff. What are you thinking?

Of course sense-free thinking flips 'outer' thinking on its elbow.  There are no symbols in sense-free thinking. Why would we need them when thinking offers us the real deal? What do we find in the absence of a process, where no process is? Ask a question and the answer is already ready and ideal even before it is expressed to self. Without some sense of that answer the question would never have been perceived. A question is a kind of percept that is never severed from its concept – even if the answer cannot be realised in thought for many years. Patience is a game of waiting for the moment to become seasonally ripe when the green question flowers into colour and geometrical form. It takes me time to work out what your question really could be asking. If I do not do this I might answer the wrong question – not a mis-thought but a mis-perception. So I will ask you for clarification rather than guess. But I will first have some fun exploring a little.

Sense-free thinking is wordless. We all know how words get in the way. Body-free thinking is direct perception. Gain a percept and you have a concept in no time at all. The immediacy of mature complex ideas is highly frustrating for one’s colleagues who mole and toil through analysis and sequential logic. The gap between looking and seeing is an embodied memory chase with an organic net.   It is a frustrating exertion in pursuit of an ephemeral distraction of moths that flutter of themselves towards death by hot light. As Bryn wrote: Ideas for one’s contribution are audible/visible in the moment, but the form of words has to be fought for.
 
Is it this toiling and chasing that is attracting you, Jeff? It takes time to shuffle and formulate sensory related words from the personal memory of vocabulary to paint the ideas for consumption by others without compromising their integrity. Get close and act. Then step back and reflect. A naked concept can be dressed and re-dressed like Barbie fit for a party. Is this construction true to style? No. A sense-free concept can be clothed and re-clothed with words suited to the nature of the outing. No? A supersensible being may be invited to participate in converse by naming it with vocabulary tailored to the receptivity of listeners. No? The one to whom Venus reveals herself in her natural beauty needs must clothe her nakedness in earthly garb for earthly minds. Christian Rosencreutz, having found his way into the presence of the unclothed Venus had henceforth to stand as her guardian that others might not similarly enter. Aphrodite springs fully formed and ever anew from the brow of the writer. Pick a card, any card - it is always the Queen of Hearts…
 
Enough! This is a truly playful, joyful meander through paradisal feasts unimaginable – until this moment. Let go – let come. 
 
Jeff, elsewhere you wrote: Steiner helped in that he could use an infinite variety of symbols to get at core experiences. This allowed all the various tendencies in his listeners to select the kinds of concepts that work for them. […] But the joy is that we can choose to let any of our symbols refer directly to the present stream of our experiencing. In this way, "Guardian of the Threshold" and "shame" can be used to help us notice more clearly what we are currently experiencing. 
 
Steiner drew graphics. Are you substituting symbols for words and for graphics? All expressions of thinking are graphic or wordy transubstantiations of the inhabitants of thinking. But do these translations help us notice more clearly what we are currently experiencing as you suggest? Are they not rather what slows us down and distracts us into sentimentally translating the sight of a gnome – for example – into a mystical guru-bearded old stereotype, with a redness of red hat? It is obviously individualised with a heavy coat of social conditioning. As far as I can tell, Steiner did not do this to reach his experiences. He got to core experiences and then translated them in his notebooks and lectures, working the mental pictures out for others to comprehend in living vitality. The comments on masterpieces in my previous post also apply here. Is this the process where you want the inside story? 
 
This trial is known as the Air-Trial, because while undergoing it the candidate can support himself neither upon the firm basis of external incentive, nor upon the figures, tones, and colours which he has learned at the stages of preparation and enlightenment, but exclusively upon himself.
[…]
We must unite ourselves and become as one with the higher truths. We must not only know them, but also be able, quite as a matter of course, to manifest and administer them in living actions, even as we ordinarily eat and drink. They must become our practice, our habit, and our inclination. There must be no need to keep thinking about them in the ordinary sense; they must come to living expression through the person himself; they must flow through him as the functions of life flow through his organism.
Knowledge of Higher Worlds: Chapter 3
 

So do you mean the kinesthetic sensation of that flowing of a living expression, Jeff? I eagerly look forward to your clarification. I am enjoying solipsism as Saturday evening entertainment but it may be for nothing. It is a fascinating journey. Glad to have you along Tim!

John you are a funny man I often laugh out loud when I read your stuff :-)  I am not sure if your Venus is a Barbie, Sophia or maybe a kind of Paris Hilton clone.  Probably she takes on all of those guises at different times.

I connect this with the conversation going on here on "The Rape of Sophia" http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2219.

I have always found that the scene at the end of Goethe's Faust Part 1 where his soul ascends to heaven and it is said "The Eternal Feminine leads us ever onwards" is so inspiring, it touches a truth that is fundamental for me and not stated so clearly anywhere else that I can find.  How do others experience this ideal and the related idea of Sophia, the eternal Wisdom of God, Gaia the soul of the world and so on? 

Hi Tim;

I reckon King Solomon wrote a great piece on Sophia http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/1709

Jeff! if I can reply here - to 'I remember' :) CJ Jung explains anima/animus by saying : this way the soul has a deep and meaning relationship with itself ...

Ok think I've hogged the board enough now ! Carl 100 bucks! reckon the angels take credit card?!

Partly in response to Tim’s question, but also in consideration of how the eternal feminine – in a specific and limited sensory revelation – clothes herself: Spiritual science again gives a special name to the whole of the external sense-world in so far as it arouses certain feelings of pleasure or pain, joy or sadness in our souls. But under that name we must think only of the influence working upon our Sentient Soul from the tapestry of the outer world of the senses; this force does not let us remain cold and impassive but fills us with certain feelings. So that just as the first influence exerted on the Sentient Soul after we go to sleep is given the name of Mars, the influence which takes effect on waking is called the force of “Venus”. Macrocosm and Microcosm: Lecture 2 wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Places/Vienna/19100322p01.html 
(These M&Ms are one of my favourites.)

 
I am obviously gypsy - and as Tim suggests, jester, because I cannot resist laughing at and in my struggles - in my adherence to the karmic lens of personal experience. I am pretty sure you hold true to your karmic view too, Jeff. This contribution feels like I am making excuses for not answering your question, as far as I have understood it. Repeating some of the previous posts, I cannot yet think my way into that something that Jeff wants me to describe. I am prepared to be directed towards something that I cannot perceive, but I have not arrived there yet. Let’s walk further…
 
Jeff you wrote: You see, I believe that by enacting the I/World split we generate every wonderful Ideal ever advocated, but we do so from within the dynamic of the split, therefore the ideal is merely a representation of the ‘percept of self’ that has already mistaken reality to be made up of all sorts of partial percepts and concepts.  I am attempting to look beyond sensory percept/concept splitting because I am trying to enter sense-free realms of thought where I do not recognise myself any more than the experiences that I have in this place. I retain the sensibility that I have not yet found out who I am. I am pressing up hard against my personal edge and ‘kicking the pig’ (could not resist confessional reference to Story Time thread because it demonstrates that the split is an illusion). To write or do something that pertains to such ideals, I have to create something out of nothing. So I fall senti-mentally in love with images that apparently whisper of these ideals. This is not altogether successful in the creation business. Does that help you, Jeff, with my use of sense-free: the only deodorant that works for anthroposophists?
 
Jeff, you wrote: But I typically think that “ideal” is being used to represent meshes of mental pictures (with strong feelings associated, no doubt!) rather than as an expression of the meaning itself.  Not by me, Jeff! I am not a typical case of the generalities of human behaviour and outer appearance. Yet I am not untypical in my good intentions. My ideals used to be mental constructions, but more often these days they are heralds of what is still hidden just over the horizon. My mental picture of spirit-envisioning (my rendering of the third activity in the Foundation Stone Meditation) involves actively sticking out my neck to peer over the horizon for a mind’s eyeful of spirit potential or spirit will. All this takes place in dim imaginations for which I try to find wordy colours to paint on the canvas of readers’ minds some echo of my inner perception. More often than not this is little more than a scribble of impressionistic caricature. This is possibly why I cannot yet observe a process – I am probably trying too hard to notice it. I sense my way towards where the light grows stronger from where the call is sounding. My blind spots are full of what-I-think-I-know-therefore-I-have-stopped-looking objects. I realise that for many (most?) readers I become incomprehensible, but I can try, try again… Quentin Crisp memorably suggested: If at first you don't succeed, failure may be your style. It may be my style but is not my ideal!
 
Here is an example of a split that is not a split, except in the way it is expressed. Jeff wrote: I do think, however, that any kinesthetic sense will reveal its intuiting if attended to properly.  But, at that point it becomes more than merely kinesthetic. It is the thinking that changes the perception, not the kinesthetic sense. It always was more than merely kinesthetic; it is only our perception that is partial. We open a ‘new’ window. When we become aware of the bigger ‘picture’ we may say it has now appeared, rather than saying only now do I see it. Thus we vote for the split rather than for the healthy social life in our expression of the event. Once this illusory split has disappeared, it heals the rest of our illusory splits if we allow it freedom. Fear, hate and doubt rise up to stop this happening. Only determined courage will permit the healing to proceed when we are consciously in the presence of the Greater Guardian, so clearly described in M&M Lecture 3 (wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/Places/Vienna/19100323p01.html). 
 
Jeff, if the real world was completely ideal, I would have no reason to make any effort to be a good fellow. I could just be myself and embody my natural economy of self-expression = comfortable laziness. But part of my nature lives to learn and develop and that part looks at lazy John with compassion but not mercy. If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re going. (Irwin Corey) Bother! What is perfect about the present is its capacity to be transformed. Ideals do live in the real world, as Jeff suggests. The present moment holds the perfect lesson and the ideal opportunity that is its divine purpose. So I extend my soul towards ideas that I cannot yet embody. It takes an effort to mentally picture what the developed John will be like, so I start to do the new John to find out. It takes a while for it to become effortless – a long while. It begins with trying to comprehend something that I have never perceived. 
 
Fidelity – from Carl’s principle of universal reproduction 
I may working on Carl’s ideal in converse here. It is my ideal to enter into dialogue through encountering those living spirits to whom the other person’s expression bears witness. I am trying to use the other person’s sensible expression as a window through which to look directly into the super-sensible spirit. The window may be anything from opaque through translucency to a masterpiece of transparency. The capacity to look through the earthly manifestation interests me more than the adequacy of the other person’s expression. This is my ideal of high fidelity listening. 

A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

There is a thought-world, which we sometimes call the ethereal world.  It is a "landscape" organized according to rules like those of music (c.f. the ten forms of change: retrogradation; inversion; retrograde inversion; augmentation; dimunition; inclusion; textural, partition; interversion and exclusion; or other elements of music theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_Theory ).

My introspective experience leads me to make a distinction between: mental pictures; generalized concepts; pure concepts and ideas.  The first two are more subjective, the last two hardly so. They are a natural hierarchy, with the lowest being the mental picture and the highest being the idea.  Where in this scheme lies the "ideal"?

In PoF we confront this when looking at the problem of moral imagination.  What is the free "ideal" which we will create out of our own thinking-intuition and in order to follow this ideal in life with our will?  Does this "ideal" exist in a region of the ethereal?  Is it there before we "think" it, or only after?

Borrowing further from the landscape metaphor: mental pictures more crystiline, more earthly and fixed.  Generalized concepts more plant and animal like, having a kind of natural life.  Pure concepts more aeriform, expansive.  Ideas more light and warmth filled, penetrating all else. 

In Theosophy, Steiner speaks of the Consciousness Soul (what we are developing today) as being a relationship between the Soul and the Good and the True, a kind of "uniting" with the Eternal.  What is meant here by "uniting"?

Contact with the "spiritual" world involves not just our own activity but the activity as well of "Grace".  We ask, seek and knock and there is a response.  "Uniting" then would seem to include two actions, only one our own.  We create a moral "ideal" upon which we will choose to act, and this is met with something from above.

This potential to engage in an act of "creation" has to be the case, otherwise we are not free.  Again, the sentence with which we began:

A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

If our "creation" of an ideal is a free act, in what region of the ethereal does it take place?  Is it a mental picture, a generalized concept, a pure concept or an idea?  If it is unique to our individual biography is this "ideal" also fully individual?  For example, are all acts which we might characterize as being "sacrifices" the same for that characterization, or is each independent due to its particular expression?

As an action that will be remembered in the moral aspect of the akashic record it would seem to be unique regardless of how similar in kind and in nature to any other like action. It seems to me that such a moral "ideal" is an idea that never before existence, and is unique to the circumstances in which it was created, regardless of how superficially similar in kind to any other moral act.  Where then is the region of "creation" of ideas?

It would seem to be above the higher element of the ethereal world where can be found "ideas".  Is this the astral world, or is it even higher still.  Tomberg made this observation in his Studies of the Old Testament: the Father has already "thought" all the ideas, but the Son has not yet created out of all of them.  Are we operating in the realm of the Father thought-creation when we create a self chosen moral "ideal"?

How can we do this?  How, if it is a new "ideal/idea" can it be of the same region as original Father-thought?  Yet, how can it not be just there?  The realm of activity of higher beings is outside time and space.  For example, the reason Christ can attend to everything (as well as can the Father) is that they have all of not just Eternity from which to reach into the world of time and space and each of its particular and unique moments, but also what Steiner called "duration", which existed even before Eternity.

"Not I, but Christ in me" says St. Paul.  Christ says also: "I and the Father are one".  What is the human spirit, the individual I-AM?  What Mystery?

Here is Steiner from A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception:

"Man is not behaving in accordance with the purposes of the Guding Power of the World when he investigages one or another of His commandments, but when he behaves in accordance with his own insight. For in him the Guiding Power of the world manifests Himself.  He does not lives as Will somewhere outside of man; He has renounced his own will in order that all might depend upon the will of man.  If man is to be enabled to become his own lawgiver, all thought about world-determinations outside of man must be abandoned."

Our will, when it creates a moral ideal, creates in the same realm as the Father, out of the principle of the Father as exists in us.  We come to this ability through Christ (Not I, but Christ in me).  Having created this moral ideal, we then incarnate it (moral technique), and bring into the Creation itself, something unique, something that did not exist before.  We act from above the world of the ethereal or the astral, as an I-AM and from thence into the world of existence.

Our moral actions do not exist before we do them, not even if the form of an "ideal".  No wonder, on another thread on this website, "shame" was seen as an essential rite of passage up to and near the Threshold, for just consider how little we live out of this creation of the moral ideal.  How berift is the world of creation in the absence of our moral participation.  How arid and painful this veil of tears, unless we have married it with our moral creativeness, including our willingness to share in each other's suffering.  Again:

A true individuality will be the one who reaches up with his feelings to the farthest possible extent into the region of the ideal.

If the region of the ideal is the realm of our co-participated creation, what does it mean to "reach up with our feelings" into this region?  Another Mystery to be sure.

19 days ago I died, twice.  Fortunately my angel got me to the ER for this performance of the consequences of the shameful way i had treated the gift of having a divinely created body - this Temple for my spirit.  I did not see a white light, but was unconscious (my heart stopped twice and I was clinically dead two times my doctor said).  Where was "I" during this time for which I have no memory?

My doctor is worried my judgment might be impaired and doesn't want me to drive.  To write this will cause considerable tiredness, and yet (at the same time) a little bit of joy to know that I can still "think".  Being tired, I'll leave for another time (maybe) the question of "feelings".

love,

joel

Twenty years ago I thought it was OK for my dog to mess on somebody's lawn and I didn't think twice about hosing down the driveway.  I used to eat meat every day and thought it was great.  People smoked at the desk next to me in my office.

Now we have water restrictions and regulations about pooper scoopers, I hardly ever eat meat and anyone who wants to smoke at work or in a restaurant is sent to gather with the other lepers out the back. 

Two hundred years ago we had slavery and women couldn't vote.  And so on.

There are ideals that can only be fully realised at a particular point in time I think.  Ripeness is all, as Shakespeare's Lear says memorably.  Though the Father God or some other advanced personality may have thought them already perhaps they are still awaiting their time for full realisation.  That I guess is where the Christ and the Spirit God come in.

Braveheart - we missed you and you are in our thoughts daily.  May each moment of the hours fill you with strength and love.

Peace and love forever.

What a pain in the local elbow it is indeed to be inflicted with objections to the way one has grown used to addressing one’s percepts as I! That is the end of that game for good and all time. Now the present writer has to think twice – three times as he is a member of the Anthroposophical Society – before formulating a single sentence: a sentence to oblivion if one does not watch one’s Ps and Qs. Rudolf Steiner did not object to the writer saying in his naïveté I to a humble tree. O, dear him! How wretched the man who has to say you has-been to those shame-faced percepts he used to so faithfully call himself. A perfect mote in the blackguard’s I, if ever the writer saw a tree-derived beam in the bathroom mirror. 

How will the awakened one become aware that the world sleeps no more? How will it feel to wake up tomorrow morning? [pause while the experiment is performed] Cramp in the right calf, as it happens! The experimenter in the Scottish laboratory of life has ruminated over the idea to his pensive dissatisfaction that one cannot keep up this game for infinitely long without the additional fluid intake of divine assistance. 

"Oh, to be alive in such an age when miracles are everywhere and every inch of common air throbs a tremendous prophecy of greater marvels yet to be."
 - Walt Whitman

Jeff, you wrote:  At some point, there is hardly anything left needing to be called "I" except for the re-cognition that Thy will is all that's being done. 

Jeff, you also wrote of your: first belief that everything but thinking is 100% conditioning.

There is nothing left needing to be called I. Anything referred to in the first person is mis-labelled conditioning and distraction from THY WILL. What a truly liberating experience of being locked out rather than locked in! If all ideals are conditioning, then all spiritual vision is programming. There is only thought-washing and solipsism. This writer cannot find a way out of this predicament... A flame flickers and fades, but it is surely a conditioned reflex in the emptiness...

Is this idealism?

John that is worthy of a Shakespearean clown... I (oops I mean this writer) got it eventually!

Jeff, you really are an interesting chap. There is definite purpose in your contributions here.

Where is the vital source of that purpose in your cosmic view? Do you see your purpose as an ideal among ideals, or as something yet to be created as a new masterpiece?

Something seems to be absent. What is it that brings dynamic evolutionary motivation to the place where you are? If all ideals were already presently realised there would be nothing to interest the gods in the activities of humanity. Does not freedom imply that it could all go perfectly pear shaped? What lives for you in the activity of realisation? What prevents the spread of as conditioned today so tomorrow's reality?

By the way, today's attempt to go 24 hours without saying I to a bunch of percepts faltered in the face of introducing reflective practice to a friendly multinational group of students this afternoon. The day was not ideal for this test. Only 5 hours left to go and then back to the new normal...

Jeff asks about yesterday’s game of hide and seek. 

It was a lesson on the resilience and vulnerability of authenticity in the face of extreme mummery. Elaboration fed on elaboration until Jeff recognised the voice as no more than a tinkling cymbal. The only way out was to write about internalised purpose from the other outer position. That was a new kind of hurricane hell brewing!

To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.
  - Jacques Derrida

Don’t try this one at home folks. If you want to play with fire, go out and buy matches. Saying I is important, but only say I to I, not to any percepts that you happen to have round about you. I prefer not to add more just now. Are there hospitals for this kind of carelessness?

I just remembered that I read Gendlin's Focussing book many years ago. It is one the few non-anthropositive tomes that I did not dispose of when I last moved house.

I still have it! It was an important balance to the training for eurythmy at the time.

Yea, it's pretty impressive that he can go from relating Wittgenstein to Heidegger and then show how an uneducated house-husband from Mid Missouri already can use that relationship for his own spiritual growth, without ever having to read all of the distinctions explicated by the philosophic "giants"!!!! If that isn't what PoF was pointing towards, I'll keeping moving in that direction...

"felt-sense" is the functional concept that anthroposohia is missing; it matters not one jot if they call it something else; they just need the function!!! Khulewind comes very close to going into that; his work on "cognitive-feelings" shows the direction but he never followed up the changes they make. I think Jesisah Ben-Aharon is pursing this kind of change in his epistemological work.

Jeff

I was so inspired by this thread, a passage from a book called "The Handbook of the Navigator" and the Gendlin article that I wrote a poem - it is at http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/2238.

Thanks all!