Hi John,

This is an interesting article, thanks for sharing it here.  I want to comment on what the writer of the article has communicated but I need to think about it for a while longer.  Many ideas came to mind as I was reading it.

Love,
Patri

Hi Jeff,

I'm not exactly sure of your question and assumption, but I'll try to give a brief answer to what I suspect is your underlying confusion...

Owen Barfield wrote an essay some years ago: "Rudolf Steiner's Idea of Mind", for a collection of essays on Steiner on thinking.  In this essay Barfield points out that ordinary consciousness assumes that we perceptually share the sense world, and individualize our experience of the world of thought.   However, according to Barfield, Steiner's works point out that the truth is the opposite of this - we individualize our experience of the sense world and have a shared perception of the world of thought.

For example, I see, from my point of view, a slightly different tree (as a independent given) than you do from your point of view.  But there is only one concept of a triangle, and we all "experience" the same concept when we think about triangles.

Words on a page are referents to concepts.   We all know what a "page" is.  The matter gets a bit tricky when we string a number of words together, for which the concept is not exactly in the individual words, but in the whole sentence, or even a paragraph.  This concept/meaning of the whole can, nevertheless, be experienced - that is it is a "percept" in the world of thought toward which we can rise, through purification and discipline, to a state of soul in which this "meaning as a percept in the world of thought" is beheld in a participatory way.

I use the term "participatory" because if you read my "In Joyous Celebration of the Soul Art and Music of Discipleship", you may recall what I wrote there about thinking about, thinking with, thinking within and thinking as.  In the movement (based on the arts of soul purification and discipline) from about to with to within to as, the "gap" between our I and the object of thought narrows such that at a certain point "it thinks in me".

As a consequence, when we read the words of another on a page, they are a finger pointing to a place in the world of thought, which "place" can be beheld as a percept (that is we can have an experience of the meaning/concepts in which the writer of the words on the page was living at the time of the writing.  Such meaning/concepts will also reveal its nature (whether it is about, with , within or as) as a "quality" of the thought (about, with, within or as) the sense world or spiritual world percepts to which the thought refers.  We can "feel" with our own thinking, in following the finger pointing, whether or not the writer was living in meaning/concepts for which he had (or not) a definite perceptual experience.

There are then two kinds of spiritual world percepts (as against sense world percepts).  Those percepts which appear to thinking as the meaning of words, sentences and paragraphs, and those percepts which, as Beings, have in independent existence from the I.   In other circumstances I have described these "meaning concept percepts" as the "ethereal garment" of spiritual Beings.

Writing also reveals the nature of the thinking activity of the writer, for behind what we might call grammer and syntax, or the nature of the "orderly expression" of words, sentences and paragraphs, this activity lives as a kind of "fingerprint".  For example, Steiner sometimes talked about how Jesuitical Thinking had certain quite definite characteristics.

In other circumstances I have described this process by which words are linked to each other on the page as a kind of music, which has harmonies and disonances.   For example, we have a term: "oxymoron", to refer to the joining of two words in such a way that the one word (contemplated as a single pure concept) adds nothing to the second word, or clashes with it in such a way that the "joining" gives no real meaning, or is essentially "illogical" (disharmonious to the underlying Logos Nature of the World of Thought).

Anyway, all this is background for my "experience" of reading the "thought" of Bowman, which "experience" is a percept of the ethereal garment of the meaning/Being as that exists in the Realm of the False Holy Spirit, which is an illusory and illogical thought landscape through which one can travel on the way to the True World of Thought, where the Logos Nature of Christ reveals itself in the music of ideas.  It is a "threshold" experience, where Lucifer is the Guardian, and if we are not ready he will lead our thinking activity into illusion (the meaning/concepts we create are then false).

Most of us create meaning/concepts about spiritual matters, which are part truth and part illusion, because we have not yet learned the scientific discipline at the heart of PoF.  We do not yet practice the pure contemplation of single concepts.  We could say that the discoveries offered by PoF have that well known "onion-like" quality.   We learn one kind of thing by "understanding" the ideals the book describes, but another quite different thing by the actual process of scientific introspection (coming to "knowledge") of our own minds.   The world of the book, as a set of ideas, and the actual world of our own inwardness, are not identical.  The first is a map, the second an very real ethereal territory.  The book is flat, abstract and representative, while the authentic territory of our minds is rich, complex and a mystery temple where sacraments are to be practiced if we want to actually know.

joel

You make an important point.  I would put it a bit differently, but in essence mean more or less the same thing.  In my exerience thinking has a quality like breathing (which is why for example, the experience of the Holy Spirit is often called in the New Testament: Holy Breath).

Tomberg in his Meditations on the Tarot, speaks of the work of our angel as "respiration", a kind of vertical movement carrying spiritual inspiration from the higher worlds to us below, for the angel is able to work in the above more easily.  This is why the angel is depicted with wings, according to Tomberg, because of this capacity for upward and downward spiritual movement.

Because the ultimate experience of Holy Breath is a threshold experience, we do encounter the Guardian however.  The essential element is moral in nature - that is our moral intention is crucial, which is why PoF focuses so strongly on moral imagination, moral intuition and moral technique.  The purity of our moral intention enables our thinking gesture to cross the threshold, even unconsciously or semi-consciously, accompanied by our angel.

We don't, however, bring down a given thought content as if we were passive recipients of HOLY INVIOLET TRUTHS (the true Holy Spirit wants our freedom, above all other characteristics).  Holy Breath then breathes on the embers of latent goodness in the soul and spirit, and this baptism by Holy Breath (a Second Eucharist), enables morally intended thought to have a certain quality.   Where it gets fuzzy is when we finish the upward and downward gesture of thinking/breathing and "expell" the thought into words in speech or writing.  The incarnated thought in words shifts a bit from the actual experience we had when only engaged in thinking.

The I at this point more clearly stamps is own nature on the thought experience, and in rendering it into words also brings it to earth.  In a sense the I moves from the threshold, where Lucifer has a certain sway and where the thought as Holy Breath is experienced, down to earth, where Ahriman has a certain sway, and when we render the thought experience into words (incarnate it) we also fix it or make it rigid.  What was living to thinking experience tends to die into the words on the page (which is also why Steiner wanted teaching to be "oral", and resisted for a long time having his lectures published).  The spoken word is more living to the experience of the listener, thatn is the written word to the reader.

At this point the reader takes over the process, and if they recreate the thought that was once living in the thinking of the author in the right way, then the reader goes to the same place in the thought world where the writer went.   A certain sympathy for the writer will help this, while an antipathy will hinder it.  We tend to call this "understanding what was meant".

Different readers will "understand" different things from the same text (which fact led the deconstructionists to assume that text had no meaning whatsoever - introducing their own confusion due to their not recognizing the principle that the thought of a triangle is the same for every mind).

You perceive the good in Bowman's intention, and by your sympathy draw near in thought, during reading, to that same aspect of the thought world in which his prior thinking lived.  If you have not thought about what he has thought about, you will have received by this recreation of his experience of the world of thought (via the act of "reading") some additional "insight", "meaning" and "understanding".  If you have thought about it, and reached other (although perhaps similar to a degree) conclusions, then you might experience a dissonance.

We could, of course, never "correct Carl Jung", but Steiner's own example is to do just that, constantly, even in PoF.  "An incorrect result of research in the spiritual world is a living being.  It is there; it must be resisted, it must first be eradicated" R.S 22.10.1915, GA 254.

the truth matters, especially if Anthroposophy is to be scientific...

joel