George O'Neil wrote a work book on the Philosophy of Freedom in which he was able to articulate many things very well in regards to right reading. I don't consider his work with finding certain patterns in the book significant but he was able to study the book in a way similar to myself. I used to call the first step basic reading comprehension. To experience the special way the thoughts are organized you need to rethink the thoughts with understanding. This is achieved in the same way you would study any book, looking up words in the dictionary, maybe doing some searches on key words at the RS Archive to find references of Steiner using them, and reading slow enough to absorb the thought. It is very helpful to "boil" a paragraph down to a few words.
O'Neil calls this Mastering the Content. It is a prerequisite for the next step of Contemplative Comparison. Each thought in the book has a relationship to all the other thoughts. Contemplation of these relationships lead to deeper meaning. You can go back to a passage indefinitely and gain new insights each time.
The simplest approach is to enter into the thoughts very closely while reading with focussed concentration. And then when you start having interesting experiences of insight you will know the book has lifted you to another level of comprehension and you are likely experiencing the thought-training development. It will carry over into improved everyday thinking in your life. Regular study can develop into a passion for study as this study lifts you and becomes like a spiritual food that sustains your spiritual nature.
Master of Content
To achieve this living in thought, as distinct from building in logical thought-units and letting the personal feelings determine the pattern of words, we first must become master in the highest degree of content, utterly eliminating the arbitrariness of personal preference and emphasis. Says Goethe: To have the whole in your heart, you must have conned its every part. To which Rudolf Steiner has added: First read for substance, then read again for form.
Contemplative Comparison
In contemplating the totality of a living thought-organism, correspondences and symmetries, previously unseen, begin to emerge, each illuminating the other. Meanings come forth, never before expected, revealing interdependence and mutual support. The whole is experienced as weaving interplay of single thoughts, each reflecting the whole as experiencable from its single aspects.
The Cascade Format in Study Basics
Hi Tom,
I read Chapter One, Paras 1-19 in the Cascade Format you have here on the PoF website, and it was most interesting. It was akin to reading poetry and the text had a different kind of aliveness to it, as you are living in your thinking and imaginative concentration with the sense of poetry.
Cheers,
Patri
Here are some interesting
Here are some interesting comments on thinking from lectures published as Old and New Methods of Initiation, Fourteen Lectures given in Dornach, Mannheim and Breslau from 1 January to 19 March 1922 (If you don't have this out of print book I am currently proof reading these for the archive)
In modern initiation there must be anxiety on a different score. Here, knowledge of the higher worlds can only be achieved at all by means of Imagination. Here we have to live in a world of pictures; the pictures have a picture character from the start. There is no danger of mistaking them in their picture character for anything else. But we have to learn to assess them correctly. In order to know how to relate these pictures to the spiritual reality they represent, we have to apply to them the exact thought processes we have acquired as modern human beings. We really have to think within this world of pictures in the very way we have learnt to think in the ordinary physical world. Every thoughtless glance is damaging to modern initiation. All the healthy ways of thinking we have developed as modern human beings must be brought to bear on higher knowledge. Just as we can find our way about the ordinary physical world if we can think properly, so can we only find our way about in the world of the spirit — which we enter through modern initiation — if we are able to penetrate with the thinking we have gained here in the physical world into all the knowledge we attain through Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. In my book Theosophy,3 as well as in Occult Science and Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, I have always stated categorically that this is a characteristic of modern initiation.
That is why it is so important that anyone who desires to enter into the higher worlds in a modern way should learn to think with exactitude and practise thinking with exactitude. This is not as easy as people suppose. To help you understand what I mean let me say the following: Think of something really startling: Suppose our present respected company were to be surprised tomorrow here in the Goetheanum by a visit from, say, Lloyd George — of course this is only hypothetical, but I want to give an extreme example. If Lloyd George were to turn up here tomorrow you would all have certain thoughts and certain feelings. These thoughts and feelings would not be the result of simply observing all that went on from the moment of his appearance until the moment of his departure. In order to simply follow all this, you would not need to know that it was Lloyd George. If you did not know who it was, you would simply note whatever can be noted with regard to somebody who is entirely unknown to you. Until you learn to disregard everything you already know and feel from elsewhere about something you are observing, as long as you cannot simply follow what is going on without any of this, you are not thinking with exactitude. You would only be thinking with exactitude if you were capable — should Lloyd George really appear here tomorrow — of entertaining thoughts and feelings which applied solely to what actually went on from the moment you first noticed him to the moment when he disappeared from view. You would have to exclude every scrap of prior knowledge. You would have to exclude everything that had irritated you and everything that had pleased you about him and take in only whatever there was to take in at that moment. Only in this way is it possible to learn to think in accordance with reality.
Just think how far human beings are from being able to think with exactitude as regards reality! Only let something stir in your soul and you will see what feelings, living hidden and unconscious in your soul, you allow to rise up. It is extremely difficult to confine oneself solely to what one has seen. Read a description of something and then ask: Is the writer merely describing what he saw or is he not also calling up hundreds and hundreds of prejudices, both in feeling and in thinking, which are bound up with it? Only if you are capable of restricting yourself solely to what you have seen will you be in a position gradually to attain to thinking with exactitude.
Thanks for the link of Live Ink Tom - amazing experience.