I would like to let you all know that a new Philosophy of Freedom Study Group has now begun in Aberdeen!
We are 7 souls making a humble beginnning before the summer recess, and with the will to pick ourselves up again in the new academic year. We are all Camphill co-workers, half of us are not members of the Anthroposophical Society and 2 have never read PoF.
Anyone from our North East Scotland locality is welcome to email me through my contact page if you are tempted to join us. We meet on Sunday evening. There is no charge and no expectation of genius. What we lack in expertise we make up for in enthusiasm.
John Ralph
Aberdeen Study Group First Report
We have decided to try out our way of working this busy month before we begin to study sequentially in the autumn. We spent an intensive 2 hours on paragraphs 17 and 18 from Chapter 5, suggested by one of the group. The original suggestion was a whole page but we only got half way.
A question arose as to what Steiner means by “awareness of oneself” (which is rendered as "perception of oneself" in another translation). Does he mean sensory perception of self or the self image in our thinking?
There was some shock and disbelief at the assertion: “Our thinking is not individual like our sensing and feeling; it is universal.” This led to a discussion of how it is only possible to communicate because there is some common ground in the field of thinking.
We pictured what we were trying to grasp and arranged the results next to one another. Then we shared what we had attempted to colour and how the different images related to one another in each person’s perception.
In the following days emails have been exchanged about our experiences of the session which have included the wish to continue the work using the same method soon.
Midsummer Reporting from Aberdeen
We studied Chapter 5: 19-22. It was very helpful to have the German original text available and 2 participants with German as their first language. We discovered that the inner gestures within the text have a rhythmical repetition within the paragraphs we have looked at so far. As I do not have the German text to hand I cannot recapitulate the example here.
In one sentence we found a confusion in the inner gesture transleted from the German; "But since we stand at a point in the periphery, and find that our own existence is bounded by definite limits, we must explore the region which lies outside our own being with the help of thinking, which projects into us from the universal world existence." (http://www.philosophyoffreedom.com/node/3579) The word "projects" was originally a word that describes the way mountains reach up into the sky. Perhaps someone can post that German word for me as this comment is probably gobbledegook without the fact behind it.
A question we took away with us: what is the source of thinking?
Tom, please would you put this question in the forum for me?
how to post a topic in the forum
To post a Philosophy of Freedom topic in the forum click the forum link at the top of the website and then click "post new topic". Then select the chapter forum from the scroll down menue. Each POF chapter has its own forum. By posting POF topics in the forum an archive is built for future reference.
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