When a child is born it lives in a world of mostly undifferntiated experience.  It doesn't cognize this field of experience, but it does "feel" it: pleasure and pain, attraction and rejection, and so forth.  It also doesn't differentiate itself from its surroundings - it's I and its mother (for example) are one.

As the child grows we introduce it to language and culture.  We help it differentiat experience by giving it "names".  Cognition begins to appear first as a way to organize these "names", but cognition is still the weakest member of the organism.  The upper pole, the nerve-sense organism, is highly developed (the head is more developed than the metabolic-limb organization, which are least developed.   The middle rhythmic realm, breath and circulation, instinctively mediates between these two poles as is its primary role.  At the same time, the upper pole has no need for what we later (in adolescence) recognize as real conscious thinking.  The nerve-sense system of the child is learning to organize the world, but not to reflect upon or form theories about it.

Now Barfield (Saving the Appearances) and Coleridge conceive of the tiny child as still rooted in the Divine.  While the world of undiffentiated experience is a challenge, the child is borne into this world enveloped by the Angel.  Through the Angel, what Coleridge called: the primary imagination or the "repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I Am",  develops what Barfield called: figuration.  Figuration is a kind of thinking that we don't even notice because it has become so embedded in our consciousness.  We see a tree and we know it is a tree, but we no longer have to think: "this is a tree", or what that means.

As we grown into language and culture we "incarnate" into this state of figuration - a cognitive-set which is pervasive, and mostly lives below the level of ordinary cognitive processes.

At a certain point we are taught to read.  The elements of the world of figuration (the names) now acquire symbol-sets.  We know a tree when we see it, and we have a related mental picture.  With the symbol-set- or the word - we now have an "abstraction".  The tree, which is a member of the field of figuration, is now represented not by a mental picture, but by a term which ordinary discursive thinking can use (the language-using inner voice).  Reading causes a multiplication of abstractions, few of which we notice.  We read, and then live in the abstractions, but no longer notice the process of abstraction itself.

We are also taught during this formal educative process (and perhaps by our environment of relatives and friends) to reason or reflect, and to theorize.  At the same time, we tend to learn these skills semi-consciously, and like walking (which we had to orginally focus a lot of will on to accomplish), we do reflection and theorizing instinctively (that is we do it, but don't notice the doing of it).

With these tools we then encounter a book: The Philosophy of Freedom (or, Spiritual Activity).  Having now been well trained by the educative process, we read and study the book - that is we live in the abstractions, which then become a kind of secondary influence on figuration, at least with respect to how we see (know/perceive) the processes of our "mind".  Our language and culture have already pre-constructed many of the abstract ideas we have about mind, and now with the encounter with this book we add more abstract ideas.

This path of study is familiar.  We are educated individuals, and we know how to study and read.  The question that lurks heavily here, however, is: Do we know how to experience?

Christ said: "lest ye become again as little children, ye cannot enter the kingdom of heaven"; and, "the kingdom of heaven is inside you.".

The child knew how to purely experience the world of the senses, a process it very much has to complete in order to incarnate into the sense world.  The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity challenges us once more to incarnate into a world of experience, this time not of the sense world, but of the inner world.  As we do this we will bring a kind of debris from our prior life experience in the form of habits connected to having learned to learn by study and reading.

Facing a new field of experience, via scientific introspection (looking and observing that which is within us), we are tempted to bring to this experience pre-conceptions formed by our prior educational experiences.  Bearing within our cognitive-set many abstractions about mind, to which we have added our interpretions of what we believe Steiner meant in writing The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, we place a kind of ghost (Barfield called these: idols) or pre-thought thought in front of the actual experience.  Yet, what we really need to do is to abandon all such prior (old) abstract conceptions, in an effort (strong forces of will-in-thinking are required here) to have unmediated experiences of our own inner life of mind.

Eastern spiritual disciplines are not unfamiliar with this problem, although they solve it in a distinctively Eastern fashion.  They tend to have their own ghosts or idols, which pre-thought thoughts they get rid of by stepping outside the cognitive process itself.  They abandon cognition for pure experience (long years of mediation), in order to persue the goal of recovering the spiritual treasures their traditions remember, when human beings were once living in what Barfield calls: original participation.  The East wants to abandon earth existence in order to return to the undifferentiated Source.

In the cultural West, where science has arisen, the impulse concerns instead the enoblement of earth existence.  We don't want to abandon the maya of existence, but rather want to transform it into something new, out of our own creativity.  Barfield called this: final participation.  The I chooses to co-participate the next phases of spiritual evolution.

At the same time, we in the West have the same problem, which is what to do about the interferance of abstract thinking on the need to know mind (the inner spiritual) as pure experience.  Instead of abandoning cognition, we are to cognize cognition - think about thinking.  Yet, we are stuck with the tools education has granted us: reason, reflection and theorizing; and as well, faced with the problem of figuration (embedded pre-conceptions about mind that we often don't even notice).

This returns us (finally, I am sure for some readers of this) to: the path of study and the path of experience...

My experience is that one should stop reading The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity for long periods of time, and also stop discussing it with others, in order to live more richly in experience (direct reflection and theorizing) out of our own I, without reference to the map Steiner has provided.  In simple terms: far less study, and far more experience.

Once our experience has widened and deepened, and is as free as possible of the Steiner categories (mental picture, moral techique etc.), we return to the text.  We have to spend more time in the actually territory (our own mind) and far less time on the map (the text).  Emerson, for example, was convinced that books were very dangerous.  They were useful to inspire us, but absolutedly deadly if their thought content substitutes for our own cognitive actions.  Remember the last sentence to the original preface of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity: "One must be able to confront an idea and experience it; otherwise one will fall into its bondage."

This includes every idea we gain from reading Steiner.  Only when we can separate ourselves from his "spiritual parenting", and become completely independent of his abstract conceptions, will we really be on a path of inner (spiritual) freedom.

love,

joel