To me, the Hamerling quote about being able to want (will) what one does not want (will) is so much hair-splitting. He prefers to theorise about the factors influencing human life rather than consider facts which can be observed by anybody in their own lives.

We all know - well at least I do - that we often have to force ourselves to do something we don't want to do for a (hopefully) higher reason. For example, I would like to lie in bed a bit longer but know that my family wants to go out for an excursion. Or I know that it would be pleasant to surf the internet, but I have a meditation to practice first. And so on.

In all of this, I do not experience all of these motives as externally driving causes - some (for example, forcing myself to get up supposedly for the sake of my family, postponing a pleasure because I feel that the meditation is more important to me and so on) I must take up consciously and make an effort of will.

In other words, it is a basic human experience that we experience a "hierarchy" of needs or motives. Of course I'm borrowing there from Maslow.

Of course, this is all made much clearer in Part 2 of PoF.

But Hamerling would say, yes but it only _seems_ that way to you - in fact, it is simply that the strongest motive is controlling your action without your realising it.

But really, in my opinion anyone who maintains this in the face of the simplest facts of human life either prefers a theoretical weaving of ideas to real life or perhaps even is acting out of some kind of ill will that prevents them from recognising that precisely in the midst of the "hierarchy of needs/motives" in human life there arises constantly the possibility of acting freely.

Sometimes I don't even know where my rational decisions come from. Can I know anything about my self, or is my real self hidden like the dark side of the moon?

Away with all this worrying about it, then! Maybe it's not even important to know! Can't we just define freedom as the ability to move forward toward what we want, and stop worrying about why we want it?

Hamerling says yes. Since we have no real control over what we desire, our only freedom must lie in whether we're able to do what we desire, right? Isn't this what the Declaration of Independence means by "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness?"

It certainly feels like freedom to be able to chase after what we want. Every time I get in my car, I feel free just driving down the road. But when my forward motion is blocked, the free feeling evaporates. If this goes on for a while, I begin to feel ill-used, almost as if my God-given right to unrestricted forward motion were being attacked by the motorists in front of me. When I catch myself feeling this way, I have to laugh! But nevertheless the feeling is there, underneath normal everyday feelings, waiting to get called up by any circumstance that impedes my progress. (Some people can't laugh at it, and road rage is born.)

The odd thing is, it doesn't matter where we're going or why; we still get upset about getting stuck in traffic. We may be going somewhere we dread going, like a job interview for a job we don't really want, or a root-canal appointment. It might be putting it too strongly to say that, the less we really want to go where we're going, the madder we get at being held up. But I wouldn't be surprised if something like that were operating, because if you're in a bad mood to begin with, it gets worse faster.

Apart from the physical feeling of freedom that unrestricted forward motion brings, what does it have to do with the living concept of freedom we are trying to find in POF? Is the answer "nothing at all?" Or is being able to do what we want merely the outer garment that freedom only sometimes wears? Hamerling seems content to settle for the clothes of freedom, while its body stays hidden, for he says that our will is determined by the strongest motive, not just sometimes, but always. And he seems content that this garment of freedom stays at the mercy of external circumstances. Do we have to be content with this too?

Steiner insists that we must stay with the motive if we're going to define freedom in a meaningful way. Is it conscious or unconscious? Does it impel us with absolute necessity or is there room for some other relationship to arise between it and us? (I don't know if anyone else sees humor in his rebuttal of Hamerling, but I do! I love the way he turns Hamerling's semantical argument on its ear.)

So apparently we're not going to get off easy, as Hamerling would prefer. We're going to be wrestling with our motives, not just accepting the rule of the strongest. We're going to be asking ourselves how we decide things, before we ask how we do things. We're going to look past the clothes!

Lori turned PoF into a short story about driving. She said:

"Every time I get in my car, I feel free just driving down the road. But when my forward motion is blocked, the free feeling evaporates. If this goes on for a while, I begin to feel ill-used, almost as if my God-given right to unrestricted forward motion were being attacked by the motorists in front of me. When I catch myself feeling this way, I have to laugh! But nevertheless the feeling is there, underneath normal everyday feelings, waiting to get called up by any circumstance that impedes my progress. (Some people can't laugh at it, and road rage is born.)"

For the purpose of discussion, let's allow the "driving down the road" to stand for freedom (the intuitive occurence, the experience of thinking, the self-perceiving concept, etc...). Who or what registers that the "forward motion" is blocked? Observe it and notice what happens in the transition from freedom to blocked. Who is there? Who is saying that "the free feeling evaporates"? Who feels ill-used and under attack? (By the way, your choice of words matches my driving experience perfectly). What is happening in the transition? Who is it that even has the capacity to feel threatend? Is the freedom actually evaporating, or does it only appear that way to the emerging split, the emerging subjective self? What is that self really afraid of? What does it really want? Does it really just want to keep driving? But my favorite part of your story begs just one question:

What in the world has the capacity to laugh in the face of such attrocious abuse? The only thing I don't like about your story is that somebody could use the content to invalidate the point. They could say something like, "Well, she's just laughing because nothing really important is happening, just cars driving." I would want the driving aspect of your story to stand for ANY perceived act of aggression, because I believe that the laughter is a deed of love that can emerge in the midst of even the most apparently awful, I/world split conditions.

If Freedom clothes itself in whatever conditions are available to it, we can eventually learn to catch it when it is changing out of one outfit and into another. This "catching" of Freedom changing its clothes IS the observation of thinking's formlessness. The experience of intuiting is the only way we can speak of a free act. Steiner puts it:

"Man is free to the extent that he is able to realize in his acts of will the same mood of soul that lives in him when he becomes aware of the forming of purely ideal intuitions."

I know the horse is dead, but I can't help but mention that in the above quote (Chap 12 addition) Steiner does NOT say that man is free to the extent that he selects the right ideal. He makes a point to say that it is a MOOD that COMES with noticing the FORMING of intuitions. In the 1918 additions Steiner often shifts the focus to the process, to moods, to cognitive feelings, to the felt-life of concepts because the finished husks of concepts (what we say later when we are back in the split I/world) are temporary and always changing.

The 1918 additions make it much harder to talk about freedom as anything having to do with selecting or choosing or linking. The 1918 additions begin to reveal a new mode of expression that Steiner, I believe, was developing to help the reader get past the detour of thinking PoF is about anything other than what is happening in the reader right now.

Lori ends with:

" We're going to be asking ourselves how we decide things, before we ask how we do things. We're going to look past the clothes!"

Drive On!

Hi Jeff

I love your idea of freedom changing its clothes! I'm not sure if I could laugh at just any old act of aggression, though! Unless maybe it comes from inside me. Then I can laugh at the silly monster. Before I can laugh at someone else's monster I'd want to be sure they can laugh at it too, so I don't get pounded.

Yea, Lori, avoiding major monster poundings is a great idea at all times!

Ok, I hear you on the whole "laughing in the face of aggression" thing, but I want to say that in my opinion it wasn't you that was able to laugh. Ego might try to immediately interpret the laugh has belonging to it and meaning something about it, but I would suggest that the laugh does not come from the Lori Story even though the Lori Story might kidnap the laugh immediately and call it its own.

Love just comes and it surprises us. The laughter comes. This is freedom. It might not always take the form of an auditory chuckle, but that is just a type of clothing that the "laugh" can take. I believe that "The Laugh" results from what happens when our wholeness sees how seriously the split-selves are taking themselves. It's not a mean laugh at all. It just comes and washes away the split for a moment. it's highly cognitive, however ego must interpret it differently.

A couple years ago I helped facilitate a group of young college students who had eating disorders. As the weeks passed and the group deepened their trust for each other, they became more honest and more able to see through each other's odd rationalizations and defense mechanisms. At one point a woman who was anorexic and growing thinner as of late, said something like, "Oh, God, I just am so HUGE!" A trusted group member from across the circle who was also struggling with anorexia responded with something like,

"Debby, you're the biggest person I have ever seen!" This was said in a beautifully loving and sarcastic manner. Debby (name obviously changed) began to tremble into laughter, into tears and back into laughter. I was awe struck. I don't want to minimize Debby's experience just to make a point here, but I will just say that I believe her new found capacity to laugh at herself was an opening up to something that had nothing to do with the Debby Story. It was a huge step in her healing that never needed to be mentioned or philosophised about, although we could have if she had been drawn to such questions.

I think that when a free deed takes place, it appears almost reflexive to the ego. There isn't a lot of deciding or trying or linking of percepts and concepts on the stage of self-consciousness. It comes. We make room for it. No; we ARE the space in which it comes. Thinking is that opening into the eternal flood of freedom. This might not sound coherent, so just go ahead and laugh!

Jeff

There you go again, finding freedom in the unlikeliest places! That's one of the things I like best about what you write!

Any animal who can move, can experience the freedom of being able to do what its nature drives it to strive for. As human beings, we share this ability but also have other qualities. (Here Steiner uses the phrase "vernünftigen Denken" which has the literal translation [from the online dictionary] "reasonable thinking.") The other qualities we have rest on our reasonable thinking, or arise from our rational thinking, as this translation has it. Anyway, rational thinking is in there on the ground floor!

Since our human nature rests on this kind of thinking, nothing science discovers about how animals behave can teach us about human freedom, Steiner says. That would include Paul Ree's comparison between us and asses, as an argument against the existence of free will.

Yet he includes Ree's comparison, to show what misunderstandings have arisen from the habit of comparing humans to animals. So, in order to participate in these misunderstandings, I want to ask: Is there some way in which I could look at my own behavior and say, "Ree's right! I am an ass!"?

Once again I'll try the first person here. (I love it when Steiner uses plants, animals and people to illustrate his points in POF.)

"“It is easy to explain why the movement of a stone seems to us necessary, while MY VOLITION does not. The causes which set the stone in motion are external and visible, while the causes which determine MY VOLITION are internal and invisible. Between us and the place of their activity there is the skull of the ASS-LIKE ME. . . . The determining causes are not visible and therefore thought to be non-existent. The volition, it is explained, is, indeed, the cause of MY turning round, but is itself unconditioned; it is an absolute beginning..."

For some reason I've always imagined that the donkey in Ree's example had been led out of the barn in order to do some task for its master, but abruptly stopped, turned around and headed back to the barn again at a good clip, so its master had to chase it.

How am I like this donkey? So often I leave the house and head for the barn with some small mission in mind, only to arrive distracted and do something else instead. Then, when I get back to the house carrying my feeling of accomplishment, I'm shocked to find the original thing still undone.

Or I come to my senses while in the barn and realize I've forgotten what I came there for. Then sometimes with effort I remember, but occasionally have to go back to the house again and start over. (Luckily the house is close to the barn!) Where's the donkey here? I seem to turn into one halfway between house and barn. I start out as a purposeful human being, striding along, and arrive as something else entirely. As long as I'm mindful of my purpose, I know why I'm walking toward the barn. The instant I no longer know, I'm just walking that way because one foot steps out in front of the other. I don't know precisely when the change happens, but I know afterwards that it did.

So it's unmindfulness that makes me take steps to carry out a motive after I've forgotten what that motive is. Unmindfulness throws a veil over my motives. But what unmindfulness covers, mindfulness can uncover, right?

Anyway, that's how I think I'm like Ree's donkey. But, going by what Ree himself says here, it doesn't look like that's why he thinks I'm an ass. He's saying that the real true causes that determine my motives are as obscure, as ding-an-sich-like, as the causes that determine the donkey's motives. Between me and the cause of the donkey's motives lies the donkey's thick obdurate skull, and between me and the real true cause of my motives lies something just as impenetrable. Behind this impenetrable wall lies a world of causes working without my supervision.

So, in Ree's paradigm, I can even remember my motive all the way to the barn, but because I'm permanently barred from knowing its causes, I'm still an ass, inwardly. And the reason I'm permanently barred, he says, is that the causes are not visible. I can't perceive them. What if I can perceive them? "But you can't!" Ree replies. But what if I can?

Somewhere in my reading I've latched on to the idea that to declare a region of the mind "The Unconscious," is like drawing a line in the sand and saying, "You can't cross this line." Then, when someone does cross it, you have to say, "Well, I didn't mean that line, but rather this line here. You really can't cross this line!" and draw a new line in the sand. And so it keeps going, with new lines constantly having to be drawn. Isn't Ree doing something like this?

Thinking is obviously not a means of perception to Ree! But it is to me, because through thinking I perceive whether my motive has come with me to the barn intact, or not. If it hasn't, then through thinking I can try to call it up again. Or if that fails I can carry my thinking self back to the house until the sight of some evocative object reminds me of the original thoughts I had about needing to go over to the barn and do something about it.

Furthermore, through thinking I can ask myself, "What caused me to want to do this?" and I can sometimes even answer!

So I suppose that, when I'm being unmindful, I'm a little bit like Ree's donkey, but leading myself, with thinking, toward consciousness of my own motives isn't entirely beyond my capabilities.

Lori wrote:

"Somewhere in my reading I've latched on to the idea that to declare a region of the mind "The Unconscious," is like drawing a line in the sand and saying, "You can't cross this line." Then, when someone does cross it, you have to say, "Well, I didn't mean that line, but rather this line here. You really can't cross this line!" and draw a new line in the sand. And so it keeps going, with new lines constantly having to be drawn. Isn't Ree doing something like this?"

You've just described the history of depth psychology over the last 110 years. Bless Freud's soul for having the courage to pursue his intuition about the unconscious. By doing so he brought an entire new domain into view that we all have benefited from regardless of whether or not we completely reject his theoretical framework. After Freud we can watch how an endless stream of brilliant theorists and practitioners redefine the notion of The Unconscious. They brought a new sensitivity to how our freedom and conditioning interact constantly with each other; the work on defense mechanisms alone is breathtaking to behold.

But PoF comes along and declares that there is no need to posit the construct of an "unconscious". PoF has no interest in inference because it demands that there is only one thing to observe: your participation, right now, in your individualized activity of freedom. Everything else is some form of dreaming.
As a dude who's always been interested in the zone where philosophy and psychology cross, I took very quickly to the way PoF reversed the whole notion of the "unconscious" on its head.

But what about the Donkey?

Lori, let's pretend you march out to the barn almost every morning to do some task a certain way. You've done it for years. If I were to interrupt you on your walk to the barn and ask what you are doing, let say you would respond with something like,

"well Jeff, this is the best time of day to do X because X requires such and such. I'd rather do it now then later and X seems to go better if I take care of it before Y and Z."

Ok...you've been doing it this way ever since you can remember. One day you find yourself in the barn having just marched in and you get distracted by something else. You attend to it and then have that strange feeling that there is something else to do.....but what.....oh, jeez, of course. It's time to do X. This happens a few more times this month and one day as you are walking back into the house and realizing that you still have something....to....do..........??????????..........a new feeling emerges.......very strange......kind of fluttery....and anxious....but there is strange excitement that comes with this feeling.......as it emerges so does the thought that you forgot to do X again...but now there is something very new with the thought of doing X....You are not sure what...but you stay with this new sense and let it keep coming....Somehow X feels more distant and....less....no, it could be, but it really feels less necessary. Your mind tells you that you must be crazy because YOU KNOW that X is necessary and that you should have done it....but....you stay with this Idea as it comes into being....and all of a sudden it forms itself in an explication that says,

"Oh my Goodness....I've only been doing X that way because I wanted to please my dad...He did X that way. He taught me how important it was to do X just like that. Each of these mornings when I felt so good marching out to do X, I now see that the joy and determination in my step was satisfying a deep desire to keep running the farm "the right way"....wow.....now that I realize this....it's really funny but I see that there are 10 other ways to do X and I'd actually enjoy it more doing it that way....WOW!"

I made this up, obviously but I hope the experience can be generalized to any situation in which we know why we do something. After this intense, and potentially life changing, realization we could say there is a new found freedom in your action. Ok, but.....something in me resists this interpretation. In three years you might go through something similar and realize, "Holy Bucket of Worms, This whole Farm life has been simply about pleasing dad...I really, in my heart, would be doing Z!!!!!" And then if we are attributing freedom to explicated knowledge, we would have do say that even after the first big insight that caused you to do X your way, you were still being guided by unknown causes and motives.....

You know me well enough to know that I can't tolerate this. If we search for freedom in its clothing of finished concepts, we only will ever find it when we think we know things. If we let freedom be what is always with us if we attend to it, if we let our attending to our experiencing stand for our freedom, then we don't need to deny that doing X was ever an instance of being a skull of the ass.

Who knows, after doing Z for 8 years and loving it, you might go, "Oh, it wasn't that I shouldn't be a farmer, but I need to be a farmer MY way and now I know, after doing Z, I see that farming is my passion.." These examples could easily be read as instances of somebody who simply can't make up her mind. That's a limitation of how I am writing and the somewhat artificial nature of the situation. I would hope that we could see that X can stand for all of those things that we march towards with conviction and understanding in our step. And, therefore, X stands for how our "world" changes as we go deeper into the mystery of what and who we really are. And, therefore, X stands for our freedom in every moment as long as we are willing to live curiously on the edge of this moment and ask into this edge.....what's going on right now for me....Who am I right here at this place....?

In other words, X can be seen as an instance of being a donkey without knowing it OR X can be seen as the soft whispering that is always there saying,

"Hey, you're not alone. You haven't done anything wrong and there's nothing you need to to do to deserve or earn the freedom that you are. You are right on track, just notice me."

I am not suggesting we don't reflect on our actions and motives. I'm not suggesting, "Hey, you're already free so don't worry about it."....I'm suggesting that your freedom is experienced within the act of turning your attention to the source of any motive at any time; your freedom is the "turning towards" and no matter what your mind ends up saying about the object of your attention, you can remain attentive to the experience of turning and the infinite radiance that issues forth from there.

Many anthropops claim that one of Steiner's most free deeds was the Christmas Conference in which he united his karma with the Society. That's fine with me as long as we also notice that he was not certain what its results would be before he did it and it took a period of time until he felt certain that it was being blessed from above. In fact, I'll vote for it being a true deed of love, only if we recognize that true deeds of love do not need the kind of certainty and clarity that the ego demands of them.

Jeff

p.s. I sometimes used to wish that Steiner had called the book, "The Skull of the Ass" It's a great phrase!