Chapter 6 - The Human Individuality:
Key 1 - Experience the continual OSCILLATION in yourself between universal world process and personal feeling.
Quote 1 - "We are certainly not the external things, but together with them we belong to one and the same world. That section of the world which I perceive as my subject is permeated by the stream of the universal world process...All that is contained inside the skin belongs to the cosmos as a whole...The forces active within the limit of my body are the same as those which exist outside. Therefore, in reality, I am the things; not, however, insofar as I am a perceiving subject..." (1st pgh, chapter 6)
Quote 2 - "Our life is a continual oscillation between our living with the universal world process and our own individual existence. The further we ascend into the universal nature of thinking, where what is individual ultimately interests us only as example, as an instance of the concept, the more the character of the quite definite individual personality is lost within us. The further we descend into the depths of our own soul life and let our feelings resound with the experiences of the outer world, the more we cut ourselves off from universal life. A true individuality will be one who reaches up with his feelings farthest into the region of the ideal." (5 pghs from end of Chapter 6)
Become this pulse, and feel the real painful transition between world and self. Find the I in-between the whole pulse of thinking and feeling. Weave together dying and living into one continuous swinging back and forth.
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Key 2 - Overcoming of the "Physiological Proofs of the limits of our knowledge" by becoming aware of the true nature of Intuitive Thinking, Pure Perception, and the formation of a representation.
Key quote - "From the fact that an electrical process calls forth light in the eye, those who conclude that outside our organism, what we sense as light is only a mechanical process of motion, forget that they are only passing from one perception to another, and nowhere to something over and above perceptions. Just as we can say that the eye perceives a mechanical process of motion in its surrounding as light, we can also say that the regulated change in an object is perceived by us as a process of motion."
In other words, neither the perception of motion or the perception of light could ever be judged to be primary in importance without the operation of thinking.
We must dig out a certain sickness in our thinking, as Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon has pointed out in "Spiritual Science in the 21st Century" and elsewhere. This ill representation that controls much of our life concerns the false belief that if only we could find the correct group of perceptions, they would BY THEMSELVES, show us the real nature of our subjectively limited reality. Thus, the quest to find the 'true nature' of matter, the 'true vibrations of color,' the 'true nature' of evolutionary mutation and so on, all based on observation (supposedly with no thinking involved).
Steiner uses the case of light, cinematography and motion.
Take the example of watching a horse running on the screen. We might say that the limits of our knowledge comes from the fact that I see a horse running, but I do not see the fact that the image of the horse running is actually, 'behind the scenes,' a group of static images that are flashed with speed into one area of vision. So, such people want to say that if only we can observe the hidden 'behind the scenes' nature of matter, light, color, cells, etc. we will find the true world that appears as subjective illusion in our natural life. But the deception that is not recognized here is that no percept is ever connected to any other, no percept is ever understandable at all, no percept is ever categorizable at all, no percept demonstrates any aspect of organized mathematical truth at all. Everything is understandable, arranged in categories and sets, mathematically abstracted, evaluated in terms of illusion and reality, etc. THROUGH THINKING ONLY! No percept demonstrates its own truth value, only thinking. Hence, no mechanical or electrical motion behind the scenes is ever observed, because mechanical ideas, electricity, and motion itself are CONCEPTS, that can only be fully recognized and expanded through intuitive thinking. The pure flux of sensations, perceptions, feelings, desires, fragments of light, darkness, color, flicks on a screen, etc. are never organized into knowledge without thinking, and specifically the creation of representations (or particular percept-fragments linked up to concepts). Therefore, there is no deep layer perception that will unveil the truth of a more surface layer of perception BY ITSELF. This only happens through thinking and thinking (which can only be intuitively, no perceptually, non-imagistically experienced) adds the fundamental ingredient for all knowledge - it is truly connected with the real essences of the world as they are, not just the perceptible fragments.
Even the laws of nature as expressed mathematically do not enclose the wholeness of reality, since they forget about percepts altogether and they ignore the creative element of world-unveiling in intuitive thinking (which they used UNCONSCIOUSLY to form their equations!).
This is a tough one to wrestle with. Good luck!
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Key 3 - As Alva Noe says, the skin is not a 'magical membrane' that somehow cuts all of our experience inside from the laws of the rest of the world. Therefore intuit, perceive and feel that what is inside your skin is blended together with what is happening outside; and what is happening outside, is melted together with what you experience as inside. Then find and create a middle, moral, spot of self-perception, self-intuition.
via GIPHY
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