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Pinchbeck on Steiner
Really cool passage from New World Disorder’s interview with Daniel Pinchbeck. In this segment, Pinchbeck is talking about the profundity of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophy:
He notes that you can’t really make a final distinction between our thoughts about things and the things themselves. Thinking, for him, is a part of reality - as much a part of reality as any physical object. He points out that we have no right to consider a plant’s ability to produce leaves, roots, and blossoms as separate from the thoughts we have about that plant. It may be that our thoughts about the plant are as much a property of that plant as its blossoms, stems, and leaves. If thinking is recognized as a part of the world in this way, then we can also see that thought is neither subjective nor objective, but a universal world process in which we participate. Thinking is different than all other processes, because it is the only activity that we experience from the inside - when we use our thinking to investigate anything else, we are looking at something outside of out thought. But when we investigate our thinking, we have to use our thinking to do so. One beautiful aspect of thoughts is that they can be shared - once I have a thought, and write it down or express it, anybody else can also experience that thought from their own perspective. Hence, you can neither call thinking subjective or objective. This perspective is incredibly liberating. If thinking is a part of reality, and it is neither subjective or objective, then, for Steiner, there can be no limits to cognition. There is also no possibility of nailing down a “Final Theory” of everything. This is just a delusion of a certain mindset.
My favorite part of all that is this idea that our thoughts about something - a plant in this instance - are as much a part of it as its physical attributes. Oh awesome, this also contains a quote about Steiner which I’ve been searching for where I originally read it for months now:
Steiner believed that the best way to oppose “evil” is not through strident protest and negativity (which tends to be the monotonous approach of the Left), but by simply creating what is “good.”
Goddamn! How great is that? For all you Steiner-heads out there, can you recommend to the rest of us good entrance points into Steiner’s vast body of work?
September 29th, 2005 at 8:45 am
Well, I can’t reccommend, but I can de-recommend How to Know Higher Worlds, it’s a very supplemental guide and offers little in the way of “thinking” or theory.
September 29th, 2005 at 11:14 am
I’m into Steiner’s Agriculture lectures right now and find them deeply illuminating:
http://www.garudabd.org/Agriccourse/contents.html
Lots of material on the Steiner Archive:
http://www.rsarchive.org/Books/
September 29th, 2005 at 1:40 pm
i can’t recommend any steiner but as I was drifting out of sleep this morning and into the world of the waking the quantum physics wave-particle duality was in my mind as a paradigm with multiple applications - true about everything at the deepest level
the world is real from certian angles, an illusion from other, but what it really is we cannot know
spirits are independent entities form one angle, psychological angles from another, etc.
I am a self-contained ego from one angle, a part of my environment with no boudaries from another (where do i stiop and the outside world begins?)
ideas are true from one angle, false from another etc
the Participatory anthropic principle really does seem the best explanation to me some days
September 29th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
Hm, that’s a great point about wave/particle duality being a metaphor for a new kind of thinking that can be applied across the board. Never thought about it like that but it makes perfect sense.
September 29th, 2005 at 2:53 pm
it has always puzzled me why we keep building more powerful particle accelerators to fire that particle with greater force into another particle for a split second of slightly bigger fireworks. we aren`t creating different particles, just different sparks.
and yes, lets stop putting life into negative stuff, choose the positive instead. that`s what meditation is for. the third eye is the the first wysiwyg device.
September 29th, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Waking logic never makes quite as much sense as that sort of hypnogogic dream logic but at the time I felt as though I had resolved life’s depest riddle. Of course it loses something in the retelling though.
The world is real/not real
spirits are internal/external
i am self-contained/boudaryless
ideas are true/false
etc
both at once in every instance
September 29th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
I’ve never read Steiner but his comment about The Left’s negativity bears comment from me, because I noticed (before Bush Jr. “took office”) that The Right has been studying The Left’s playbook for the past two decades, and were making strides in their cause by co-opting the very tactics that cause right-wingers to decry “the liberal media” in the first place.
Whatever negativity and strident protest The Left inspired in the ’60s (SDS and the Yippies come to mind) The Right has improved upon it and made it work for them.
This explains why lots of Democrats seem to be kowtowing to Republican demands: they are responding to the overwhelming pressure that is coming from The Right like gangbusters.
Thank God for catastrophe and human incompetence, the two things I hold sacred in this world!
September 30th, 2005 at 12:11 am
They’ve done an amazing job - just keeping up a steady drumbeat.
The latest thing you see on conservative chatboards is the phrase “liberal fascist.” It doesn’t matter if it makes any sense or not just use it every chance you get until it becomes a commonplace that nobody questions.
February 20th, 2006 at 4:11 am
[…] today, or how strung out Angelina Jolie looked yesterday. There’s a Daniel Pinchbeck quote I like which I think could be applied here: Steiner believed that the b […]
October 20th, 2006 at 2:47 pm
[…] There’s a nice quote I found a while back by psychedelic author Daniel Pinchbeck where he is referencing the work of mystic Rudolf Steiner, one of his heros. Pinchbeck explains that: “Thinking, for him, is a part of reality - as much a part of reality as any physical object. He points out that we have no right to consider a plant’s ability to produce leaves, roots, and blossoms as separate from the thoughts we have about that plant. It may be that our thoughts about the plant are as much a property of that plant as its blossoms, stems, and leaves.” […]