Monday 24 October 2016

Personal experience of super-sensible perception

I have come to believe that it is essential for modern Man to develop super-sensible perception; in other words, to develop the ability to (and habit of) perceiving some of the reality of the world beyond the sense-perceptible/ scientistic/ materialistic.

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=steiner+prophecy

This all sounds very spiritual, mystical and woo-woo - and of course it is; by mainstream contemporary standards of public discourse - yet super-sensible perception is also pretty much an everyday occurrence for many (not all) people.

Super-sensible perception may be identified because we perceive something; yet we know that what are perceiving is not a part of the sensory data.

To show what I mean I will give examples from my personal experience.

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1. Music

When hearing great music, I am aware that what I most value is not in the composition, nor is it captured by the performance: it is not simply a product of sound perceived by hearing. This is a fact, and the fact is obvious - but not trivial. Even when the music is nothing but arpeggio block chords, as with the piece above.
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2. Pictures
 

When viewing a great painting (the above being of Salisbury Cathedral by John Constable) I feel far more than the depiction or the paint, is doing - there is a definite and solid sense of mystery about what I perceive.
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Poems

My love he built me a bonny bower,
And clad it a’ wi’ lilye flour;
A brawer bower ye ne’er did see,
Than my true love he built for me.

There came a man, by middle day,
He spied his sport, and went away;
And brought the King that very night,
Who brake my bower, and slew my knight.

(The beginning of the Lament of the Border Widow, an anonymous Scottish-English Border Ballad.)

The above poetry is simple, crude, un-literate - the first verse uses many conventional and clichéd phrases, the second verse is literalistic in its description... Yet super-sensible perception tells me, with rock-solidity and stark factuality - that this poem is as beautiful and profound as can be told.
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4. Stories



Please don't ask me to explain what on earth (or off it) The Little Prince story is about - I only know it is about much much more than my sense perceive.
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5. Paranormal phenomena

A large majority of the population feel quite sure that some dreams mean something beyond the dream; or that they sometimes foresee future events; or that the sometimes experience telepathic communications - that such experiences are sometimes valid - and they equally sure that these valid experiences cannot always be explained by five-sense, 'objective' perception. I agree.
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6. The night sky

When I look at the night sky, on a clear night (only on a clear night, with darkness between the stars) a can see a network of fine silver lines radiating from and joining the heavenly bodies, stretching across considerable segments of the sky: I see not so much a spray of detached stars, as a luminous gossamer web over the dome.

I know that I see these threads by super-sensible means - because they are not seen by other observers (i.e. they are not an optical illusion), they are not recordable by binoculars - yet the lines are there, quite definite; present but not originating from vision.

In sum, super-sensible perception is something common and everyday that most people experience already - they only need to notice it, take it seriously, and regard it as real.