Essay: Beyond the Flat M@L

[Marco Masi]

Thank you Marco! I'll take a look.

In case you're not familiar, the following might be of interest:

• Goethean Science (Chapter 9, Goethe's Epistemology is especially interesting)
• The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception
• Goethe's World View

I have on my desk the second one and struggling to find the time to read it... Thanks so far.

[Anthony66]

The question of morality is also completely clear in Deep M@L. Morality is not some arbitrary rules decreed by a Divinity for humans to follow. Instead, it's the measure for our spiritual activity and whether it leads to greater harmonization and integration of the Cosmic perspective or the opposite. Since the Cosmos is one and the same thing with our deeper strata of consciousness, while we work on the integration of our perspective we are at the same time working for the moral development of the whole world. Here we shouldn't imagine that we turn away from the outer world and manipulate reality only from the spiritual depths. No - we draw the moral impulses from the spiritual depths and then manifest them through our own activity in the outer world.

In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.

Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?

[AshvinP]

The question of morality is also completely clear in Deep M@L. Morality is not some arbitrary rules decreed by a Divinity for humans to follow. Instead, it's the measure for our spiritual activity and whether it leads to greater harmonization and integration of the Cosmic perspective or the opposite. Since the Cosmos is one and the same thing with our deeper strata of consciousness, while we work on the integration of our perspective we are at the same time working for the moral development of the whole world. Here we shouldn't imagine that we turn away from the outer world and manipulate reality only from the spiritual depths. No - we draw the moral impulses from the spiritual depths and then manifest them through our own activity in the outer world.

In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.

Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?

I came across a quote before but cannot figure out who said it (possibly Whitehead) - "all evil is truth which is out of season". That speaks to this notion of immorality as either premature grasping at eternal spiritual knowledge-wisdom or prolonged infancy and adolescence of spiritual knowledge-wisdom. It is all about striking the proper balance by adopting harmonizing perspective of the Christ-being and evolving through the phenomenal world into the spiritual.

The reason why freely developing our moral imagination and moral intuitions (which is essentially becoming fully conscious of them) will also lead to objective moral values is because we inhabit a truly shared spiritual realm of ideation, i.e. imaginations, inspirations, and intuitions. It is a rediscovering of those moral intuitions we (quite literally "we", due to reincarnation) first subconsciously projected into institutions of the physical world, but in full clarity of consciousness and therefore spiritual freedom.

I just wanted to comment briefly, and I am sure Cleric can add more.

[Cleric K]

In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.

Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?

Ashvin summed it up. I just would like to add another example. Ben recently said:

The notion that bliss and joy are only available to the elect I find unpleasant (often racism is part of this). A spiritual hierarchy also tends inevitably towards making moral judgements - (Cleric referred to Purity and Sewage for instance).

The problem always seem to stem from the fact that our soul and spirit are considered either non-existent or completely structureless. There's no other reason that one may find what I said about purity and sewage disagreeable. When we speak about the sensory world, the facts force us to take heed. For example, if we water our crops with gasoline, we can't expect good yields. There are things that are compatible or incompatible with proper biological functions. I hope everyone will agree that there's objective difference between a healthy plant and a diseased or dead plant. In an operation room the highest standards of sterility must be met. Is this some arbitrary value system, enforced by the elite? Well, maybe - if we consider the laws of Nature enforced system. The rooms where silicon chips are being manufactured are even more clean than the operation room. A single dust particle may ruin the process. Is the elite artificially introducing clean-room requirements so that they can drive competitors out of the market?

So we see that in the physical realm we have completely objective requirements depending on what we want to achieve. The peculiar characteristic of our age is that people simply don't want to conceive that our finer organization also has structure, organs, processes, belonging to corresponding environments.

Just as there are objective criteria for healthy and diseased biological life forms, so there are healthy and pathological soul processes. The soul and spirit realm are not made of some abstract energies that we can manipulate with particle accelerators. They are made of ... well, soul and spirit 'material', in other words - environments out of which our thoughts, feelings, will precipitate. The attunement of the latter is not a matter of some mechanical polishing, a kind of soul plastic surgery we can get in exchange of money. It is what we, individually make of ourselves. As far as we are beings with biological life we partake in the Natural order. But with our soul and spirit we partake in the Moral order of the Cosmos. What the physical laws are for the natural world, so are the moral laws for the soul and spirit world. They are not some rigid laws carved in stone as some commandments. They are the living realms within which our spiritual nature flows. They look like laws of social behavior only from our limited Earthly perspective, because we're still as children that need to be told not to poo into and eat from the same plate - that's how unaware we are of the ways reality works. On high there are living spiritual processes that shape the structure of our evolutionary matrix. When we conduct our thoughts, feelings and will in ways incompatible with these strata of reality, we experience the consequences - pain, suffering, torment, hopelessness, fear, death. These are not arbitrary punishments invented by some harsh God. These are natural things, as it is natural than one will bleed to death if his throat is slit. They are the intrinsic dynamics of worlds that people want to know nothing about. Yet this doesn't excuse them from the consequences, in the same way that fire would not excuse those who didn't know its laws. Fire burns without discrimination and says to man "you'll know better next time". The same words are spoken to us from the spiritual world but people don't yet know better.

Just look around, take a look at the excuse for a civilization that we're all part of. What sounds logical:
1/ The World is essentially mindless matter, so morality is purely human epiphenomenon consisting of emergent patterns of behavior of complex particle systems, aimed at optimizing social performance?
2/ MAL wanted to experience precisely this, so we shouldn't interfere?
3/ God created corrupt World so that he can send brand new souls for one-shot lives on Earth to test their faith?
4/ Reality isn't real so we can simply close our eyes and wait to wake up after death?
5/ We're part of development process and we have very serious holes in our understanding of what man is, what he is made of, how his body, soul and spirit function, how they are structured, what they should be nourished with?

If someone believes that it is elitist to recognize that a world based on lies corresponds to a diseased spiritual organism, breathing and drinking sewage, while a world based on pursuit of truth and the harmony of the facts, corresponds to a healthy vibrant spiritual organism, then I don't really have much to add.

[Anthony66]

In moral philosophy, the authority problem surrounds the question of how a moral system is enforced. For example, divine judgement is threatened against the wayward while the righteous are promised reward and favor. Is there a carrot or stick associated with the system you propose? I'm guessing "greater harmonization and integration" is the carrot especially when we realize we are but a perspective of this common deep mind.

Also is there any sense of "objective" morals if you are familiar with that argument? If I understand things, Steiner challenges us to be agents who act freely according to our developing moral imagination, not under some fixed timeless set of commandments. Would one understand that new ways of moral action would evolve through the eons?

Ashvin summed it up. I just would like to add another example. Ben recently said:

The notion that bliss and joy are only available to the elect I find unpleasant (often racism is part of this). A spiritual hierarchy also tends inevitably towards making moral judgements - (Cleric referred to Purity and Sewage for instance).

The problem always seem to stem from the fact that our soul and spirit are considered either non-existent or completely structureless. There's no other reason that one may find what I said about purity and sewage disagreeable. When we speak about the sensory world, the facts force us to take heed. For example, if we water our crops with gasoline, we can't expect good yields. There are things that are compatible or incompatible with proper biological functions. I hope everyone will agree that there's objective difference between a healthy plant and a diseased or dead plant. In an operation room the highest standards of sterility must be met. Is this some arbitrary value system, enforced by the elite? Well, maybe - if we consider the laws of Nature enforced system. The rooms where silicon chips are being manufactured are even more clean than the operation room. A single dust particle may ruin the process. Is the elite artificially introducing clean-room requirements so that they can drive competitors out of the market?

So we see that in the physical realm we have completely objective requirements depending on what we want to achieve. The peculiar characteristic of our age is that people simply don't want to conceive that our finer organization also has structure, organs, processes, belonging to corresponding environments.

Just as there are objective criteria for healthy and diseased biological life forms, so there are healthy and pathological soul processes. The soul and spirit realm are not made of some abstract energies that we can manipulate with particle accelerators. They are made of ... well, soul and spirit 'material', in other words - environments out of which our thoughts, feelings, will precipitate. The attunement of the latter is not a matter of some mechanical polishing, a kind of soul plastic surgery we can get in exchange of money. It is what we, individually make of ourselves. As far as we are beings with biological life we partake in the Natural order. But with our soul and spirit we partake in the Moral order of the Cosmos. What the physical laws are for the natural world, so are the moral laws for the soul and spirit world. They are not some rigid laws carved in stone as some commandments. They are the living realms within which our spiritual nature flows. They look like laws of social behavior only from our limited Earthly perspective, because we're still as children that need to be told not to poo into and eat from the same plate - that's how unaware we are of the ways reality works. On high there are living spiritual processes that shape the structure of our evolutionary matrix. When we conduct our thoughts, feelings and will in ways incompatible with these strata of reality, we experience the consequences - pain, suffering, torment, hopelessness, fear, death. These are not arbitrary punishments invented by some harsh God. These are natural things, as it is natural than one will bleed to death if his throat is slit. They are the intrinsic dynamics of worlds that people want to know nothing about. Yet this doesn't excuse them from the consequences, in the same way that fire would not excuse those who didn't know its laws. Fire burns without discrimination and says to man "you'll know better next time". The same words are spoken to us from the spiritual world but people don't yet know better.

Just look around, take a look at the excuse for a civilization that we're all part of. What sounds logical:
1/ The World is essentially mindless matter, so morality is purely human epiphenomenon consisting of emergent patterns of behavior of complex particle systems, aimed at optimizing social performance?
2/ MAL wanted to experience precisely this, so we shouldn't interfere?
3/ God created corrupt World so that he can send brand new souls for one-shot lives on Earth to test their faith?
4/ Reality isn't real so we can simply close our eyes and wait to wake up after death?
5/ We're part of development process and we have very serious holes in our understanding of what man is, what he is made of, how his body, soul and spirit function, how they are structured, what they should be nourished with?

If someone believes that it is elitist to recognize that a world based on lies corresponds to a diseased spiritual organism, breathing and drinking sewage, while a world based on pursuit of truth and the harmony of the facts, corresponds to a healthy vibrant spiritual organism, then I don't really have much to add.

Thanks Cleric, that was very helpful.

[Anthony66]

....When we reach this highest point we know that we are still an incomplete being, we don't feel as a stable self there but we are carried on the waves of the idea-beings. As we strive to acquire the unity of our Cosmic perspective, more and more the imperfections in that perspective begin to protrude and as we try to sort them out, they begin to transform into the seed-idea of what is to become our next incarnation, or descent into convolution of consciousness. As we become freer from personal entanglements, we become in position to work for the good of the whole humanity. We can't do otherwise because the layers of humanity are also part of our perspective. We can never reach perfection as long as the Cosmic organism as a whole is imperfect.

Cleric,

What is the guarantee that the Cosmic organism will reach perfection or move in that direction? Why not dissolve into an entropic soup? And then what happens - cosmic bliss in a static state for eternity?

[Cleric K]

Cleric,

What is the guarantee that the Cosmic organism will reach perfection or move in that direction? Why not dissolve into an entropic soup? And then what happens - cosmic bliss in a static state for eternity?

As far as the bare intellect is concerned, there's no guarantee of anything except the current experience. The obsession with proofs proceeds from misunderstanding of what intellectual thinking's role is. Instead, thinking should be used as probing tool which reveals more and more of the invisible landscape of meaning within which our state of being metamorphoses.

Is there a guarantee that I'm going to die? Nothing can formally prove this. Yet the harmony of the facts reveals that this is where my Earthly life funnels toward.

It is somewhat similar with the other great existential questions. To answer these we need to continually widen the horizon of our experience. Perfection is not guaranteed. The harmony of the facts revels that conditions are continually changing, just as our bodily conditions change from childhood, through puberty, adulthood and old age. Perfection is something we must strive for if we want to adapt.

As a very simplistic analogy, we can say that the Sun's warmth may be continually rising. Does this mean that we're moving towards perfection? Not really. Actually this could be our demise. It is up to us to perfect by accommodating the changing conditions. If we do nothing, we'll burn.

I know that this is a recurring theme here. People rebel that it's totalitarian that we're forced to adapt to Cosmic conditions. People want to be unconditionally free. Well, everything in our Earthly life confirms that we're dependent on Cosmic unfoldings. The simplest example being death - go rebel against that. For this reason, people simply imagine that after death they'll be completely free. Thus it's pointless to seek any evolution on Earth.

We've led this conversation many times with Eugene and basically we reach the same point every time - to place a bet on some desirable version of the after life and simply go through Earthly life as on an excursion, or investigate what we have here and now, which for any serious nondual/monist conception should give us the means to understand also the state after death (instead of thinking declaring itself impotent to know anything about beyond the threshold and place a bet on a belief of choice).

To your other question - "And then what happens - cosmic bliss in a static state for eternity?" This is also recurring regularly. The problem is that being negligent of our own thinking, we don't notice how we unknowingly absolutize our ego state. Most importantly, we absolutize our Newtonian sense of Time. The very way the question is posed shows that eternity is conceived as something akin to infinite duration. In other words, the Newtonian clock continues to tick, we continue to think, to feel bored, to desire this or that, or feel bliss. Quite naturally this state is seen as quite unappealing. And rightly so. Yet eternity has nothing to do with infinite ticking of clock in static bliss.

It's a very difficult question - no doubt about it. As long as we approach it completely intellectually we continually put the Newtonian arrow of Time (which is the axis of linear thinking) in the blind spot.

For example, we can say that eternity has something to do with bending the arrow of Time into a circle. But what do we do when we try to conceive of this? We secretly place our thinking outside this bending Time. We imagine that we can stand above Newtonian time and observe it but we completely blind ourselves for the fact that our thinking contemplation still ticks along the real arrow in the background. In other words, the intellect is powerless to contemplate the structure of time through its own forces (in the way it's used to contemplate tables and chairs). This can only be approached when we begin to see our real-time thinking itself as the World Process. This has been spoken at length in the Central Topic. The tendency to move in the blind spot and contemplate the conscious contents from a secretly absolutized perspective has been likened to a hysteresis process. As long as we try to understand Time and Eternity as thoughts in our mind, we perpetuate this hysteresis process, we polarize and contemplate thought forms (which should represent eternity) while at the same time we blind ourselves for the cognitive process going through Newtonian linear time. Only when the hysteresis process spirals into unity we begin to experience the topology of Time, within which thinking flows. This is not achieved by abstract philosophizing but through inner activity of a new kind. We need to perceive the thinking process and guide it in a way which is largely unknown to the cognitive habits of the intellectual age.

I remind of the fishes analogy.

As said, these are difficult things. The are difficult for those who honestly want to approach them, let alone for those who simply seek excuses not to tackle them. We can approach these matters only with a dose of humility. As long as we believe that the highest wisdom consists of simply calling all Earthly existence an illusion and expect any potential higher reality only after death, these questions can't be approached.

[lorenzop]

The word ‘meaning’ is used a lot here in this thread and other threads, by both you and Ashwin. Sometimes with ‘Cosmic’ or as ‘landscape’. What are you referring to?

[AshvinP]

The word ‘meaning’ is used a lot here in this thread and other threads, by both you and Ashwin. Sometimes with ‘Cosmic’ or as ‘landscape’. What are you referring to?

Meaning is what we live in all the time. It is what we perceive all around us in the world. The perceptual characteristics of the world are about as varied as they can get, but the meaning is what unites them into coherent experiences. Cognitive science has also confirmed that we perceive meaning prior to quantitative perceptual structures. When I have referred to "cosmic meaning", probably I meant intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. The former are meanings immediately given in perception for modern man, like the meaning of spatial dimension, while the latter are more the archetypal meanings of the sort we discern in mythology, poetry, music, and aesthetics of all sort.

[lorenzop]

The word ‘meaning’ is used a lot here in this thread and other threads, by both you and Ashwin. Sometimes with ‘Cosmic’ or as ‘landscape’. What are you referring to?

Meaning is what we live in all the time. It is what we perceive all around us in the world. The perceptual characteristics of the world are about as varied as they can get, but the meaning is what unites them into coherent experiences. Cognitive science has also confirmed that we perceive meaning prior to quantitative perceptual structures. When I have referred to "cosmic meaning", probably I meant intuitions, inspirations, and imaginations. The former are meanings immediately given in perception for modern man, like the meaning of spatial dimension, while the latter are more the archetypal meanings of the sort we discern in mythology, poetry, music, and aesthetics of all sort.

So meaning is not a characteristic or property of the world, but a paradigm/model through which we experience the world. Is freedom then to live without meaning?