Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, Idealism vs Materialism

[Ben Iscatus]

I've upgraded the OS from 4th density to 5th density and now have the capacity to live as a breatharian.

Yes, a breatharian would be a good example of an upgrade. There was a video by Thomas Campbell where he told of giving up food and water for quite a long while, he said without getting hungry or thirsty, but after reading that dehydration can cause kidney failure, he suddenly felt a pain in his side and resumed normal consumption!

Would a person that doesn't eat, drink or breathe be sixth density? Or just dead?

[Papanca]

I haven't been able to meet or hear of anyone who strikes me as having had this upgrade. In a world of 8 billion, and mass internet connectivity, it's almost surprising that we don't come across a few homo sapientior types. So I'm a skeptic. Harari says homo deus will have to be bio-engineered; but that won't be for spiritual qualities, will it?

Sharing your skepticism. If we look back at the millennia of the human history, we can see a certain progress in human behavior and mentality, much of it can be attributed to the technological and cultural progress and access to quality education. But the progress has been very slow, gradual and haven't yet touched the deep instinctive egoic human survival mechanisms. There have been many examples of spiritually progressed individuals, but they represent only a negligible minority of population. But also, over the history, there have been a lot of utopian theories (as part of some spiritual traditions, or as philosophical or sociopolitical theories such as communism) that might seem like very attractive and easy silver-bullet solutions to humanity's problems, but never worked in practice due to their over-simplistic understanding of reality and of the underlying problems. So, to hope that the humanity as a whole will upgrade into homo-trans-egoic within a century (by massively adopting idealism of Anthroposophy or what's not) would be rather naive.

But we should ask ourselves why do we have such unrealistic expectations for the progress of humanity? After all, the human progress is orders of magnitude faster compared to the natural selection based evolution progress. Why would we expect it to be even faster?

And you should continue to ask yourself why you keep misrepresenting Anthroposophy. Your posts have really become farces. It is like me coming to your place of work and shooting down your proposed engineering designs without knowing a single thing about engineering. How could you possibly know about it if you have not read anything by its founder, Steiner? And if you have read something by him, and want to critique it, you can post an excerpt and make a logical critique. We know that won't happen, though, because it is the hard work of reading and understanding that you guys desperately want to avoid. Anthroposophy says each individual must do that hard work or they will not make any spiritual evolutionary progress, which is basically the opposite of your bolded statement. The very attractive and easy "solution" is to avoid spiritual effort altogether and assume all will be revealed to you upon death, or at least you don't have to worry about what's valid and invalid until after you are dead. It is exactly what the materialist does - they say spiritual reality, if it exists, cannot be discerned while we are alive, and probably we will die and that's it. Think about it... you have taken materialism and simply called it "nondual" and "idealist" to make your view seem less mechanistic and absurd. The underlined part shows you are still failing to take idealism seriously, as you think natural selection of physical stuff over billions of years is what drives human evolution. Every idealist during or after the rise of materialism was aiming to combat its de-spiritualization, de-mythologization, etc. of the world - you are trying to circumvent all of that and regress right back to mechanistic materialism.

I have a question for you Ashvin, and please don't take it as adversarial, i have a great respect for your attempts to expound and share this spiritual science patiently and persistently.

There are so many form of spiritualities out there, and each ask us to exert a tremendous amount of effort and spend a great amount of time to test its fruits, to take buddhism as an example, you have to read an unholy amount of sutras and practice the eightfold path etc before you are even allowed to express your doubts and skepticism, yet both time and energy are limited, there is an opportunity cost (whatever time and energy you dedicate to any form of spirituality can't be dedicated to an other), so it doesn't seem absurd to me to follow some kind of heuristics : Look at people who have practiced the specific form of spirituality, and see the fruits it bore, so to be more specific, who would you recommend as some great follower of Steiner spirituality ? Krishnamurti ? Some other name ? Nobody ?

[Papanca]

There are healthy and unhealthy ways to search for a Soul.
Often the eyes speak more than philosophical books about the essence of what is being communicated.
In that respect I find the photos of Steiner and Jung very telling.




Compare it with Maharshi

[Eugene I]

Look at people who have practiced the specific form of spirituality, and see the fruits it bore, so to be more specific, who would you recommend as some great follower of Steiner spirituality ? Krishnamurti ? Some other name ? Nobody ?

Steiner was an adamant critic of Krishnamurti.

[Soul_of_Shu]

who would you recommend as some great follower of Steiner spirituality ? Krishnamurti ? Some other name ? Nobody ?

I'm surprised you've missed it ... our very own Cleric! Albeit Barfield was surely influenced by Steiner, I'm not sure I would put him in the spiritual follower category, as he was also very much his own leader. But I'm also curious as to who else in the Steiner lineage one would turn to as a living, breathing teacher to study under, if one were so inclined?

[Eugene I]

I'm surprised you've missed it ... our very own Cleric! Albeit Barfield was surely influenced by Steiner, I'm not sure I would put him in the spiritual follower category, as he was also very much his own leader. But I'm also curious as to who else in the Steiner lineage one would turn to as a living, breathing teacher to study under, if one were so inclined?

When a medicine undergoes an approval process at FDA they look at both positive benefits and negative side effects, both are equally important.
Here is an example: one psychiatrist wrote in an article that at the times of the popularity of Kastaneda's books they had a lot of "Katstanedian" patients whose mental health was significantly negatively affected by unhealthy practices of the Kastaneda teachings.

On another note, the fist half of the 20-th century was an episode of unprecedented collective madness in the Western civilization. Many philosophies and spiritual teachings/practices developed during that time bear the distortions and delusions of that madness, even though many of them did have significant discoveries and insights. The nation most significantly affected by that madness was Germans and Russians (this is not to blame them for that, it's just an observation). You can sense that madness in the eyes of Steiner and Jung, as well as of many other significant people of those times (I will not bother pasting photos of Hitler and others like him). We need to be sober and critical and sort the "good grain from the chaff".

[Soul_of_Shu]

You can sense that madness in the eyes of Steiner and Jung, as well as of many other significant people of those times (I will not bother pasting photos of Hitler and others like him). We need to be sober and critical and sort the "good grain from the chaff".

Well, speak for yourself, as I don't sense that madness in those photos. I suspect some projection is factoring in, given your karmic bonds.

[AshvinP]

And you should continue to ask yourself why you keep misrepresenting Anthroposophy. Your posts have really become farces. It is like me coming to your place of work and shooting down your proposed engineering designs without knowing a single thing about engineering. How could you possibly know about it if you have not read anything by its founder, Steiner? And if you have read something by him, and want to critique it, you can post an excerpt and make a logical critique. We know that won't happen, though, because it is the hard work of reading and understanding that you guys desperately want to avoid. Anthroposophy says each individual must do that hard work or they will not make any spiritual evolutionary progress, which is basically the opposite of your bolded statement. The very attractive and easy "solution" is to avoid spiritual effort altogether and assume all will be revealed to you upon death, or at least you don't have to worry about what's valid and invalid until after you are dead. It is exactly what the materialist does - they say spiritual reality, if it exists, cannot be discerned while we are alive, and probably we will die and that's it. Think about it... you have taken materialism and simply called it "nondual" and "idealist" to make your view seem less mechanistic and absurd. The underlined part shows you are still failing to take idealism seriously, as you think natural selection of physical stuff over billions of years is what drives human evolution. Every idealist during or after the rise of materialism was aiming to combat its de-spiritualization, de-mythologization, etc. of the world - you are trying to circumvent all of that and regress right back to mechanistic materialism.

I have a question for you Ashvin, and please don't take it as adversarial, i have a great respect for your attempts to expound and share this spiritual science patiently and persistently.

There are so many form of spiritualities out there, and each ask us to exert a tremendous amount of effort and spend a great amount of time to test its fruits, to take buddhism as an example, you have to read an unholy amount of sutras and practice the eightfold path etc before you are even allowed to express your doubts and skepticism, yet both time and energy are limited, there is an opportunity cost (whatever time and energy you dedicate to any form of spirituality can't be dedicated to an other), so it doesn't seem absurd to me to follow some kind of heuristics : Look at people who have practiced the specific form of spirituality, and see the fruits it bore, so to be more specific, who would you recommend as some great follower of Steiner spirituality ? Krishnamurti ? Some other name ? Nobody ?

Papanca,

Thanks for the questions. I don't take any thoughtful comments or questions or critiques as adverserial, only clear and repeated attempts to obfuscate and convince others to dismiss without any logical consideration whatsoever.

I recommend Owen Barfield as a direct follower of Anthroposophy. He is easier to approach for many people to begin with. I also try to show in my essays the major overlaps between of other 20th century thinkers (and Goethe, Hegel, Fichte, Emerson, and Coleridge prior to that) and Steiner's work. These include Jung, Heidegger, Bergson, the American pragmatists, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo (haven't discussed them much yet but plan to), Mircea Eliade, and others I am not thinking of right now. And as Dana mentioned Cleric's essays and posts are great real time examples of the imaginative spiritual science we are speaking of. I am talking here of very significant overlaps which would be uncanny to most people.

They are not at all surprising to the spiritual scientist who understands the nature-function of our Thinking activity and the shared realm of ideal content we all exist in. In fact, anyone who starts from sound premises (which could just be the givens of our perceptual and cognitive experience, although idealism also helps), uses careful reasoning, and a bit of Imagination will come to these same philosophical and spiritual conclusions. To understand that nature of Thinking there is no better resource than Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Freedom) by Steiner. It is not very long and will be very clear if understood as a phenomenology without any prior metaphysical assumptions.

If it doesn't resonate or seems confusing, then we are always happy to answer questions and clarify the arguments. This has been done many times on the forum already which I can link you to. And after that if you still think it is not very profound or useful, then we are not going to try to force feed it to you. That goes against the entire Spirit of Anthroposophy, despite uninformed claims here to contrary.