Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert
Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 4:44 pm
Yes, I agree. One of the ways to cope with this gap is to move into a Schopenhauer-like view - that our consciousness is the highest level and below us is the darkness of the unconscious M@L. This saves the trouble to search for conscious access to the spiritual world and self-assures the thinking ego that metaphysical speculation is the most it'll ever have. But we should never forget that it is just a philosophical outlook that we choose to use.
Very important remark. For me it took years to become capable of resisting the temptation to immediately project the higher experiences into thoughts. It's like learning that you can swim without stepping on the sea floor. It took my scientific mind quite some time until it capitulated at the fact that higher spiritual activity can be traced as it precipitates into thinking but the reverse can't happen - you can't patch together thoughts and produce the higher activity from that. Although I said "it took", it's actually an ongoing process. We are always midway. We become better at something but then immediately the new tasks are revealed.
and from each lofty step arrives a deeper plungeit's still my area of prime research to look for the most gradual bridge between normal thinking and higher cognition.
Looking forward to it.I have some ideas in this direction and I hope I'll be able to share them at some point.
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I meditated more on your "simplex-complex" and I like it similar to the way I like extraordinary-ordinary or choiceless-choice. Surely something like e=mc2 is simple-complex. I think the math term might be 'elegant', which is lovely indeed. I think what I was reaching for was a caution against making the complex complicated by getting lost rather than liberated in abstraction. Nice polishing of terms. Thanks. Scott, for the prod.Lou Gold wrote: ↑Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:11 amNothing wrong with paradox and its marvelously creative tensions, which are resolved by making love not war. However, I should emphasize that 'Done Deals' are always temporary, pauses along the Way, in the Now as they say. The way to keep it simple-complex is to not get caught in the abstractions.ScottRoberts wrote: ↑Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:08 pmWhat's wrong with endless complexities? Keep it simple-complex, I say, and avoid Done Deals.
We've already covered this. They are not actually that 'ridiculous' It's only that in our age it's considered racists to mention the word race.findingblanks wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:14 am The things he says about skin color are incredibly ridiculous but they fit right in with the models he had unconsciously eaten up in his environment. They were not grounded in hate, just simply reflections of very deep holes in experience.
Here once again we should make the distinction between speaking of the above in the context of a cultural container (where specific souls incarnate) and souls in bodies of color in the modern world - which obviously are quite able to find their way to the Christ.findingblanks wrote: ↑Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:14 am like when he goes into detail explaining what happens if The Christ tries to integrate with a dark skinned person
AlsoOnly it will be necessary to remember there are errors in the lectures which I did not revise.
The right to an opinion in regard to the content of such privately printed material can naturally be
admitted only in the case of one who knows what is taken as the pre-requisite
basis of this judgment. For most of those pamphlets such a pre-requisite will
be at least the anthroposophic knowledge of man and of the cosmos, in so far
as its nature is set forth in anthroposophy, and of that which is found in
this information as "anthroposophic history" as it is taken from the
spiritual world.
In the above sense, it's quite easy for one who doesn't stop at the words, to penetrate the deeper stratum of the spiritual world that he is describing. If we read in this mood his scientific courses and astronomy lectures, even though there are physically incorrect things there, we can still discover in ourselves the spiritual realities that he was trying to project - even though he couldn't put them in the correct physical concepts. And that's actually inspiring because it shows how much more work is left to do - something that we should take on.I have made it very clear in this account of the course of
my life that, even in childhood, I lived in the spiritual world as in that which was self-evident to
me, but that I had to strive earnestly for everything which pertained to a knowledge of the outer
world. For this reason I am a man slow in development as to all the aspects of the physical world.