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Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 4:44 pm
by Lou Gold

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 5:41 pm
by Cleric K
Lou Gold wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 3:25 pm Where we agree (perhaps) is that the present weakness of an Idealism that leaps from individual whirlpools to M@L is the lack of structure.
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.
Lou Gold wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 3:25 pm Knowing that the map is not the territory
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.

Nevertheless, it's still my area of prime research to look for the most gradual bridge between normal thinking and higher cognition. I have some ideas in this direction and I hope I'll be able to share them at some point.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 6:01 pm
by Lou Gold
it's still my area of prime research to look for the most gradual bridge between normal thinking and higher cognition.
and from each lofty step arrives a deeper plunge
I have some ideas in this direction and I hope I'll be able to share them at some point.
Top
Looking forward to it.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:34 pm
by Lou Gold
This morning's intuition, which somehow spontaneously came floating by, said:

"Transcendence will never evade immanence. It must join with it to create the next step."

This, for me, has been a fun dialog. Thank you.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 8:44 pm
by Lou Gold
Lou Gold wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 2:11 am
ScottRoberts wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 11:08 pm
Lou Gold wrote: Mon Feb 08, 2021 7:30 am Wrestling intellectually with paradox creates endless complexities where using a pot makes it simple. KISS and DONE DEAL!
What's wrong with endless complexities? Keep it simple-complex, I say, and avoid Done Deals.
Nothing 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.
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.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 09, 2021 10:50 pm
by Cleric K
Lou Gold wrote: Tue Feb 09, 2021 7:34 pm "Transcendence will never evade immanence. It must join with it to create the next step."
Yes, the promise of true monism :)

Thank you too, Lou.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:14 am
by findingblanks
I love Steiner's work. He is wonderful in that he shows us how complex it can be when one is trying to translate interaction with real archetypes into communicable experience. 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.

It was not random that his most generative ideas, the ones that people are taking up and applying in the word as individuals to great benefit, can be spoken of without the mention of any spiritual mechanisms (like when he goes into detail explaining what happens if The Christ tries to integrate with a dark skinned person). It is very telling that he was at his best when he was at his most sensorial phenomenological. Love that guy.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 12:13 pm
by Cleric K
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.
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.

Natural history has made its own discoveries. See something like this. Is it 'racist' to speak of humans migration and adapting to new environments? If the harsher environments of the north have caused the skin to lose its pigmentation and forced humans to develop more the intellect, so that they can find creative solutions to the obstacles, does this make it discriminatory?

It's just that a century ago (at Steiner's time) the cultures were still quite segregated. In Africa we could find tribes that have preserved their culture and rituals from deepest antiquity. This is where we should make the distinction: Steiner spoke of the races in the sense of cultural containers that preserved different stages of humanity's development - because at that times this was still the case to a very large extent. As already mentioned previously, we should not at all judge in this way the souls that live in bodies of color in the modern age.
In this sense - yes, if Steiner was focused on the fact that these lectures would become publicly available a century later he would have taken the time to speak also about the coming intermingling of the races all over the world and he would turn more explicit attention about the distinction between the physical container and the souls. (of course this distinction is described in many other places, like the Philosophy of Freedom)

Steiner's goal was to trace the development of humanity through the millennia, not only from physical perspective but also from spiritual. He explained how the human spirit was constantly moving forward and was transforming in the process. Natural history does the same, although focusing only on the physical part.
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
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.

Here's something that I expect Lou will roar about :)
Take the voodoo trance dances that are still practiced in many places in Africa. In these dances the human vehicle becomes open container for spirits. Now someone will argue that this is just one of the many paths to the One Truth. But it's not. And here we just need to be clear headed about it. There are things that simply can't be reconciled. You can't keep the doors and windows open in winter and expect that the hеater will be able to warm the house. It's similar to spiritual development. We can't just open the doors of our being and let indiscriminately anyone enter and leave, and hope that in this way we are performing higher service. Because the first to enter are thieves and burglars who care not for the house but what they can take from it. The human body should be made into a temple of the Divine, where only what's pure and luminous can enter. We see this at every level - even the tiny cell allows only beneficial elements to pass its membrane and expels the harmful. Why should the human aura be an exception? What's the logic to tear down our spiritual membrane and let ourselves to be flooded by all kinds of poisons and sewage? Why not try to be a conductor of what's pure, luminous, life-giving, loving and give it freely to our brothers and sisters?

Try to explain this to a voodoo trance dancer and it'll become clear what Steiner meant.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2021 4:43 am
by findingblanks
Cleric K, I don't know if you've read Steiner's lecture GA 174B, but you'll see very clearly that he was talking about any human being circa 1920s that had non-white skin. He goes into great detail explaining why non-white skin PRESENTLY (at that time) could not intergrate with the Guiding Spirit Of Our Time and why it would REMAIN THIS WAY for about 2000 more years. Have you read his explanation of this mechanism? Many people haven't because this is the lecture that Anthroposophical society had taken out of all of it's books and has worked hard to make sure nobody reads. I can send it to you if you haven't read it. I don't think Steiner was racist. I don't think his worst notions about skin make him a racist. He was just wrong about some things.

The great thing about this lecture is that it helps explain so many of his other comments about skin color and evolution. Also, you may or may not be aware of how they have retranslated some of his lectures on this account.

I have profound respect for much of Steiner's work, so I am not bothered by those areas he made clear mistakes based on lack of information and cultural blind-spots. Like his comments about what causes bulls to go wild.

Re: Rudolf Steiner's Fifth Gospel by John David Ebert

Posted: Wed Feb 24, 2021 12:27 pm
by Cleric K
No, I haven't read that particular lecture. Please send me a PM.

I don't claim that Steiner is infallible and that he hasn't expressed one-sidedly or even erroneously at times. He was a human after all. For example, his scientific courses have errors - things that don't match facts later discovered. Some of his ideas about orbital mechanics were also wrong. He speaks of this in his autobiography:

Only 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.
Also
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.
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.


As far as the races, it's only necessary to keep in mind that genetically determined physical body does not equate with the soul (and he made that clear on many occasions). There can be advanced souls in bodies of color. At the same time - as it should be obvious to anybody - white skin is not at all a 'proof of quality'. There are souls incarnated in white-skinned bodies which are on lower stage of moral development than most savages. This we can see all around us.

The thing about the 2000 years has to do with the fact that there'll continue to be cultural groups who won't have any interest in developing the higher faculties of soul and spirit. And the key here is not to see this as a judgment or a prejudice. It would be simply false to assume that some cruel divinity has condemned certain souls to incarnate in environment that doesn't allow them to realize their fullest potential. It's the other way around - souls themselves seek the most appropriate conditions for their incarnation, such that they can experience whatever is suitable for them.

It should also be noted that the 'white' race will also remain as a historical cultural container. Currently the Western civilization mainly lives in the so called intellectual soul. There the "I" identifies with the thoughts it produces. The soul can only intellectually hypothesize its true nature as neurons, soul, energy, information, mind at large, etc. It can't really break away from thinking. We are now at a point of history where the consciousness soul is awakening. In that, the "I" finds itself as spiritual reality that doesn't need some intellectual support - it's the opposite - that spiritual reality brings forth the intellectual thoughts our of itself in a self-explanatory way. BK's Idealism is only one of the signs of the times that humans are groping towards this direction. In the coming centuries there'll be more and more souls that'll experience themselves as spiritual beings - not as belief but as immediate reality. These will at the beginning be a kind of 'outsiders'. Yet through the ages they'll become more and more and will form a new culture. But even then, the current white race will remain as a cultural container where souls will incarnate which have still work to do on the intellectual soul.