Soul_of_Shu wrote: ↑Tue Sep 21, 2021 1:43 pm
Indeed, I have no comprehensive knowledge of the disciplines the above quotes refer to. However, if I were to feel truly inspired to study those disciplines, I would delve into it with no lack of effort, however difficult it may be. But I doubt that without such inspiration, it would ever make much sense. I feel much the same about Steiner's ideas on astrology, Atlantis, Lemuria, etc. For whatever reason, these aspects of his ideation just don't inspire this imagination. And frankly, I don't even care if he is just simply wrong about those aspects. But that in no way undermines or detracts from those aspects that do inspire this imagination, which I then make the effort to explore. So I'm curious as to what your take is on why one may feel deeply compelled to explore some aspects, but not others. If after exploring PoF, it doesn't naturally lead to being inspired to explore the astrological/zodiac cosmology, or the ruminations about Atlantis and Lemuria, is something crucial missed?
It's another thing which we can only understand properly if we consider the depth of reality. It's like asking "How come when various seeds are planted in the ground, one grows into a tomato, another into pumpkin, the third into carrot?" It's similar with our rhythmic embodiments. Just as each morning we begin from where we left off on the previous day, so when the outer shell drops at the time of death, the soul and spirit forces that have animated our Earthly character continue their refinement and ultimately fertilize 'vertically', the 'horizontally' fertilized egg, where as a seed a new unfoldment begins. The soul and spirit forces that we carry are in very complicated configurations. As they interact with the World Content they further unfold according to their nature. All of this is contained in the
Parable of the Sower.
Presented in this way, it can be asked "So everything is predetermined? Our destiny unfolds entirely by the iron necessity of our soul seed?" It depends on the level of development of the individual. There's a spectrum within ourselves - from instinctive, nearly animalistic life, to life that can comprehend the laws and dynamics of reality and exercise higher degrees of freedom. In the former case our life primarily shaped by the environment, in the latter we become capable to augment the instinctive flow through moral imagination and intuition. We can observe this gradient in many different places - in ourselves, in a growing child, in humanity's historical development.
It's worth looking at this gradient more closely. We can roughly differentiate it into three parts. One is called the sentient or instinctive soul. It corresponds to the level of human conduct that is entirely driven by the instinctive flow. One is magically drawn by what gives pleasure and repelled from what causes pain.
The next region is called the intellectual soul. This is the kind of consciousness in which most modern people operate. This level of the soul began to take shape in the Greek epoch. Prior to that humanity as a whole was living in the instinctive soul. In the intellectual soul the thinking spiritual activity rises its head, so to speak, above the instinctive flow. We are not simply a witnessing "I" which is pulled around by the forces of destiny but we differentiate our thinking head from the flow and being to reflect on it. We understand the laws, regularities, patterns of life's unfoldments, we intuit ideas and we can plan how these ideas can be manifested in the sensory realm.
Then we have the consciousness or spiritual soul. This is only now beginning to awaken. In the intellectual soul, even if we rise with ideas about the necessities of the World process and are able to augment destiny through ideas, we still understand ourselves as a thinking ego. Everyone may have different theory about this ego - it could a brain, a soul, a nothingness, energy, a quantum potential, etc. No matter what our theory is, the common thing is that this theory exists only as thoughts within the intellect, the ego in the intellectual soul can't step outside its own thoughts. This is now gradually changing for small number of souls. PoF is practically nothing but a living travel guide which leads us along the gradient between the intellectual and the consciousness soul. When PoF is experienced in the right way we find a new dimension of our being. We no longer try to define what we and the world is through floating intellectual thoughts but we recognize that thinking itself is part of the World process.
Let's try to approach this with an analogy. Let's imagine our thoughts are being written on the screen of consciousness as by a spiritual hand. In the intellectual soul we're conscious only of the written symbols (thoughts). Intuitively we know that all these thoughts belong to a common center which we recognize as our ego, yet we have no clear awareness of what it really is. It's like the hand is conscious of what it writes but can't see itself. It can only build written theories about its true nature. The hand writes down "I'm brain, I'm soul, I'm energy, etc." yet sees nothing but the written text.
The transition to the consciousness soul is like the hand beginning to become aware of itself. It begins to feel that it is holding a pen, that it can stretch the fingers, make shapes. At this point a very important shift occurs. The hand now no longer speculates about its true nature through contemplation of written symbols but simply perceives its own movement. In the intellectual soul the movement of the hand is known only
indirectly through the written imprints. Now the hand begins to know itself through the direct experiences of its movements. This analogy can lead us quite far if we meditate on it.
We live in time where the consciousness soul is being birthed. As with any other development process, the transition between the old and the new is always accompanied by turmoil. Some forces want to cling to the old. Other forces want the future but would like to directly teleport in the final destination, while skipping the intermediary steps. The symptoms of all these things are all over the place for those who have the eyes to see them. The things to keep watch for are the different ways this birth of the spiritual soul is avoided. We can see it on full display in this forum. The hand simply doesn't want to experience directly its movements. It wants to experience either only the written symbols (ordinary intellectual thoughts) or no writing at all (the mystical state), or it wants to experience automatic writing (visionary states, psychedelics). In all cases the reality of the hand remains in the shadows.
So we have a spectrum of souls, unfolding according to their seed. Some souls don't want to hear about the hand (they don't want to hear about PoF). They accept as real only what the invisible hand writes as thoughts but fiercely refuse to awaken in the hand itself and its movements. Others read PoF and experience glimpses of the hand movement, yet don't go much further. Others still, continue all the way.
So the original question was why this spectrum of souls? The general answer was that everyone grows from the seed that has been planted from the previous life, just as the extract of what we are now doing will form the seed for the next. If we have to be more specific, it's all about conflict of interests (desires). Truth doesn't equal comfort (at least not initially). The more we become aware of the hand, the more we become aware it is a part of a spiritual organism. Some are comfortable to trace the reality of this organism only up to an extent because beyond certain threshold this organism is no longer strictly ours. This is the main difference between the experiences in the consciousness soul and Manas, the Spirit-Self. In the former we're still a more or less enclosed ego, in the latter we already cross the threshold of the Spiritual World.
Each of these steps along the spiritual gradient is connected with certain shifts of self-consciousness, we understand ourselves differently and together with this we find ourselves in completely unsuspected relations with the environment. Many of these realizations can be deeply disturbing for our personality.
So I can roughly see two cases of why souls don't go any further. The first is that they are pressed down by the laws of necessity (karma). They simply don't have the inner freedom to point attention to anything else. The second is that souls attain to the place where they can exercise their freedom but they don't want to give up the comfort of their current situation.
The question now is "how to know if I'm truly and inevitably pressed into a certain life situation or I have a choice?" The very fact that we recognize alternatives with our thinking, already means we have a choice. The choice basically is if we want to begin with difficulties but come out better and better in the long run or start easy and comfortably and get worse and worse in time. It doesn't require occult vision to reach this conclusion. It's confirmed in every aspect of ordinary life.
So I would like to leave it with the hand analogy. I repeat that the most crucial difference is that in the intellectual soul we live entirely with the written thoughts, without being aware of the hand - we understand it only as far as we build symbolic-theoretical models of it. As the consciousness soul is being developed, we begin to experience ourselves as the active force that shapes the hand itself. Then we more and more understand the ordinary written thought-symbols as consequences of these shapes and moves. This transition completely changes what we consider to be knowledge. In the intellectual soul we think of knowledge as different patterns of written thoughts which are then correlated with other perceptions. In the consciousness soul knowledge becomes the actual movement of the hand and how it is being shaped by the environment - both of our own personality and that of the wider World.
At this point, the only limit for how far this process can go is we ourselves. Every further step with which we discover new degrees of freedom of our spiritual organism is won by feeling the restricting factors and overcoming them. Facing these factors is not always pleasant because we face our own habits, opinions, prejudices, likes, dislikes and so on. All of these are the forces that tie the hand and prevent the spirit to
know its degrees of freedom.