"Healthy tradition" means something like "It's OK to go to any dancing classes - tango, salsa, cha-cha-cha - as long as it doesn't interfere with your normal life." This is the general attitude towards spirituality too. It's considered a nice leisure time activity but the moment it has to tell something which concerns 'normal' life, it becomes too much.Eugene I wrote: ↑Fri Dec 03, 2021 3:23 pm Especially when there is a question whether a specific spiritual practice or group is a sect or is it a healthy tradition. The question is: does what I'm believing, perceiving and experiencing have any relevance to reality or is it mostly a product of my individual mind/imagination/unconsciousness?
What's the point of asking the above question? Of course it is relevant! It's part of the One reality. Is the child's consciousness relevant to reality? Of course it is. Is it the full picture? Anyone can answer for themselves.
The evolution of consciousness is like the above. Our state of being continuously turns within itself from the periphery (future) through the center (now) and away (past). Put aside Steiner and SS. These are principle questions which we can talk about without ever hearing of the latter.
Normally we experience the flow of thinking at the moment it manifests near the pinhole. We say "I think" and that's correct. But this is the freedom of our spirit only at the moment where the wave function is already quite structured. In this sense Sam Harris is quite correct when he says that we're not nearly as free as we imagine. Normally we're not conscious of the peripheral flow which streams toward the center and becomes more and more concrete. Imagine that your perspective is deep towards the center of the torus. Then the imploding periphery is behind your eyes. You don't see what the future carries towards concretization. You see it only when it passes through your vantage point and continues down towards the past.
The question is whether you allow as a possibility that consciousness can rise towards the flow which is normally behind the face of your "I"/eye. I've given many different example how this is achieved. But they'll all remain irrelevant if you assume your vantage point to be already top-level, in other words - there's nothing behind your face - the moment thoughts appear in your consciousness they are your free and original creation. From such a perspective it doesn't make sense to speak of the peripheral flow which gradually approaches your eye from behind.
Now the above will evoke something like "Are you saying that you can see the future?" Yes, and anyone can do it. But this is not the future like guessing the lottery numbers. Before knowing the future of the world we must learn to know our very short-term future. We know this future when we begin to understand our character, temperament, desires, opinions, prejudices. These are all the shaping peripheral forces that gradually concretize the thoughts that we think at the pinhole. We say "my thoughts just pop up into existence". Yes they do, but if we gain consciousness of the peripheral flow we see how our thoughts are being continuously prepared by these forces, before we encounter them in front of our eyes.
This is at crux of the matter. And I repeat that this is a question completely independent of Steiner and SS. It is really the question whether we accept the eye of our intellect as the top authority, or we're open that we're flowing within forces that are behind our face and continually flow through us from the future towards the past.
This opens the existential question: can we move towards the future with our face turned towards it? Or we'll always walk with our back turned to it and accepting as real and originally created only what flies past our eye.
PS: BTW the twisting time-torus can become a powerful meditation in the above sense.