The Central Topic

[Lou Gold]

The last words are key. Because this is what we see everywhere. This veil philosophy basically gives everyone carte blanche to do anything they want. Here's an example. A serial murderer may say: "MAL/God wanted to experience how it feels like to take the lives of others by causing them excruciating pain in the process. But don't worry, this is all planned. There's no Karma. I won't be punished. All my victims have volunteered to have these painful experiences. It's all good." Now if we take this veil philosophy seriously we can't really say anything to that person.

Cleric, almost any philosophy, religion, spiritual practice or worldview can be abused by applying a twisted logic to it to justify egoic actions. Even PoF can be, as we saw in another thread in the example of Steiner's racist claims that were almost undistinguishable from Nazi's racial philosophy, so your arguments can be equally applied to the SS.

We actually can say a lot to this person from the standpoint of the "veil philosophy", because the "veil philosophy" does not deny the Divine dimension with its moral, agapic and esthetic values. The connection with the Divine dimension and its values and meanings are still accessible to us through our spiritual intuition, they are not completely veiled, but they are not imposed on us deterministically so that we can exercise our freedom of choice in our actions. But yes, freedom comes with a price that it can be abused and wrong choices can be made, and it is understandable that many people feel uncomfortable with that.

If we remove all the veils and converge to the Ideal Perfection and Unity, this will be the end of freedom, life and development, it's a stagnation point. If we reject and neglect the Ideal and the Divine and choose to only exist within our veils, it's a path do division, isolation and degradation. It is only when Ideal and veiled coexist in a good balance, integrated and diversified at the same time, where Life can flourish and Divine can actualize itself through live experiences. As Lou said: "Divine Integrated Diversity".

It occurs to me now that perhaps "Divinely Integrating Diversity" might be an even better phrase. But words do lean toward dualism, so perhaps "Divinely Integrating/disintegrating Diversity" is even better.

[Cleric K]

Where did we say exactly that "nothing needs to be fixed"?

I think it does make a practical difference in how we orient to our current situation. If we approach our spiritual growth as some path towards utopia or complete knowledge, then we will view this reality as somehow deficit, needing some distance eventual "fix" instead of seeing this limited and to some extent veiled reality as being necessary to instantiate profound meaning. A distant "optimized" state would seem to preclude what is offered here and now.

I gave it here and here. There is a reason why the pre-death consciousness exists in a different form/mode from the post-death one, even though both of these modes are fundamentally the same consciousness. The reason is that such existence in a variety of modes is the only way life can unfold into the variety of forms. There is nothing wrong with this variety of consciousness modes of existence, it is not a "fall"/sin to be saved from, or a problem to overcome. But there are two forces/motives in place to keep the process in dynamics: the motive to disintegrate into variety and discontinuity of modes, and the motive to integrate into a singular and continuous mode, and both motives co-exist (in different proportions) to maintain the dynamics of life. There is nothing wrong with aligning yourself with the integrative force (and this something you chose), likewise there is nothing wrong with the opposite alignment, it is all part of life.

Let me first say that I don't claim that the fall was an error. Just like you, I've always said that it is the evolutionary scenario for the experience of relative freedom, precisely by deep fragmentation of consciousness, which we call the veil. The veil is not a membrane between separate worlds but a threshold of consciousness beyond which the 'wavelengths' of meaning are way too different from our intellectual concepts. And that's why we lose intellectual consciousness in deep sleep - the meaning in that state doesn't 'fit' in our sensory concepts.

But you say:

Instead, we said that, within the limits of the non-prefect and veiled existence, there is a lot, in fact unlimited ways, in which it can be "fixed", improved and developed "to life to greater heights" by incorporating and integrating the Divine values into our veiled and limited human existence.

And here's where disagreements come because when I say that we need to seek understanding of what the obstacles are (as in TCT) and how we can fix them, you say that that's escapist. OK. Then if fixing is escapist, we shouldn't touch anything and enjoy the divine misery. Maybe simply tell us what is your vision for fixing. Non simply in abstract terms but concretely, what is it that lives in humanity which needs to be transformed and how that work should that be commenced.

[AshvinP]

I think it does make a practical difference in how we orient to our current situation. If we approach our spiritual growth as some path towards utopia or complete knowledge, then we will view this reality as somehow deficit, needing some distance eventual "fix" instead of seeing this limited and to some extent veiled reality as being necessary to instantiate profound meaning. A distant "optimized" state would seem to preclude what is offered here and now.

I tried to point out to Eugene how this whole 'veil' philosophy is abused. On one hand we postulate a veil which separates us from reality. But at the same time we develop a belief system about what this beyond reality is like and how based on this we can guide our life here on our side of the veil. Paradoxically, it's impossible to know if any of our beliefs about the beyond are correct because our own belief precludes any possibility for direct knowledge of the beyond.

Cleric,

Thank you for more inspiring posts as usual. This "veil" abuse is really at the heart of so many of these misunderstandings, prejudices, projections, etc. It is really switched on and off without any explanation for why. And it actually ties in very well with a legal concept I come across a lot in my practice, so I am writing a short essay to address it. I hope it usefully adds to what you have already wrote here.

[Soul_of_Shu]

I think it does make a practical difference in how we orient to our current situation. If we approach our spiritual growth as some path towards utopia or complete knowledge, then we will view this reality as somehow deficit, needing some distance eventual "fix" instead of seeing this limited and to some extent veiled reality as being necessary to instantiate profound meaning. A distant "optimized" state would seem to preclude what is offered here and now.

I tried to point out to Eugene how this whole 'veil' philosophy is abused. On one hand we postulate a veil which separates us from reality. But at the same time we develop a belief system about what this beyond reality is like and how based on this we can guide our life here on our side of the veil. Paradoxically, it's impossible to know if any of our beliefs about the beyond are correct because our own belief precludes any possibility for direct knowledge of the beyond.

Cleric,

Thank you for more inspiring posts as usual. This "veil" abuse is really at the heart of so many of these misunderstandings, prejudices, projections, etc. It is really switched on and off without any explanation for why. And it actually ties in very well with a legal concept I come across a lot in my practice, so I am writing a short essay to address it. I hope it usefully adds to what you have already wrote here.

So with all this discussion of a so-called 'veil' that somehow drops like a curtain between the transcorporeal soul-being that one is in essence, and its bodily expression donned like a costume upon stepping within the corporeal construct, an inquiry arises. What is to be made of such a veil, when upon occasion that corporeal expression/costume can be viewed as an objectified percept from a non-local out-of-body, transcorporeal state, by none other than the soul-being that one is in essence, whereupon any such veil vanishes, as if some imagining never actually there in the first place?

[Cleric K]

So with all this discussion of a so-called 'veil' that somehow drops like a curtain between the transcorporeal soul-being that one is in essence, and its bodily expression donned like a costume upon stepping within the corporeal construct, an inquiry arises. What is to be made of such a veil, when upon occasion that corporeal expression/costume can be viewed as an objectified percept from a non-local out-of-body, transcorporeal state, by none other than the soul-being that one is in essence, whereupon any such veil vanishes, as if some imagining never actually there in the first place?

This is the whole deal, that the concept of veil as it is thrown around here creates completely misleading image. The great prejudice is that we are already a complete being and our consciousness, in the way we feel it right now, is practically the ultimate perspective, which will forever feel like this, only the pictures before our eyes will be altered. This connects us right back to the Central Topic and the mind cone with its apex, where the ego imagines itself to be already at the highest vantage point, where it's just a matter to adjust the focus of the picture but there's not even a thought that the form of consciousness in itself might be only a more limited manifestation of something which we can't even conceive through sensory-like concepts.

This misconception leads to all those misunderstood objections to evolution. One imagines that working to overcome the veils of consciousness will simply prematurely reveal details about the movie and will spoil our fun. Notice how this objection doesn't even for a moment consider that this unveiling may actually radically change the way we experience reality. Instead it simply imagines that some pictures will enter our mind cone which we're not supposed to see at this moment.

I gave an example recently with my child experience with the news here. To be worried about breaking the veil is like being worried that the child can accidently become fully conscious of all the meaning on the news - that is, become an adult in a second. The metamorphic process simply doesn't work in this way. Consciousness evolves gradually, it gradually builds staircases of meaning through which it climbs towards higher order and more holistic encompassing of reality. This process can not be tricked, hacked, bypassed. If that was possible every dose of psychedelics would send the person directly to the end of the movie. But this is not what happens. One stares at the news broadcast without any understanding, not too different from staring at static.

To say that the veil vanishes is misleading. It's much rather that some leeway is added in between our spiritual eye and the 'costume'. The costume is like a mask that fits very tightly the face of our thinking. This mask is not only the corporeal face but also our feelings, desires, passions, beliefs, ideas. Most of the time people are unaware that their whole soul life is being expressed in the face of the mask. In the spirit of TCT we can gain consciousness of the forces with which we're normally completely merged and which guide our thoughts, feelings and expressions of the face mask. To lift the veil is not to remain the same while simply setting sight on some spoilers of the secrets of existence, which we arrogantly believe that our intellect is fully capable of grasping in the way we have it now. It's about gaining consciousness of the strata of meaningful reality beneath the face mask and the intellect itself. This is the leeway. This is when we see ourselves as objectified percept (this is actually a glimpse at what is called in esoteric terms The Guardian at the Threshold). Yet we're not independent of these layers. Even in higher cognition we're never completely outside of them. We become fully submerged in them once again when we're carried away on the waves of sensory life. The fact that we have glimpsed the interior of the costume doesn't mean that we have overcome it. Actually this glimpse should only act as a stimulus to realize how real these things really are and how great our responsibility is to work upon them. Our Earthly persona is weaved of this costume. The way we think, the way we feel, the way we move - all of these are part of the living elemental nature of the costume. I repeat that this costume is not only the crude physical but also the body of life processes and the body of desires. Normally all these are flattened as a thin mask through the eyes of which we gaze 'outside', while all the details of the costume complex remain behind our face. If we strip away completely the costume and remain only with the "I", modern man will find himself in deep dreamless sleep. Not because there's nothing to be experienced in this state but simply because there's nothing that can be translated into the concepts of the ordinary intellect, except the feeling of duration, the feeling that we've spent time in that state.

So let that be clear. The veil is not some arbitrary membrane which obscures what we imagine we're otherwise perfectly capable to comprehend. The veil is the fact that we're normally pressed against the interior of the face mask and don't dare to trace the forces which guide our thoughts, feelings and actions, precisely in the sense of TCT. If we do that, if we begin to pay attention to the curvature of meaning, of sympathies and antipathies, the wave function which determines the palette of what we can think and feel, then we begin to notice this leeway and we begin to understand the forces which flow from the depths and become our outward thoughts and expressions only on the surface. These forces are not strictly local to our bodily persona but lead us to the wider soul relations and further into Cosmic relations. It is possible to attain to an accidental glimpse of this leeway through psychedelics but only as vague affirmation that 'there's really something there'. In order to understand the structure, the dynamics, the flows, we need to set to work gradually and patiently, just like the child only gradually grows in the language of the news broadcast. It is difficult to convey how much really our self-image changes when we behold and understand these things.

In the last few veil back and forths we can see precisely that - people invent a caricatured picture of the veil which is nothing else but arbitrary barrier serving as excuse for how deep self- and world-knowledge should go. It is completely dismissed that this increase of consciousness within the layers of the costume is what evolution is about and where the individual and collective sources of evil are hiding. So when the tight fit of the mask is loosened this not only doesn't signify some vanishing of the veil which will spoil what makes our life interesting but on the contrary - it will present us with the completely real work that lies in front of us.

[Soul_of_Shu]

This is the whole deal, that the concept of veil as it is thrown around here creates completely misleading image.

I knew Cleric would enter corporeal stage left ... or is it right? ... Must check with the director Thanks as usual, as you give a response with much to ponder, and which is going to require some time to do so. Meanwhile I'll await whatever response to my query may come from other understandings (I'll not presume to add the prefix 'mis-' at this point, offering the benefit of the doubt) of the so-called veil.

So here's another dreamtime revelation to deconstruct ... One is never not 'dead'. Being 'dead' is the home base of one's ever-present transcorporeal soul-being. Yet, upon its donning of the bodily costume while stepping within the corporeal stage/construct, and with the tightly-fitting, exclusive identification with the persona mask/costume and construct, it falls under the 'maya' spell and its 'veil', and lives a discrete, and possibly discreet, life, while its transcorporeal life aspect is seemingly occluded and ignored, with all the desperate fear, confusion and angst that entails. You lurking backstage Cleric?

[Cleric K]

So here's another dreamtime revelation to deconstruct ... One is never not 'dead'. Being 'dead' is the home base of one's ever-present transcorporeal soul-being. Yet, upon its donning of the bodily costume while stepping within the corporeal stage/construct, and with the tightly-fitting, exclusive identification with the persona mask/costume and construct, it falls under the 'maya' spell and its 'veil', and lives a discrete, and possibly discreet, life, while its transcorporeal life aspect is seemingly occluded and ignored, with all the desperate fear, confusion and angst that entails. You lurking backstage Cleric?

You're hitting even more Central Topic here, Dana It's all related with the resurrection question.
Yes, what you say is exactly right. The question is how to make this understanding concrete, experientially real and not only theoretical? As long as we simply know the combination of words "this is only an identification with the costume", it doesn't in itself lift us to the reality of what we say.

To get a hint of that reality we need to begin to discern what has already been called several times "thinking gestures". When we stand in front of a mirror we make clear distinction between our willed movements and the perception of their reflection. Humanity is only know getting at the evolutionary stage where a similar distinction is to be attained also in respect to thinking. This is what all those talks about 'observing thinking' are really about. Gradually we begin to recognize ourselves as the being that gesticulates with meaning and perceives how these gestures stir the imaginative tableau where we perceive the effects of what we're invisibly doing. This is what begins to open the leeway.

Without this distinction, modern man lives in a torrent of thoughts for which however he doesn't feel clearly the thinking gestures he performs (let alone what sympathies, antipathies, prejudices, etc. rule that thinking). Most of todays thinking is quite instinctive. Once we begin to awaken to our living spiritual gesticulation, our ordinary thinking seems in comparison as if we've been muted, with tied hands and feet and producing only grunting sounds and convulsionary movements. When we begin to gain consciousness of our spiritual activity it's like an explosion of degrees of freedom is discovered. Our thinking becomes eloquent, expressive, it paints living pictures. It's as if the thinking-hands of the artisan in us are untied and we begin to produce the most varied and high-resolution forms, sounds, shapes, which express the most intricate meaning in which we live fully consciously.

As long as people experience their consciousness entirely within the sensory-like reflections, they completely justifiably feel that this will be lost at the moment of death. As long as we live only in the senses and the thought-perceptions that bubble up on their own, we live in the part of the bodily complex that is continually dying. It is being continually dragged down as if by entropy and only the life forces fight against this to prevent dissolution. When the life forces withdraw, the body becomes a corpse. Today's science recognizes only the corpse. It seeks life only as collisions between molecules in the corpse, which somehow manage to remain quasi-stable. When we cross the threshold of death we have clear consciousness only if we have learned to know ourselves as the spirit living in meaningful thinking gestures. This is what makes the practical difference and not only abstractly-theoretical one. Anyone can try to distinguish the living thinking gestures that we perform, from the sound-like perception of the voice in head. When we live in the thinking gestures we get a sense of what endures the moment of death and what is left behind.

[Jim Cross]

You seem to think the fact that we are conscious and experience something is telling us something useful in an absolute sense,. It doesn't. The real hammer may be imagined too but it is at the same time clearly different from the one that is only imagined.

I think you misunderstood me. My point was exactly that our conscious experience does not tell us anything in the absolute sense. It only tells us that the phenomena of conscious experience are real and they exists, that's all. So, if we are to refrain from making any claims about any absolute existence, then we are only left with the facts of our experienced existence. What we experience (our thinking and conscious phenomena: perceptions, imaginations, thoughts, feelings) undeniably exist simply because we experience them right now.

But I think you are still confused about "The real hammer" - there is no such thing in your conscious experience as "The real hammer", there are only sense perceptions based on which you construct an idea of "a real hammer". You have no way to prove that any "The real hammer" actually exist in the "world out there" apart from your idea about it.

Imagine that you are having a dream in which you hit your dreamed finger with a dreamed hammer. You feel real pain as real as you would feel in your waking state. Yet, it's all in the dream, there is no "real hammer" existing anywhere beyond your dream. There is actually a technique in lucid dreaming practice to convert your dream in a super-realistic one so that you cannot distinguish it from waking reality anymore. Now, how do you know if you waking experience is in any way fundamentally different from your dream experience. How do you know if we live in the world of "real hammers" and not in a Matrix or virtual reality, or in a world imagined by some highly intelligent conscious being or beings and projected on us as some "virtual reality"? There is no way to know. Therefore, any assumption about the existence of a "real hammer" can only be a metaphysical assumption, because you have no way to distinguish a "real hammer" from a hammer projected on you in the Matrix/VR or a hammer in your super-realistic dream.

Philosophy for children, Ages: Ages 11-14 (KS3), Ages 7-11 (KS2)

Eugene,

You can argue there is no "real" hammer but I'd bet that neither you or anybody else here will actually do the second part of the exercise. So you can argue in the abstract there is no "real" hammer yet in pragmatic and practical terms you will treat the "real" hammer differently from the imagined one. And that is my point. That difference is what is meant by "matter". Speaking pragmatically, that is.

If you want to adopt a pure idealist position, then explain why you treat the "real" hammer differently. Explain the hardness and heaviness of existence.

[Eugene I.]

Eugene,

You can argue there is no "real" hammer but I'd bet that neither you or anybody else here will actually do the second part of the exercise. So you can argue in the abstract there is no "real" hammer yet in pragmatic and practical terms you will treat the "real" hammer differently from the imagined one. And that is my point. That difference is what is meant by "matter". Speaking pragmatically, that is.

If you want to adopt a pure idealist position, then explain why you treat the "real" hammer differently. Explain the hardness and heaviness of existence.

Speaking pragmatically, I will just not intentionally attempt any actions that will cause any perceptions of pain. Whether or not there is a "real hammer" causing these sense perceptions of pain is actually practically irrelevant.

[Eugene I.]

And here's where disagreements come because when I say that we need to seek understanding of what the obstacles are (as in TCT) and how we can fix them, you say that that's escapist. OK. Then if fixing is escapist, we shouldn't touch anything and enjoy the divine misery. Maybe simply tell us what is your vision for fixing. Non simply in abstract terms but concretely, what is it that lives in humanity which needs to be transformed and how that work should that be commenced.

First, regarding the problem fixing. There are and always will be problems in human life, that’s inevitable in our limited and veiled mode of existence. We should make all possible efforts to fix them, but should not expect them to completely go away and should not be discouraged that they do not disappear. Our life is not only about fixing problems and not only about attaining utopian perfection, there are many other meaningful goals in our life. Perfection is a polarity that brings dynamics into life, unattainable by itself, but always catalyzing development and progress in life. Our desire and constant expectation to avoid problems and attain an undisturbed pleasure of perfect peace and unity is in a way an egoistic desire for a maximum pleasure and for avoidance of any discomfort or misery. If one is to make pursuing such perfection to be the goal of their life, they will only be constantly frustrated and feel constant misery simply because it is never practically attainable. Instead, it is more practical to learn to accept imperfections that we cannot currently fix but still make all efforts to improve and fix the issues that can be fixed.

Then, you wrote: “Consciousness evolves gradually, it gradually builds staircases of meaning through which it climbs towards higher order and more holistic encompassing of reality.” This is correct, the humanity as a whole is evolving, each human soul is evolving, including the climbing towards more holistic encompassing of reality. This is the “curvature” and flow of humanity, a natural vector. And so, there is a value in attaining higher knowledge and lifting the veil gradually. But to reduce all life to such process is a grossly narrow view. This curvature is just a rough fable of human existence which allows to unfold a lot more processes. It is like to say “this movie is all about WW2” – no, the WW2 is only a fable that allows to unfold a lot of personal stories and struggles and achievements, the stories of courage, love, creativity, and those little stories are what is more valuable and important in the movie than just a common fable. So, the plot of human evolution is only a scene that allows for much more and deeper things to happen and for the Divine to actualize itself in a large variety of scenarios. This does not negate the common curvature of evolution, it is just that by far not everything that happens in human life is reducible simply to the evolution towards the higher knowledge, there is a lot more content, unique paths and degrees of freedom. It is like a large current in the ocean. If we look from afar, it seems like all that is going on in the ocean is this giant current. But in fact the current is only a common momentum that allow for a gazillion of local turbulences to happen, and it’s in those turbulences where the life of the ocean actually unfolds. Likewise, the metamorphic process is only a common curvature of the flow that gives us humans a momentum to unfold a rich fabric of human experiences and Divine actualization.

Now, regarding the SS in particular, it is true that the veil is slowly lifting, but it is a slow and gradual process that only sets the momentum in human lives, and to claim that we can break through it by applying certain esoteric practices is just a wishful thinking. As we saw, Steiner spent a lifetime in his occult practice of attaining higher knowledge, and what did he get? “Blood pumping itself”, “willows healing arthritis”, “spiritual superiority of Arian/German race”, “planet Mercury related to element Mercury”? This is just an evidence that the Steinerian approach is far from being a panacea for fixing problems or a practically useful way of attaining knowledge. This is an example that no matter how beautiful a declaration of a certain method to acquire knowledge can be, only practice can prove it to be useful or not useful. This is not to say that it is entirely wrong and should not be attempted, it is to say that this is only one of the paths that can be pursued. It can certainly contribute to the overall human development to some extent, but to say that it is the only valid and true path would be an overstatement.

There are innumerable ways in which the Divine actualization can be accomplished, there is not a single panacea for fixing all the problems of our human existence and not a single common way everyone is supposed to do it. The Divine actualization includes, but not limited only to fixing problems or attaining the beyond-the-veil knowledge. This is how the Divine gets actualized in the infinite variety of ever-developing forms and states of consciousness through an infinite variety of paths. We all have a way to intuitively perceive through the veil, in the "depths of our hearts", or "the heights of our subtle spiritual intuition", we see through the veil and we know the Divine qualities - Courage, Beauty, Love, Compassion, Creativity, Curiosity and others. We do need to apply our intuitive cognition to reach to them and recognize them. If we choose to, we can, as you suggest, struggle to "unveil the veil" and cognate through some levels of the "spiritual guts" and structures behind the veil to uncover all its machinery, there is nothing wrong with it, but that is not the only way to live and fix problems and pursue the spiritual goals, and not as practically effective as Steiner hoped it to be. Just a few examples:

Bio-scientists apply the creativity of their thinking (which is essentially the Divine creativity) to scientifically study microbiology and invent medicines and vaccines to help to improve or save millions of lives. This is the Divine Creativity actualized in our veiled life experience. As a comparison, Steiner spent decades in esoteric meditations trying to acquire knowledge about medicines and human body biology and could not figure out anything better than "blood pumping itself" or "Willows healing arthritis".

A musician plays or composes music and actualizes Divine Creativity and esthetic sense of Beauty in concrete pieces of musical forms.

A hospice or a rescue worker accomplish their roles to actualize the Divine Love, Compassion and Courage.

A person with a disability overcomes his desperation and suffering, chooses to live positively and accomplish what he can still accomplish, and by doing that actualizes the Divine Courage and Creativity.

A religious or spiritual practitioner attains unique spiritual insights and sates that can only be achieved in human form with the veil in place. This unfolds the Divine Curiosity and Creativity to explore the infinite universe of conscious states.