I appreciate that you are interested in my essays, but honestly I feel that they are not too helpful at this point, especially for anyone pretty new to these issues. I have gained a greater appreciation of how abstract and complex these things can sound when someone is not familiar with the holistic spiritual evolutionary context. Perhaps I will start quoting a few excerpts here and there as needed.Federica wrote: ↑Sat Jun 25, 2022 3:52 pm Back to your theme of reuniting the natural with the moral, I would like to explore this idea of the moral as a ‘continuation of the natural on a higher plane, which can only occur through our spiritual activity’. This connection between nature and morality is completely obscure to me and I wish I could gain a beginner's sense of what it means. I‘m seeing that you have written a number of essays and I can imagine you have tackled this theme before. Now if the reason why you are not referring me to these is that you don’t think it’s appropriate to quote your own writings, please consider making an exception to your reference policy : )
I can't say the natural- moral connection is super clear for me either. It's clear enough that I know it exists and is increasingly permeating my own experience on the path to higher consciousness. As Cleric mentioned before, when dealing with moral ideals - the 'why' of various actions undertaken in Cosmic evolution - we are in a domain that the intellect simply cannot grasp yet. There is a strong tendency for it to anthropomorphize the higher worlds with our concepts of what it means to be ethical and moral in our thoughts and actions. So we need to always look out for that and be satisfied with our fuzzy moral intuitions for a while, although we make the broad outlines more clear with sound reasoning.
That being said, from a purely theoretical perspective, we can consider how the perceptual world, i.e. the natural world, came into existence. Why did the primordial Spirit (Idea) polarize itself and differentiate from perfectly unified meaning? We all have experience of this polarization within us as well - it is the hysteresis process that Cleric wrote about. When our spirit submerges itself into the world, we are polarized on the x-axis of flowing along in outer perceptions. When it withdraws back into itself, we polarize on the y-axis of contemplating meaning. You seem to have already grasped this dynamic from within your own spiritual activity. So this is a dim reflection within us of the Cosmic breathing out and breathing in. When we breathe in meaning, we breathe out perceptions and vice versa. This is quite literal in the case of speech and singing.
In all cases, modern humans do this voluntarily, or at least in principle we can. No one says, "you must submerge your spirit into surroundings to flow with perception and then withdraw back into meaning". Even Nature's relation to humans makes this activity less and less conditioned over time, more and more a matter of choice. (clearly many have chosen to flow along with perceptions with little rhythmic contemplation of their meaning). The polar relation will always be there, but how closely the poles are united is up to us now. Here we also see the danger in MAL as an instinctive animal, which implies it is somehow less evolved (more polarized) than we are. Then all is flipped on its head - we feel to be at the very apex of cognitive evolution and MAL can be encapsulated within our concepts. This is the basis of all modern dualism and reductionism. And if MAL is an instinctive animal consciousness, then we ourselves are essentially only that. Instead of evolving to higher levels of consciousness, the goal is to devolve back to lower modes. And clearly this can be accomplished if we make it our goal - we already see it happening around us and, if we are brave enough to look inwards, within us.
I hope it's evident the moral implications of such an orientation. But, returning to the Cosmic hysteresis, it is only reasonable to conclude it was a free sacrificial act, which is dimly reflected in our own spiritual activity. And this free sacrifice propagates through the entire Cosmic architecture. At every level, we see ideational beings freely sacrificing so that others may evolve through the natural environment created by those sacrifices. What is inner spiritual activity always becomes the outer environment during the course of evolutionary progression. We will run into issues with this if we try to conceptualize it with linear time assumption, so we just need to remember that linear time is our own cognitive limitation, not a property of reality itself. Nature also requires death to prepare the soil for new life on the individual and species level. As Goethe said, "Nature has invented death so that she might have abundant life." More immanently to our own experience, our cognitive adaptation and evolution at this stage requires free sacrifices of the intellectual ego. This is an example of natural sacrifice of living organisms expressed on a higher cultural and individual plane.
We can only make room for new ideas, passions, habits, feelings, etc. if we are willing to sacrifice old ones. We can't put 'new wine into old wineskins or else both will be ruined'. We should make no mistake, this is resisted from within just as much as physical death. Ideologies across the board from materialism to theistic fundamentalism are clinged to by those in their possession beyond any reason. The suicide bomber will sacrifice his own life for his ideology. Is this logical? Not at all. One cannot truly sacrifice by killing other people on the promise of a reward in heaven. It's the cessation of logical reasoning when reaching a subconsciously desired conclusion which leads to dangerous idolatry in this manner. The only way to transmute this natural inclination towards radical idolatry is through living knowledge of the spiritual born through a higher Logic within, the Logos or Divine Word. The path to higher consciousness mentioned above, if pursued, will make very clear to us what sort of sacrifices are needed at every stage along the way to sow the seeds for further growth, and will also add to us the courage to confront those sacrifices if we pursue it in righteousness.
"No one should deny the danger of the descent, but it can be risked. No one need risk it, but it is certain that someone will. And let those who go down the sunset way do so with open eyes, for it is a sacrifice which daunts even the gods. Yet every descent is followed by an ascent; the vanishing shapes are shaped anew, and a truth is valid in the end only if it suffers change and bears new witness in new images, in new tongues, like a new wine that is put into new bottles."
- Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation
Federica wrote: Another connected issue I'm experiencing is a fluctuation in understanding. Just because at one point I might have intuited some bits of reality, it doesn’t mean that they are acquired forever. Tomorrow I could lose sight of them, regress to a lower point, and come up with some less than intelligent questions or notes. Ok. I will stop rambling now. As you said, every day is a new adventure. And within every adventure awaits the bright, light-blue lagoon of gratitude and the gift of dipping our steps and soaking our soul in it.
Yes this will continue. I definitely have experienced and continue to experience that on this intuitive thinking path, although it becomes less and less of an issue over time. The best I can tell so far, the knowledge only remains firmly in place once the holistic context is firmly rooted within us, and that requires a certain amount of imaginative thinking development through meditation and other exercises for soul work. As Steiner says, "the visible must plunge again and again into the invisible in order to evolve." That's why I keep stressing the individual concepts don't matter so much as the thinking skills which you are developing simply by approaching your inner world of experience in humility and good faith. Which doesn't mean you shouldn't attempt to understand and remember the concepts expressed, but we don't need to become too pedantic about it. Things will be forgotten and mistakes will be made repeatedly, but the new thinking skills will also provide a means to balance that out. These skills will prove invaluable for you later down the road.