Lou Gold wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 6:21 pm
Federica wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 4:05 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Jul 11, 2022 2:52 pm
I would also take this opportunity to say, if we are following the Logic of concepts and imaginations precipitating from the higher worlds, then we can't judge any particular individual thinker too negatively. I am not intending to say, "wow BK is so silly for making these logical errors" or anything similar. In some sense, every individual lives through these errors at various stages of their life. They are very subtle and difficult to notice and address. We are dealing with transpersonal forces which shape our lives almost entirely beneath the surface of the conscious intellect.
Yes. As much as I can I try to counterbalance and devils advocate my judgments, and it never crossed my mind that BK was silly. But your remark makes me wonder how to find the fine balance between "the forces that shape our life almost entirely" and your motto "Do not stop on any steps".
To Lou you said that "it's our moral obligation to Nature, and to the Cosmic organism as a whole, to begin transforming that over this current incarnation, wherever we happen to be in life", not that Karma is what it is?
Federica, I'm finding your dialogue with Ashvin as a very rich addition to this forum. It constantly tempts me to chime in but I'm going to withhold my habit for now in favor of seeing where you and Ashvin wll take it. In the meantime, my compliments to all.
Ashvin, Is your motto (signature) a quote from Steiner, or where?
Thanks, Lou. The motto is an esoteric teaching Steiner mentions in a lesson, but it isn't attributed to anyone specifically.
Let me add some more thoughts on Federica's question, since it's such a massive and important topic for our time. It is the polar relation of Necessity (Karma - Earth) and Freedom (Heaven), which is simply another manifestation of that between Unconsciousness and Consciousness, Differentiation and Integration, Willing (or Perceiving) and Thinking. A very interesting verse in scripture to contemplate is, "
I have not come to abolish the Law or Prophets, but to fulfill them." The Law associates with morality given from without as instincts, impulses, traditions, etc., while the Christ impulse is that of moral conscience from within, born of living spiritual knowledge. The latter allows the continuation of the former but, instead of as external compulsions, as inner impulse of the individual agency in complete freedom.
It is really helpful here to consider what we call animal and human 'instincts' as nothing other than Divine Ideas which subconsciously direct our behavior. That is what Steiner refers to when he comments that the 'spirits of darkness' are only operative in thinking now, but not in our emotions and will impulses. It's yet another inversion of the common modern way of understanding these things - our lower bodily nature is associated with lofty Divine beings, while our upper head nature (physical intellect) is more associated with lower Earthly forces, i.e. spirits of darkness. Yet as the impulse to freedom unfolds, if the lower instincts remain unconscious, then they begin to feel as external forces compelling and oppressing us. That is the basis of why moderns view the unconscious as some absolutely dark realm, blind will, mindless matter, nothingness, emptiness, etc. It is actually a realm filled with luminous and supra-moral Beings, but they appear 'dark' due to our own lack of living consciousness.
Why is this inversion horizon from Necessity to Freedom called the "Christ impulse"? We don't need to rely on any dogma for this, and actually this is quite unknown to mainstream religious tradition. They sense it only vaguely, buried beneath the piles of abstract doctrines which accrued mostly post-Reformation. It's interesting to see just how many 'inversions' are actually recounted in scripture itself, without any modern dogmas.
Christ as a Cosmic Being, the Divine Word, incarnates as a 'puny' human being of flesh and blood.
The great Sun-Spirit unites himself with the Earth evolution.
He turns water into wine.
He says, "
the last shall be first and the first shall be last".
He says, "
That unto every one which hath shall be given; and from him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away from him."
"
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it."
“To what shall we liken the kingdom of God? Or with what parable shall we picture it? It is like a mustard seed which, when it is sown on the ground, is smaller than all the seeds on earth; but when it is sown, it grows up and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out large branches, so that the birds of the air may nest under its shade.”
He tells people to 'love your enemies' and 'turn the other cheek'.
Christ Jesus triumphally rides into Jerusalem as the 'King of the Jews', the Messiah, on a donkey, a jackass (when everyone would be expecting a white horse).
Those are just a few of many examples littered throughout the Gospels. The epistles of St. Paul also stress the inversion horizon often -
"Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men."
Other thinkers like Jean Gebser have located this momentous time as that in which the Space-consciousness begins its inversion into Time-consciousness, the latter irrupting much more fully in our own time, as reflected by many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic developments (such as GR and QM). (related to that, via Imaginative cognition, we can also begin to behold Memory more in spatial configuration, as depicted in movies like Interstellar, except it's not a physical occurrence of course).
The new mutation of consciousness, on the other hand, as a consequence of arationality, receives its decisive stamp from the manifest perceptual emergence of the spiritual... Two apocryphal statements of Christian doctrine clarify in their way what is meant here: “This world is a bridge, cross it but do not make of it your dwelling place,” and “I have chosen you before the earth began.” They point to the spiritual origin prior to all spatio-temporal materialization. We may regard such materialization as a bridge that makes possible the merging or coalescence, the concrescere of origin and the present. The great church father Irenaeus presumably had these sayings in mind when he stated: “Blessed is he who was before the coming of man.” We have seen him; he revealed himself in space and time. In his departure he was beheld by his disciples in his transparency, a transparency appropriate only to the spiritual origin (if anything can be appropriated to it), the transparency which a time-free and ego-free person can presentiate in the most fortunate certainty of life. The grand and painful path of consciousness emergence, or, more appropriately, the unfolding and intensification of consciousness, manifests itself as an increasingly intense luminescence of the spiritual in man.
- Jean Gebser, The Ever-Present Origin
So we are living in an epoch when the fruits of the Christ impulse can really manifest themselves and humanity can transmute outer Divine necessity into inner spiritual freedom. But for this, we must realize that we are "
in the world, but not of the world". The materialistic, reductionistic, selfish ways of the modern world must be flipped on their head, inverted within our own consciousness. For the worldly human, the pole of Willing service and faithfulness to God cannot coexist with the pole of Thinking freedom of soul and spirit. It is an irresolvable paradox. For the human who lives with his consciousness in higher worlds, these two are naturally and inextricably linked, One eternally giving rise to the Other in their Cosmic dance. "
I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come."