Lou Gold wrote: ↑Sat Jul 16, 2022 4:55 am
Federica wrote: ↑Fri Jul 15, 2022 2:17 pm
AshvinP wrote: ↑Thu Jul 14, 2022 8:57 pm
I agree, all too often moderns take some isolated phenomena in Nature and call it "evil", precisely because they give priority only to outer appearances. Then everything is evaluated as an atomized unit apart from its holistic influence, especially over broad temporal scales. Atheists, and sometimes modern mystics (BK has brought this up before), often use this as an argument against the existence of a personal and self-conscious God - "if He exists, why would he allow forest fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.?" It's simply a projection of a static, atomized perspective onto Reality and then a judgment of Reality's moral worth based on that projection.
This can happen with cultural appearances too. We have so much identity politics now - racial this, gender that, matriarchy/patriarchy this, cultural appropriation that. It's all people confusing static outer appearances for the full meaningful significance of cultural institutions and developments. It just goes to show how much a lack of living and holistic spiritual knowledge is at the root of so many regressive attitudes today, which only end up ensuring the divisions which they outwardly claim to fight against, so to be seen as "virtuous" by others, again an obsession with outward appearances, remain in place much longer than necessary.
I agree completely with this viewpoint! Practically impossible though, to communicate it in society without creating colossal misunderstandings.
I can imagine that, even here, this has been automatically misunderstood by some.
It would be interesting to hear what Lou has to say about that, from his diversity and inclusion perspective (if this is an acceptable way to qualify it).
Not sure what you are asking me to comment on Federica. I can say that after living for 15 years in Brazil among a range of socio-economic circumstances from very poor to very rich, a reentry to standard American middle-class lifestyle seemed as a binge consumerist affluenza. I was amazed.
About forest fires and catastrophic forces, they are standard presences in natural ecologies of living systems. In general, nature works to promote diversity and against sameness. Indeed, they are the mechanism of diversification following the pioneer phase of monocultural colonization. Later as the system matures one has to conduct a war against "weeds" in order to maintain a lawn or a cornfield as nature inexorably pushes toward diversity. I think the rule in identity politics has to be mutual respect of differences and no imposed one way for all.
I think Goethe nailed it in his
Aphorisms on Nature.
Lou,
I keep mentioning you are ignoring an entire pole of Reality, one-half of the entire evolutionary progression. Actually you are only focusing on the involutionary progression, the diversification of systems and forms. The evolutionary progression is the integration of that diversity back into living Wholeness, where every form and system becomes ever-more conscious of how it is functioning within a unified Cosmic Organism. As I mentioned before, if we have a tendency to give preference only to the past, then we will focus on the diversification of Nature and ignore the integration through Culture. Then we start to feel the latter is something "evil" or "oppressive". Yet we are then once again inverting the actual relationship - what is
earlier becomes "evil" when it refuses to adapt and evolve, not the other way around. Goethe's aphorism is pointing precisely to the intuition that evolution redeems what is earlier from its outmoded and 'evil' orientation, by allowing us to experience it again more consciously and thereby integrate the diversity. Remember, Goethe was all about balancing the polarities. It's not about reaching some homogenous "sameness", but about
harmonizing the rhythms of all the diverse forms currently working at cross-purposes without obscuring their individuality.
Let's explore this polarity of past-future, involution-evolution, differentiation-integration further. It's simply our default to state to orient towards former pole and obscure the latter in one way or another. Even the materialist who is well-versed in evolutionary theory will tend to focus on the differentiated outer forms and not the inner integration of conscious ideas. Higher ideations - imaginations, inspirations, intuitions - are of the 'future'. They are the supersensible context which archetypally structures our destiny from 'above'. Everything we perceive around us, including our inner concepts, are from the 'past'. They are accomplished ideational works of bygone ages. Secular science informs of this in its own dim way - light travels various distances from objects to reach our eyes. This is what is really meant by "Maya" - a world of past perceptions, including concepts, which are in process of decaying and dying away. The sensory world bears us up, not so we can remain chained to it, but so that we may evolve through it into higher planes of consciousness. "
The world is a bridge, make not of it your dwelling place."
Metaphysics, history, anthropology, etc. are theories of Being, theories of the past. Inward phenomenology of cognition and spiritual practice is a way of Becoming, a portal to the future. We extract what is of essence from the former and move on to the latter, and we continue to rhythmically alternate between the poles so that we are spiraling upwards in a harmonious way. The longer we are content to simply dwell with our theories of all sorts, the deeper we mire ourselves in past perceptions which are dying out. There is no Spirit - no life or higher meaning - to be found only in the world of perceptions and mere concepts. It has withdrawn from outer nature so that we may discover the Spirit from within our inner nature in freedom. It is easy to see that conceptual philosophy, materialist and idealist, secular and religious, has simply been revolving around the same questions for hundreds of years now, making absolutely no progress towards greater understanding or practical transformation of our inner lives. That is because it tries to stitch together past perceptions into something new and living, but it can't be done.
Harmony is a supreme virtue here. We oscillate violently in the modern era between the poles, constantly overcorrecting from one to the other, as in Cleric's
magnetic pendulum. Think how often we indulge ourselves in something, like food or drink or mindless entertainment (past), only to then try and balance it out with temperance and mental endeavors (future) for a while. We drink ourselves to death in the Winter only so that we can 'dry out' during the Summer, rinse and repeat. Most are only dimly conscious of this oscillation and simply take it as a permanent state of being. Indeed, if we tend to focus only on Nature, then these cyclic oscillations seem like the end goal, the highest possible achievements. But instead the goal can be to spiral these into closer unity by becoming conscious of them in a living way. Jung identified the polarity of extroversion (past) and introversion (future). It's very easy for us to overcorrect from a life of sensory indulgence into isolated asceticism. In one case, we lose ourselves into the world of sensory impressions, in the other, we gain ourselves but we lose the world.
The oscillations are so rapid now that many people live in the distant past and future simultaneously. They cling to external authorities to provide for them, to natural gender and racial divisions, to national divisions of the past, yet also crave immediate freedom, equality, inclusion, etc., that which can only be actively and gradually earned from the future. As Federica mentioned, it's difficult to even speak of these things without enraging someone or the other. The extent to which we feel our blood boiling at the very mention of such things is the extent to which they are entirely subconscious for us. Intuitive thinking as a spiritual path is about Centering our lives in the streams of Being and Becoming, rhythmically navigating the oscillations as we spiral upwards into the future. Our inner life should be calm and steady at all times. Of course this is an ideal, it won't happen right away - but if we are always
anticipating a period of indulgence after temperance, depression after optimism, etc., then we have already made great progress in balancing them out. Likewise, we can anticipate periods of differentiation following integration, yet remain confident that the latter is in the driver's seat.
It is not about depriving ourselves of anything. Our instincts, impulses, antipathies, sympathies, reasoning and concepts can serve us well IF we become conscious and orient them properly. We do this by directing them towards the higher worlds from which they originated. They are like ingrained circuits which were etched into our being throughout the aeons and which our inner spiritual activity - our imagination - is channeled through. If we want to liberate our activity from these constrained pathways, then we need to put them to a higher use, in service to the future. We can desire, feel, and think about the higher worlds, and then gradually we spiral our activity, which is a gift from those very same higher worlds, and the object of its desire, feeling, and contemplation, the higher worlds themselves, into unity. As Cleric speaks of often, the higher worlds begin thinking, feeling, and willing through us. That is the inversion which is possible for modern man - we can transition from mechanically stitching together concepts about the higher worlds, and begin experiencing how they think our conceptual activity into existence.
Love must be mentioned here. It is our deepest intuition when it is not confused for our dim Maya feelings and concepts of what it is, which is much easier said than done. Love looks to the past with reverence and gratitude for the Wisdom of the sensory creation, the life of instincts, feelings, and concepts which bears us up, the diversification of systems and forms, yet always with a more radical
interest in the dormant potential becoming and harmonizing of All-Beings. If we gaze at sunsets and trees and rivers, plants and animals, and the diverse forms of Nature without a sense of how much greater they can become through our own inner development, then we have lost interest in the pole of future becoming. Love is the ultimate bridge between the sensible and the supersensible - it imparts the individuality with a free desire to do for ourselves and our neighbors what the Gods once did for us, and that is how creative evolution unfolds.
"God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love. We love him, because he first loved us." (1 John 4)