Whirlpool's core/first motion

[AshvinP]

Hi Ashvin,

Getting back to the threads now, after a few days when I couldn’t spend any time either on the forum or on anything related, I feel scarily estranged from the discussion. I remember I was completely involved in it, but sadly, I can’t find that connection right now. I can only find the motivation to search for it again. All in all, it's maybe not that bad, because what I’ve lost in terms of involvement I seem to have gained in equanimity. I can see this by reading my last posts, I find them somewhat exaggerated now. Wisdom must be with those who can be fully involved and fully balanced at the same time!


Anyway, the help of the various perspectives you have offered here on identification and Karma remains to be aknowledged. The perspectives were useful to gain an overall understanding, or sense, that identifications are unconscious, and stating “we are not those people'' is limited. Maybe this statement is nothing but a subtler way to recreate that same ‘us versus them’ separation that I was criticizing in the radical identifications.
It’s possible that there’s a way to go beyond such a relative viewpoint through a deep understanding of doctrines that at the moment I don’t realize. I certainly don't want to exclude that. More than the suggested thought experiments - the first one I found impossible to experiment with, and about the second, I can confidently and carefully say that I couldn’t care less about nationality - it’s the compendium of perspectives that I found helpful to draw the contours of this unknown space. I don’t know the space in itself, but its shape seems consistent, or at least could be consistent, with itself and with everything else. That's what I can say at this point.

Federica,

This is natural. I often have days where I am much less interested in pursuing the spiritual path than others. Sometimes I 'forget' things that I had just worked out the day before, or it's much more hazy and less inspiring than it seemed to be. This is the oscillation we will always be confronting on the path, since, after all, our desires, feelings, and thoughts are very much conditioned to the sensory world and its daily happenings. As we decondition, it raises up and confronts us even more fiercely. What you stated is very wise - we shouldn't view this oscillation as an 'enemy' to eliminate. It serves a great purpose in our evolution and we will often find, from a later, more holistic vantage point, that what seemed like a setback actually made room the opportunity for great spiritual advances.

And this is all tied into what I was saying about our subconscious identifications that we often presume to have 'overcome'. We are most vulnerable to that conditioning whenever we feel like we have overcome it. I wrote an essay on dualism here once, and Cleric offered this comment which I found very insightful and helpful. It can equally apply to any worldview or modern state of being.

viewtopic.php?p=14365#p14365

The first is that this addiction is not entirely of the same kind as other addictions. The big difference is that in most other addictions we know what it is to be addicted but in most cases we also know what it is to be sober. The big difficulty today is that it's not just about abolishing dualism. The trouble is that people don't know what the sober state is, because it is something that is only now beginning to enter the general evolution. This is also why non-dualism is such a misnomer today. It's not enough to just stop thinking about duality. If I'm not particularly bright then if I keep my mouth shut I'll probably get into less trouble. But this in itself won't make me smart. This is the challenge, that it's not just about abolishing dual thinking but about working towards a higher form of consciousness.





When we look at the whole image we can think to ourselves "I'm completely balanced now, I'm outside the duality." But in fact, it can be said that we're in the blind spot in the dark half, looking at the white half and seeing there the fractal of the whole, which, however, we believe is the full picture. As a matter of fact there's no point of view 'outside' the polarity. We spoke with Martin about this recently. The polarity of the mind is really the balancing of the two-petal lotus flower or the two brain hemispheres. This is achieved through concentration - all jumping around of thoughts must cease and all thinking must be focused as laser in the weightless point in the head. But this polarity is not the one from which the World proceeds. Interestingly, it was so for Hegel. For him the fractal of concepts was the World. Yet this polarity lives as an octave within higher order polarity (in the astral). There are even higher order polarities. Actually the feeling of dissociation comes not from the mind-polarity but from the astral. And this is quite obvious. It's much easier to conceptualize "It's all one" and collapse the mind. It's much more difficult to overcome the feelings of antipathy and embrace the world with Love - not only in some wishy-washy sentimental way but as real, sacrificial Love, such that we take responsibility for the sins of the world as if they are done by our very own brothers, sisters, children and most importantly - ourselves.

My point is that we should guard against projecting our blame onto duality. Think about it: the very fact that we divide things into dual and non-dual is already a duality. These are very slippery things and if we try to solve them mentally they can lead to actual breakdown. Something of this sort happened to Nietzsche. It looks a little like Gödel's theorem: if a given axiomatic system can prove its consistency then it is not consistent (since the G statement can be formulated). Similarly, if thinking concludes that it is now in non-dual mode, it most certainly isn't.

Fighting against certain mode of thinking can turn out to simply perpetuate the war. We shouldn't simply label different kinds of cognition and prefer one over the other. Any kind of thinking has it's rightful place. It's not a bad thing that we formulated a thought in polar subject-object relation. The real question is how these thoughts fit in the big picture.

The solution can only be found if we have the High Ideal. In PoF this is approached with Moral Imagination, Moral Intuition. We don't know the exact solution, it's not humanly possible to solve that many equations for flying stones. But we can focus our intentions toward the potential where the problem is already solved. We need to have faith that the solution exists - it's only a matter of finding our way to it.

Let's say I'm taking a slice of bread from the toaster. Is it a problem that I'm seeing the toaster and the slice in the sensory realm and think about them as an object that I reach for? Not really. It is a nice thing to recognize the different modes of thinking but we need a different skill if we're to judge if it is really the thinking mode that causes problems. Ultimately, what's really important is the moral value of what we're doing, feeling, thinking. And this value is not measured against some predefined yardsticks. It's really about trying to relate everything to the One Unity. Of course now some will object and say that there isn't one morality but that it's all about individuals or groups which are loosely related. There's no question of moral life only for beings who have no chance to affect each other - that is, if they exist in independent realities. As long as there's even a single point of contact, there's always a more encompassing whole from which the groups can be seen. The groups can be in conflict or harmony, so we can't address these issues if we don't seek the moral whole which encompasses them.

In this sense, when I take the slice of bread, why am I doing it? To feed myself. Why do I need to feed myself? To provide nutrition for my body. Why? To be healthy? Why? To perform my daily tasks? Why? Because I have certain goals in mind? What goals? To provide for my family, to do something beneficial for society, to develop some new skills which will allow me to be even more helpful, to work in alignment with the evolutionary impulses of the time, which are part of the grand Cosmic eons, within which the One common existence of all beings flows.

So we see that everything we do, feel, think can ultimately be traced to its moral dimension. This is really what distinguishes man from the animal. The animal operates by the necessity of the instinct, man must seek the moral impulses for his actions in freedom. We can seek these impulses only if we hold the High Ideal, the vision that everything is ultimately part of the One Cosmic organism. If we don't do that we'll be moral for our self, for our family or nation, but at some point we'll encounter a group which will clash with our interests. To move beyond that point we need true understanding of the spiritual whole from which my group and the other are part. Only through that understanding I'll be able to draw the moral impulses that can harmonize the groups.

I just wanted to expand on what is, of course, already implicit in the essay - that overcoming duality is not an end in itself. We can only make sense of it when it's seen in the larger picture where everything that we do, feel and think has moral significance for the Cosmic Whole. It is now an interesting exercise to trace how each of these 12 points actually affects the moral dimension of existence. It will be seen that it's not simply that the points in themselves decide arbitrarily that this is bad, that is good, but it'll be seen that they stand on the way of freedom and morality that can reach for the One Unity.

[Federica]

Federica,

This is natural. I often have days where I am much less interested in pursuing the spiritual path than others. Sometimes I 'forget' things that I had just worked out the day before, or it's much more hazy and less inspiring than it seemed to be. This is the oscillation we will always be confronting on the path, since, after all, our desires, feelings, and thoughts are very much conditioned to the sensory world and its daily happenings. As we decondition, it raises up and confronts us even more fiercely. What you stated is very wise - we shouldn't view this oscillation as an 'enemy' to eliminate. It serves a great purpose in our evolution and we will often find, from a later, more holistic vantage point, that what seemed like a setback actually made room the opportunity for great spiritual advances.

And this is all tied into what I was saying about our subconscious identifications that we often presume to have 'overcome'. We are most vulnerable to that conditioning whenever we feel like we have overcome it. I wrote an essay on dualism here once, and Cleric offered this comment which I found very insightful and helpful. It can equally apply to any worldview or modern state of being.

viewtopic.php?p=14365#p14365

The first is that this addiction is not entirely of the same kind as other addictions. The big difference is that in most other addictions we know what it is to be addicted but in most cases we also know what it is to be sober. The big difficulty today is that it's not just about abolishing dualism. The trouble is that people don't know what the sober state is, because it is something that is only now beginning to enter the general evolution. This is also why non-dualism is such a misnomer today. It's not enough to just stop thinking about duality. If I'm not particularly bright then if I keep my mouth shut I'll probably get into less trouble. But this in itself won't make me smart. This is the challenge, that it's not just about abolishing dual thinking but about working towards a higher form of consciousness.





When we look at the whole image we can think to ourselves "I'm completely balanced now, I'm outside the duality." But in fact, it can be said that we're in the blind spot in the dark half, looking at the white half and seeing there the fractal of the whole, which, however, we believe is the full picture. As a matter of fact there's no point of view 'outside' the polarity. We spoke with Martin about this recently. The polarity of the mind is really the balancing of the two-petal lotus flower or the two brain hemispheres. This is achieved through concentration - all jumping around of thoughts must cease and all thinking must be focused as laser in the weightless point in the head. But this polarity is not the one from which the World proceeds. Interestingly, it was so for Hegel. For him the fractal of concepts was the World. Yet this polarity lives as an octave within higher order polarity (in the astral). There are even higher order polarities. Actually the feeling of dissociation comes not from the mind-polarity but from the astral. And this is quite obvious. It's much easier to conceptualize "It's all one" and collapse the mind. It's much more difficult to overcome the feelings of antipathy and embrace the world with Love - not only in some wishy-washy sentimental way but as real, sacrificial Love, such that we take responsibility for the sins of the world as if they are done by our very own brothers, sisters, children and most importantly - ourselves.

My point is that we should guard against projecting our blame onto duality. Think about it: the very fact that we divide things into dual and non-dual is already a duality. These are very slippery things and if we try to solve them mentally they can lead to actual breakdown. Something of this sort happened to Nietzsche. It looks a little like Gödel's theorem: if a given axiomatic system can prove its consistency then it is not consistent (since the G statement can be formulated). Similarly, if thinking concludes that it is now in non-dual mode, it most certainly isn't.

Fighting against certain mode of thinking can turn out to simply perpetuate the war. We shouldn't simply label different kinds of cognition and prefer one over the other. Any kind of thinking has it's rightful place. It's not a bad thing that we formulated a thought in polar subject-object relation. The real question is how these thoughts fit in the big picture.

The solution can only be found if we have the High Ideal. In PoF this is approached with Moral Imagination, Moral Intuition. We don't know the exact solution, it's not humanly possible to solve that many equations for flying stones. But we can focus our intentions toward the potential where the problem is already solved. We need to have faith that the solution exists - it's only a matter of finding our way to it.

Let's say I'm taking a slice of bread from the toaster. Is it a problem that I'm seeing the toaster and the slice in the sensory realm and think about them as an object that I reach for? Not really. It is a nice thing to recognize the different modes of thinking but we need a different skill if we're to judge if it is really the thinking mode that causes problems. Ultimately, what's really important is the moral value of what we're doing, feeling, thinking. And this value is not measured against some predefined yardsticks. It's really about trying to relate everything to the One Unity. Of course now some will object and say that there isn't one morality but that it's all about individuals or groups which are loosely related. There's no question of moral life only for beings who have no chance to affect each other - that is, if they exist in independent realities. As long as there's even a single point of contact, there's always a more encompassing whole from which the groups can be seen. The groups can be in conflict or harmony, so we can't address these issues if we don't seek the moral whole which encompasses them.

In this sense, when I take the slice of bread, why am I doing it? To feed myself. Why do I need to feed myself? To provide nutrition for my body. Why? To be healthy? Why? To perform my daily tasks? Why? Because I have certain goals in mind? What goals? To provide for my family, to do something beneficial for society, to develop some new skills which will allow me to be even more helpful, to work in alignment with the evolutionary impulses of the time, which are part of the grand Cosmic eons, within which the One common existence of all beings flows.

So we see that everything we do, feel, think can ultimately be traced to its moral dimension. This is really what distinguishes man from the animal. The animal operates by the necessity of the instinct, man must seek the moral impulses for his actions in freedom. We can seek these impulses only if we hold the High Ideal, the vision that everything is ultimately part of the One Cosmic organism. If we don't do that we'll be moral for our self, for our family or nation, but at some point we'll encounter a group which will clash with our interests. To move beyond that point we need true understanding of the spiritual whole from which my group and the other are part. Only through that understanding I'll be able to draw the moral impulses that can harmonize the groups.

I just wanted to expand on what is, of course, already implicit in the essay - that overcoming duality is not an end in itself. We can only make sense of it when it's seen in the larger picture where everything that we do, feel and think has moral significance for the Cosmic Whole. It is now an interesting exercise to trace how each of these 12 points actually affects the moral dimension of existence. It will be seen that it's not simply that the points in themselves decide arbitrarily that this is bad, that is good, but it'll be seen that they stand on the way of freedom and morality that can reach for the One Unity.

Thank you! That's really helpful right now, both your essay and the expansion in the comment here below. I will have to read it again though, especially some quotes were laborious for me to follow and make full sense of.


In relation in particular to this:

It is now an interesting exercise to trace how each of these 12 points actually affects the moral dimension of existence. It will be seen that it's not simply that the points in themselves decide arbitrarily that this is bad, that is good, but it'll be seen that they stand on the way of freedom and morality that can reach for the One Unity.

and this:

As Cleric said, we can certainly focus on the high ideals of moral dimension to help manifest future qualities in the present. That is a good exercise with the 12 signs in the essay - read them over and try to concretely sense the moral dimension of what they signify. They clearly all relate to separation, alienation, isolation, fragmentation, etc. They also relate to a deemphasizing of everything related to our individual sense of agency, ambition, and Self-determination, i.e. our importance in co-creating the world we and our descendents will live in for ages to come. I am definitely curious if you or others can sense other moral meanings in them.

what comes to mind with reference to sign #1:

We speculate about the nature of reality from a 3rd-person "view from nowhere", imagining we can stand apart from the Cosmos and watch how events unfold from frame to frame without any influence of the knowing observer on the events being observed.

is that standing in the third-person “view from nowhere” perspective is what requires the role of the judge, who separates right-doing from wrong-doing. The impartial, external perspective entitled to discriminate right from wrong could actually be a definition of the vantage point itself.
When one is part of the One Reality, an external judge is not needed because what is good for anyone in the completely interconnected reality is good for everyone too. From the viewpoint of the spiritual whole in which we all partake, there is no need for external judgment, as long as there is faith that - even if we don’t remember and cannot trace the exact unfolding of karma, or the exact trajectory of the stones in Clerics metaphor - there is a logic within all phenomena and individual free initiative alone can concentrate consciousness around tighter spiraling of polarities and towards the potential for a harmonious solution. I see now that the thought “we are not those people” is actually a perfect example of dualistic thinking, and can only be thought when standing in the judge position, that is to say in the vantage point.


Another thing that comes to mind. An additional sign of dualistic thinking could appear when we have an accident or sickness, and have difficulties integrating and accepting the event, considering ourselves victims of bad luck or adverse hazard. It’s dualistic to not recognize that we can read the sickness or the accident like a metaphor of our spiritual ill-being and that in that language resides the key to healing.


.

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

You might be interested in the latest Symbolic World podcast with Jonathon Pageau where the topic of Christian esotericism is discussed (not terribly positively I should add). Steiner is mentioned. The video is also here:

Anthony,

Thanks. I would request you highlight some points made if you think they warrant further discussion. Generally I have lost interest in 'trudging' through these videos to find the nuggets.

In the first few minutes, I see Pageau is taken aback by the idea that reincarnation could be consistent with Christian esotericism. That indicates he just isn't too familiar with the deeper streams. I remember once he also indicated there were 'dark forces' behind Jung's thinking because it was aligned with ancient Gnosticism. As much as I admire his fierce loyalty and faith to his Orthodox understanding, I just don't feel there is much to be gained from his 'symbolic world' discussions. As we often mention, a major issue is that people forgot the symbolic world is meant to be a stepping stone towards inner experience of the worlds which are being symbolized. The longer this is put off, the more otherwise insightful thinkers lapse into more mainstream prejudices of thinking. I would say that arc is pretty evident in BK as well.

I made it to 10 min now - it sounds like they are doing an exoteric deconstruction of 'esoteric' Christian streams. You can sense they are simply analyzing it like an exoteric historian would analyze various cultural streams. Maybe this changes later, I don't know. There also doesn't seem to be an awareness of how consciousness has evolved over the last 2,000 years and how that could factor into the development of these various streams.

Steiner has some great lectures on the esoteric understanding of these various esoteric streams and their evolution, especially the Rosicrucian and Freemason and Theosophist, but others as well. I am sure Martin and Pageau would balk at it all and call it nonsense, but they would of all his spiritual science as well.

[AshvinP]

is that standing in the third-person “view from nowhere” perspective is what requires the role of the judge, who separates right-doing from wrong-doing. The impartial, external perspective entitled to discriminate right from wrong could actually be a definition of the vantage point itself.
When one is part of the One Reality, an external judge is not needed because what is good for anyone in the completely interconnected reality is good for everyone too. From the viewpoint of the spiritual whole in which we all partake, there is no need for external judgment, as long as there is faith that - even if we don’t remember and cannot trace the exact unfolding of karma, or the exact trajectory of the stones in Clerics metaphor - there is a logic within all phenomena and individual free initiative alone can concentrate consciousness around tighter spiraling of polarities and towards the potential for a harmonious solution. I see now that the thought “we are not those people” is actually a perfect example of dualistic thinking, and can only be thought when standing in the judge position, that is to say in the vantage point.


Another thing that comes to mind. An additional sign of dualistic thinking could appear when we have an accident or sickness, and have difficulties integrating and accepting the event, considering ourselves victims of bad luck or adverse hazard. It’s dualistic to not recognize that we can read the sickness or the accident like a metaphor of our spiritual ill-being and that in that language resides the key to healing.
.

Great observations!

And I want to make clear, for my part, there should never been any sense of self-condemnation, which we often find in the stricter religious circles, as we get from modern understanding of concepts like 'total depravity' (which admiteddly wasn't a great example to use). We can only reveal and understand our own dicontinuities of consciousness if we approach them with inner courage, dispassionate understanding, equanimity, even Love, in the sense of wanting what's best for ourselves, to develop our full potential. We should only be seeking to learn and improve from our dark desires, antipathetic feelings, mistaken thoughts, not to condemn and rage against them with fire and brimstone. I think we mentioned before here the backwards memory review exercise Steiner offers. It is very helpful and he makes clear it should be approached without negative judgments about what we did or didn't do. The last thing we want to do is dwell on the past, in paralyzing shame or regret - instead we are always seeking to orient towards the future through the power of scientific, imaginative self-consciousness.

I also came across this passage from Steiner recently, which speaks to your insight above re: accident and sickness. Another way to approach it, which is certainly tougher for our modern exoteric thinking, is to pay attention to that which does not happen to us, especially when informed by what we feel as intuitions and inspirations. Here we can resonate more with the positive elements of our deep spiritual activity which weave together our "destiny" in the esoteric spaces of evolution (between sleeping and waking, death and rebirth), but which generally remain subconscious for the waking intellect.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one: —

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

[Federica]

(...)

I also came across this passage from Steiner recently, which speaks to your insight above re: accident and sickness. Another way to approach it, which is certainly tougher for our modern exoteric thinking, is to pay attention to that which does not happen to us, especially when informed by what we feel as intuitions and inspirations. Here we can resonate more with the positive elements of our deep spiritual activity which weave together our "destiny" in the esoteric spaces of evolution (between sleeping and waking, death and rebirth), but which generally remain subconscious for the waking intellect.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one: —

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

Ashvin,

Thanks for the further reading suggestions! Regarding the meaning of what does not happen to us, which only strikes us when an event is sensationally avoided, the fact that this “other world system” is constantly present, and its connection to the subconscious nature of feelings and will, and to the “so-called dead”, I have to say, well… I don’t get it. There seems to be a parallel between what does not happen and freedom, as if we could, in another “world system”, choose what happens to us, if we were doing it right, instead of remaining submitted to necessity, but I can’t see the connections. I tried to read the lecture but I found it quite difficult. Even trying to bring the idea to the thought about illnesses and accidents that do not happen to us, I can’t see where I’m going. No problem, I just put it on the side as something to get back to at a later stage.


On your essay there’s much more I’d like to comment and ask. I’ll do it on that thread. Here I’m only left with one general question about technology and mechanism that arose a few days ago. I later forgot it, but now the essay is reviving it. Recently, as you were expanding on the cannibals in the metaphorical forest, you wrote:

These are, of course, real spiritual beings and their 'offspring' we are dealing with here. They entered into human evolution quite some time ago and we are nested within their consciousness. We can't really function intellectually or imaginatively without their involvement in our being. But Ahriman has also become the source of our errors and lies re: higher worlds, and is sometimes called 'the lying spirit'. The age of materialism is due to his influences. His spirits are bound up with all modern mechanistic thinking and technology.

So I was surprised, and especially now after reading your essays on phenomenology of mechanism, when I later read this, in your exchange with Lou:

Scientific spiritual thinking has a burning desire for the world's appearances to be raised up through our own creative activity, our psychospiritual technology which can also interface with physical technology, and thereby bring about something brand new in the course of Cosmic evolution.

How to reconcile these seemingly separate directions?

.

[AshvinP]

(...)

I also came across this passage from Steiner recently, which speaks to your insight above re: accident and sickness. Another way to approach it, which is certainly tougher for our modern exoteric thinking, is to pay attention to that which does not happen to us, especially when informed by what we feel as intuitions and inspirations. Here we can resonate more with the positive elements of our deep spiritual activity which weave together our "destiny" in the esoteric spaces of evolution (between sleeping and waking, death and rebirth), but which generally remain subconscious for the waking intellect.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

But what I wish to convey in a description of this kind is that we must place the realm of the so-called dead within the same realm in which we ourselves live, and we must become conscious of the fact that we feel separated from the dead (but in reality we are not separated from them) only because we dream and sleep away our feeling-life and will-life, where the dead are. However, something else can be found in this world that we dream and sleep away, something that man as a rule does not follow at all in his usual consciousness. Sometimes he becomes aware of this when it appears before him in specially striking cases; but these are exceptional, outstanding cases, which only draw attention to what is always permeating life and streaming through it. You yourselves will have heard of many cases resembling the following one: —

Someone is in the habit of taking a daily walk; it leads him to a mountain slope. He goes there every day; it is his special pleasure. One day he goes there again as usual. Suddenly, while he is walking, he hears something like a voice, although it is not a physical voice, which tells him: — Why are you taking this walk? Can you really not do without this pleasure? It speaks more or less like this. He begins to hesitate and turns aside, in order to think over what has just happened to him. In this instant a piece of rock rolls down; it would quite certainly have struck him, had he not turned aside.

This is a true story, but one that only points out sensationally something that is always present in our lives. How often you plan to do this or that — and this or that prevents you. Think how many things would have been different, even in the smallest experiences of life, had you started out at an appointed hour, instead of half an hour later, because something detained you. Think what changes have thus come into your life; what changes have also come into the lives of many other people! It is quite easy to picture this. Let us suppose that you have planned to take a walk at 3:30 PM; you were supposed to meet another person and to tell him some news that he, in his turn, would have told to someone else. Because you came too late you do not tell him this news; this was not done, and with a certain right. Here we see a universal order of laws that differs from the one that we describe as a necessity of Nature. It consists therein, that someone is prevented from continuing his walk because he hears a voice that causes him to turn aside, and thus saves him from being struck dead by the falling piece of rock. We feel that here a different world system is at work. But this world system permeates our existence always, not merely when such sensational events take place. Even in such matters, we are used to see only the sensational aspect of things. We do not notice this other world. Why? Because we turn our gaze toward the events that occur in our life and in our surroundings and not toward the events that do not occur, events that are continually being prevented, continually being hindered.

From a certain moment in spiritual experience, that which does not happen is held back from us. That from which we are, as it were, prevented, can rise up in our consciousness in the same way as that which does happen; except that it comes to our consciousness as another world system. Try to place this world system before your souls by saying to yourselves: man is accustomed to look only at what happens and not at what has been prevented from happening. What he does not notice in this case is intimately connected with the realm in which the dead are, in which we ourselves are with our dreamlike feeling and sleeping will. Within us, we cut ourselves off from this other world because dream and sleep play also into our waking life. All that seethes, lives and weaves beneath the boundary which separates our thinking from our feeling contains, at the same time, the secrets that build not only the bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but also the bridge between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom and of so-called chance.

Ashvin,

Thanks for the further reading suggestions! Regarding the meaning of what does not happen to us, which only strikes us when an event is sensationally avoided, the fact that this “other world system” is constantly present, and its connection to the subconscious nature of feelings and will, and to the “so-called dead”, I have to say, well… I don’t get it. There seems to be a parallel between what does not happen and freedom, as if we could, in another “world system”, choose what happens to us, if we were doing it right, instead of remaining submitted to necessity, but I can’t see the connections. I tried to read the lecture but I found it quite difficult. Even trying to bring the idea to the thought about illnesses and accidents that do not happen to us, I can’t see where I’m going. No problem, I just put it on the side as something to get back to at a later stage.

Federica,

I started writing a response to this. But since you are commenting on the esoteric spaces essay, I'll try to utilize it there. I think it will fit better in that discussion, anyway. I should mention, the recent lectures I have been sharing with you are new to me as well. I am familiar with the underlying principles at work, but many of the connections he had made in them are brand new insights for me. In general, those underlying principles are what we should try to grasp first, as they will then harmonize and greatly enrich the conceptual details of the spiritual evolutionary process. I know that if I had read these same lectures not too long ago, they would not have made the same impact on me. I will try to point to these underlying principles more precisely when sharing more lectures in the future.

On your essay there’s much more I’d like to comment and ask. I’ll do it on that thread. Here I’m only left with one general question about technology and mechanism that arose a few days ago. I later forgot it, but now the essay is reviving it. Recently, as you were expanding on the cannibals in the metaphorical forest, you wrote:

These are, of course, real spiritual beings and their 'offspring' we are dealing with here. They entered into human evolution quite some time ago and we are nested within their consciousness. We can't really function intellectually or imaginatively without their involvement in our being. But Ahriman has also become the source of our errors and lies re: higher worlds, and is sometimes called 'the lying spirit'. The age of materialism is due to his influences. His spirits are bound up with all modern mechanistic thinking and technology.

So I was surprised, and especially now after reading your essays on phenomenology of mechanism, when I later read this, in your exchange with Lou:

Scientific spiritual thinking has a burning desire for the world's appearances to be raised up through our own creative activity, our psychospiritual technology which can also interface with physical technology, and thereby bring about something brand new in the course of Cosmic evolution.

How to reconcile these seemingly separate directions?

.

Correct me if I'm wrong - the seeming tension you are pointing to is how we can say there are spirits of darkness at work in modern technology, yet we should also 'interface' with that technology with our creative spiritual activity. If so, consider this passage which I also utilized at the end of the esoteric spaces essay:

Do not think I want to come before you as a typical reactionary who would like to put a stop to cars and typewriters, or even to this terrible handwriting. Anyone who realises how the world is going knows very well that such things have to be; they are justified. Hence there is no question of abolishing them; I am saying only that in dealing with them we should be on our guard. These things have to come and must be accepted in the same way that we accept night and day... all this has to be faced in order that men should rightly develop a vigorous approach to spiritual knowledge, spiritual feeling, and spiritual will. There is no question of fighting against the material, but of getting to know its reality and necessity; and also of seeing how essential it is that strength of spirit should be brought to bear against the crushing weight of physical existence.

So it is firstly important to realize the physical technology born of human spiritual activity is here to stay and is not to be eliminated. It is certainly plunging us deeper into spiritual darkness, but that's due to our own moral orientation towards it. For one, we are not self-conscious of what it signified that we are able to develop such technology - of how the higher ideations precipitating from the spiritual make that possible. Because we lack that living spiritual knowledge, we orient selfishly towards 'our' creations - we take excessive pride in them and feel they should be employed only to make our Earthy lives more comfortable, more convenient, more luxurious, more sensuous and pleasurable, etc. None of this brings us living connection with the world or ourselves, any existential meaning to our lonely islands, but it helps us keep our plight buried in the subconscious and delay the reckoning. Nevertheless, we subconsciously sense the crushing weight of a physical existence which lacks spiritual knowledge, or we semi-consciously refer to it as the 'meaning crisis' and write books and give lectures.

Secondly we should remember that there is no freedom and moral action to speak of without resistance. The fundamentalists will balk at the notion that 'evil' can be intertwined with 'good', but that is actually the case. It's not as if the Good powers at work don't know about these spirits of darkness at work on the Earth or are helpless to do anything about it - in many ways, they set up the conditions for those spirits to be at work on the physical plane. We really grow our moral and free consciousness in proportion to the suffering and evil we are tasked with confronting and redeeming through our creative thinking activity. The lack of the latter is what keeps us enslaved to the physical technology instead of putting it to use for the benefit of the Whole. We are dealing with long evolutionary processes, though, and there is still a lot more Earthly drama to unfold. Many of these technologies can be adapted to higher spiritual purposes in epochs to come, but if more portions don't awaken soon it's possible the evolutionary course gets greatly diverted from its course towards higher Unities.

The most important task for mankind in the era of intellectuality was the development of reason through the investigation of external nature and the development of technology.

In this direction great and impressive results have been accomplished in recent centuries. However, it must be said that the intellect has begun to lose its creativity, though we still live with its heritage. The most creative period was from the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno right up to the nineteenth century. Especially in western civilization the greatest intellectual achievements have been attained in recent centuries.

It is obvious, even to an external unbiased observation, that the intellect has lost some of its creative power. In general, mankind has no longer the same enthusiasm for intellectual accomplishments. Yet the practice of centuries continues through a certain cultural inertia. Thoughts run along the old grooves but the intellect brings nothing new of real importance to the fore.
...
However, in order to fructify the developed intellect, a stream of spirituality from higher regions of world existence now seeks entry into the earthly life of mankind. Whether this will happen depends upon man opening his heart and soul to what thus seeks entry, through many doors, as it were, into the earthly world from the spiritual world. It will be necessary for man not only to become conscious once more of the spiritual in all nature, but able to perceive it.
...
However, when knowledge is no longer obtained by means of combining abstract, logical thoughts, but by uniting ourselves through our thinking with the world rhythm, then we shall rediscover the elemental beings contained in everything of a solid earthy nature. The outstanding characteristic of these elemental begins dwelling in solid earth is cleverness, cunning, slyness — in fact, a one-sidedly developed intellect.

Thus, in the solid earth element live spiritual beings of an elemental kind who are very much more clever than human beings.
...
The elemental beings dwelling in the fluid element — i.e., in water — have particularly developed what is, in man, his life of feeling and sensitivity. In this respect we humans are really backward compared with these beings. We may take pleasure in a red rose or feel enchanted when trees unfold their foliage. But these beings go with the fluid which as sap rises in the rose bush and participate in the redness of the blossoms. In an intimate way they share feelingly in the world processes. We remain outside of things with our sensitivity, whereas they are right inside the process themselves and share in them.

The elemental beings of air have developed to a high degree what lives in the human will. It is splendid that the analytical chemist discovers the atomic weight of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and that he finds out how hydrogen and oxygen combine into water to be further analysed or else how chloride of lime is analysed, and so on. But elemental spiritual beings are active behind all this, and it is essential that man should acquire insight into their characteristics.

To what ends these elemental beings are put in service towards will depend on us and to what extent we awaken to the spiritual with moral conscience. I hope to make some of the principles here more clear in the separate post. After all, we want to be clear on the relation between all these manifold spiritual beings and our own evolutionary timeline, as well as our inner activities of willing-feeling-thinking. We want to discern how the living Time-Organism constitutes what we experience today and what we can experience going forward. And we want to do it so that we are not only combining abstract thoughts, but creatively participating in the process which can actually redeem the current plight of humanity and the Earth evolution.

[Federica]

(...)

I also came across this passage from Steiner recently, which speaks to your insight above re: accident and sickness. Another way to approach it, which is certainly tougher for our modern exoteric thinking, is to pay attention to that which does not happen to us, especially when informed by what we feel as intuitions and inspirations. Here we can resonate more with the positive elements of our deep spiritual activity which weave together our "destiny" in the esoteric spaces of evolution (between sleeping and waking, death and rebirth), but which generally remain subconscious for the waking intellect.


https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA179/En ... 09p01.html

Ashvin,

Thanks for the further reading suggestions! Regarding the meaning of what does not happen to us, which only strikes us when an event is sensationally avoided, the fact that this “other world system” is constantly present, and its connection to the subconscious nature of feelings and will, and to the “so-called dead”, I have to say, well… I don’t get it. There seems to be a parallel between what does not happen and freedom, as if we could, in another “world system”, choose what happens to us, if we were doing it right, instead of remaining submitted to necessity, but I can’t see the connections. I tried to read the lecture but I found it quite difficult. Even trying to bring the idea to the thought about illnesses and accidents that do not happen to us, I can’t see where I’m going. No problem, I just put it on the side as something to get back to at a later stage.

Federica,

I started writing a response to this. But since you are commenting on the esoteric spaces essay, I'll try to utilize it there. I think it will fit better in that discussion, anyway. I should mention, the recent lectures I have been sharing with you are new to me as well. I am familiar with the underlying principles at work, but many of the connections he had made in them are brand new insights for me. In general, those underlying principles are what we should try to grasp first, as they will then harmonize and greatly enrich the conceptual details of the spiritual evolutionary process. I know that if I had read these same lectures not too long ago, they would not have made the same impact on me. I will try to point to these underlying principles more precisely when sharing more lectures in the future.

On your essay there’s much more I’d like to comment and ask. I’ll do it on that thread. Here I’m only left with one general question about technology and mechanism that arose a few days ago. I later forgot it, but now the essay is reviving it. Recently, as you were expanding on the cannibals in the metaphorical forest, you wrote:

These are, of course, real spiritual beings and their 'offspring' we are dealing with here. They entered into human evolution quite some time ago and we are nested within their consciousness. We can't really function intellectually or imaginatively without their involvement in our being. But Ahriman has also become the source of our errors and lies re: higher worlds, and is sometimes called 'the lying spirit'. The age of materialism is due to his influences. His spirits are bound up with all modern mechanistic thinking and technology.

So I was surprised, and especially now after reading your essays on phenomenology of mechanism, when I later read this, in your exchange with Lou:

Scientific spiritual thinking has a burning desire for the world's appearances to be raised up through our own creative activity, our psychospiritual technology which can also interface with physical technology, and thereby bring about something brand new in the course of Cosmic evolution.

How to reconcile these seemingly separate directions?

.

Correct me if I'm wrong - the seeming tension you are pointing to is how we can say there are spirits of darkness at work in modern technology, yet we should also 'interface' with that technology with our creative spiritual activity. If so, consider this passage which I also utilized at the end of the esoteric spaces essay:

Do not think I want to come before you as a typical reactionary who would like to put a stop to cars and typewriters, or even to this terrible handwriting. Anyone who realises how the world is going knows very well that such things have to be; they are justified. Hence there is no question of abolishing them; I am saying only that in dealing with them we should be on our guard. These things have to come and must be accepted in the same way that we accept night and day... all this has to be faced in order that men should rightly develop a vigorous approach to spiritual knowledge, spiritual feeling, and spiritual will. There is no question of fighting against the material, but of getting to know its reality and necessity; and also of seeing how essential it is that strength of spirit should be brought to bear against the crushing weight of physical existence.

So it is firstly important to realize the physical technology born of human spiritual activity is here to stay and is not to be eliminated. It is certainly plunging us deeper into spiritual darkness, but that's due to our own moral orientation towards it. For one, we are not self-conscious of what it signified that we are able to develop such technology - of how the higher ideations precipitating from the spiritual make that possible. Because we lack that living spiritual knowledge, we orient selfishly towards 'our' creations - we take excessive pride in them and feel they should be employed only to make our Earthy lives more comfortable, more convenient, more luxurious, more sensuous and pleasurable, etc. None of this brings us living connection with the world or ourselves, any existential meaning to our lonely islands, but it helps us keep our plight buried in the subconscious and delay the reckoning. Nevertheless, we subconsciously sense the crushing weight of a physical existence which lacks spiritual knowledge, or we semi-consciously refer to it as the 'meaning crisis' and write books and give lectures.

Secondly we should remember that there is no freedom and moral action to speak of without resistance. The fundamentalists will balk at the notion that 'evil' can be intertwined with 'good', but that is actually the case. It's not as if the Good powers at work don't know about these spirits of darkness at work on the Earth or are helpless to do anything about it - in many ways, they set up the conditions for those spirits to be at work on the physical plane. We really grow our moral and free consciousness in proportion to the suffering and evil we are tasked with confronting and redeeming through our creative thinking activity. The lack of the latter is what keeps us enslaved to the physical technology instead of putting it to use for the benefit of the Whole. We are dealing with long evolutionary processes, though, and there is still a lot more Earthly drama to unfold. Many of these technologies can be adapted to higher spiritual purposes in epochs to come, but if more portions don't awaken soon it's possible the evolutionary course gets greatly diverted from its course towards higher Unities.

The most important task for mankind in the era of intellectuality was the development of reason through the investigation of external nature and the development of technology.

In this direction great and impressive results have been accomplished in recent centuries. However, it must be said that the intellect has begun to lose its creativity, though we still live with its heritage. The most creative period was from the time of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno right up to the nineteenth century. Especially in western civilization the greatest intellectual achievements have been attained in recent centuries.

It is obvious, even to an external unbiased observation, that the intellect has lost some of its creative power. In general, mankind has no longer the same enthusiasm for intellectual accomplishments. Yet the practice of centuries continues through a certain cultural inertia. Thoughts run along the old grooves but the intellect brings nothing new of real importance to the fore.
...
However, in order to fructify the developed intellect, a stream of spirituality from higher regions of world existence now seeks entry into the earthly life of mankind. Whether this will happen depends upon man opening his heart and soul to what thus seeks entry, through many doors, as it were, into the earthly world from the spiritual world. It will be necessary for man not only to become conscious once more of the spiritual in all nature, but able to perceive it.
...
However, when knowledge is no longer obtained by means of combining abstract, logical thoughts, but by uniting ourselves through our thinking with the world rhythm, then we shall rediscover the elemental beings contained in everything of a solid earthy nature. The outstanding characteristic of these elemental begins dwelling in solid earth is cleverness, cunning, slyness — in fact, a one-sidedly developed intellect.

Thus, in the solid earth element live spiritual beings of an elemental kind who are very much more clever than human beings.
...
The elemental beings dwelling in the fluid element — i.e., in water — have particularly developed what is, in man, his life of feeling and sensitivity. In this respect we humans are really backward compared with these beings. We may take pleasure in a red rose or feel enchanted when trees unfold their foliage. But these beings go with the fluid which as sap rises in the rose bush and participate in the redness of the blossoms. In an intimate way they share feelingly in the world processes. We remain outside of things with our sensitivity, whereas they are right inside the process themselves and share in them.

The elemental beings of air have developed to a high degree what lives in the human will. It is splendid that the analytical chemist discovers the atomic weight of hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, and that he finds out how hydrogen and oxygen combine into water to be further analysed or else how chloride of lime is analysed, and so on. But elemental spiritual beings are active behind all this, and it is essential that man should acquire insight into their characteristics.

To what ends these elemental beings are put in service towards will depend on us and to what extent we awaken to the spiritual with moral conscience. I hope to make some of the principles here more clear in the separate post. After all, we want to be clear on the relation between all these manifold spiritual beings and our own evolutionary timeline, as well as our inner activities of willing-feeling-thinking. We want to discern how the living Time-Organism constitutes what we experience today and what we can experience going forward. And we want to do it so that we are not only combining abstract thoughts, but creatively participating in the process which can actually redeem the current plight of humanity and the Earth evolution.

Thank you Ashvin. I thought I would start from the beginning and have commented on the first installment first, on liminal spaces. I will certainly come to the second one on esoteric spaces, as soon as I find the time to do it. Thanks for expanding on the necessity of technology despite its dark side, that was indeed my question.

[AshvinP]

Thank you Ashvin. I thought I would start from the beginning and have commented on the first installment first, on liminal spaces. I will certainly come to the second one on esoteric spaces, as soon as I find the time to do it. Thanks for expanding on the necessity of technology despite its dark side, that was indeed my question.

Federica,

I want to provide a broad conceptual overview here in relation to your earlier comment re: the Steiner lecture, but I also hope it will help contextualize any further responses on the mechanism essays.

We can relate the 'what doesn't happen' from Steiner's lecture to the liminal (esoteric) spaces of perception. I think you have followed that particular discussion in previous threads and in the essay pretty well so far - perceptions are like negative images and the meaning lives 'in between' them. Even in the superficial, externalized understanding of secular science, we know that we only see the colors of objects which were not absorbed by those objects, but are reflected. So, in addition to restoring the 1st-person perspective on phenomena, where the forces responsible for them are flowing through our own inner activity, we also need to remember how broad "perceptions" really are - they are anything we can make the object of our thinking. So they are not only objects perceived in space, but those perceived over time, i.e. our inner experiences (desires, feelings, thoughts) over the days, weeks, months, etc., as individuals and collectives, as well as natural and cultural phenomena extended over time. The liminal space of 'what doesn't happen' during any given time period is such a perception.

What goes on in these liminal/esoteric spaces? This is where we find the willing, feeling, and ideational activity of the dead and the higher hierarchies, i.e. our higher Self. For purposes of a broad conceptual understanding, it helps to remember the underlying principle - "all is One". At the vague level of abstract philosophy and mysticism, this is practically useless, and counterproductive when it leads us to a duality of science and spirituality by negating the fundamental nature of our cognitive activity. But if we resist that tendency, then we can ask, how are we all One? Every first-person perspective should be an image of the entire spiritual Cosmos - a perspective which only arises from the 'interference' of all other ideal forces/perspectives, from eternal past to future. Although most of the inner meaning of those forces remain subconscious, there are still outer and inner perceptions which point in their general direction. These are the (mostly flattened) negative images of all those subconscious forces.

So each individual's outer and inner worlds, in their temporal character, gives a sense of the TC spectrum which exists from the eternal past to the eternal future - we are each, at every moment, a temporally structured microcosm of the Macrocosm. Every moment of our being is an image of the temporal Whole. When we look out at the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, we are perceiving past stages of our own evolution, i.e. higher order Time-rhythms in which our being used to flow along instinctively. The extent to which we can connect these observations with our current inner temporal rhythms is the extent to which we also restore that higher order meaning to the outer appearances. Even at the surface level, we can see how moving from the outer world to our inner organism goes from fixed spatial objects to temporal processes, like nerve-sensing, respiration, metabolism, etc. These inner rhythms are the activity of higher beings, in whose consciousness we are nested, and we resonate with that activity through our own higher cognition - imagination, inspiration, intuition. These grow us into the inner perspectives which are creatively responsible for the Earthly kingdoms and 'forces of nature'.

The modern 3rd person view has conditioned us to think of most things as absolute 'spaces' of experience, like our life of waking, dreaming and sleeping. But staying rooted in the first-person perspective, we can understand these are simply our ways of categorizing varied alternating states of consciousness which have become polarized from one another in the course of our evolution. The same can be said of 'life' and 'afterlife' (between death and rebirth). In fact, the same applies to "thinking, feeling, willing". Our experience of these inner activities reflect polarized modes of consciousness, where we cast out perceptions (willing) and then reflect them into consciousness (normal waking thinking). But again we shouldn't imagine this all happening in the 'space' of our physical organism, but rather along the entire TC gradient. Our life of feeling bridges the two through sympathies and antipathies for what is perceived and thought.Our language can only go so far (and metaphorical approach is best for these dynamics), but the point here is to get a feel for how they are fluid activity of ideation-perception and it's only our current level of decoherence within the TC structure of our being which makes it feel like more rigid 'spaces' in which our activity unfolds, like spatial dimension and linear time.

These latter should be understood as manifestations of the underlying discontinuities of consciousness from our current relational perspective on the Whole. We could say the cognitive element of the holistic Idea has been attenuated more and more from willing-felling into its own category of "thinking". This attenuation also leads to the birth-death-rebirth discontinuity and, within a single incarnation, the waking-dreaming-sleeping discontinuity. Within a single waking day, we are likewise dreaming as to our life of feeling and sleeping as to our life of will impulses. I think we have discussed the phenomenological support for that. We only discern our will in its final effects on our physical body movements. Our feelings arise into consciousness as if in a dream - there is no clear sense of why they arise. Only in thinking do we have a small tip of consciousness where we are awake to how our thoughts arrive (especially when we actively will them in the imaginative state).

I hope this makes more clear how all these states of being are superimposed over one another and it's our own cognitive discontinuities which spread them out in linear time and space. Only then does it become difficult to conceive how the 'realms' of the so-called dead and that of the so-called living could be overlapping, as indicated in Steiner's lecture. When we refrain from reifying things happening 'in' space and time, then things become more straightforward, although it will surely take some practice before we get used to it. Here we aren't only finding a way to come back to a genuine monism from the dualisms, but also finding the way in which our living experience can be made sense of. From our daily experience to natural and cultural history, this constant cooperation between varied 'realms' of temporally structured and nested consciousness is the only way to discern the entire drama as an organic, evolving Whole. Once we get the underlying principles in place, we can start to consider the spiritual scientific details through which the living processes becomes much more illuminated.

[Federica]

Thank you Ashvin. I thought I would start from the beginning and have commented on the first installment first, on liminal spaces. I will certainly come to the second one on esoteric spaces, as soon as I find the time to do it. Thanks for expanding on the necessity of technology despite its dark side, that was indeed my question.

Federica,

I want to provide a broad conceptual overview here in relation to your earlier comment re: the Steiner lecture, but I also hope it will help contextualize any further responses on the mechanism essays.

We can relate the 'what doesn't happen' from Steiner's lecture to the liminal (esoteric) spaces of perception. I think you have followed that particular discussion in previous threads and in the essay pretty well so far - perceptions are like negative images and the meaning lives 'in between' them. Even in the superficial, externalized understanding of secular science, we know that we only see the colors of objects which were not absorbed by those objects, but are reflected. So, in addition to restoring the 1st-person perspective on phenomena, where the forces responsible for them are flowing through our own inner activity, we also need to remember how broad "perceptions" really are - they are anything we can make the object of our thinking. So they are not only objects perceived in space, but those perceived over time, i.e. our inner experiences (desires, feelings, thoughts) over the days, weeks, months, etc., as individuals and collectives, as well as natural and cultural phenomena extended over time. The liminal space of 'what doesn't happen' during any given time period is such a perception.

What goes on in these liminal/esoteric spaces? This is where we find the willing, feeling, and ideational activity of the dead and the higher hierarchies, i.e. our higher Self. For purposes of a broad conceptual understanding, it helps to remember the underlying principle - "all is One". At the vague level of abstract philosophy and mysticism, this is practically useless, and counterproductive when it leads us to a duality of science and spirituality by negating the fundamental nature of our cognitive activity. But if we resist that tendency, then we can ask, how are we all One? Every first-person perspective should be an image of the entire spiritual Cosmos - a perspective which only arises from the 'interference' of all other ideal forces/perspectives, from eternal past to future. Although most of the inner meaning of those forces remain subconscious, there are still outer and inner perceptions which point in their general direction. These are the (mostly flattened) negative images of all those subconscious forces.

So each individual's outer and inner worlds, in their temporal character, gives a sense of the TC spectrum which exists from the eternal past to the eternal future - we are each, at every moment, a temporally structured microcosm of the Macrocosm. Every moment of our being is an image of the temporal Whole. When we look out at the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, we are perceiving past stages of our own evolution, i.e. higher order Time-rhythms in which our being used to flow along instinctively. The extent to which we can connect these observations with our current inner temporal rhythms is the extent to which we also restore that higher order meaning to the outer appearances. Even at the surface level, we can see how moving from the outer world to our inner organism goes from fixed spatial objects to temporal processes, like nerve-sensing, respiration, metabolism, etc. These inner rhythms are the activity of higher beings, in whose consciousness we are nested, and we resonate with that activity through our own higher cognition - imagination, inspiration, intuition. These grow us into the inner perspectives which are creatively responsible for the Earthly kingdoms and 'forces of nature'.

The modern 3rd person view has conditioned us to think of most things as absolute 'spaces' of experience, like our life of waking, dreaming and sleeping. But staying rooted in the first-person perspective, we can understand these are simply our ways of categorizing varied alternating states of consciousness which have become polarized from one another in the course of our evolution. The same can be said of 'life' and 'afterlife' (between death and rebirth). In fact, the same applies to "thinking, feeling, willing". Our experience of these inner activities reflect polarized modes of consciousness, where we cast out perceptions (willing) and then reflect them into consciousness (normal waking thinking). But again we shouldn't imagine this all happening in the 'space' of our physical organism, but rather along the entire TC gradient. Our life of feeling bridges the two through sympathies and antipathies for what is perceived and thought.Our language can only go so far (and metaphorical approach is best for these dynamics), but the point here is to get a feel for how they are fluid activity of ideation-perception and it's only our current level of decoherence within the TC structure of our being which makes it feel like more rigid 'spaces' in which our activity unfolds, like spatial dimension and linear time.

These latter should be understood as manifestations of the underlying discontinuities of consciousness from our current relational perspective on the Whole. We could say the cognitive element of the holistic Idea has been attenuated more and more from willing-felling into its own category of "thinking". This attenuation also leads to the birth-death-rebirth discontinuity and, within a single incarnation, the waking-dreaming-sleeping discontinuity. Within a single waking day, we are likewise dreaming as to our life of feeling and sleeping as to our life of will impulses. I think we have discussed the phenomenological support for that. We only discern our will in its final effects on our physical body movements. Our feelings arise into consciousness as if in a dream - there is no clear sense of why they arise. Only in thinking do we have a small tip of consciousness where we are awake to how our thoughts arrive (especially when we actively will them in the imaginative state).

I hope this makes more clear how all these states of being are superimposed over one another and it's our own cognitive discontinuities which spread them out in linear time and space. Only then does it become difficult to conceive how the 'realms' of the so-called dead and that of the so-called living could be overlapping, as indicated in Steiner's lecture. When we refrain from reifying things happening 'in' space and time, then things become more straightforward, although it will surely take some practice before we get used to it. Here we aren't only finding a way to come back to a genuine monism from the dualisms, but also finding the way in which our living experience can be made sense of. From our daily experience to natural and cultural history, this constant cooperation between varied 'realms' of temporally structured and nested consciousness is the only way to discern the entire drama as an organic, evolving Whole. Once we get the underlying principles in place, we can start to consider the spiritual scientific details through which the living processes becomes much more illuminated.

Ashvin, thank you. This is at the frontier of what I can make sense of at this stage, hopefully I’m on the right side of it. I’m following, but I can’t say these ‘underlying principles’ are ‘in place’. I have seen them now, but it’s not like I can stay with them. It takes an overwhelming effort to continually counteract the pull of dualism, realism - ‘the absolute spaces of experience’. At the same time I’m happy to notice that cognition is playable. It can take new shapes and make at least some contact points with even improbable-looking volumes and unknown dynamics if it just tries, maybe in an attitude of, should I say, deference, or reverence. Maybe it’s what was previously referred to as devotion. What follows here brings nothing to what you have explained, it’s not a comment, it’s just a way to document the attempt to extract myself from the standard viewpoint and take a look, so I can refer to this point going forward.

The liminal space of 'what doesn't happen' during any given time period is such a perception [anything we can make the object of our thinking].

Perception is a quest of meaning. As this conjunction is not complete, there is a perceptual meaning-making pull exerted through the emergence of liminal spaces. The perception fulfills its nature by calling for the recognition of an exact, yet continually evolving, meaning gap at every moment. The liminal space is our recognition that there’s a search for a completing leap of meaning at every moment. Instead of imagining myself sending out and watching some kind of meaning-form moving towards a perceptual void to be filled, it’s helping me to think in terms of welcoming the percept to join me, reunite with me, with an open thought that I can hope and wish to make as fluid as possible. Instead of focusing on an external shape, I try to take responsibility, so to say, for an internally concocted leap of thinking, wishing to somehow make it open to accept the void and become that void, intended as a yet unknown but truthful, shaped invitation. There is an attracting delta of meaning that is not being met, that I am not meeting with meaning. This ‘delta’ is asking and offering with equal intensity. I need and wish to attune myself to this call and gift. Just about everything could fit this differential call (call works better than void for me) jut yet. It's about welcoming the invitation to make it specific. I am also calling (wishing, asking) as much as I am making an offer. And it’s up to me to contribute to select out everything else that is not happening, to facilitate a kind of selective sorting, where trust is needed. It's necessary to take the shape of that unknown, by accepting to take an unknown shape. This trust allows the inversion of the perspective, which goes ‘inside out’, as in the Goethe quote. Until I do that, it’s an unknown intersection, what is not happening could be happening. If I only can make my thought fluid enough, I can make it sensitive to the call for possible meanings, and it will be enough for it to get materialized. Until I submit my thought to the call in this way, there’s infinite non-happenings and the future remains liminal, in transitional space. It's like a continuous thinking metabolism, where we co-create what happens by half submitting our thoughts to be shaped by higher perspectives, and half participating in the process with intention. This continuous sorting out of what happens, meets the future, and prompts the next perceptual scenario on the emerging path to manifest along its direction. This is my current understanding of where the efforts should go in order to open this extent:

The extent to which we can connect these observations [from a place of being a microcosm of the macrocosm] with our current inner temporal rhythms is the extent to which we also restore that higher order meaning to the outer appearances.

[Anthony66]

The esoteric understanding requires us to approach what is completely unfamiliar and unsuspected to our normal waking intellect. If we feel that we can pluck out a verse and, only with our modern flattened, prosaic concepts, transport our consciousness into that of inspired writers 3,000 years ago, with a deep understanding of the spiritual landscape at that time, then we are surely trapped within the modern mind-container perspective. The worst outcome of this is that, when we assume to have already encompassed the many layers of deeper meaning within the text with our exoteric concepts, we rest comfortable and lose all motivation to actually seek out that deeper meaning. We pronounce judgments on the higher worlds without even consciously experiencing their lowest reaches.

Ashvin,

Your response here from last month does not sit well with me. Why are you giving all the biblical writings a free pass and granting them the status of coming from "inspired writers"? Sure they were written at a different time and we have to work hard to grasp the layers of meaning, but passages like the Numbers 31 are abominable by any ethical standard worthy of consideration. We don't need any higher cognition to make this judgement. We know that many societies of old held women to be lesser, properties of men. A blanket acceptance of all scripture as inspired is the stuff of the fundamentalists. Are not some of the influences upon the biblical writers (and all of us for that matter) aligned more with what we might consider diabolical?