Cleric K wrote: ↑Tue Nov 15, 2022 8:00 pm
I guess it all boils down to a barely conscious desire, to just expand within the broken mirror pieces and behold them as Cosmic crystal dust. Magnificent, mysterious, but ultimately incomprehensible, as it grinds down Cosmic Intuition into noise. Finding the spot in the head feels like forsaking immensity for dubious thoughts. But it is precisely in a small thought-piece of the mirror that we can find the
actual reflection of the intuitive activity of the Cosmic Being. From that point begins also the healing process and gradually the shards of our bodies fuse to become true mirrors for the life of the spirit and its ever growing degrees of freedom.
"The light of the body is the eye: therefore when thine eye is single, thy whole body also is full of light; but when thine eye is evil, thy body also is full of darkness." So we once again find immensity yet not as Cosmic rustling but as spiritual world ruled by fully conscious spiritual activity.
It seems that this requirement for our ego to deflate to the level of a mere thought, is felt as a step backwards for those who have tasted the immensity of the mystical or the psychedelic state (even though only as Cosmic noise). And I can confirm that from my experience. What you and Ashvin accomplished in only few months, took me 15 years, until I find the secret of deflation - which is driven by humility. It is here that the words are appropriate:
"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." And rich should be understood in a deeper sense. Our ego becomes rich when it inflates and swallows immensity that it doesn't comprehend, yet considers its own.
Still pondering on Oneness attraction versus willful training of the thinking faculty, I guess I am not the only one. Cleric, thank you, the progression of posts you have written on the question in this thread is simply illuminating. I cannot imagine that Eugene is not at the very least pondering your illustrations, in which something is continuously emerging from nothing. In this post, beyond inviting Eugene to reunion number two with the forum, I thought I’d recall, at the side of your illustrations, Klocek’s view on Oneness and its attractive power on modern man. In the very first pages of the Handbook,
this exact question is addressed from a slightly different angle. Some could certainly delve into it directly. Here I can only keep the topic alive by summarizing Klocek’s view.
About the longing for mystical Oneness felt by many today, he writes: “
An experience of self is impossible to measure scientifically”. So the scientific observer is tempted to qualify the self as illusionary. The QM impossibility to measure something without it being changed by the act of measurement itself, pushes the scientific observer to seek “
the door to higher perception in the abstract void” made of “
patterns of forces” with no “
independent beings” in it. Matter and its secrets are felt as hiding at the bottom of the dark abyss between self and world, and the elimination of the separate self feels as a solution to spare us from descending into the abyss.
Klocek opposes such scientific observer-centric view of contemporary physics to the view of the “
technician” - Steiner’s naive realist - who is annoyed by the crucial role the observer has risen to, and would prefer to revert back to a world of physics where the observer/the self is simply irrelevant to measurement outcomes. So the technician, or materialist, rejects Oneness, claims readiness to descend into the abyss of matter, but ultimately eradicates the "
irrelevant" self just as ruthlessly as the “
mystical physicist", only to run into contradictions when destructive and highly subjective individualities violently disrupt the world in ways that unfortunately are all but irrelevant.
The parallel is made between human evolution and cognitive development in the child: in early childhood there's the cognitive experience of immediate oneness, which later evolves in the ability to consciously form inner pictures (gifted). Then in adolescence, there’s the storming of feelings and senses, but no cognitive gift to deal with those. Then any progression must be consciously willed, and that’s where we are in evolution today, Klocek says. In need of using willpower to move forward, but tempted to revert back to non-individualized early childhood and its magical oneness (QM physicist) or to dwell in destabilizing adolescent sense life (materialist) and/or in adolescent sense- and feeling-driven thinking (present-day deviant, amoral behaviors, backed by materialism). In other words, in the microcosm of science,
Oneness is polarly opposed to Materialism, and Goethe-Steiner’s living thinking would be the view that makes the two opposites converge. In it, observer and world are united in the event of observation.
Klocek sees the only solution to these opposite dead ends in Imaginative cognition, initiated by will power. For the first time, such cognitive development will not come as gift / as automatic evolutionary process, but only through free determination to develop our soul organs, by leveraging the life forces not anymore required to evolve the physical body and its organs. Such forces will instead express themselves as living forces of thinking, the auroras that can consciously work at the development of the soul organs / chakras. Only these organs will be able to digest and purify the adolescent unleashed sense and feeling forces that are driving our world crazy these days.
Basically today we are like rebel teenagers, victims of unleashed forces, and without any gifted cognitive capacity to master them. These capacities are not directly gifted to us because at this point we have in-house the necessary life forces to apply in order to master the storms directly, by ourselves. But we have to use will power to make that purification happen.
The question boils down to: will we remain stuck in adolescent rage, kidnapped by our own physical (and soul) body (materialism), will we attempt to go back to the childhood of our civilization (mystical oneness), or will we finally be able to grow up? Not easy, Klocek says. But we can leverage our need for recognition, and our intuition that we just can't be worth less than nothing. To do something, rather than nothing, and prove our self-worth, should nonetheless make some sense… hopefully.
Growing up means cultivating (literally, livingly) the thinking seed we received as gift in our childhood, 2000 years ago by applying and developing the capacity to form inner pictures (concentration) then exploring how the soul processes the sense impressions through the conscious experience of the True Self and its morality, and finally by pursuing Imaginative cognition, on a path that “
leads back to the magical forces behind the sense world”. So the path of living thinking leads back to Oneness, Klocek says. “
In imaginative cognition, the conflict between mystical abstractionism and analytical reductionism can be resolved (…) The step that needs to be taken is to transform an abstract universal void filled with impersonal forces, by entering the being-ness of beings exponentially mightier in degree in their world-creative Imaginations than the human beings.”
The living thinking path is seen as a reconciling path between the human being and the Cosmos, just as well as between materialist science and QM.
In this perspective, the cause of attraction to Oneness, metaphorically pictured like a wish to go back to childhood’s magical experiences, seems to be connected to a longing for comfort and protection, (the same Lou expresses in his Both / And manifesto) rather than to
hybris directly. Does this make sense to anyone?
Stranger wrote: ↑Mon Nov 14, 2022 1:15 pm
what I'm doing here is to remind about the importance of seeing the "forest"
We don't need to ask Lou this question, but Eugene, if you are following, does the shielding, protecting, welcoming, magical, divine Mother/ original forest sound as a recognizable attracting principle to you?