Federica wrote: ↑Fri Dec 02, 2022 4:01 pm
Thanks Anthony, I’m happy that you're still here!
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Dec 02, 2022 12:37 pm
We don't have to go back thousands of years to find those who have claimed special knowledge. Today we have the Roman Catholics (pope speaking ex cathedra), Jehovah Witnesses (Watch Tower), Mormons (burning in the bosom), fundamentalist evangelicals (witness of the Holy Spirit), and Pentecostals (words of knowledge) to name just a few. We could go on to highlight various cults before shifting our attention to the East.
Yes. Here’s how I see it, I'll share my reflections. These religions and cults of our time all come with their more or less fantastical claims of truth. These truths are all revealed knowledge, correct? No matter what exact knowledge is concerned and how special it is, the suggested path to come to acquire the knowledge involves an act of faith, or blind belief. That’s what they all have in common: the adept is requested to surrender their will, their feeling, and their thinking to a superior agency, which is revealed to them. And the tricky part is that once total surrender has happened, it’s hardly possible to draw any limits to the devotion. Every claim of knowledge and every behavioral request
could become acceptable, as long as it becomes endorsed from within the revelation, or any extended and revised version of it. Clearly, this opens the way to all sorts of potential abuse.
I understand that you were familiar with one such system, before you decided to dissociate yourself from it, and to start guarding against the type of manipulation that can happen in connection with churches and cults. Fantastic! Now, what is the antidote for the risks that can hide in revealed truth, when it's used as a tool for undue influence? My impression is that you thought: “Science is the antidote. If I only stick to ‘evidence’ - objective truth that does not require anything else than observation and report, like in current academic scientific method, then I’m sure manipulation is averted.” So maybe the hypothesis within which you have started your new life has been: “In terms of approaches to knowledge, there’s either cults, or science, the former is vulnerable to manipulation, the latter isn't ”. If this is more or less correct, I can guess that, when spiritual science has been mentioned, your intention has been to decide whether SS can be put on one or the other side of this demarcation line. Is it a science, or is it a cult?
[Anthony it turns out I have to attend to something now, I'll continue later on, but I want to post the above in the meantime, so in case you or anyone else want to comment in the meantime, I can correct and recalculate when I'm back]
Resuming from above, replacing ‘spiritual science’ with ‘Anthroposophy’ everywhere.
Are we ashamed of our living thinking?
So, is Anthroposophy a science or a cult? First of all, as Ashvin said, it’s coercive and misleading to force the thinking flow into either/or ‘switches’ like so. Think of a magnificent mountain torrent streaming downhill, the water dances and sings in untamed and ever novel combinations of swirls, falls and spouts. That’s how our thinking could flow, in harmony with its (spiritual) environment. Now think of long, concrete edges being built alongside that mountain stream, and of dams installed to streamline the current. The character of the waterflow is now totally different, at odds with its natural environment. Our thinking flow too has become estranged from its spiritual environment, in the constriction of external grids.
Metaphors again and again? Yes... It seems to me that one very basic, but significant, way to start harmonizing our thinking within its natural (spiritual) environment is precisely to allow ourselves to welcome such metaphors when they come to mind, like the torrent image here. Today we have a strong inner resistance to noticing, let alone expressing, such images. We push them away, we think they are childish. We think it’s much better to come up with a clean, elegant, abstract reasoning to speak our mind. What serious thinker today would speak of torrents and what not, to make a logical argument about anything? It would just be plain ridiculous!
I believe we have come to feel ashamed of our living thinking, afraid to sound like a 5 year-old, or like a gauche version of an ancient poet. Similarly, one might resist, and even judge, the use of these colorful highlighters in posts, for example: “I’m not a 12 year-old whimsical school-kid, am I”. My impression is, these are great attuning habits, like warmups, to make our normal thinking more playable and harmonious, even prior to any concentration or meditation. I believe it says to the spheres: “Hey I am ready to play with you, or at least, I would like to be ready!” In this sense it’s also a gesture of humility. It says: “I used to be proud of the sleek and fashionable intellectual framework, Bayesian or whatever. I used to express ideas in the form of these sharp silhouettes, and enjoy the intellectual high, feeling so evolved and self-complacent, but I now recognize self-indulgence in that, and I want to be more truthful to the authentic nature of this thinking force I am a part of.”
Anthroposophy is neither a cult nor a science
Back to our original question, we can say that Anthroposophy is not a cult. There’s no invitation to blindly surrender to revelations. If we can’t get all the fantastical claims of knowledge just yet, it’s for the same reason why I can’t grasp advanced mathematical theorems today. I haven’t studied the required materials, that’s why.
Anthroposophy is not science either, in the sense of contemporary science, because it doesn’t expound parallel representations of reality (models) as sandboxes for our mind to play around in them. That spiritual science pursues knowledge along a third way makes sense, because it puts thinking at the center of inquiry, that very faculty we employ in all forms of knowledge attainment. One could object, psychology and philosophy also inquire thinking. They do, but to a major extent, present-day psychology and philosophy approach thinking as an external scientific object, by building its hypotheses-induced, simplified replica as a gym in which thoughts can train, and their lactic acid of evidence can be milked. As Wayfarer said, and I believe him, present-day philosophy has become “
sterile and often meaningless academic jargonese”. I can imagine how those outcomes are sterile, to the extent they belong in the sandbox, not in reality.
So in the mainstream, scientific approach to thinking today, the thinking-I is steamrolled
by itself to build a conceptually external model
of itself to be inquired as an object from outside, but still by means of the thinking agency (how else) residing
inside the self… for simplicity. In other words, thinking is supposed to understand itself through an external model of thinking, even though thinking only can operate from within the center of the first person perspective. Then, something lures it into trivializing or forgetting such redeployment of itself, by itself, in the form of an abstracted replica. In Anthroposophy, one doesn't even start this dissociative game. Instead, we keep our thinking one with itself, and we dive into it
as is, immediately, not
as if we were doing it as an experiment in some hypothetical parallel sandbox.
We should be careful of what we are doing when we invoke science and evidence
In such exercise of Anthroposophy, we do expect to develop a solid, objective, external, data-based knowledge that can be taught and learned. We can expect to develop a
scientia, which indeed will be much more comforting and reassuring than secular science, for the one who is weary of never again falling prey to manipulation and unsubstantiated claims. As Ashvin said: “
We rarely consider just how much of the 'publicly available' results from secular methods that we take on faith and take for granted in all our scientific contemplation.” We can certainly grant that the scientific method works quite well in hard sciences, natural sciences, where the sensory spectrum is inquired. In the post above, Cleric has explained how such science, effective in terms of usable findings that follow the contours of nature's physiognomy, is heading towards extreme dualism when it comes to its mindset. As BK once put it, such science is useful to find out how the sensory spectrum behaves, not what it is.
But if we now look at how the scientific method is applied outside natural sciences - in social sciences, economics, psychology, consciousness studies, etc. - it’s impossible to escape the realization that, more often than not, the sandbox, in which all evidence is gathered and all conclusions are drawn, is conjured up so far away from reality, it's so simplified, than we can only walk the way back to reality (and accept that the conclusions from the sandbox are true for real) by means of an
enormous leap of faith. Nonetheless, we still believe in those sandboxes, as if they explained reality, because they look and feel so sleek and intelligent. We have been taught by Mainstream that scientific method is a good, objective, reliable, authoritative, and consensual approach to knowledge, while spirit is dubious, unverifyable, unreliable and ambiguous. We also get regular friendly reminders of such state of affairs. Today it’s still more or less ok to be spiritual - we are told - for wellbeing purposes, “if it works for us”, but we should be clear, spirit is not knowledge. Basically, spirituality is a life add-on. Some might benefit from it, be it, as a self-care strategy, especially if they are struggling with life, but they should keep it within the private sphere, and most of all, they should not fantasize that one can go from spirit to knowledge. Science is the way there. One is a staple, the other is completely optional. That’s why every time we call for ‘science’ as the safest way to knowledge, we don't even need to be specific. We know that we will automatically gain reflected authority, consensus, reliability, etcetera, in front of our peers, anyway, and we got so used to that instant acceptance and gratification, that invoking science has become automatic behavior. It cannot harm, we think.
That’s why we need to be very careful. I wrote above that knowledge by revelation is potentially risky, because it opens the way to manipulation. Well, there is today a non-negligible risk to fall prey to such manipulation when we blindly invoke not only the cults of our time, but also the scientific method, if we don't know what we are talking about exactly (not saying that you are doing it, Anthony, but it's a very common, indicative behavior). A few know what they are talking about, I grant that, but the vast majority does not make any check whatsoever. We often hold a very dim idea of what we are stating, when we invoke evidence and science. In other words, we are on a path of faith, although we don’t know it, and we would not admit it. We invoke “Oh Evidence”, we believe that we are being rational and objective, and get 100% social acceptance and rewards while we are at it, no scrutiny required. The most evanescent shadow of scrutiny is enough, so we can feel rational. This is very easy to check. If you ask people, including ourselves, often times we have no idea whatsoever what the scientific mantra we recite consists of, in detail. Usually at the first or second inquisitive question, answers become very vague, of the type “everyone knows that” or “if it wasn't like that, someone would have told us”. It's scary to realize how many daily decisions we make on such foundations, I am of course no exception in that. We are all exposed. Then, when it comes to the fantastical claims of Anthroposophy, we suddenly switch gears and become the most demanding skeptics. So there is a phenomenon of widespread, unassumed,
faith in scientific method as a secure way to true knowledge in every pursuit, that we need to guard against, especially in fields of inquiry that span beyond the sensory spectrum.
We already took the plunge
For these reasons, it seems to me that Anthroposophy appears as the safest and (paradoxically) most down-to-earth method, or
scientia, in Latin sense, to inquire thinking and to attain spiritual knowledge. I will conclude with a guess. I have been reading your words, trying to inhabit the perspective they come from, and here’s the impression I’m getting. You say “
I hope the lights come on”, and earlier you spoke of “
the plunge" one needs to take. There are thoughts of discontinuity in these words. You seem to believe that a remarkable, discrete event should happen, a plunge, or a change of state.
My impression, from the perspective of my minuscule point of progression on the path, is that there is no plunge to be taken. We are already in the water, immersed in the pool. We are already endowed with thinking. What we need to do is to simply stop grabbing the edge, and start swimming towards the center of the pool. We already can swim, we can move our available thinking function, but we need to
trust our ability enough, to dare to quit our stronghold, to release the grip to the edge of vicarious, sandbox thinking, and “
venture a little deeper than we are normally comfortable with”, to the center of the pool.