Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[AshvinP]

Federica,

We should be clear that I am not arguing to 'adopt VR'. Rather the argument is that, the very existence of VR and certain VR experiences is a pedagogical tool for our living thinking, even for people who never have the chance or inclination to experience it themselves, or only try it once in a while. I don't play VR every day for 30-45 min (not sure where you got that from) and don't recommend anyone else do so either. It is not unique from other cultural phenomena in that regard - all natural and cultural phenomena have the potential to be redeemed as fantastic tools for our spiritual growth when we approach them with living thinking and pure intentions, which is a fact that is sorely missed in modern thinking. In the context of Cleric's recent posts on the other thread, we can say that all such outer forms of spiritual activity point to the deeper temporal forces of the shared soul and spirit organism which brought them to manifestation. The very fact that VR is a novel technological development means it must provide us a new angle from which to approach the living forces of that shared inner landscape. It provides us unique analogies and metaphors and illustrations which simply can't be made from within the experience of the normal sensory spectrum. Remember, this is what prompted your comments. No one claimed VR is the go-to spiritual tool that we should all experiment with on a daily basis. Rather we used them briefly as metaphors for how our spiritual activity interacts with the perceptual environment, as one tiny angle of approach among many others, and it's up to others to decide whether they can sense the same pedagogical value as we do from that very limited and idealized use of VR.

The problem with metaphysical conclusions is not having them per se, but deriving them from momentary expressions of the outer physiognomy (natural and cultural forms) of the Spirit. Our metaphysics should be a flexible, open-ended, multiple angle, evolving process of exploring the principle ways in which the Spirit manifests itself through our living first-person consciousness, which is of course the only thing we can possibly know-experience. Our metaphysics should center around the deeper thinking perspective which is formulating the abstract conclusions, along with all other perceptual structures. This is how phenomenology (appearances) spirals into ontology (reality) through epistemology (what it means 'to know'). To recognize archetypal structures and principles of spiritual evolution is a valid metaphysical conclusion as long as we don't idolize it as some abstract model, as an end-in-itself for our knowing assessment, but as a symbol for how our first-person cognitive experience unfolds. These principles are really the only aspect of the spiritual dynamics we can get a confident hold of with our ordinary reasoning. Without them we remain mired in fragmented details of how things appear to us at any given time. In that sense, the principle that all phenomenal forms must provide pedagogical value as analogs to the underlying spiritual processes is something we can know as intrinsic to spiritual evolution. It is logically necessitated by the polar relation between the potential-actual, unmanifested-manifest, idea-perception, etc.
 

I was not expressing any concerns. I was inquiring what features in people’s ‘black boxes’ could explain a preference for, and an attraction to, VR. You seem to agree it's an interesting question, so what I've found all the more surprising in the essays, to start with, is that you are not interested in inquiring what soul attitudes might explain a preference for locking oneself in these virtual augmentations of the perceptual layers. It’s not even augmentation we are dealing with, it’s a prosthetic perceptual spectrum, aiming to replace the natural world. Kind of an intermediary stage between the traditional approach to natural perceptual spectrum and transhumanism, a more advanced stage of descent into the illusion of mastery and knowledge mentioned in my post above, where the extra layers are not simply externally and exclusively imposed to our senses through a VR kit, but they are grafted into the body, they are pushed through to the other side of the threshold of the physical boundary, as to give a double turn and a double lock to the dissociative boundary.

The black box features, the soul attitudes, for VR immersion are the same as for every other cultural phenomena which involves abstracting, externalizing, egoistic thinking. Certainly those can be and have been explored in depth through spiritual science. They generally revolve around desires for comfort, ease, minimal responsibility, stimulation, pleasure, personal power, etc. coupled with a subconscious longing for the spiritual worlds which becomes more and more pathological as it remains in possession of the intellectual, atomistic ego. It's a huge error, in my view, to think that these are unique to people who incline towards VR technology, which will practically be every young person as it becomes more widely available. Likewise it is a mistake to assume that normal sensory technology is not also conditioning our bodily organism at a deep level. The music we listen to also penetrates our etheric organism. In that context, I mentioned that the songs retained in my etheric memory which are brought more into my waking consciousness prompted me to take more active responsibility for what and how I expose myself to the sensory spectrum. Without that greater consciousness, they would still be conditioning my being but entirely outside of my awareness. And without the exposure, I would never have that resistance to work through with my will. There are great lessons to be learned and virtues to be earned from all perspectives, phenomena, obstacles, etc.

Above all we can't forget the role of the conscious thinking participant in determining the 'descent' into or 'ascent' from the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Everything is relative to the mode of consciousness. A being whose natural mode of cognition is instinctive consciousness would be making an ascent to express their meaningful activity through intellectual concepts, while a being whose natural mode is Imaginative would be making a descent to do the same thing. An easy way to see if we are falling into this trap is to ask, 'can my conclusions hold good no matter what develops in the next 100 years?' Can you know that there can be nothing of unique pedagogical value to the VR experience no matter how the technology develops through human consciousness over that time? I know for sure all cultural phenomena have pedagogical value because of the foundational principle of spiritual evolution, the fact that there already is that value with respect to VR for at least two people on this forum and, no matter what happens, there will be enough higher cognitive capacity to retain or expand that value. There really is no absolute descent in spiritual evolution - there is no absolute "dualism", "dissociation", etc. - only a spiral upwards which certain perspectives of the Spirit can participate in or miss out on as they lag behind. The lagging behind is what then allows perspectives to persist in the thinking experience we call "materialism", "dualism", etc. It is not intrinsic to the perceptual forms themselves.

It's like the advent and development of positivism, or materialism. There are obviously crucial spiritual lessons to learn from such episodes of evolution. But it’s not necessary to live the materialistic life and to adopt materialistic beliefs, in order to comprehend them. Likewise, there are clearly spiritual lessons to learn from many present-day cultural phenomena. However, to refer to your most recent examples from the other thread, it’s not required that we make a career in the meat consumption industry, or that we undergo gender affirming/mitigating surgery, in order to mine those lessons is it?

Of course not. And I have never made the argument that we should immerse our entire lives in VR for spiritual growth. In fact I have said a few times that most people should stay away from it altogether, precisely because the risk of "double dissociative boundary" is great for those who are unwilling to bring their first-person thinking activity out of the blind spot (which is unfortunately most people). Again, that is the determining factor if these things become curses or blessings. The advent of materialistic thinking is a great example - it's exactly the sort of development which is integral to our progressive spiritual evolution and which can be redeemed into great lessons for perfection of our whole organism IF we become conscious of the dynamics through which that advent occurred. Without that development, practically none of what we are doing on this forum would be possible. But if it doesn't become conscious for us, it can catapult us back into an animalistic state of being. Why should there be any fundamental difference for the technologies which have resulted from materialistic thinking, as extensions of it? It's very unlikely an idealistic person living in the 18th century would be able to fairly assess materialism in its potential redemptive value, and we are in a similar situation with 21st century technologies. If we stray from the foundational principles of spiritual evolution and judge the metaphysical value of each phenomena as isolated experiences, as they exist now and as we imagine them to be at our current level of development, then this is not sound holistic reasoning.

Of course, we don’t need the least VR to understand and experience non-Euclidean geometry. This is a completely arbitrary assertion that only can emerge from a metaphysical position that VR is a fantastic cognitive tool of the future. It’s curious that at the same time you say that you share my antipathy for it, but still spend 30-45 minutes in virtual reality every day.

I was referring to the experience of moving around in a small 4x4 grid in the room and feeling oneself to have travelled many miles through a 3D landscape of corridors, elevators, buildings, etc. I tried this game and it is definitely a unique experience that we can’t have outside the VR setting with ordinary cognition. It has translated our non-Euclidean ideas into concrete perceptual-conceptual experience we normally can't have, for people who have never heard of 'non-Euclidean' before. I imagine there are other similar possibilities which will be manifested through VR. Of course none of this has value unless we are conscious of how the mathematical systems and these spatiotemporal manifestations are reflecting our intimate spiritual activity and its transformations through cognitive states of being. Then we can make the living connection between modes of cognition and spatiotempotal experience.

Above all, I think we should be clear on this below. We are making unique gestures with our spiritual activity from the VR perspective, embedding new degrees of freedom, as 'counter-intuitive' as this may seem. How can we be expanding DoF when we are enslaving ourselves to the sub-sensory loops of VR experience (or any other sensory experience, for that matter)? That is precisely the question. And the answer is our continual rhythmic passing through the 'pinhole of cognition' in which we say to the Cosmos, 'thy Will be done', and thereby inhale new living impulses for all that was once dead in our thinking.

For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration. Our grunting intellectual being is left meditating, while our subtler spiritual being begins to find its existence.

This exchange reminds me a bit of our earlier discussion about writing vs. speech - you took a similar position on writing being outside the 'continuum' of the normal flow of spiritual activity, although I know you weren't nearly so antipathetic to writing as to VR. Do you see how a similar thing might be happening here?

I do see how you have come to connect the two exchanges. It’s certainly because I haven’t explained my point well enough in my previous posts. I hope I got better now at showing that I am not separating VR technology from the rest of human physical and spiritual activity, as an exception or discontinuity. It is definitely part of a continuum. As I mentioned, I think the next ring in the materialistic chain, expanding on VR and the metaverse, is transhumanism. There are certainly subconscious reasons why we are engaging more and more in such types of self-secluded worlds, and I tried to sketch some initial reflections that could open to those lessons in my previous post (reflections that you seem to have ignored completely, misinterpreting them as concerns related to VR usage). What I’m saying is, it’s completely unnecessary, and at the very least a time waster, to engage in VR as a practice, hoping to extract spiritual lessons from regular use. And I maintain that: I don't think that adding more copies of copies of copies, inundating our senses with augmented perceptual flows (basically more of the same, but worse) will ever provide metaphors or lessons that are not already available to us through the sensory spectrum of the first-level world content. And so I am left with the same question I had at the end of my previous post. For a materialist VR is understandably a lure and a comfort, but how

is it possible for an anthroposophist to rule out the dashboard only to end up missing it somehow, to explore a fully gated, dualistic representation of reality-in-itself, recreated just one level up the full sensory spectrum?

Completely unnecessary for whom, time wasting for whom? There are only relational perspectives of evolving consciousness, so this cannot be made into a universal maxim. It cannot be that every individual who experiments with VR through living thinking consciousness is on the way to the next ring in the materialistic chain of transhumanism. You say you are not treating the VR experience as irredeemable, but what you write above is the very description of something irredeemable.

[Anthony66]

It has been said that wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. This seems to be accentuated many times over with SS. Few today are interested in things spiritual. Of those that are, they are either drawn to exoteric traditions or vague forms of new age belief. Until I encountered this forum, I don't think I have ever come across anyone propounding the ideas spoken of here. And as I've said many times, these ideas are extraordinarily difficult to grasp. Is this the domain of a select few? What is the likelihood of substantial numbers in the world advocating this approach? I guess it's a matter of exponential growth - perhaps things might be different after a few score generations.

By 'selected few' we should understand those who have reached the possibility to think about such things. As such, you are selected. If you reach the point to ask whether you're selected, then you are selected. From this point onwards any limitation is a self-imposed limitation. This doesn't mean that the obstacles are imaginary. They are real. Something must truly be transformed in our brain, in our body, in our subtle organization. But the belief that it is impossible to undertake such transformation is a self-imposed limitation. There's nothing that prevents us to make even if it is only the tiniest step in that direction, except we ourselves. The rationale of such self-imposed limitations usually goes like: "But I have so much work to do that it's impossible to make any substantial difference in this lifetime. So there's no point to even start." But with such logic we would never be able to achieve anything even on a purely sensory plan. Everything that humanity does is a work in progress. It's like Newton saying "Even if I develop celestial mechanics, I don't see space flight becoming possible in my lifetime, so there's no point to even start." This already hints at us that our human life only receives its worth when we see it as a link in a much greater evolutionary flow. And we don't even need to accept reincarnation for this. Even a materialist can sense that by making individual progress, they contribute something to the world. We only don't feel this if we're at a stage of development where we say "To hell with this world. Whether the world will flourish or perish, is all the same to me, since I won't be around to see it. So I'll just take whatever I can from it, while I still can."

The extraordinary difficulties result when we try to form a completely intellectual picture of reality. Then we accumulate more and more pebbles until we say "That's too much, I'm crushed by this weight and it still makes no sense." Many times the example with the geocentric and heliocentric perspectives has been given. It is very difficult to keep intellectual track of the bodies in the geocentric view. But in the heliocentric, by finding a different vantage point, everything becomes much more clear. Our task today is to find that vantage point within thinking itself. All scientific and philosophical problems result from the fact that man doesn't understand what thinking is. As soon as we find our concentric relations to our thought forms, we find a completely unsuspected way of looking upon what reality is and how our thinking fits in it.

The thing is, Newton was a gifted individual and only those who proceed to university maths/physics will ever understand his work. Sure, the rest of humanity has benefited from his efforts, e.g. the satellites that give us our GPS. But the masses have no idea about the details or even the fundamentals of gravitational theory or calculus.

As I said, SS would appear to be for the select few, the harbingers whoever they are, at least in this age. Perhaps we can view things a bit like standard evolutionary where a small number of individuals receive a beneficial mutation which one day might become fixed in the population. Similarly, those in our current time who make spiritual progress can confer blessings upon the larger human race.

[Federica]

Federica,

We should be clear that I am not arguing to 'adopt VR'. Rather the argument is that, the very existence of VR and certain VR experiences is a pedagogical tool for our living thinking, even for people who never have the chance or inclination to experience it themselves, or only try it once in a while. I don't play VR every day for 30-45 min (not sure where you got that from) and don't recommend anyone else do so either. It is not unique from other cultural phenomena in that regard - all natural and cultural phenomena have the potential to be redeemed as fantastic tools for our spiritual growth when we approach them with living thinking and pure intentions, which is a fact that is sorely missed in modern thinking. In the context of Cleric's recent posts on the other thread, we can say that all such outer forms of spiritual activity point to the deeper temporal forces of the shared soul and spirit organism which brought them to manifestation. The very fact that VR is a novel technological development means it must provide us a new angle from which to approach the living forces of that shared inner landscape. It provides us unique analogies and metaphors and illustrations which simply can't be made from within the experience of the normal sensory spectrum. Remember, this is what prompted your comments. No one claimed VR is the go-to spiritual tool that we should all experiment with on a daily basis. Rather we used them briefly as metaphors for how our spiritual activity interacts with the perceptual environment, as one tiny angle of approach among many others, and it's up to others to decide whether they can sense the same pedagogical value as we do from that very limited and idealized use of VR.

The problem with metaphysical conclusions is not having them per se, but deriving them from momentary expressions of the outer physiognomy (natural and cultural forms) of the Spirit. Our metaphysics should be a flexible, open-ended, multiple angle, evolving process of exploring the principle ways in which the Spirit manifests itself through our living first-person consciousness, which is of course the only thing we can possibly know-experience. Our metaphysics should center around the deeper thinking perspective which is formulating the abstract conclusions, along with all other perceptual structures. This is how phenomenology (appearances) spirals into ontology (reality) through epistemology (what it means 'to know'). To recognize archetypal structures and principles of spiritual evolution is a valid metaphysical conclusion as long as we don't idolize it as some abstract model, as an end-in-itself for our knowing assessment, but as a symbol for how our first-person cognitive experience unfolds. These principles are really the only aspect of the spiritual dynamics we can get a confident hold of with our ordinary reasoning. Without them we remain mired in fragmented details of how things appear to us at any given time. In that sense, the principle that all phenomenal forms must provide pedagogical value as analogs to the underlying spiritual processes is something we can know as intrinsic to spiritual evolution. It is logically necessitated by the polar relation between the potential-actual, unmanifested-manifest, idea-perception, etc.
 

I was not expressing any concerns. I was inquiring what features in people’s ‘black boxes’ could explain a preference for, and an attraction to, VR. You seem to agree it's an interesting question, so what I've found all the more surprising in the essays, to start with, is that you are not interested in inquiring what soul attitudes might explain a preference for locking oneself in these virtual augmentations of the perceptual layers. It’s not even augmentation we are dealing with, it’s a prosthetic perceptual spectrum, aiming to replace the natural world. Kind of an intermediary stage between the traditional approach to natural perceptual spectrum and transhumanism, a more advanced stage of descent into the illusion of mastery and knowledge mentioned in my post above, where the extra layers are not simply externally and exclusively imposed to our senses through a VR kit, but they are grafted into the body, they are pushed through to the other side of the threshold of the physical boundary, as to give a double turn and a double lock to the dissociative boundary.

The black box features, the soul attitudes, for VR immersion are the same as for every other cultural phenomena which involves abstracting, externalizing, egoistic thinking. Certainly those can be and have been explored in depth through spiritual science. They generally revolve around desires for comfort, ease, minimal responsibility, stimulation, pleasure, personal power, etc. coupled with a subconscious longing for the spiritual worlds which becomes more and more pathological as it remains in possession of the intellectual, atomistic ego. It's a huge error, in my view, to think that these are unique to people who incline towards VR technology, which will practically be every young person as it becomes more widely available. Likewise it is a mistake to assume that normal sensory technology is not also conditioning our bodily organism at a deep level. The music we listen to also penetrates our etheric organism. In that context, I mentioned that the songs retained in my etheric memory which are brought more into my waking consciousness prompted me to take more active responsibility for what and how I expose myself to the sensory spectrum. Without that greater consciousness, they would still be conditioning my being but entirely outside of my awareness. And without the exposure, I would never have that resistance to work through with my will. There are great lessons to be learned and virtues to be earned from all perspectives, phenomena, obstacles, etc.

Above all we can't forget the role of the conscious thinking participant in determining the 'descent' into or 'ascent' from the sensory-conceptual spectrum. Everything is relative to the mode of consciousness. A being whose natural mode of cognition is instinctive consciousness would be making an ascent to express their meaningful activity through intellectual concepts, while a being whose natural mode is Imaginative would be making a descent to do the same thing. An easy way to see if we are falling into this trap is to ask, 'can my conclusions hold good no matter what develops in the next 100 years?' Can you know that there can be nothing of unique pedagogical value to the VR experience no matter how the technology develops through human consciousness over that time? I know for sure all cultural phenomena have pedagogical value because of the foundational principle of spiritual evolution, the fact that there already is that value with respect to VR for at least two people on this forum and, no matter what happens, there will be enough higher cognitive capacity to retain or expand that value. There really is no absolute descent in spiritual evolution - there is no absolute "dualism", "dissociation", etc. - only a spiral upwards which certain perspectives of the Spirit can participate in or miss out on as they lag behind. The lagging behind is what then allows perspectives to persist in the thinking experience we call "materialism", "dualism", etc. It is not intrinsic to the perceptual forms themselves.

It's like the advent and development of positivism, or materialism. There are obviously crucial spiritual lessons to learn from such episodes of evolution. But it’s not necessary to live the materialistic life and to adopt materialistic beliefs, in order to comprehend them. Likewise, there are clearly spiritual lessons to learn from many present-day cultural phenomena. However, to refer to your most recent examples from the other thread, it’s not required that we make a career in the meat consumption industry, or that we undergo gender affirming/mitigating surgery, in order to mine those lessons is it?

Of course not. And I have never made the argument that we should immerse our entire lives in VR for spiritual growth. In fact I have said a few times that most people should stay away from it altogether, precisely because the risk of "double dissociative boundary" is great for those who are unwilling to bring their first-person thinking activity out of the blind spot (which is unfortunately most people). Again, that is the determining factor if these things become curses or blessings. The advent of materialistic thinking is a great example - it's exactly the sort of development which is integral to our progressive spiritual evolution and which can be redeemed into great lessons for perfection of our whole organism IF we become conscious of the dynamics through which that advent occurred. Without that development, practically none of what we are doing on this forum would be possible. But if it doesn't become conscious for us, it can catapult us back into an animalistic state of being. Why should there be any fundamental difference for the technologies which have resulted from materialistic thinking, as extensions of it? It's very unlikely an idealistic person living in the 18th century would be able to fairly assess materialism in its potential redemptive value, and we are in a similar situation with 21st century technologies. If we stray from the foundational principles of spiritual evolution and judge the metaphysical value of each phenomena as isolated experiences, as they exist now and as we imagine them to be at our current level of development, then this is not sound holistic reasoning.

Of course, we don’t need the least VR to understand and experience non-Euclidean geometry. This is a completely arbitrary assertion that only can emerge from a metaphysical position that VR is a fantastic cognitive tool of the future. It’s curious that at the same time you say that you share my antipathy for it, but still spend 30-45 minutes in virtual reality every day.

I was referring to the experience of moving around in a small 4x4 grid in the room and feeling oneself to have travelled many miles through a 3D landscape of corridors, elevators, buildings, etc. I tried this game and it is definitely a unique experience that we can’t have outside the VR setting with ordinary cognition. It has translated our non-Euclidean ideas into concrete perceptual-conceptual experience we normally can't have, for people who have never heard of 'non-Euclidean' before. I imagine there are other similar possibilities which will be manifested through VR. Of course none of this has value unless we are conscious of how the mathematical systems and these spatiotemporal manifestations are reflecting our intimate spiritual activity and its transformations through cognitive states of being. Then we can make the living connection between modes of cognition and spatiotempotal experience.

Above all, I think we should be clear on this below. We are making unique gestures with our spiritual activity from the VR perspective, embedding new degrees of freedom, as 'counter-intuitive' as this may seem. How can we be expanding DoF when we are enslaving ourselves to the sub-sensory loops of VR experience (or any other sensory experience, for that matter)? That is precisely the question. And the answer is our continual rhythmic passing through the 'pinhole of cognition' in which we say to the Cosmos, 'thy Will be done', and thereby inhale new living impulses for all that was once dead in our thinking.

For this reason we have to see things in twofold way. We must exercise our spiritual activity in order to live creatively in its gestures. We need this not only in order to expand the degrees of freedom of our spiritual being but also to create the vocabulary that we'll need for translating through resonance, the higher world spiritual gestures. But at the same time, we can't move towards the subtler forms of spiritual activity by reiterating our Earthly spiritual gestures. The thinking gestures of the caveman's grunts remain grunts no matter how we rearrange them. For this reason we always pass through concentration. Our grunting intellectual being is left meditating, while our subtler spiritual being begins to find its existence.

This exchange reminds me a bit of our earlier discussion about writing vs. speech - you took a similar position on writing being outside the 'continuum' of the normal flow of spiritual activity, although I know you weren't nearly so antipathetic to writing as to VR. Do you see how a similar thing might be happening here?

I do see how you have come to connect the two exchanges. It’s certainly because I haven’t explained my point well enough in my previous posts. I hope I got better now at showing that I am not separating VR technology from the rest of human physical and spiritual activity, as an exception or discontinuity. It is definitely part of a continuum. As I mentioned, I think the next ring in the materialistic chain, expanding on VR and the metaverse, is transhumanism. There are certainly subconscious reasons why we are engaging more and more in such types of self-secluded worlds, and I tried to sketch some initial reflections that could open to those lessons in my previous post (reflections that you seem to have ignored completely, misinterpreting them as concerns related to VR usage). What I’m saying is, it’s completely unnecessary, and at the very least a time waster, to engage in VR as a practice, hoping to extract spiritual lessons from regular use. And I maintain that: I don't think that adding more copies of copies of copies, inundating our senses with augmented perceptual flows (basically more of the same, but worse) will ever provide metaphors or lessons that are not already available to us through the sensory spectrum of the first-level world content. And so I am left with the same question I had at the end of my previous post. For a materialist VR is understandably a lure and a comfort, but how

is it possible for an anthroposophist to rule out the dashboard only to end up missing it somehow, to explore a fully gated, dualistic representation of reality-in-itself, recreated just one level up the full sensory spectrum?

Completely unnecessary for whom, time wasting for whom? There are only relational perspectives of evolving consciousness, so this cannot be made into a universal maxim. It cannot be that every individual who experiments with VR through living thinking consciousness is on the way to the next ring in the materialistic chain of transhumanism. You say you are not treating the VR experience as irredeemable, but what you write above is the very description of something irredeemable.

Hey Ashvin,

I think we have to distinguish two things here, otherwise you will go on saying that you don’t argue for people to adopt VR - which has been extremely clear as an intention since long, you have been repeating that tirelessly - and I will go on vainly making the case for not adopting it.


One thing is the lessons that can be learned from the existence of VR in our societies, as a cultural phenomenon. I never doubted or refused that these lessons are there to be mined, and I am sure you agree I made this very clear. As I said, just like other cultural phenomena, from materialism to gender fluidity, there is clearly a wealth of insights to be gathered from understanding them within the arch of human evolution. That was even the very reason for initiating this VR discussion for me: to go beyond the personal, trying to inquire what it means that we, as a society, are going in such direction - what is the overarching idea. So this is one aspect.


The other aspect - that I initially explicitly sought to avoid, but has been impossible to avoid, because of the way you have constructed your essays - is the personal aspect. You have set up your essays based on direct reference to your personal practice of VR, to which you refer continually. Additionally, you use the expression “pedagogical tool” which in my understanding cannot refer to the first aspect I have described above, but necessarily refers to 'learning from practice as from a teacher'. In this case VR is the teacher. By the way, it’s from these personal references I got that:

Personally, I limit my sessions to about 30-45 minutes per day

Incidentally, this reference to personal practice, connected to the conclusion that such practice can be very pedagogical and can offer important lessons, in parallel with the intention to not recommend this practice to others, is in my opinion what creates the ambiguity I referred to. From an essay (not a standard post) on VR, titled as it is, introduced with the initial statements I already highlighted in my previous post (pervasive new technology impossible to overestimate, that we cannot ignore, etc.) one expects something of the nature of the first aspect (what are the lessons to be learned from this evolutionary phenomenon) whilst in fact what you are expressing in these essays is primarily your experience of practicing VR, and what usefulness you personally are extracting from it. Here I can see you objecting that we shouldn't separate personal practice and first person experience from overall understanding of a phenomenon. To that, I would say that, just as you agreed that we don't have to undergo gender affirming surgery in order to inquire and understand the evolutionary meaning of gender fluidity, the same case can be made for understanding VR through first person spiritual activity which does not require personal and regular practice.


As a premise to any possible further arguments and counterarguments, do we agree on this?

[AshvinP]

Hey Ashvin,

I think we have to distinguish two things here, otherwise you will go on saying that you don’t argue for people to adopt VR - which has been extremely clear as an intention since long, you have been repeating that tirelessly - and I will go on vainly making the case for not adopting it.


One thing is the lessons that can be learned from the existence of VR in our societies, as a cultural phenomenon. I never doubted or refused that these lessons are there to be mined, and I am sure you agree I made this very clear. As I said, just like other cultural phenomena, from materialism to gender fluidity, there is clearly a wealth of insights to be gathered from understanding them within the arch of human evolution. That was even the very reason for initiating this VR discussion for me: to go beyond the personal, trying to inquire what it means that we, as a society, are going in such direction - what is the overarching idea. So this is one aspect.


The other aspect - that I initially explicitly sought to avoid, but has been impossible to avoid, because of the way you have constructed your essays - is the personal aspect. You have set up your essays based on direct reference to your personal practice of VR, to which you refer continually. Additionally, you use the expression “pedagogical tool” which in my understanding cannot refer to the first aspect I have described above, but necessarily refers to 'learning from practice as from a teacher'. In this case VR is the teacher. By the way, it’s from these personal references I got that:

Personally, I limit my sessions to about 30-45 minutes per day

Incidentally, this reference to personal practice, connected to the conclusion that such practice can be very pedagogical and can offer important lessons, in parallel with the intention to not recommend this practice to others, is in my opinion what creates the ambiguity I referred to. From an essay (not a standard post) on VR, titled as it is, introduced with the initial statements I already highlighted in my previous post (pervasive new technology impossible to overestimate, that we cannot ignore, etc.) one expects something of the nature of the first aspect (what are the lessons to be learned from this evolutionary phenomenon) whilst in fact what you are expressing in these essays is primarily your experience of practicing VR, and what usefulness you personally are extracting from it. Here I can see you objecting that we shouldn't separate personal practice and first person experience from overall understanding of a phenomenon. To that, I would say that, just as you agreed that we don't have to undergo gender affirming surgery in order to inquire and understand the evolutionary meaning of gender fluidity, the same case can be made for understanding VR through first person spiritual activity which does not require personal and regular practice.


As a premise to any possible further arguments and counterarguments, do we agree on this?

Federica,

From the initial essay, there was nothing ambiguous in the following:

I do not encourage anyone to buy this system and engage it as a spiritual tool. It is only intended for those who already have engaged in it or are simply curious about it. The fact is that we cannot remain luddites in a world where these technologies have manifested and will continue to be pervasive cultural phenomena. They come with many risks and pitfalls, so most people should simply avoid using them altogether and, instead, find more traditional sources of spiritual knowledge. It requires great Wisdom and Self-knowledge to evaluate whether such a spiritual tool will be safe and useful. For people who are naturally and heavily inclined towards intellectual reasoning, as I myself am, more imaginative tools could be helpful to balance out these soul-forces. Again, it will require a personalized and thorough evaluation for each individual. What follows is for those who have done such an evaluation and decided to proceed, or for those who know others involved in this VR gaming phenomenon and are curious what spiritual lessons can be mined from them.

The ambiguity is only created if we decide to ignore the plain meaning and read some other subtext into what was written. Also, when I wrote 'I limit my sessions to 30-45 min per day', I was intending to communicate that, IF I engage a VR session on any given day, I don't use it for more than 30-45 min. I can see how this can be interpreted in the way you did, but now that I have clarified, it should be clear what was meant. In the past 6 months, I have probably used VR for a total of about 3 hrs and most of that use came recently, after it became bitterly cold outside and I decided to try the fitness games again. So I hope we can consider this 'ambiguity' cleared.

I am not sure if I agree with the other parts you wrote above. If Cleric offers a metaphor related to mathematical thinking or computer technology or anything similar, we don't need to become mathematicians or computer technicians to appreciate and gain spiritual value from it. But if we then decide this perspective is worth pursuing deeper for our spiritual practice, we do need to try and inhabit the thinking perspective, or configuration of thinking-space, which sees the intuitive landscape in a mathematical way. For this deeper use, we can't simply contemplate 'mathematical thinking' as an abstract concept which arose in spiritual evolution from a safe distance. The same principle applies to materialistic thinking. As it turns out, most of us are able to inhabit the materialistic thinking perspective by default education, whereas more imaginative perspectives take active effort to pursue.

No comparison can be made here to having gender affirming surgery, which is the final result of a thinking perspective. We don't need to share in all the behaviors of a thinking perspective to more closely inhabit it. We simply need to penetrate with ego-consciousness to the deeper layers of our normally subconscious soul-life from which all these thinking perspectives emerge. They are embedded within each and every individual. It requires a continual rhythmic alternation of active spiritual gestures with ordinary reasoning cognition and the inhaling of Cosmic ideation through concentration-meditation. The spiritual gestures from the VR perspective are simply one tiny subset of vocabulary we can choose to expand based on our own individual circumstances and practice, especially if we happen to be using it for fitness or gaming anyway. It is one of the many perspectives of the Spirit from which it can awaken to its own activity.

It should also be clear that, although no particular individual must start using to VR to extract spiritual value from it, some individuals must. There are no metaphors or illustrations to be constructed only through contemplation from afar. It is precisely the people who have developed living thinking, the Anthroposophist and so forth, who are in the best position to take this existing technology, which more and more people will surely engage in, and extract something of spiritual value from it, helping to redeem it from the clutches of the lower human nature. If everyone in such a position were to universally judge it as a completely unnecessary time-waster, then its negative materialistic, enslaving qualities would only be magnified over and over again while anything of potential redemptive value for the free spirit would remain unrealized in the course of human evolution.

[Federica]

Federica,

From the initial essay, there was nothing ambiguous in the following:

I do not encourage anyone to buy this system and engage it as a spiritual tool. It is only intended for those who already have engaged in it or are simply curious about it. The fact is that we cannot remain luddites in a world where these technologies have manifested and will continue to be pervasive cultural phenomena. They come with many risks and pitfalls, so most people should simply avoid using them altogether and, instead, find more traditional sources of spiritual knowledge. It requires great Wisdom and Self-knowledge to evaluate whether such a spiritual tool will be safe and useful. For people who are naturally and heavily inclined towards intellectual reasoning, as I myself am, more imaginative tools could be helpful to balance out these soul-forces. Again, it will require a personalized and thorough evaluation for each individual. What follows is for those who have done such an evaluation and decided to proceed, or for those who know others involved in this VR gaming phenomenon and are curious what spiritual lessons can be mined from them.

The ambiguity is only created if we decide to ignore the plain meaning and read some other subtext into what was written. Also, when I wrote 'I limit my sessions to 30-45 min per day', I was intending to communicate that, IF I engage a VR session on any given day, I don't use it for more than 30-45 min. I can see how this can be interpreted in the way you did, but now that I have clarified, it should be clear what was meant. In the past 6 months, I have probably used VR for a total of about 3 hrs and most of that use came recently, after it became bitterly cold outside and I decided to try the fitness games again. So I hope we can consider this 'ambiguity' cleared.

I am not sure if I agree with the other parts you wrote above. If Cleric offers a metaphor related to mathematical thinking or computer technology or anything similar, we don't need to become mathematicians or computer technicians to appreciate and gain spiritual value from it. But if we then decide this perspective is worth pursuing deeper for our spiritual practice, we do need to try and inhabit the thinking perspective, or configuration of thinking-space, which sees the intuitive landscape in a mathematical way. For this deeper use, we can't simply contemplate 'mathematical thinking' as an abstract concept which arose in spiritual evolution from a safe distance. The same principle applies to materialistic thinking. As it turns out, most of us are able to inhabit the materialistic thinking perspective by default education, whereas more imaginative perspectives take active effort to pursue.

No comparison can be made here to having gender affirming surgery, which is the final result of a thinking perspective. We don't need to share in all the behaviors of a thinking perspective to more closely inhabit it. We simply need to penetrate with ego-consciousness to the deeper layers of our normally subconscious soul-life from which all these thinking perspectives emerge. They are embedded within each and every individual. It requires a continual rhythmic alternation of active spiritual gestures with ordinary reasoning cognition and the inhaling of Cosmic ideation through concentration-meditation. The spiritual gestures from the VR perspective are simply one tiny subset of vocabulary we can choose to expand based on our own individual circumstances and practice, especially if we happen to be using it for fitness or gaming anyway. It is one of the many perspectives of the Spirit from which it can awaken to its own activity.

It should also be clear that, although no particular individual must start using to VR to extract spiritual value from it, some individuals must. There are no metaphors or illustrations to be constructed only through contemplation from afar. It is precisely the people who have developed living thinking, the Anthroposophist and so forth, who are in the best position to take this existing technology, which more and more people will surely engage in, and extract something of spiritual value from it, helping to redeem it from the clutches of the lower human nature. If everyone in such a position were to universally judge it as a completely unnecessary time-waster, then its negative materialistic, enslaving qualities would only be magnified over and over again while anything of potential redemptive value for the free spirit would remain unrealized in the course of human evolution.

Ashvin,

I have to admit I have been tempted at this point to let the discussion fall, on the basis of the discord that seems to emerge. But the truth is, I don’t feel any antagonism towards you. It’s quite the opposite, and it's naturally possible to continue this discussion in a serene and hopefully useful way, so I am pursuing just that. Letting it fall would be to acknowledge that different perspectives can't be approached with positive intention. As a side note before I comment on your post above, I get what you intended with your reference to VR use per day, so I don't think any longer it's at odds with your antipathy for the tool (which was my exclusive reason to quote that detail in the first place).

From the initial essay, there was nothing ambiguous in the following

Yes, there was nothing ambiguous in the quoted passage itself, but the passage in isolation is not what I have highlighted as ambiguous. Another way to show it is as follows. You recently said:

I would just point out here that we don't need to draw a sharp line between what we are discerning through our logical reasoning and what we have 'experienced'. Since the very structure of reality is thought-processes, and we are thinking be-ings, our intuitive shape is actually molding itself to the contours of reality in our logical reasoning through these concepts, creating-discovering its degrees of freedom.

Nonetheless, in the essay you draw such sharp line. And you continue to draw it here above when you state:

It should also be clear that, although no particular individual must start using to VR to extract spiritual value from it, some individuals must. There are no metaphors or illustrations to be constructed only through contemplation from afar.

Maybe it should be clear, but unfortunately for me it isn't. That no metaphors can be constructed from contemplation from afar seems to me in striking contradiction with your statement that we don’t need to draw a sharp line between logical reasoning and experience (for context, that was your response to me saying that I was following your reasoning about how to approach the distractions in meditation, but because I don’t have the experience of mastering the distractions in that way, I would record your illustration and use it as a guideline in my attempts).


The ambiguity then - or we could say, the tension, to use a word you probably dislike less - the tension comes primarily from the fact that you start from your personal practice of VR to conclude on VR as a “virtual school for the nascent imagination”. The nascent imagination has to be the nascent imagination of humanity, I would gather? Which can go to imagination school by practicing VR. So Thinking has to go to Will-school. Will is the pedagogue of Thinking. Understood, and well understood, that you only see some individuals will have to do that, and that you don’t push everyone to VR ground school, still it should be legit and understandable that one can feel some level of tension in the expansion you proceed to, from personal practice to a selected recommendation to some others to engage in the practice as a school for the nascent human imagination, especially when you elsewhere point out that Thinking doesn’t need to go to Will-school, and we don’t need to draw sharp lines.


So please believe me, I have not “decided to ignore the plain meaning and read some other subtext into what was written”. That would be both chilly and dumb of me. I do see a tension in your approach to this one topic, it's not a staged posture. And you know that as soon as I have a chance - which happens very often - to acknowledge and thank you for the help and guidance your bright reasoning and illustrations offer, I am always very happy to gratefully seize that chance.


But as far as this particular topic goes, I find the tension to be there, and indeed to continue in the last three paragraphs of your post. You argue that we can understand the mathematician’s metaphor, but if we want to go deeper in it, we would need to inhabit that thinking perspective through practice, and actually become mathematicians. You make it a matter of depth. Thinking can have a general grasp at the metaphor, but for deep understanding, thinking will have to go to Will-school. Again, you draw a line.


But this is not all. Very surprisingly, when it comes to the specific case of gender fluidity (which was your example, that you brought in together with the meat industry example on the other thread) you change approach and you take away the sharp line again. Here, as it were, there’s no depth to be gained by living the thinking perspective in practice and through Will. All can be grasped through ‘spiritual activity proper’. You achieve this discontinuity (which reminds me of my older stance in the speaking-writing discussion) by introducing this category of “final result” that for some reason we should understand as being separate from other milder forms of will activation, and therefore, in this particular case, completely unnecessary. Please allow me to find this reasoning discontinuous.


Hence my question to you: is there anything in the above that you would recognize as legitimately giving rise to questioning, or is it all my arbitrary decision to impose phantom captions on your elaborations?

[AshvinP]

Federica,

From the initial essay, there was nothing ambiguous in the following:

I do not encourage anyone to buy this system and engage it as a spiritual tool. It is only intended for those who already have engaged in it or are simply curious about it. The fact is that we cannot remain luddites in a world where these technologies have manifested and will continue to be pervasive cultural phenomena. They come with many risks and pitfalls, so most people should simply avoid using them altogether and, instead, find more traditional sources of spiritual knowledge. It requires great Wisdom and Self-knowledge to evaluate whether such a spiritual tool will be safe and useful. For people who are naturally and heavily inclined towards intellectual reasoning, as I myself am, more imaginative tools could be helpful to balance out these soul-forces. Again, it will require a personalized and thorough evaluation for each individual. What follows is for those who have done such an evaluation and decided to proceed, or for those who know others involved in this VR gaming phenomenon and are curious what spiritual lessons can be mined from them.

The ambiguity is only created if we decide to ignore the plain meaning and read some other subtext into what was written. Also, when I wrote 'I limit my sessions to 30-45 min per day', I was intending to communicate that, IF I engage a VR session on any given day, I don't use it for more than 30-45 min. I can see how this can be interpreted in the way you did, but now that I have clarified, it should be clear what was meant. In the past 6 months, I have probably used VR for a total of about 3 hrs and most of that use came recently, after it became bitterly cold outside and I decided to try the fitness games again. So I hope we can consider this 'ambiguity' cleared.

I am not sure if I agree with the other parts you wrote above. If Cleric offers a metaphor related to mathematical thinking or computer technology or anything similar, we don't need to become mathematicians or computer technicians to appreciate and gain spiritual value from it. But if we then decide this perspective is worth pursuing deeper for our spiritual practice, we do need to try and inhabit the thinking perspective, or configuration of thinking-space, which sees the intuitive landscape in a mathematical way. For this deeper use, we can't simply contemplate 'mathematical thinking' as an abstract concept which arose in spiritual evolution from a safe distance. The same principle applies to materialistic thinking. As it turns out, most of us are able to inhabit the materialistic thinking perspective by default education, whereas more imaginative perspectives take active effort to pursue.

No comparison can be made here to having gender affirming surgery, which is the final result of a thinking perspective. We don't need to share in all the behaviors of a thinking perspective to more closely inhabit it. We simply need to penetrate with ego-consciousness to the deeper layers of our normally subconscious soul-life from which all these thinking perspectives emerge. They are embedded within each and every individual. It requires a continual rhythmic alternation of active spiritual gestures with ordinary reasoning cognition and the inhaling of Cosmic ideation through concentration-meditation. The spiritual gestures from the VR perspective are simply one tiny subset of vocabulary we can choose to expand based on our own individual circumstances and practice, especially if we happen to be using it for fitness or gaming anyway. It is one of the many perspectives of the Spirit from which it can awaken to its own activity.

It should also be clear that, although no particular individual must start using to VR to extract spiritual value from it, some individuals must. There are no metaphors or illustrations to be constructed only through contemplation from afar. It is precisely the people who have developed living thinking, the Anthroposophist and so forth, who are in the best position to take this existing technology, which more and more people will surely engage in, and extract something of spiritual value from it, helping to redeem it from the clutches of the lower human nature. If everyone in such a position were to universally judge it as a completely unnecessary time-waster, then its negative materialistic, enslaving qualities would only be magnified over and over again while anything of potential redemptive value for the free spirit would remain unrealized in the course of human evolution.

Ashvin,

I have to admit I have been tempted at this point to let the discussion fall, on the basis of the discord that seems to emerge. But the truth is, I don’t feel any antagonism towards you. It’s quite the opposite, and it's naturally possible to continue this discussion in a serene and hopefully useful way, so I am pursuing just that. Letting it fall would be to acknowledge that different perspectives can't be approached with positive intention. As a side note before I comment on your post above, I get what you intended with your reference to VR use per day, so I don't think any longer it's at odds with your antipathy for the tool (which was my exclusive reason to quote that detail in the first place).

From the initial essay, there was nothing ambiguous in the following

Yes, there was nothing ambiguous in the quoted passage itself, but the passage in isolation is not what I have highlighted as ambiguous. Another way to show it is as follows. You recently said:

I would just point out here that we don't need to draw a sharp line between what we are discerning through our logical reasoning and what we have 'experienced'. Since the very structure of reality is thought-processes, and we are thinking be-ings, our intuitive shape is actually molding itself to the contours of reality in our logical reasoning through these concepts, creating-discovering its degrees of freedom.

Nonetheless, in the essay you draw such sharp line. And you continue to draw it here above when you state:

It should also be clear that, although no particular individual must start using to VR to extract spiritual value from it, some individuals must. There are no metaphors or illustrations to be constructed only through contemplation from afar.

Maybe it should be clear, but unfortunately for me it isn't. That no metaphors can be constructed from contemplation from afar seems to me in striking contradiction with your statement that we don’t need to draw a sharp line between logical reasoning and experience (for context, that was your response to me saying that I was following your reasoning about how to approach the distractions in meditation, but because I don’t have the experience of mastering the distractions in that way, I would record your illustration and use it as a guideline in my attempts).


The ambiguity then - or we could say, the tension, to use a word you probably dislike less - the tension comes primarily from the fact that you start from your personal practice of VR to conclude on VR as a “virtual school for the nascent imagination”. The nascent imagination has to be the nascent imagination of humanity, I would gather? Which can go to imagination school by practicing VR. So Thinking has to go to Will-school. Will is the pedagogue of Thinking. Understood, and well understood, that you only see some individuals will have to do that, and that you don’t push everyone to VR ground school, still it should be legit and understandable that one can feel some level of tension in the expansion you proceed to, from personal practice to a selected recommendation to some others to engage in the practice as a school for the nascent human imagination, especially when you elsewhere point out that Thinking doesn’t need to go to Will-school, and we don’t need to draw sharp lines.


So please believe me, I have not “decided to ignore the plain meaning and read some other subtext into what was written”. That would be both chilly and dumb of me. I do see a tension in your approach to this one topic, it's not a staged posture. And you know that as soon as I have a chance - which happens very often - to acknowledge and thank you for the help and guidance your bright reasoning and illustrations offer, I am always very happy to gratefully seize that chance.


But as far as this particular topic goes, I find the tension to be there, and indeed to continue in the last three paragraphs of your post. You argue that we can understand the mathematician’s metaphor, but if we want to go deeper in it, we would need to inhabit that thinking perspective through practice, and actually become mathematicians. You make it a matter of depth. Thinking can have a general grasp at the metaphor, but for deep understanding, thinking will have to go to Will-school. Again, you draw a line.


But this is not all. Very surprisingly, when it comes to the specific case of gender fluidity (which was your example, that you brought in together with the meat industry example on the other thread) you change approach and you take away the sharp line again. Here, as it were, there’s no depth to be gained by living the thinking perspective in practice and through Will. All can be grasped through ‘spiritual activity proper’. You achieve this discontinuity (which reminds me of my older stance in the speaking-writing discussion) by introducing this category of “final result” that for some reason we should understand as being separate from other milder forms of will activation, and therefore, in this particular case, completely unnecessary. Please allow me to find this reasoning discontinuous.


Hence my question to you: is there anything in the above that you would recognize as legitimately giving rise to questioning, or is it all my arbitrary decision to impose phantom captions on your elaborations?

Federica,

There is no antagonism here either. I do feel, though, that the argument is straying further and further from transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution (including spiritual practice) which the VR discussion should only serve as a jumping off point towards. The argument seems to now be about whether there is a 'tension' in my line of reasoning spanning from the original essays last year to various posts made in the last week or so. Sure, there can be legitimate line of questioning into whether my comments and reasoning has been entirely consistent, but to what end?

I suppose you are asserting that I am only upholding some unique pedagogical value to the VR experiential perspective because of this tension, or discontinuity, in my reasoning. If I were to resolve the tension, then it would be more clear to me that VR as a first-person experience is an unnecessary, time-wasting practice for anyone, no matter what stage of cognitive development they have attained or what Cosmic ideals they are pursuing through it? But there is simply no way I could imagine ever reaching such a conclusion, no matter what path I take to reach it. It really goes against the most bedrock principles that I have previously reasoned out regarding the nature of humanity's spiritual evolution towards greater degrees of thinking freedom through the wise guidance of the higher "I"-beings and my own spiritual evolution within that context. Notice also that such a conclusion would imply that Cleric and I have convinced ourselves through faulty reasoning that it is worth our time to explore the VR landscape and write about it, when, in reality, everything we wrote about could have just as easily been done without ever putting on a headset, since none of it was unique to the VR perspective. Of course this is possible, but very unlikely.

With regards to logical reasoning and 'experience', it is certainly a mistake to stop reasoning when we reach a conceptual foothold on the thinking perspective we are exploring and turn that foothold into the 'final word' on the matter. It would be an idolatrous mistake for you to, once following the reasoning of posts from Cleric or myself on the thought-distractions, to rest comfortable with that understanding and therefore fail to seek out the deeper living experience of what you previously only knew outwardly in concepts, i.e. the inner experience of your own thought-distractions. It would be like resting comfortably with the outer physiognomy of a person once you have observed them and interacted with them from every possible angle, rather than seeking to then resonate with the transpersonal soul-forces which animate them. The inversion from outer to inner experience always involves the crossing of a threshold which appears as a discontinuity from the outer perspective, a qualitative jump from the previous form of spiritual activity to the new form. Yet from the higher inner perspective, it is realized how everything which was done outwardly, including obstacles and misunderstandings, served a critical preparatory purpose in the metamorphic progression.

We can use Cleric's diving suit metaphor here. Our life of concepts is a diving suit with its joints and hinges which constrain the expression of our intuitive intents into rigid logical chains of thought. We also clothe ourselves in the additional constraints of the sensory spectrum, including our physical bodies. With the VR perspective within the sensory spectrum, we add yet another set of constraints on our spiritual activity (at this stage, we are quite literally putting on a headset and constraining our hands to the controllers). Yet the nature of this set of constraints is such that, within its sub-sensory spectrum, our activity becomes somewhat more spiritualized. The transformation of imagery is less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc., or the 'laws of nature', and more dependent on our heads and fingers. We must actively do something for the images to transform, unless we are simply watching videos. We can push a few buttons, turn our head, spin around, and view the 7 wonders of the world in full panoramic relief. I think we both agree that there is something of great significance taking place here, either for better or for worse (and usually for worse).

Earlier you mentioned that VR could be seen as a link in the chain to transhumanism. Do you agree the latter is a pathological manifestation of a natural spiritual evolution, in which the eternal human soul seeks to de-identify itself with its physical sheath and reunite with the spiritual worlds in which it subconsciously dwells? If so, then the question we should ask is, what makes VR or transhumanist pursuits pathological rather than healthy? In SS terms, why is loosening the etheric body, with its imaginative forces, from the conceptual constraints of the physical sheath a healthy pursuit for the Anthroposophist and a pathological one for the VR gamer or the transhumanist? I have already mentioned my answer to this question a few times in a few different ways, so instead I am interested to hear yours.

[Federica]

Hey Ashvin
I don't want to wait until I have written a reply before I wish you and everyone here Happy Year 2023!
May this forum have a long and rich life, with more old and new members feeling the need to understand the world and themselves with new eyes, starting to redeem their Will, Feeling and Thinking! Apropos redemption, it comes to mind that exactly a hundred years ago to the day (yesterday, to be precise) the Gotheanum burned to the ground. Happy New Year!

[AshvinP]

Thank you, Federica. I wish you and all here a blessed and fruitful New Year as well!

[AshvinP]

It has been said that wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it. This seems to be accentuated many times over with SS. Few today are interested in things spiritual. Of those that are, they are either drawn to exoteric traditions or vague forms of new age belief. Until I encountered this forum, I don't think I have ever come across anyone propounding the ideas spoken of here. And as I've said many times, these ideas are extraordinarily difficult to grasp. Is this the domain of a select few? What is the likelihood of substantial numbers in the world advocating this approach? I guess it's a matter of exponential growth - perhaps things might be different after a few score generations.

By 'selected few' we should understand those who have reached the possibility to think about such things. As such, you are selected. If you reach the point to ask whether you're selected, then you are selected. From this point onwards any limitation is a self-imposed limitation. This doesn't mean that the obstacles are imaginary. They are real. Something must truly be transformed in our brain, in our body, in our subtle organization. But the belief that it is impossible to undertake such transformation is a self-imposed limitation. There's nothing that prevents us to make even if it is only the tiniest step in that direction, except we ourselves. The rationale of such self-imposed limitations usually goes like: "But I have so much work to do that it's impossible to make any substantial difference in this lifetime. So there's no point to even start." But with such logic we would never be able to achieve anything even on a purely sensory plan. Everything that humanity does is a work in progress. It's like Newton saying "Even if I develop celestial mechanics, I don't see space flight becoming possible in my lifetime, so there's no point to even start." This already hints at us that our human life only receives its worth when we see it as a link in a much greater evolutionary flow. And we don't even need to accept reincarnation for this. Even a materialist can sense that by making individual progress, they contribute something to the world. We only don't feel this if we're at a stage of development where we say "To hell with this world. Whether the world will flourish or perish, is all the same to me, since I won't be around to see it. So I'll just take whatever I can from it, while I still can."

The extraordinary difficulties result when we try to form a completely intellectual picture of reality. Then we accumulate more and more pebbles until we say "That's too much, I'm crushed by this weight and it still makes no sense." Many times the example with the geocentric and heliocentric perspectives has been given. It is very difficult to keep intellectual track of the bodies in the geocentric view. But in the heliocentric, by finding a different vantage point, everything becomes much more clear. Our task today is to find that vantage point within thinking itself. All scientific and philosophical problems result from the fact that man doesn't understand what thinking is. As soon as we find our concentric relations to our thought forms, we find a completely unsuspected way of looking upon what reality is and how our thinking fits in it.

The thing is, Newton was a gifted individual and only those who proceed to university maths/physics will ever understand his work. Sure, the rest of humanity has benefited from his efforts, e.g. the satellites that give us our GPS. But the masses have no idea about the details or even the fundamentals of gravitational theory or calculus.

As I said, SS would appear to be for the select few, the harbingers whoever they are, at least in this age. Perhaps we can view things a bit like standard evolutionary where a small number of individuals receive a beneficial mutation which one day might become fixed in the population. Similarly, those in our current time who make spiritual progress can confer blessings upon the larger human race.

Anthony,

It's important for us to keep close tabs on the habit of thinking where we say, people have certain innate capacities and skills, most of which are incapable of grasping lofty spiritual ideas. This is yet another manifestation of the 3rd person view from nowhere. We start dreaming of some hypothetical people and what generalized qualities of thinking they have, rather than our first-person thinking perspective on this forum and what we are currently doing with it. It is clear from your comments that there is some progression in appreciation and understanding of what is being spoken of. Yet, as we spoke of before, it is a very rough and choppy path to begin with, especially if we are doing concentration, meditation, etc., since we are pushing our thought and feeling and will boundaries much further than our organism is used to. It's like if we go on vacation and play, eat out, drink, do zero work for a week straight, living in pure happiness, joy, pleasure - when we return to the normal routine, there will naturally be a hard snap back in our emotional life.

Humanity as a whole has been oscillating between inner moods of enthusiasm for the spirit and cynicism/nihilism against all things spiritual for many centuries now. We can clearly see the collective manifestations in various worldviews, social and political movements, wars, etc. But the main obstacles come when, in our polarization to the more nihilistic mood, we convince ourselves that this is the way it must be. No matter how many times it happens, we tend to forget and feel 'this time is different - I have hit max connection with the spiritual'. We start speaking of our inherent or innate inability to know our inner life, which is then projected onto humanity at large. We speak of how SS can only be for the masses at some later stage. But this mindset will ensure the people holding it never learn the new thinking skills, no matter how much time passes and evolutionary circumstances change. That is the supreme irony. The more we adopt a passive and helpless attitude towards what can be known, the more passive and helpless to know we become. What was once a domain of thinking experience under the control of our free spirit becomes more of an innate or inherent limitation. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The reasons for this negative feedback are clearly outlined by SS itself, and we can study the details. But we also need to root ourselves in the ground principles and wait patiently for the details to come to life within us, through rhythmic exercise of reasoned contemplation and prayerful meditation. What we have won for ourselves through active thinking consciousness in previous incarnations is what we have carried with us into the current incarnation and what we win during this incarnation is what our core individuality will carry forward into new ones. Since the dawn of the 20th century, all individuals who find themselves wondering about this path have been graced with the capacity to make a qualitative metamorphosis of their thinking consciousness to Imaginative, which is a foreshadowing of what will eventually become the normal waking mode of cognition for humanity.

We can learn a lot simply by paying attention to what purposes our desires, emotions, mindset and generalized conclusions are serving in our life - what do they motivate us to do or not to do, where do we direct our attention and interest after reaching those conclusions, and so forth? You mentioned that you couldn't imagine yourself giving up red wine for spiritual development right now and I think Cleric did a great job of exploring that angle with you. Yet I don't know if you followed it, because your response was a non-sequitur. You quoted something and then went into the 'select few' speculation, which had little to do with what was quoted. These are precisely the habits, tendencies, and behaviors that SS asks us to confront honestly and examine carefully in the pursuit of living self-knowledge. It is exactly in that honest examination that we become able to orient our thought-life within the Heliocentric perspective and the 'extraordinary difficult' ideas start to become more simple and even somewhat obvious.

It's like a mystery movie where the director drops a lot of fragmented hints and clues throughout, where every other scene has something pointing to the resolution, but we never seem to be paying enough attention. When the resolution finally arrives and the director flashes us back to all the clues which he gave, we start to feel, 'oh man, that was so obvious... if only I had paid more attention to some of these details, I would have figured it all out right away!' This is a very similar experience we have on the thinking spiritual path - we start to experience how daily life itself has been giving us the clues to these deepest riddles but our perspective was too aliased before to notice. Except we don't keep making the same inattentive mistakes with every new mystery movie. We don't remain with fragmented details until someone else comes along and gives us the holistic image on a silver platter at the end, but we learn to discern the overarching narrative patterns and constellate that holistic image for ourselves, in advance, and then the details we confront along the way naturally fall into their sensible places. 

[Anthony66]

It's important for us to keep close tabs on the habit of thinking where we say, people have certain innate capacities and skills, most of which are incapable of grasping lofty spiritual ideas. This is yet another manifestation of the 3rd person view from nowhere. We start dreaming of some hypothetical people and what generalized qualities of thinking they have, rather than our first-person thinking perspective on this forum and what we are currently doing with it. It is clear from your comments that there is some progression in appreciation and understanding of what is being spoken of. Yet, as we spoke of before, it is a very rough and choppy path to begin with, especially if we are doing concentration, meditation, etc., since we are pushing our thought and feeling and will boundaries much further than our organism is used to. It's like if we go on vacation and play, eat out, drink, do zero work for a week straight, living in pure happiness, joy, pleasure - when we return to the normal routine, there will naturally be a hard snap back in our emotional life.

Ashvin,

I know it wasn't your intention, but I feel like I'm being gaslighted here. My conviction that SS is for the few in this generation is very strong. I would be confident of cleaning up with any bet on this. I'd give testimony in a court. It's not based on dreaming of hypothetical people but on what I have learned about the thousands of people I've interacted with. It's based on the fact that I've never met a SS inclined person in the flesh yet. It's based on what I have learned about this world over many decades.

But now my analytical skills are under the spotlight as they are manifesting "the 3rd person view from nowhere". I feel a disconnect. On the one side I have this horizontal thinking based confidence of the assessment of things. On the other, I'm trying to cultivate a vertical aspect, a lived aspect. The fruits of the vertical lie in the horizontal - we can't throw those away. But how does a greater lived first-person thinking impact on these fruits which in this case is the assessment that SS is not broadly for this age?