Conformal Cyclic Meditation

[AshvinP]

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?

Anthony,

What I am trying to convey, and what Cleric did a much more precise and thorough job conveying on the other thread, is that SS can't be treated like another planar theory akin to Newtonian mechanics, GR, QM, or anything similar. It is a way of life and living, a way of consciously exploring what we are always doing in our thinking to philosophize about the world and about our thinking, to scientifically examine the world and our thinking. The thought-out assertion that 'SS is for the few in this generation' - where it comes from, how it arises, what it reflects about the current state of our spiritual activity - is the subject matter of SS. It is what SS seeks to explain through our living thinking experience.

I mentioned the negative feedback and self-fulfilling prophecy which arises from such a thought. Cleric wrote about how everyone waits for everyone else to take the first step when they are beholden to a group-consciousness, which is really what is being expressed in that thought. As you know, SS is centered around the Christ impulse which can live in every individual today. Consider the verse, "Before Abraham was, I am." The ancient Hebrews had a thoroughly group-consciousness centered in their ancestor Abraham. Christ indicated that even this group-consciousness is simply an expression of the Cosmic "I" which is now manifesting within the individual soul, through the awakening to our intuitive thinking capacity.

So the thought is not an objective fact of reality that we can prove in the court, but a state of our group-based thinking perspective which projects itself as something akin to a 'law of nature'. It convinces itself that it must await some prescribed time limit - a lifetime, an epoch, etc. - before it can awaken to itself and transform itself. The thought only holds good IF people continue dreaming in the thought. The moment we awaken from this thought as individuals, it no longer applies. As Cleric said on the other thread, the terminology hardly matters. "SS" is simply a convenient label that is used to point towards intuitive thinking activity which is no longer in the blind spot.

What is your understanding of that argument?

[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?

Anthony,

What I am trying to convey, and what Cleric did a much more precise and thorough job conveying on the other thread, is that SS can't be treated like another planar theory akin to Newtonian mechanics, GR, QM, or anything similar. It is a way of life and living, a way of consciously exploring what we are always doing in our thinking to philosophize about the world and about our thinking, to scientifically examine the world and our thinking. The thought-out assertion that 'SS is for the few in this generation' - where it comes from, how it arises, what it reflects about the current state of our spiritual activity - is the subject matter of SS. It is what SS seeks to explain through our living thinking experience.

I mentioned the negative feedback and self-fulfilling prophecy which arises from such a thought. Cleric wrote about how everyone waits for everyone else to take the first step when they are beholden to a group-consciousness, which is really what is being expressed in that thought. As you know, SS is centered around the Christ impulse which can live in every individual today. Consider the verse, "Before Abraham was, I am." The ancient Hebrews had a thoroughly group-consciousness centered in their ancestor Abraham. Christ indicated that even this group-consciousness is simply an expression of the Cosmic "I" which is now manifesting within the individual soul, through the awakening to our intuitive thinking capacity.

So the thought is not an objective fact of reality that we can prove in the court, but a state of our group-based thinking perspective which projects itself as something akin to a 'law of nature'. It convinces itself that it must await some prescribed time limit - a lifetime, an epoch, etc. - before it can awaken to itself and transform itself. The thought only holds good IF people continue dreaming in the thought. The moment we awaken from this thought as individuals, it no longer applies. As Cleric said on the other thread, the terminology hardly matters. "SS" is simply a convenient label that is used to point towards intuitive thinking activity which is no longer in the blind spot.

What is your understanding of that argument?

I don't accept that negative feedback, self-fulfilling prophecy, or group-consciousness are at play here in terms of stifling one's personal spiritual progress. Difficult endeavors attract the few. Few attain a mastery of GR but those who have the aptitude and motivation pursue a course of study. Endurance sports are hard but those with slow-twitch muscle fibers, a high aerobic capacity, and a certain mental constitutions find great pleasure in pushing their bodies. Monastic life is hard but some are strongly drawn to it.

Acknowledging that SS is not for the many at this time in no way limits or thwarts the individuals who are drawn to it. It simply means they will be sitting amongst empty pews.

[AshvinP]

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?

Anthony,

What I am trying to convey, and what Cleric did a much more precise and thorough job conveying on the other thread, is that SS can't be treated like another planar theory akin to Newtonian mechanics, GR, QM, or anything similar. It is a way of life and living, a way of consciously exploring what we are always doing in our thinking to philosophize about the world and about our thinking, to scientifically examine the world and our thinking. The thought-out assertion that 'SS is for the few in this generation' - where it comes from, how it arises, what it reflects about the current state of our spiritual activity - is the subject matter of SS. It is what SS seeks to explain through our living thinking experience.

I mentioned the negative feedback and self-fulfilling prophecy which arises from such a thought. Cleric wrote about how everyone waits for everyone else to take the first step when they are beholden to a group-consciousness, which is really what is being expressed in that thought. As you know, SS is centered around the Christ impulse which can live in every individual today. Consider the verse, "Before Abraham was, I am." The ancient Hebrews had a thoroughly group-consciousness centered in their ancestor Abraham. Christ indicated that even this group-consciousness is simply an expression of the Cosmic "I" which is now manifesting within the individual soul, through the awakening to our intuitive thinking capacity.

So the thought is not an objective fact of reality that we can prove in the court, but a state of our group-based thinking perspective which projects itself as something akin to a 'law of nature'. It convinces itself that it must await some prescribed time limit - a lifetime, an epoch, etc. - before it can awaken to itself and transform itself. The thought only holds good IF people continue dreaming in the thought. The moment we awaken from this thought as individuals, it no longer applies. As Cleric said on the other thread, the terminology hardly matters. "SS" is simply a convenient label that is used to point towards intuitive thinking activity which is no longer in the blind spot.

What is your understanding of that argument?

I don't accept that negative feedback, self-fulfilling prophecy, or group-consciousness are at play here in terms of stifling one's personal spiritual progress. Difficult endeavors attract the few. Few attain a mastery of GR but those who have the aptitude and motivation pursue a course of study. Endurance sports are hard but those with slow-twitch muscle fibers, a high aerobic capacity, and a certain mental constitutions find great pleasure in pushing their bodies. Monastic life is hard but some are strongly drawn to it.

Acknowledging that SS is not for the many at this time in no way limits or thwarts the individuals who are drawn to it. It simply means they will be sitting amongst empty pews.

We could reformulate the thought a bit for clarity, as follows - "most people are not currently awakened to their intuitive thinking activity, and this must persist for at least another generation" (because awakening is a difficult endeavor, complex, or whatever other reason we use). The underlined part is not really at issue (although we have no idea how many humans really are awakened, since true awakening is generally not advertised), but the bold part betrays the thinking perspective from which the thought is issued. It is the same with the bold part in your last comment.

Ironically, if we simply investigate the thinking perspective from which the thought is issued, we are already grasping SS, the SS perspective is already for us, and we are already in process of making it for this generation. It's not something which can ever happen to us or to humanity, but only something we can make happen for us and for humanity. As long as we continue to view our own living thinking experience as some theory which needs to be mastered, we ensure that living thinking remains in the blind spot and we wait for some external power to force it out of the darkness into the light, but that external power doesn't exist. Instead the spiritual environment will continue to transform around us and this will breed fear and resentment.

[Federica]

Federica,

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





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.

Ashvin, thank you for your wishes and apologies for this late reply - I have been unsure how to answer, I will admit.

the argument is straying further and further from transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution (...) The argument seems to now be about whether there is a 'tension' in my line of reasoning.(...)
Sure, there can be legitimate line of questioning into whether my comments and reasoning has been entirely consistent, but to what end?

Absolutely, the argument has strayed. I think I have addressed that, and how it’s happened. As said, making it a personal question was not my intention when starting this VR discussion. But you asked me whether I had read your essays, and they are built on your personal practice. So far, I have not too much hesitated to comment on both the transpersonal and the personal, by virtue of what you wrote a few months ago:

Similarly there are guardians related to the life of feeling and willing, whom I have not encountered yet, but I hope that I will some day! It's easy to consider these descriptions and feel we are talking about some devilish being who we need to fight or run away from, but really we are dealing with a great gift from the higher worlds. It reveals to us our actual being as viewed from the perspective of those higher worlds, with all our inner warts turned outwards for us to see objectively. It gives us the opportunity to morally develop ourselves instead of entering the higher worlds impure and, therefore, entirely unprepared. So, you can see, there are many unsuspected ways in which the geysers will be brought to our attention on the spiritual path and they will be very hard to miss. I realize this is what you were also pointing to when saying, "because you can go further than that with feelings, and do way more than take stock and set signal ropes". So your intuition was once again correct, but I'm not sure you realized how difficult it becomes to ignore the life of feeling on the path.

That being said, I do really value your feedback on these things and I hope you don't hesitate to continue providing it. When it is motivated by genuine interest in bringing to greater light our inner being and what we can do to confront it in a living way, it hardly matters if it's "correct". It's really the Spirit of the gestures that matter and this can always reveal things to us which we may otherwise miss.

Now when you regret that the argument is straying from the transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution, and ask “to what end”, it is apparent the situation has changed. To be honest, I believe that asking to what end I question your line of reasoning is strange. To what end are we discussing on this forum? Could it not be to pursue that same end that we might have a discussion like this one, and that your lines of reasoning can be looked at? I am not sure I can commit to never questioning your lines of reasoning, but the point is taken for the personal aspects.

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?

So I’m not going to elaborate on this, although, for the record, I do want to correct that what’s written here is at odds with what I was asserting. With this I hope the space is cleared from the personal aspects, and I will address your questions on VR and transhumanism in a separate post with a clean slate.

[AshvinP]

Now when you regret that the argument is straying from the transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution, and ask “to what end”, it is apparent the situation has changed. To be honest, I believe that asking to what end I question your line of reasoning is strange. To what end are we discussing on this forum? Could it not be to pursue that same end that we might have a discussion like this one, and that your lines of reasoning can be looked at? I am not sure I can commit to never questioning your lines of reasoning, but the point is taken for the personal aspects.

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?

So I’m not going to elaborate on this, although, for the record, I do want to correct that what’s written here is at odds with what I was asserting. With this I hope the space is cleared from the personal aspects, and I will address your questions on VR and transhumanism in a separate post with a clean slate.

Federica,

I wasn't questioning your motivations or the spirit in which you are engaging the line of argument. What I was trying to convey is as follows. Let's say that my old essays were completely off the mark and/or inconsistent with the arguments I am making now. All this would establish is that my thinking has developed further and now I hold a different position on the VR issues. Honestly, I shouldn't have even mentioned the old essays, because I actually feel that they are often misleading for various reasons (not just the VR ones), mostly because they are unnecessarily abstract and complex. Some of the points made in them may be very misleading as well. My perspective has progressed quite a bit. Like you guys, I have been learning a ton about the first-person living thinking dynamics from Cleric's illustrations and my own studies/practice. I also don't quite remember what arguments I presented or how I presented them in the essays. So I would rather stick with what I am conveying in my posts here and now, and if there seems to be a tension or discontinuity with earlier essays, just assume the earlier ones are off and my position has changed.

That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

[Federica]

Now when you regret that the argument is straying from the transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution, and ask “to what end”, it is apparent the situation has changed. To be honest, I believe that asking to what end I question your line of reasoning is strange. To what end are we discussing on this forum? Could it not be to pursue that same end that we might have a discussion like this one, and that your lines of reasoning can be looked at? I am not sure I can commit to never questioning your lines of reasoning, but the point is taken for the personal aspects.

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?

So I’m not going to elaborate on this, although, for the record, I do want to correct that what’s written here is at odds with what I was asserting. With this I hope the space is cleared from the personal aspects, and I will address your questions on VR and transhumanism in a separate post with a clean slate.

Federica,

I wasn't questioning your motivations or the spirit in which you are engaging the line of argument. What I was trying to convey is as follows. Let's say that my old essays were completely off the mark and/or inconsistent with the arguments I am making now. All this would establish is that my thinking has developed further and now I hold a different position on the VR issues. Honestly, I shouldn't have even mentioned the old essays, because I actually feel that they are often misleading for various reasons (not just the VR ones), mostly because they are unnecessarily abstract and complex. Some of the points made in them may be very misleading as well. My perspective has progressed quite a bit. Like you guys, I have been learning a ton about the first-person living thinking dynamics from Cleric's illustrations and my own studies/practice. I also don't quite remember what arguments I presented or how I presented them in the essays. So I would rather stick with what I am conveying in my posts here and now, and if there seems to be a tension or discontinuity with earlier essays, just assume the earlier ones are off and my position has changed.

That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Ashvin,

It is one thing that you are not particularly keen on revisiting old writings - it’s completely understandable and I think it’s both brave and healthy to put out essays and then to be able to distance oneself and evolve viewpoints (we all have in mind counterexamples) - but… the issues I have questioned above involve a post you wrote on 26/12/22 versus another one dated 30/12/22! Some of them come from within the same 30/12/22 post, and some I haven’t even mentioned, and it’s with some effort that I am resisting bringing them up here. Because it counters my soul preferences, it’s certainly a very useful effort, although incomplete, and I am resolutely not suggesting that we reopen anything of the above here. However, it should be clear that exchanges will be difficult if you keep on replying off the marks of what I’m saying.

[AshvinP]

Now when you regret that the argument is straying from the transpersonal principles of spiritual evolution, and ask “to what end”, it is apparent the situation has changed. To be honest, I believe that asking to what end I question your line of reasoning is strange. To what end are we discussing on this forum? Could it not be to pursue that same end that we might have a discussion like this one, and that your lines of reasoning can be looked at? I am not sure I can commit to never questioning your lines of reasoning, but the point is taken for the personal aspects.




So I’m not going to elaborate on this, although, for the record, I do want to correct that what’s written here is at odds with what I was asserting. With this I hope the space is cleared from the personal aspects, and I will address your questions on VR and transhumanism in a separate post with a clean slate.

Federica,

I wasn't questioning your motivations or the spirit in which you are engaging the line of argument. What I was trying to convey is as follows. Let's say that my old essays were completely off the mark and/or inconsistent with the arguments I am making now. All this would establish is that my thinking has developed further and now I hold a different position on the VR issues. Honestly, I shouldn't have even mentioned the old essays, because I actually feel that they are often misleading for various reasons (not just the VR ones), mostly because they are unnecessarily abstract and complex. Some of the points made in them may be very misleading as well. My perspective has progressed quite a bit. Like you guys, I have been learning a ton about the first-person living thinking dynamics from Cleric's illustrations and my own studies/practice. I also don't quite remember what arguments I presented or how I presented them in the essays. So I would rather stick with what I am conveying in my posts here and now, and if there seems to be a tension or discontinuity with earlier essays, just assume the earlier ones are off and my position has changed.

That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Ashvin,

It is one thing that you are not particularly keen on revisiting old writings - it’s completely understandable and I think it’s both brave and healthy to put out essays and then to be able to distance oneself and evolve viewpoints (we all have in mind counterexamples) - but… the issues I have questioned above involve a post you wrote on 26/12/22 versus another one dated 30/12/22! Some of them come from within the same 30/12/22 post, and some I haven’t even mentioned, and it’s with some effort that I am resisting bringing them up here. Because it counters my soul preferences, it’s certainly a very useful effort, although incomplete, and I am resolutely not suggesting that we reopen anything of the above here. However, it should be clear that exchanges will be difficult if you keep on replying off the marks of what I’m saying.

Federica,

Noted. I see now that you desribed the 'tension' as not only between the original essay and recent posts, but also within my recent posts. That was my mistake, sorry.

[Federica]

(...)
That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Here we are, Ashvin, back to the main topic. I tried my best to gather the essence of my thoughts, from VR to transhumanism. I look forward to yours, and to the metaphor!

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).

I would doubt we can say that different sets of sensorial configurations, or spectrums, can make our activity more or less spiritualized. Can we say that, because we will - or cause - a certain transformation from one frame to the next through the move of a finger, or a blink in one direction, rather than through stretching a leg, then our activity becomes more or less spiritualized, as a consequence of which body part is involved? I am not sure.
If I can borrow some vocabulary from Cleric’s last essay, which I imagine is fresh memory for all of us, we steer our configuration spaces all the time, our activity is equally spiritualized all the time. It hardly matters whether we are doing it within a natural configuration space, or a VR-supplemented one. As I put it before, "that the virtual world doesn't exist in the same way our natural world does, is irrelevant from an experiential perspective". Said in yet another way, the transformation of imagery in VR is not “less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” because it's just never dependent on those anyway.
At most, I would imagine, when we will a certain transformation through a head movement rather than through our usual leg movement, there is a theoretical possibility that we can come to conceive the potential separateness of idea and physical movement. Maybe that’s what you mean, that we can hope to notice the primacy of our thinking gestures in that shift.
I have to say, I really really don’t believe this can happen in practice. Unless one already understood that, unless one already realized that outside VR, it’s not because we supplement the sensory spectrum with the 7 wonders of the world that we will come to realize that we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. That would be a miracle! I think we cannot reasonably expect that sensorial variations will illuminate our living thinking, and make us grasp the secret. As I put it before, only thinking can manipulate thinking. Conversely, for you who have already understood that clearly, there’s no value added to be found in the VR experience either.


So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.
I think the etheric body has to be loosened in healthier, T-led ways rather than by trying to cut it apart with a forever dull VR-knife, which also puts unnecessary obstacles on the path. It’s as if we entrust a mediocre and unskilled surgeon - who not only was educated in past, obsolete (materialist) methods, but also has to operate with a forever dull knife - with the task of lifting our etheric body. So I can't help but disagree with a future-oriented look on VR. I rather see it as an expression of old, dying-off stuff of the past. As I see them, these are the last, or before-last, gasps of reductive materialism. Borrowing again from Cleric's vocabulary, I see VR, and transhumanism for that matter, as part of the reductionist dead ends in evolution.
To conclude before I move on to transhumanism, I will take the liberty to quote Cleric’s words of caution with regards to the possible spiritual import of Michael Levin’s model. Surprisingly or not, I think these words would also perfectly apply to VR:

It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.
This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires.

The previous actually provides a perfect transition to the topic of transhumanism, insofar as Levin’s model can be seen as a precursor of an upcoming new sort of vertically integrating scientific bio-models that will open the way to advanced body modifications, biohacking, and other transhumanist pursuits.

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.

I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).


All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies). Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.


Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession. It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).


Unsurprisingly, my conclusion is that it’s not necessary to make (VR, the multiverse, and) transhumanism fit into a lawful and unified evolution of the spirit, where it should supposedly express a natural, only unconscious, longing of the soul to reunite with the spiritual worlds, whilst the anthroposophist expresses the same desire in full awareness. In the trajectory of evolution there are dead ends. And I doubt it’s desirable, or even possible, to redeem dead ends by descending into them. They would be best redeemed/extinguished if others pursue spiritual development and enter into the depth of reality directly.

[AshvinP]

(...)
That said, I look forward to your response. I actually thought of a metaphor to employ which may clarify my points more, but I will hold off on sharing that for now.

Here we are, Ashvin, back to the main topic. I tried my best to gather the essence of my thoughts, from VR to transhumanism. I look forward to yours, and to the metaphor!

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).

I would doubt we can say that different sets of sensorial configurations, or spectrums, can make our activity more or less spiritualized. Can we say that, because we will - or cause - a certain transformation from one frame to the next through the move of a finger, or a blink in one direction, rather than through stretching a leg, then our activity becomes more or less spiritualized, as a consequence of which body part is involved? I am not sure.
If I can borrow some vocabulary from Cleric’s last essay, which I imagine is fresh memory for all of us, we steer our configuration spaces all the time, our activity is equally spiritualized all the time. It hardly matters whether we are doing it within a natural configuration space, or a VR-supplemented one. As I put it before, "that the virtual world doesn't exist in the same way our natural world does, is irrelevant from an experiential perspective". Said in yet another way, the transformation of imagery in VR is not “less dependent on our physical legs, arms, etc.” because it's just never dependent on those anyway.
At most, I would imagine, when we will a certain transformation through a head movement rather than through our usual leg movement, there is a theoretical possibility that we can come to conceive the potential separateness of idea and physical movement. Maybe that’s what you mean, that we can hope to notice the primacy of our thinking gestures in that shift.
I have to say, I really really don’t believe this can happen in practice. Unless one already understood that, unless one already realized that outside VR, it’s not because we supplement the sensory spectrum with the 7 wonders of the world that we will come to realize that we live at our human-scale geodesics all the time. That would be a miracle! I think we cannot reasonably expect that sensorial variations will illuminate our living thinking, and make us grasp the secret. As I put it before, only thinking can manipulate thinking. Conversely, for you who have already understood that clearly, there’s no value added to be found in the VR experience either.


So the only great significance I see in the VR-supplemented sensory spectrum is, at the cultural level, that it enacts certain evolutionary trends, whilst, at the individual level, I think it’s only significant in terms of the soul preferences it reveals.
On these bases, I am still convinced that VR as a regular practice is at best - for those on a living thinking path - a useless gizmo, a gadget-practice unable to deliver any original state (exclusively experienceable through VR practice), and at worse - i.e. for everyone else - I think it's a damaging practice, apt to exasperate materialistic beliefs, and to exasperate a baseline of fear and anxiety with regards to knowledge and mastery of the physical and spiritual environments, in all the ways I have previously said.
I think the etheric body has to be loosened in healthier, T-led ways rather than by trying to cut it apart with a forever dull VR-knife, which also puts unnecessary obstacles on the path. It’s as if we entrust a mediocre and unskilled surgeon - who not only was educated in past, obsolete (materialist) methods, but also has to operate with a forever dull knife - with the task of lifting our etheric body. So I can't help but disagree with a future-oriented look on VR. I rather see it as an expression of old, dying-off stuff of the past. As I see them, these are the last, or before-last, gasps of reductive materialism. Borrowing again from Cleric's vocabulary, I see VR, and transhumanism for that matter, as part of the reductionist dead ends in evolution.
To conclude before I move on to transhumanism, I will take the liberty to quote Cleric’s words of caution with regards to the possible spiritual import of Michael Levin’s model. Surprisingly or not, I think these words would also perfectly apply to VR:

It’s much more efficient if one can directly tackle the reality of our central thinking space and go on to work outwards from there. But for various reasons, very few seem willing to step into this direct experience. The intellectual habits of the last five centuries still hold a very strong grip on the soul and most thinkers feel obliged to invest themselves into an intellectual scaffold before daring to confront their spiritual activity directly.
This is not only a more roundabout way, full of traps and loopholes in which our thinking can become entangled, but is also a very tempting ground for our unconscious desires.

The previous actually provides a perfect transition to the topic of transhumanism, insofar as Levin’s model can be seen as a precursor of an upcoming new sort of vertically integrating scientific bio-models that will open the way to advanced body modifications, biohacking, and other transhumanist pursuits.

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.

I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).


All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies). Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.


Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession. It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).


Unsurprisingly, my conclusion is that it’s not necessary to make (VR, the multiverse, and) transhumanism fit into a lawful and unified evolution of the spirit, where it should supposedly express a natural, only unconscious, longing of the soul to reunite with the spiritual worlds, whilst the anthroposophist expresses the same desire in full awareness. In the trajectory of evolution there are dead ends. And I doubt it’s desirable, or even possible, to redeem dead ends by descending into them. They would be best redeemed/extinguished if others pursue spiritual development and enter into the depth of reality directly.

Federica,

As it turns out, the analogy I previously constructed works very well as a response to your latest post (at least IMO). I don't need to edit much. The reason we call these things potential "tools" is because they are not means for or the cause of inner transformation, but instruments that the transforming-transformed free spirit can use to its benefit, and ideally the benefit of the Whole, as it steers along the geodesic gradient. We could make a comparison to magicians here. Magic is real. Physical obejcts and rites can be used as portals to higher planes of consciousness and spirits can summoned to the Earthly plane. Baptism in water can be a truly magical act. But the great error comes in when the physical objects and practices themselves are invested with the magical power rather than the moral agency using it as the instrument of his/her spirit. Through such errors we enter into all sorts of pathological and parasitic manifestations of spiritual activity.

So I agree with you on that point and there was never any intention to convey that VR technology, or any other materialistic tech, could ever be the cause of spiritual transformation. If anything it is the effect of a natural spiritual evolutionary progression which has manifested in the lower order configuration spaces, and which can be used to work back into the higher order spaces, for better or for worse. The extent to which we can work on freely purifying the whole body-soul-spirit organism in the course of our spiritual evolution is what determines whether we steer it towards the better or for worse. Actually everything written on this forum is a tool in the same sense, since none of it will be remembered or put to any good use without the inner work. Redemption always requires sacrificial descent into the lower realms, of course archetypally exemplified by the MoG. No forces which develop through spiritual evolution go 'extinct' - they only end up serving different aims within the spiritual economy. I won't go further into that now, but these principles are the most foundational for my current spiritual scientfic understanding.

Here is the analogy:

Let's imagine a VR interface which allows the user to control a physical drone through intents and ideas. The leeway to manifest this spiritual activity will, of course, still be constrained to certain aspects of the interface. For purposes of the metaphor, we will make these constraints as 'rarefied' as possible. We could imagine the user can turn his head to look at certain areas of the interface which are associated with different actions for the drone, like take off, elevate to certain heights, fly north-south-east-west, land, etc. When the user blinks once for 5 seconds, the drone fires out a data-collecting device into the environment it is surveying. He uses certain voice commands to set targets for the drone. Through the VR interface, he is able to switch into 'subjective mode' and look through the drone's sensory apparatus and see what it sees, hear what it hears, sense what it senses (including warmth, coldness, textures, etc). He can also return to an 'objective mode' where he views the drone from a distance as it navigates the environment. The two subjective-objective perspectives can then be integrated through the VR software. 

Now we will consider a passage from Steiner which indicates what the corporeal human being is from the spiritual perspective. We are trying to see if this VR drone interface has anything to offer us towards this spiritual perspective which we don't have in the non-VR sensory perspective. 

It is the same with human beings. A human being is only the streaming together of forces of the macrocosm, forces we find in the heavens, here or there in the macrocosm. Where we usually assume a human being somewhere on earth, there is nothing for the occultist. In fact, forces stream down from above and up from below and intersect. Then, just as the peculiar relationship of rain and sunshine produces the rainbow, so forces streaming out of the macrocosm from above and below result in the phenomenon that looks like a human being. People are nothing as they stand before us. In truth, they are a phantom, Maya, an illusion. It is the cosmic forces, intersecting where our eyes think they see a human being, that are real. Try to take the statement seriously that a human being is nothing as he or she stands before us. A human being is but the shadow of many forces. The being who reveals himself in a person can easily be elsewhere than at that point where the individual in question is walking around on two legs.

So we could say the VR drone interface is a way to conceptually imagine the spiritual activity of non-corporeal beings who incorporate dead or living organisms as their bodies and thereby accomplish their intentions in the manifest world, while their Ego-consciousness works from elsewhere. Let's be clear this is only an analogy - as Cleric mentioned on the other thread, the VR technology, like all modern science and technology, reflects our intellectual movements which try to mimic the true hierarchy of spiritual activity which is expressed through living Nature. It is only when we understand the results of our intellectual movements as analogies that we avoid reductionism and gain pedagogical value of the inner spiritual dynamics. And we only understand them as analogies when we take livingly and seriously the supra-sensory reality of spiritual activity in which our intellectual and corporeal perspective is embedded. Our meaningful experience within the VR configuration space is an interference of all the higher order configuration spaces which 'bend' the geodesic curvature of the lower order spaces, including our sensory-conceptual space with physical consciousness.

In very simple terms, what we are attempting to gain more perspective on with this particular VR experience is how it feels to be an Ego-consciousness which is not tied to a specific corporeal body, but experiences itself using various bodies as necessary to accomplish its intuitive intents. It can experience the 'subjective' sensory perspective of the body at any given time, but never feels itself to be completely merged with that perspective. To expand the analogy, we can say the VR interface allows us to remotely link to many different drones, and when one runs out of energy or flies into a cliff or otherwise goes out of commission, we seamlessly transfer all its data to another drone and carry on. Here is a video which could help us get a feel for the immersive experience, but I am also positing an analogy here which goes much further than the current tech, anticipating many more improvements in the capacities of the VR tech.

Such phenomena exist already and man could perceive them if only he would give heed to them. He would then see that there are certain entities, for example, who have developed prematurely. Just as man, if he waits for the appropriate moment, will attain the Jupiter state at the right time so that he will then be able to direct his physical and etheric bodies, so there are beings who in a certain respect have developed prematurely. Such prematurely developed beings are to be found amongst the birds, especially the migratory birds. Here we have an example of the group-soul to which the etheric body of each individual bird is related. Just as the group-soul directs the regular migrations of birds, so will man, after he has developed Spirit Self or Manas, command his physical and etheric bodies; he will control and direct them. He will do this in a still higher sense from without when he has so far perfected himself that he is still in the process of transmuting his etheric or life-body. The Beings who can already do this today are the Archangels or Archangeloi. They are Beings who can already do what man will be able to do some day, Beings who are able to compass what is called ‘directing the physical and etheric bodies from without’, but who are able at the same time to work upon their own etheric body.

So through the VR experiential drone analogy, we intimate a future state in which humans will be fully conscious of how our corporeal existence is simply the instrument through which our Ego-consciousness, located 'somewhere else', accomplishes its intuitive intents in a way which is manifest to the objective consciousness of corporeal perspectives. To be fully conscious of this dynamic is to also control the corporeal bodies 'from without' - to participate in 'bending' of the lower order configuration spaces with complete continuity of consciousness. Currently, we normally only have the ability to consciously participate in this way to a certain extent after we have crossed the threshold of death. Through spiritual training we can cross the threshold of death consciously during life and at least begin to discern these living realities which will manifest more fully in future ages.

All of the analogical value in VR or any other cultural phenomena comes from our self-consciousness of the living thinking perspective which is manifesting the analogy for pedagogical purposes. We should be very clear that, when we have fully developed the Spirit Self and manifest our consciousness through it, the experience will be nothing like the VR interface. We simply can't imagine what it would be like beforehand with our physical 'objective consciousness'. None of the qualitative configuration spaces through which our consciousness weaves is reducible to any other one, as Cleric illustrated on the other thread. We can't experience the higher order spaces by building up the lower ones, no matter how sophisticated our tech becomes. So we always need to be careful to remember that these are only dim analogies and cannot be sought as ends-in-themselves. The higher tech cannot be confused for spiritual development, which involves the gradual inner purification of the whole WFT human organism.

Nevertheless, the fact that our cultural evolution has brought us to the point where such tech is available for the analogies should also be accounted for in our living thinking. Suffice to say, it's not a random coincidence that our thinking perspective has been progressively evolving to create analogies for its own relation to the future spiritual states of being. There is a Cosmic telos involved and human individuals can decide in complete freedom whether they will use the tech to further that telos or only seek their own personal pleasures, egoistic desires, short-sighted aims, etc. and thereby serve as resistance to that telos (which also serves a purpose in the spiritual economy). Ultimately, the telos will be accomplished, but the questions are when, how, and by whom? It is conceivable that, if humanity doesn't develop its morally imaginative spiritual capacities soon (in Cosmic evolutionary timescale), a lower life wave will become the new 'humanity' and be tasked with fulfilling its Cosmic mission.

In relation to these technological tools for the free spirit, I also want to highlight a few general principles we must always take heed of:

The quickest way to obscure our living first-person thinking perspective within any given configuration space is to take great enjoyment in the content of our thinking-perception. We can try to notice this every time we open our eyes and look around at the beautiful appearances of the world, every time we eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner and take pleasure in the tastes, etc. We can sense our consciousness getting sucked into the sensory spectrum and our inner life of activity being dimmed down. So that is the same for VR - if our intention is not to patiently mine spiritual lessons, rooted in Cosmic feelings and ideals, but to get immediate pleasure from engaging it as an end-user experience, then we have no chance for pedagogical value. There is a great risk that people confuse the refined VR experience for a genuine spiritual development and, for that reason alone, only those with firm spiritual training should experiment with it if they choose to. 

The second quickest way to obscure the thinking activity is to make the focus our intellectual reflecting and theorizing about the experience. It doesn't matter if it's the Beat Saber game in VR or the loftiest spiritual scientific ideas in Steiner's lectures or Cleric's posts here - if we are only interested in building abstract theories and models within our constricted intellectual space, then we will run out of room and fail to grasp the living spiritual ideations as they flow through us in the act of philosophizing. It seems the only exception here could be the scale-relative models which Cleric discussed in his post,  which may 'trick' the intellect to confront its own deeper reality. Of course, all of this can be guarded against if we first investigate the living reality of our own thinking space through PoF, Knowledge of Higher Worlds, the accompanying concentration, meditation, and willpower exercises, and so forth. If the morphic spaces models Cleric shared are a roundabout way full of traps and loopholes and temptations for our unconcious desires, then something like VR tech is doubly so.

[AshvinP]

I think transhumanism goes deeper than VR and the metaverse into the dead end of materialist reductionism, and into its illusion of mastery and knowledge, because what VR proposes as an external equipment for self-seclusion in a fully mastered parallel world of senses (or at least the ambition is that it would be fully mastered) is extended in transhumanism into a permanent, internal modification of the physical body. That the self-seclusive device is brought within the threshold of the skin, means that the longing to move into a fully mastered reality got bigger and stronger. The new ambition is to make this new fully mastered world coincide with the natural world, rather than it remaining a leisure or escape activity, with a headset to put on and play with. In a way, it’s similar to when Elon Musk says he wants to colonize Mars. Life as a whole should coincide with a new, fully artificial, secluded space, no matter how much waste we need to permanently leave unresolved behind us in order to achieve this (although I think transhumanist pursuits are somewhat worse, more alarming, than space colonization pursuits).


All this to say that I don’t think transhumanism expresses a natural wish of de-identification with our physical sheath. Rather the opposite. It expresses the most exasperated materialistic belief that the body is all we are, and that we should direct our efforts to the final pursuit of full knowledge and mastery of its workings. It’s based on the illusion that our thirst for truth will be appeased the more we enable ourselves to forge our physical world at will, starting from ourselves (our physical bodies). Everything else is an afterthought, is denied, reduced, deprived of any possible level-specific causality.


Is transhumanism pathological? It’s certainly detrimental to human spiritual development. In that sense only it can be said to be pathological. But it’s not a word I would choose. I would rather say, it’s a dead end, but I don’t think it helps loosen the etheric body in the same way VR can theoretically, and accidentally, be imagined to do it (if we are very generous) when we put on our headset. The transhumanist self-seclusion is forever (whatever transhumanists hope “forever” means). There is no back and forth in which we can entertain any hope to notice by contrast any differences in thinking gestures. Transhumanism is the last gasp, so to say, the full deployment of the reductionist obsession. It’s the end of the dead end (hopefully).

I also want to point that out what you wrote above about transhumanism could be used as a pretty tight-fitting description of healthy spiritual evolution, such as we are trying to manifest through Anthroposophy and similar communities. Except we would change the language to be more in terms of fully mastering the Ego-consciousness which unites the seemingly 'parallel' worlds of spirit-soul-body, and eventually expands out into the spiritual Cosmos to 'colonize' (integrate) the evolutionary streams of different planets. We aim to become planetary spirits in that sense, and to shape the physical world through our ideation. We most definitely aim to make the soul-spirit worlds coincide with the physical-sensory-life world in the even shorter term, to harmonize the ego-astral and physical-etheric complexes through their sleeping-waking rhythms. But what flips the aims completely on their head, from consciously allowing the physical to be made more spiritual to instinctively forcing the spiritual to be made more physical, is the lack of living consciousness of the underlying spiritual evolutionary impulses which 'incept' these desires, feelings, and thoughts within our soul-life.