Anthroposophy as Fascio

[AshvinP]

But anyway, for now, I am still eagerly anticipating an answer to Cleric's original question to you, which was clearly asking about you personally and for specifics.

maybe you can be more specific about exactly which of your liberties you feel to be threatened? What is it that you want to keep doing, which you feel will be impossible to do through the Oneness as understood by Initiatic science

I answered it here
If “'Kingdom' is not synonymous to the dual world”, then this question becomes irrelevant, because I do see my role and place in the Kingdom and its further creative collective evolution, but only on its nondual levels.
which means that the question is not about personal preferences or liberties, but about the ways of unfolding the freedom and creativity of the One Spirit through individuated spiritual activities.

It's simple, Eugene. You quoted me as a springboard to start a thread linking Anthroposophy to fascism (or fascio) and collectivism. Cleric asked you to stop being super abstract theoretical about it and give concrete examples from real-time living experience of how spiritual (or initiatic) science, or the pursuit of it, encroaches on your individual liberties. For ex., you could say 'I want to keep drinking alcohol but spiritual science indicates this habit will stunt my thinking consciousness and put a ceiling on my spiritual growth'. Can you point to any such examples?

[Federica]

Eugene, you are incredible. If you were roaming, lost and thirsty, on a scorched, desolate land and someone came to you, told you there’s a wellspring you can reach, and drew a map for you, offering help and direction, would it cross your mind to call him a fascist? And would you call the map an ideology that insults your freedom?


And yet, that’s how you conduct yourself on this forum. Clearly, you don’t want to know of any paths to any wellspring. You don’t want “Anthroposophy” to threaten your self-destructive freedom to ignore the way ahead. What you want, instead, is to give up the search, sit down cross-legged, bake yourself in the heat, and invoke direct union with ‘source’. Anything that threatens your right to meditate away the human tasks until dissolution comes, without lifting the least finger, has to be fighted at all costs, even if it means to come up with the most grotesque ideas, like this new one, of fascio. You are obsessed with finding the fast track to Source. Source should roll out the red carpet to your feet and impress your name in star form on Oneness Avenue. To be told that you have to wake up, stand up, move on, and start working, is the most aggravating thing.


The work to be done is actually the biggest stumbling block on the path, I am realizing. It's bigger than abstraction, bigger than pride. In you, resistance to work takes extreme proportions, to the point that you make up the most fantastic accusations and deformations of World Content. However, it is a general problem. I see it in myself as well, how tempting and easy it is to prioritize everyday stuff, lower level preoccupations, and the most comfortable aspects of the inquiry. You are not the only one at risk of taking your preferences for the highest guidelines, and in this sense your activity has usefulness, it works as a valuable reminder. Thank you for the reminder, Eugene. But please, for the sake of survival, including your own: this uber-workaround that you are doing, really is extreme. Please recognize, call out, and shake off the persona who makes up all this theater. Stop the drama, save up your energies for the real thing. After all, if you are still here, it must be that, somehow, opposite to dissolution, the path of absolution is still open to you, at this exact moment. Can you see it?

[Stranger]

It's simple, Eugene. You quoted me as a springboard to start a thread linking Anthroposophy to fascism (or fascio) and collectivism. Cleric asked you to stop being super abstract theoretical about it and give concrete examples from real-time living experience of how spiritual (or initiatic) science, or the pursuit of it, encroaches on your individual liberties. For ex., you could say 'I want to keep drinking alcohol but spiritual science indicates this habit will stunt my thinking consciousness and put a ceiling on my spiritual growth'. Can you point to any such examples?

Well, let's take one example: suppose after finishing this human life my soul or my higher self decides to move to some other realm or incarnate into other planet race in order to diversify its life experiences and their lessons and facilitate further spiritual evolution, as long as that realm or race is a fit for the current state of the soul's maturity. A massive amount of available NDE and regression accounts indicate that souls actually do that all the time. However, anthroposophy seems to claim that the human souls are collectively bound to the structures of the human form, always incarnate back into humans and evolve together.

This is again not about personal preferences, but about facilitating spiritual evolution. Even in our human lives people often make decisions to change their affiliation with specific structures and groups, for example move to other countries, change professions, change affiliations with spiritual or religious groups or beliefs and so on. Even though in many cases these decisions seem to be motivated by personal preferences, at the end they facilitate the spiritual evolution, because if we would have to stick with our affiliations with races, countries, professions and beliefs for the whole life, that would be an impediment for our spiritual growth. So, it is a question of finding the optimal balance in the limitations of existing structures and their degrees of freedom.

Again, apologies for drawing bad associations and please do not get me wrong, Fascio is a word for collectivism, not for fascism. Fascism is only an extreme form of Fascio and we are not discussing it here. I didn't mean to label anthroposophy as fascism. But it is often happens, and we can see it from many examples in the history, that Fascio-type (collectivistic) social or belief systems tend to develop towards more rigid collectivistic structures and leave less and less freedom for individuated spiritual activity. This is a slippery slope that may also happen to anthroposophy, and something that anthroposophist need to be aware of and prevent from happening. So, the purpose for this thread is a warning for people who practice anthroposophy.

[Lou Gold]

There is a still-point, not located above, below, here or there, from which we can witness things as they are. To know this point-of-view, one must be still. It offers a peace passing understanding, an acceptance calling forth love.

[Stranger]

PS: at the end, it is a question of value priorities. Is the highest priority to develop the structures of the WC and the cosmic organism and the individual souls only serve as the the builders of the WC? Or is it the other way around and the highest priority is the spiritual evolution of consciousness that happens through spiritual evolution of each individual soul, and the structures of the WC are only developed and put in place to facilitate the evolution? In other words, is it consciousness serving structures and organisms, or is it structures and organisms serving consciousness?

[Cleric K]

PS: at the end, it is a question of value priorities. Is the highest priority to develop the structures of the WC and the cosmic organism and the individual souls only serve as the the builders of the WC? Or is it the other way around and the highest priority is the spiritual evolution of consciousness that happens through spiritual evolution of each individual soul, and the structures of the WC are only developed and put in place to facilitate the evolution? In other words, is it consciousness serving structures and organisms, or is it structures and organisms serving consciousness?

Notice how these questions presuppose a fundamental distinction between souls and world structures. The souls are conceived as self-suficient atoms which can freely dip into this or that world structure, as a child can choose their next ride at Disney Land. Ever since we speak of DeepMAL, it has been attempted to show from the most various angles that the structure of the soul is also the structure of the Cosmos. Without this understanding, self-knowledge and world-knowledge are hopelessly separate. Then one feels that it's OK to say "This ride sucks. I don't want to know anything about it. I'll just wait till the seatbelts are out and I'll go for a more mature one." Deeper and unprejudiced investigation however, reveals that unless we understand this ride, we don't understand our own spiritual structure. Then even if we step out of the cart, the spiritual structure of the ride will still be our environment and we'll understand it just as little as we understood it while on Earth. As said so many times, Initiatic science is not here to brainwash us to seek the same sickly ride over and over again but instead to help us understand the actual way of transforming it - which is the same as our own transformation. Otherwise it's all wishful thinking - the King's son having no interest to learn the details of the Kingdom at his present level of development, imagines himself far above such childish activities and expects that on the other side he'll be welcomed with laurel wreaths and invited to take any higher position he likes.

[Stranger]

Notice how these questions presuppose a fundamental distinction between souls and world structures. The souls are conceived as self-suficient atoms which can freely dip into this or that world structure, as a child can choose their next ride at Disney Land. ... Otherwise it's all wishful thinking - the King's son having no interest to learn the details of the Kingdom at his present level of development, imagines himself far above such childish activities and expects that on the other side he'll be welcomed with laurel wreaths and invited to take any higher position he likes.

The structures and souls are not separate, yet the souls, and Consciousness in general of which souls are the individuated spiritual activities, is MORE than just its structures, and the structures are only part of Consciousness. Structures is what Consciousness DOES, not what it IS. So, do not take it to extreme and say that if we prioritize Consciousness higher than its structures then it necessarily means that the "son has no interest to learn the details of the Kingdom". No, definitely the son has interest in such learning, and such learning is the essential part of its spiritual evolution. The question is whether the son is there to serve the building of the Kingdom, or if the Kingdom is being developed to facilitate the evolution of the sons? In other words, is Consciousness is there to serve developing structures, or if the structures are developed to facilitate the evolution of Consciousness? Of course, if we equate and reduce Consciousness only to its structures, then this question becomes an irrelevant tautology. But if we realize that Consciousness is something greater than its structures, then the answer comes naturally: of course the structures are developed to facilitate the evolution of consciousness and not the other way around.

So, going back to anthroposophy, there is a reason it is called ANTHROPO-sophy, which, if translated, means "wisdom of humanity": it is a system of anthropocentric beliefs where the humanity as an organism and structure is placed at higher priority compared to the evolution of souls. It's a beehive mentality: the souls are here only to facilitate the evolution of the collective structure of humanity as a human-hive-organism. In other words, it is a Fascio of humanity. We never find this belief in any spiritual and religious traditions, so anthroposophy is unique in this respect. In reality, the human form is only a temporary structure developed to serve and facilitate spiritual evolution of individual souls as part of the process of the development of Cosmic Consciousness. This is why in any religious and spiritual traditions there have never been any commitment for the souls to necessarily reincarnate back to only human form. Instead, the souls reincarnate into forms that facilitate the spiritual evolution of each soul at its current stage of development, or, if they become mature enough to guide and help the evolution of other souls, incarnate into a form where their help is most needed. .

[AshvinP]

This is again not about personal preferences, but about facilitating spiritual evolution. Even in our human lives people often make decisions to change their affiliation with specific structures and groups, for example move to other countries, change professions, change affiliations with spiritual or religious groups or beliefs and so on. Even though in many cases these decisions seem to be motivated by personal preferences, at the end they facilitate the spiritual evolution, because if we would have to stick with our affiliations with races, countries, professions and beliefs for the whole life, that would be an impediment for our spiritual growth. So, it is a question of finding the optimal balance in the limitations of existing structures and their degrees of freedom.

You say it isn't about personal preference, but then you analogize directly to an Earthly context in which desires, preferences, etc. generally steer our decisions to change 'affiliations'. Those types of decisions are exactly the ones which are modulated by subconscious soul-tendencies and, until we make them more conscious, we have little idea whether they are facilitating our spiritual evolution. The issue is not that these decisions cannot facilitate spiritual evolution - they very well can and do in some circumstances - but that you want to understand the higher invisible world-structure in terms of current visible human culture, rather than the other way around.

Spiritual science leads us into living knowledge of exactly how our soul-transformation at the subtle levels of existence prepares the soil for more degrees of freedom in our cultural and, eventually, our natural affiliations. Most of this wise transformation takes place between death-rebirth for the average person, where we have the benefit of more holistic knowledge of how our decisions will optimize our stream of becoming, and the incarnate personality is none the wiser. It blindly reaps the benefits but also lets many opportunities pass it by because of that blindness. Through modern initiation, we can become more self-aware of these disincarnate experiences-intents and therefore spiral our incarnate intents into harmony with them.

This way, we are not only railing against collectivism in theory, as we understand it with our mere Earthly head-knowledge, but working with the Cosmic organism to transmute the collectivist structures into creative capacities for the free individual. If we are unwilling to sacrifice the qualities which bind us to mere Earthly knowledge and therefore obscure the disincarnate (cosmic) intents, then we only remain with our anti-collectivist theories but continue practically identifying with the collective affiliations from incarnation to incarnation. So, as usual, we end up practically digging ourselves deeper into what we are theoretically railing against. At the root of it all is living Self-knowledge of how our soul-structure is also the World-structure, as Cleric says. It is only that knowledge which sets us free.

[Stranger]

If we are unwilling to sacrifice the qualities which bind us to mere Earthly knowledge and therefore obscure the disincarnate (cosmic) intents, then we only remain with our anti-collectivist theories but continue practically identifying with the collective affiliations from incarnation to incarnation. So, as usual, we end up practically digging ourselves deeper into what we are theoretically railing against. At the root of it all is living Self-knowledge of how our soul-structure is also the World-structure, as Cleric says. It is only that knowledge which sets us free.

The analogy I gave for changing the affiliations with specific Earth structures is pointing to exactly that question: do our cosmic intents extend beyond any specific affiliations with the structures, or not? Or, back to the question in my previous post: are the souls for serving the structures, or the structures are serving the souls? And it is exactly the Self-knowledge that opens us to the deepest knowledge that Consciousness is fundamentally greater than and not reducible to only its World-structure. A while ago in another thread someone called anthroposophy "structural idealism", this is a rather precise term pointing to the reduction of all reality only to its structures.

[Lou Gold]

PS: at the end, it is a question of value priorities. Is the highest priority to develop the structures of the WC and the cosmic organism and the individual souls only serve as the the builders of the WC? Or is it the other way around and the highest priority is the spiritual evolution of consciousness that happens through spiritual evolution of each individual soul, and the structures of the WC are only developed and put in place to facilitate the evolution? In other words, is it consciousness serving structures and organisms, or is it structures and organisms serving consciousness?

Notice how these questions presuppose a fundamental distinction between souls and world structures. The souls are conceived as self-suficient atoms which can freely dip into this or that world structure, as a child can choose their next ride at Disney Land. Ever since we speak of DeepMAL, it has been attempted to show from the most various angles that the structure of the soul is also the structure of the Cosmos. Without this understanding, self-knowledge and world-knowledge are hopelessly separate. Then one feels that it's OK to say "This ride sucks. I don't want to know anything about it. I'll just wait till the seatbelts are out and I'll go for a more mature one." Deeper and unprejudiced investigation however, reveals that unless we understand this ride, we don't understand our own spiritual structure. Then even if we step out of the cart, the spiritual structure of the ride will still be our environment and we'll understand it just as little as we understood it while on Earth. As said so many times, Initiatic science is not here to brainwash us to seek the same sickly ride over and over again but instead to help us understand the actual way of transforming it - which is the same as our own transformation. Otherwise it's all wishful thinking - the King's son having no interest to learn the details of the Kingdom at his present level of development, imagines himself far above such childish activities and expects that on the other side he'll be welcomed with laurel wreaths and invited to take any higher position he likes.

Cleric,

I grok and appreciate your caring cautious views. The false self is full of tricks and traps. Let me add an additional view from what I perceive in liminal initiatory space. Hopefully, it will be received as compatible with and not in opposition to your point-of-view. In deep spiritual work one arrives at a boundary, a crossing over in which everything changes including how one might previously have thought or not thought about it. On one side of the line lies the land of chance and trial-and-error where progress is performed by choice, by making mistakes and eliminating them in the light of evolving awareness. Scientifically, this might be called the land of the null hypothesis in which both mistakes and forgiveness are paramount. Then comes the line. If one chooses to cross over it, one will be told one must be very careful, do not proceed as if you can just play or experiment in your actions. Here, it's not about trial-and-error. It's about the Law and if you break the law you will return to the land of mistakes. You are new here. Do not presume to know. Ask before acting. Pay attention. It's a very fine study.

OK, enough said. Hopefully, a resonance will be heard in my tones.