Anthroposophy as Fascio

[Federica]

Hmm... of course I knew it's from Hamlet. Is this mansplaining?

I think it would be more mansplaining if I tried telling you the meaning of 'battlements' and 'castles' and 'kingdoms'

Haha yes, but in fact that would have been a useful one, given that the word 'battlements' is, well, new to me!
In a way, if we want to keep saying that no question is too stupid to ask (as the saying goes) then no answer should be too obvious to offer.

[Lou Gold]

What I am calling a "big deal" is your insistence that we need to escape duality by getting the mystical blast of "experiencing Oneness". I would also debate your blaming all our ills on the dualist perspective, but that would require going into different dualisms (self-other dualism and spirit-matter dualism) and bringing in the evolution of consciousness that took us from being naive idealists to naive (spirit-matter) dualists. But all I want to say now is knowing myself as "I am the awareness of continuity, (relative) permanence, and repetition in my stream of consciousness" does not eliminate either of my dualist perspectives. It will take a lot of engaging in spiritual science to do that.

Scott,

I'm NOT sure that Eugene would agree with your portrayal of his position because he must speak for himself but I'd like to comment from my own perspective. I have had a so-called "mystical blast" -- a dream encounter with the Queen of the Forest (Sovereign Mother over all that lives and dies) whose single gaze seeming less than a nanosecond in length totally transformed my life at the practical level on the material plane and opened my process to this day to much more. That blast had an overwhelming Mitakue Oyasin or Oneness or Union with all. Having had that experience, I do not see duality as blamable. I see it as choice-giving and I watch to see how it is being used. Is its use militarized or peaceful, separation promoting or facilitating union, leading toward Oneness or Dividedness, blah, blah, blah? I ask where to find my best balance, which is first usually at the calm, clear, unmoving fulcrum point that is still like where the inhale and exhale reverse. From this location I see the best way to reenter the duality if I choose to do so. I do not know for sure if a person never having had such "blast" whether calling it mystical or not can grok what I'm describing. So let me just ask, do you recognize what I'm talking about?

[Stranger]

There is a big difference in that I said "I am the awareness of....". I am not some concept called Awareness.

Awareness is not a concept. Aren't you aware that you are aware (unless you are an AI)?

That is not something I agreed to, as far as I can recall. My preference for capitalization is to use it to emphasize that some property or activity of the Divine can be referred to by some property or activity that I have, but in a much, much more grand way that I can't even imagine. So, for example, Thinking and Love. Now one can note that the Divine is aware of so much more than I could possibly be, but there is that 'of' again. Take what it and I are aware of out, then we are simply both aware.

Exactly, both aware and in the same way.
Fine, no capital letters anymore Now, how about not using capitals in the word "Thinking" that people do on this forum all the time? I haven't seen you complaining about that

What I am calling a "big deal" is your insistence that we need to escape duality by getting the mystical blast of "experiencing Oneness". I would also debate your blaming all our ills on the dualist perspective, but that would require going into different dualisms (self-other dualism and spirit-matter dualism) and bringing in the evolution of consciousness that took us from being naive idealists to naive (spirit-matter) dualists. But all I want to say now is knowing myself as "I am the awareness of continuity, (relative) permanence, and repetition in my stream of consciousness" does not eliminate either of my dualist perspectives. It will take a lot of engaging in spiritual science to do that.

Exactly, there are different kinds of dualism (self-other, spirit-matter, and I would add more subtle subject-object one), and just knowing that "I am awareness" does nothing to eliminate them. It indeed requires years of persistent practice to dismantle these dualistic mental patterns, but without that knowledge you cannot even start that practice, it is the first and necessary step, a prerequisite for getting out of the dualistic state of mind.

Regarding the "mystical blast of experiencing Oneness", many people indeed experience it that way, and it usually happens spontaneously and not as a result of a "need". But it also happens that many people have just a quiet "aha" moment like "oh, I'm not a human self, I am awareness of the conscious stream" with nothing particularly "mystical" about it. So no, "mystical blast" is not needed, but is still happens sometimes.

[Stranger]

Having had that experience, I do not see duality as blamable. I see it as choice-giving and I watch to see how it is being used. Is its use militarized or peaceful, separation promoting or facilitating union, leading toward Oneness or Dividedness,

You are right, duality is not bamable, it is just an evolutionary stage, and as such it exists and it is needed. It is challenging, it has polarities, forces of "good and evil", but they are all necessary and instrumental sides of the game needed to fuel the evolution. But so, a transitional stage is also needed to proceed to the next metamorphic stage beyond duality for those who become ready to move on, and this transitional stage requires practical tools to accomplish this transition, such as spiritual practices and science. That is what we are doing here, it is all practical.

[Lou Gold]

Having had that experience, I do not see duality as blamable. I see it as choice-giving and I watch to see how it is being used. Is its use militarized or peaceful, separation promoting or facilitating union, leading toward Oneness or Dividedness,

You are right, duality is not bamable, it is just an evolutionary stage, and as such it exists and it is needed. It is challenging, it has polarities, forces of "good and evil", but they are all necessary and instrumental sides of the game needed to fuel the evolution. But so, a transitional stage is also needed to proceed to the next metamorphic stage beyond duality for those who become ready to move on, and this transitional stage requires practical tools to accomplish this transition, such as spiritual practices and science. That is what we are doing here, it is all practical.

YES! Location and context matter in a dynamic evolving process. No blame, just how it works and, yes(!) it's surely practical. What I notice, Eugene, is how easily we find ourselves on a similar page that seems more difficult with others. Is this because of some related or analogous direct experiences?

[Stranger]

YES! Location and context matter in a dynamic evolving process. No blame, just how i works and, yes(!) it's surely practical. What I notice, Eugene, is how easily we find ourselves on a similar page that seems more difficult with others. Is this because of some related or analogous direct experiences?

Yes, exactly, I had a similar experience to what you just described.

[Lou Gold]

Today, I received this interview with John Lennox about AI, Man & God and found it interesting and relevant to the discussions in this thread. I appreciated it all but the Steiner group might especially like the last 20 minutes. Methinks it's worth checking out.

[Cleric]

Cleric, I love these questions. Let me try some imaging (not imagining) ....

what it is to create an animal, say, a bear. What would the Intelligence that is in position to do so, experience?
It could feel like watching a personally created process unfold, perhaps a process like what we perceive scientifically as evolution.

How could we describe the contents of consciousness of such a being?
Total creative (potential and manifest) ability.

What would that being feel the bear to be in relation to itself?
Her/His/Its child.

In sum it might be that (following Blake), "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

Thanks for participating, Lou. Now what I'll write is in no way meant as criticism. It's the natural course of any pursuit of understanding/orientation within reality - we start from certain perspective and then we have to investigate how it aligns or contradicts the ever expanding horizon of our experience.

Regarding what you wrote above we can go a little meta and ask: "What is the principal soul stance from which such thoughts emerge?" This stance can be very well understood for example by someone who does pottery in both practical and artistic sense. If I have asked everything in the sense of how does a potter feels in their creative process, practically the same answers can be given (except that we should imagine a pot that has life).

I repeat that this is in no way meant to demean what you wrote. In fact we must go through answers like these. The only thing is that we shouldn't rest satisfied once we formulate them but use them as a launchpad that may lead us to unsuspected results.

At the basis of what I wrote to Eugene was that we're very quick to extrapolate our sense of existence over everything. In our Earthly existence we can create forms with our hands, we shape the clay on the potter's wheel. Our artistic imagination guides our will and we impress something ideal into sensory perceptible forms. When we try to conceive how could an animal be created it's natural that we start from our immediate experience. We can't help but use our immediate conceptions as basis. Even in Genesis it is said that God created the human form out of the dust of the ground. So God shaped man on His potter's wheel and breathed the spirit into his nostrils.

Such images have very deep significance. Dust means something very concrete. Ground is something concrete. The breath too. Yet we remain in Maya if we conceive that literally a human or animal form is created like a pot on the potter's wheel. There's no need to trust me on this. All that is needed is to follow our own reasoning until we reach certain contradictions.

For example, we may conceive that God doesn't have physical body, hands, eyes, so he couldn't have created the living forms from within the physical world. Then we say "So the higher Intelligences create by means of thought, except that their thoughts are so powerful that they swirl the dust of the ground and give it form. This however leads to further questions. What is this dust? What is reality according to the conscious experience of the gods? Unnoticeably we have translated our Earthly experience and projected in on the gods. We imagine that they are surrounded by some kind of more subtle spiritual space, filled with living forms and they use spiritual means to turn the subtle potter's wheel and create forms in this space.

So the first step would be to gain consciousness of what we're doing with our thinking and imagination when we try to answer such questions. If we don't do that, we simply extrapolate our Earthly consciousness into an imagined more ethereal version, where we're placed within some spiritual space and manipulate our environment by means of our creative intentions.

By repurposing our Earthly consciousness in such a way we drag along also all the questions that apply to it. For example, today scientists speak about the dashboard, the fact that we don't perceive reality-in-itself but only a screen of representations. But then how a god who doesn't have physical eyes and brain, perceives the dust which it shapes in a living form? If this space of living forms can be perceived without eyes, why it was necessary that the living forms should have eyes and perceive the same that spiritual space of forms through the indirection of the dashboard? Could it be that the gods also experience a dashboard of a higher kind? Does this mean that no being knows reality-in-itself?

So many questions emerge when we start following the threads that it feels our head will explode. This makes it tempting to simply hold on to some basic idea and avoid following its threads. Yet in this way we can't expect that we'll ever pierce through Maya.

All of this raises more questions than it answers. The point is to get the feeling that we're bound to be lost in contradictions if we simply imagine that our human stage - even if enlightened - is representative of 'what consciousness is'. We can't make a step into these realms if we simply imagine that the spirit in the higher worlds shapes the living forms as a potter - even if by using only thought-like means and creating the forms in some more ethereal space.

[Lou Gold]

Cleric, I love these questions. Let me try some imaging (not imagining) ....

what it is to create an animal, say, a bear. What would the Intelligence that is in position to do so, experience?
It could feel like watching a personally created process unfold, perhaps a process like what we perceive scientifically as evolution.

How could we describe the contents of consciousness of such a being?
Total creative (potential and manifest) ability.

What would that being feel the bear to be in relation to itself?
Her/His/Its child.

In sum it might be that (following Blake), "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

Thanks for participating, Lou. Now what I'll write is in no way meant as criticism. It's the natural course of any pursuit of understanding/orientation within reality - we start from certain perspective and then we have to investigate how it aligns or contradicts the ever expanding horizon of our experience.

Regarding what you wrote above we can go a little meta and ask: "What is the principal soul stance from which such thoughts emerge?" This stance can be very well understood for example by someone who does pottery in both practical and artistic sense. If I have asked everything in the sense of how does a potter feels in their creative process, practically the same answers can be given (except that we should imagine a pot that has life).

I repeat that this is in no way meant to demean what you wrote. In fact we must go through answers like these. The only thing is that we shouldn't rest satisfied once we formulate them but use them as a launchpad that may lead us to unsuspected results.

At the basis of what I wrote to Eugene was that we're very quick to extrapolate our sense of existence over everything. In our Earthly existence we can create forms with our hands, we shape the clay on the potter's wheel. Our artistic imagination guides our will and we impress something ideal into sensory perceptible forms. When we try to conceive how could an animal be created it's natural that we start from our immediate experience. We can't help but use our immediate conceptions as basis. Even in Genesis it is said that God created the human form out of the dust of the ground. So God shaped man on His potter's wheel and breathed the spirit into his nostrils.

Such images have very deep significance. Dust means something very concrete. Ground is something concrete. The breath too. Yet we remain in Maya if we conceive that literally a human or animal form is created like a pot on the potter's wheel. There's no need to trust me on this. All that is needed is to follow our own reasoning until we reach certain contradictions.

For example, we may conceive that God doesn't have physical body, hands, eyes, so he couldn't have created the living forms from within the physical world. Then we say "So the higher Intelligences create by means of thought, except that their thoughts are so powerful that they swirl the dust of the ground and give it form. This however leads to further questions. What is this dust? What is reality according to the conscious experience of the gods? Unnoticeably we have translated our Earthly experience and projected in on the gods. We imagine that they are surrounded by some kind of more subtle spiritual space, filled with living forms and they use spiritual means to turn the subtle potter's wheel and create forms in this space.

So the first step would be to gain consciousness of what we're doing with our thinking and imagination when we try to answer such questions. If we don't do that, we simply extrapolate our Earthly consciousness into an imagined more ethereal version, where we're placed within some spiritual space and manipulate our environment by means of our creative intentions.

By repurposing our Earthly consciousness in such a way we drag along also all the questions that apply to it. For example, today scientists speak about the dashboard, the fact that we don't perceive reality-in-itself but only a screen of representations. But then how a god who doesn't have physical eyes and brain, perceives the dust which it shapes in a living form? If this space of living forms can be perceived without eyes, why it was necessary that the living forms should have eyes and perceive the same that spiritual space of forms through the indirection of the dashboard? Could it be that the gods also experience a dashboard of a higher kind? Does this mean that no being knows reality-in-itself?

So many questions emerge when we start following the threads that it feels our head will explode. This makes it tempting to simply hold on to some basic idea and avoid following its threads. Yet in this way we can't expect that we'll ever pierce through Maya.

All of this raises more questions than it answers. The point is to get the feeling that we're bound to be lost in contradictions if we simply imagine that our human stage - even if enlightened - is representative of 'what consciousness is'. We can't make a step into these realms if we simply imagine that the spirit in the higher worlds shapes the living forms as a potter - even if by using only thought-like means and creating the forms in some more ethereal space.

Of course, Cleric. Using human language and metaphors represents the state of human consciousness and not God consciousness, Why belabor that a representation such as a dashboard is a representation? The more aware statement applying to both the questions as formulated and the answers given would be "Be still and know I am that I am."

Meanwhile, here's another human representation.

[Cleric]

Of course, Cleric. Using human language and metaphors represents the state of human consciousness and not God consciousness, Why belabor that a representation such as a dashboard is a representation? The more aware statement applying to both the questions as formulated and the answers given would be "Be still and know I am that I am."

Do you think it is possible to know in first-person experiential way, more of God's consciousness and the way living beings indeed come to be? And if yes, do you think that this knowledge has significance not simply for satisfaction of our intellectual curiosity but as an important stage of realizing what it means to be human not only in Earthly but in Cosmic sense? Living knowledge which may hold the keys to all the problems that plague our life in representations?