Anthroposophy as Fascio

[Lou Gold]

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?

I think so. What I am saying is that anyone has this ability (the bolded bit) who can ask "What am I thinking", and "Why am I thinking it". In short, anyone who can reflect on their own thinking, and indeed can doubt the veracity of the contents of their thinking. This ability, I should note, is a new thing (since about the 15th century), generally speaking, and has come about because of our acquired spirit/matter duality.

OK. We surely agree that anyone now has this ability. However, I'm not sure that the ancient sages did not have this ability. Is it possible that they were just ahead of the curve of their own times? Is it also possible that I can grok their statements now because times have changed for us all, including the scientists and shamans and mystics and folks who deny having any spiritual path?

[Stranger]

Umm, didn't I say that I'm ok with Thinking and Love being capitalized, to indicate that vast difference between human and divine thinking and love?

Oh, so then why can't we also capitalize the divine awareness-of? Isn't divine also aware-of? And how would divine awareness-of be different from human awareness-of? Are there different kinds of being aware-of?

So would you now agree that one doesn't need a "pursuit of Oneness" focus in addition to an "explore one's thinking" focus?

There is no need to do anything. It's entirely up to each of us how we choose to explore the reality and act in it. But then we will have to face the consequences of our choice.

But one can as well just say "explore the reality", and then if you say "we need to specifically explore thinking" then they would say "but isn't thinking also reality, so then why emphasize it?. Why then so much talk and emphasis on thinking?" Because reality is not a soup, there are certain aspects of it that better be focused on if our pursuit is the knowledge and understanding of reality in its structure. And that also applies to the polarity of Oneness which brings us from only knowing Manyness to knowing the wholeness of Oneness-Manyness. How would we know that "Oneness is Manyness and Manyness is Oneness" if we don't know what Oneness is in this polarity? Why would we ignore the pole of Oneness if our pursuit is the knowledge of reality in all its aspects available to our exploration and not just cherry-picked some of them?

[Lou Gold]

Lou, I get your approach.

We are simply talking about two very different sorts of "discussion" here. I see our current task of knowledge as one in which we should depersonalize the pursuit as much as possible. The modern age of scientific consciousness was a critical preparation for this task. Most people cannot imagine such a philosophical or scientific pursuit which is not dry, abstract, and boring, but rather filled with life, creativity, and yet still remaining depersonalized (although Cleric offers plenty of examples here to kindle our imagination). We want more life in our thinking, for very understandable reasons, so most people seek for it in earlier conditions where the thought-life was tied more to the instinctive sensuous life. But then we are not evolving cognition and when we want to direct our thought-force upwards towards unknown spiritual realities which have not yet manifested on the physical plane, we are forced to conceive the latter in only the physical-sensory concepts we are already familiar with. There is not much even wrong with this for most people IF they become self-aware of the tendency and don't convince themselves they are perceiving pure spiritual realities.

The other problem is that our age of abstraction has become so dense that we can 'agree' with everything I just wrote above, but nevertheless continue to functionally think through spiritual issues in exactly the same way. We won't even notice the discrepancy between what we are 'agreeing' to and how we keep practically exercising our thinking in the process of reaching various conclusions about spiritual reality. If we want to deal with this problem, then we need to be open to others who can view the results of our thinking more objectively than we can and provide us feedback on where and how it is going astray. As I mentioned before, it is a real sign of progress when we feel enthusiastic about this possibility of getting vital feedback. We are never the best judges of our own habits and tendencies. Of course we can evaluate the feedback and see if it makes sense or if it is prejudiced in some way, but we need to remain open long enough to actually carry out that evaluation. And if we are not at all interested in any such evaluation, we should be honest with ourselves about that fact as well.

OK, now I get your reason for depersonalization. But I don't get how judgements might be made about an individual without offering concrete evidence about the individual. That's why I reveal stuff about myself so people might judge. And, of course, as a performing artist, "show-and-tell" can be an ego trip so I work (rising and falling) to find a good balance. Am I missing something?

We are not making judgments about the individual personality, but about the transpersonal thought-process. We can only communicate with each other through concepts because our thought-life is shared. That life is animated by certain archetypal soul-tendencies which can be logically discerned. For ex., you and I discussed the victimized 'cancel culture' mentality before. Clearly there are shared soul-tendencies which lead people to feel this way which then conditions their thinking about politics, economics, religion, etc. This mentality feels that any penetrating examination of our shared soul-life and thinking structure is an 'attack' on their core individuality, because they identify that core individuality with their current personality, which includes gender, race, nationality, etc. and also their intellectual thinking mask which formats their concepts.

When I say "depersonalize", I don't mean we should leave the inner perspective of this personality out of account - actually the best way to depersonalize is to investigate that perspective thoroughly and objectively. If we run away from such an investigation and convince ourselves we have transcended personality via mystical experience, then we remain more personalized in our thinking than ever. On the esoteric path of Self-knowledge everyone needs to confront this perspective openly and honestly if any advance is to be made. It has to be continuously confronted. A good test of whether we are running away or confronting is whether, when something befalls us, ranging from the worst possible illness to a 'negative' comment on this forum, we instinctively lay the blame on some external factor (like the 'false hierarchy') or whether we are instead open to finding the causes for these qualities and events within ourselves.

We will proceed in rather a curious way. As an experiment, we will imagine that we ourselves have willed whatever may have happened to us. Suppose a loose tile from the roof of a house happened to crash down on us. We will picture, purely by way of experiment, that this did not happen by chance, and we will deliberately imagine that we ourselves climbed on that roof, loosened the tile and then ran down so quickly that we arrived just in time to be hit by it! Or, let us say, we caught a chill without any apparent cause; how would it be though, if we had given it to ourselves? Like the unfortunate lady who, being discontented with her lot, exposed herself to a chill, and died of it! In this way, therefore, we will imagine that things otherwise attributable to chance have been deliberately and carefully planned by ourselves. And we will also apply the same procedure to matters which are obviously dependent upon the faculties and qualities we happen to possess. Say some arrangement does not work out as planned. If we miss a train, for example, we shall not blame external circumstances but picture to ourselves that it was due to our own slackness. If we think of it in this way, as an experiment, we shall gradually succeed in creating a kind of being in our imagination, a very extraordinary being, who was responsible for all these things — for a stone having crashed upon us, for some illness, and so forth. We shall realise, of course, that this being is not ourselves; we simply picture such a being vividly and distinctly. And then, after a time, we will have a strange experience with regard to this being. We shall realise that though it is a creature we have only conjured up, yet we cannot free ourselves from him nor from the thought of him, and strange to say he does not stay as he is; he becomes alive and transforms himself within us. And then, when he has gone through this transformation, we get the impression that he really is there within us. And then we become more and more certain that we ourselves have had something to do with the things thus built up in imagination. There is no suggestion whatever that we once actually did them; but such thoughts do, nevertheless, correspond in a certain way with something we have done. We shall tell ourselves: ‘I have done this and that, and I am now having to suffer the consequences.’ This is a very good exercise for unfolding in the life of feeling a kind of memory of earlier incarnations. The soul seems to feel: I myself was there and prepared these things myself.

Ashvin,

To clarify, I do not resist because your approach seems dry or intellectual but I confess that I don't feel anything "juicy" as I regularly find in a good Rumi poem or a large variety of the world's scriptural texts. Forty-five years ago I was reading Aurobindo's "Life Divine" and feeling all aglow inside without an intellectual understanding of the texts, which were lighting spiritual desires and satisfactions within me. I don't personally get this from Spiritual Science but I definitely accept that it works well for some and I offer VIVAs to the Great Diversity. Where we might agree is that the more general Truth is found within.

THE TREASURE IS WITHIN

[AshvinP]

Ashvin,

To clarify, I do not resist because your approach seems dry or intellectual but I confess that I don't feel anything "juicy" as I regularly find in a good Rumi poem or a large variety of the world's scriptural texts.

Exactly, and that's fine. I would only ask you (and others on this forum who feel the same) to remember this the next time there in an inclination to question either the logical coherence or the content of spiritual science or its critical thinking perspective on other approaches. There is nothing wrong with questioning per se, but we should also be self-aware what the questioning is rooted in? Most likely it is a personal inclination of one sort or another, as you expressed above. Often times people like to convince themselves it is rooted in the most fair and thorough evaluation, but we can see on this forum that is rarely the case.

And if I were in different circumstances, perhaps more like yours, I can very well imagine not finding the juicieness I was seeking in SS. But we can also broaden our horizons to discern what may be best for humanity as a whole, independent of our personal sphere, when navigating the modern age and its life problems rooted in ignorance of spiritual relations with the physical and vice versa. These may have been our concerns too in a previous incarnation or might be in the next one. Sometimes what makes us most uncomfortable or is most unappealing to us, what requires personal sacrifice, holds the keys to unlock exactly what we are seeking the most, although maybe only after some time, on this side of the threshold or the other.

[ScottRoberts]

OK. We surely agree that anyone now has this ability. However, I'm not sure that the ancient sages did not have this ability. Is it possible that they were just ahead of the curve of their own times?

Possibly, but it is their audience I am concerned with.

Is it also possible that I can grok their statements now because times have changed for us all, including the scientists and shamans and mystics and folks who deny having any spiritual path?

Possibly.

[ScottRoberts]

Umm, didn't I say that I'm ok with Thinking and Love being capitalized, to indicate that vast difference between human and divine thinking and love?

Oh, so then why can't we also capitalize the divine awareness-of? Isn't divine also aware-of? And how would divine awareness-of be different from human awareness-of? Are there different kinds of being aware-of?

My point is that awareness is universal (assuming idealism), so to go on about capital-A Awareness (in the way you do) doesn't add anything useful to the ontology of idealism.

So would you now agree that one doesn't need a "pursuit of Oneness" focus in addition to an "explore one's thinking" focus?

There is no need to do anything. It's entirely up to each of us how we choose to explore the reality and act in it. But then we will have to face the consequences of our choice.

I am talking about those who consciously seek spiritual development.

But one can as well just say "explore the reality", and then if you say "we need to specifically explore thinking" then they would say "but isn't thinking also reality, so then why emphasize it?. Why then so much talk and emphasis on thinking?"

If they are idealists (and if they aren't they've got other problems), then thinking (again, better, 'ideational actvity') is what they are exploring. And what better place to focus than on their own ideational activity?

Because reality is not a soup, there are certain aspects of it that better be focused on if our pursuit is the knowledge and understanding of reality in its structure. And that also applies to the polarity of Oneness which brings us from only knowing Manyness to knowing the wholeness of Oneness-Manyness. How would we know that "Oneness is Manyness and Manyness is Oneness" if we don't know what Oneness is in this polarity? Why would we ignore the pole of Oneness if our pursuit is the knowledge of reality in all its aspects available to our exploration and not just cherry-picked some of them?

We already know the relative Oneness we call "I". And we already know Oneness/Manyness polarity though it is mistakenly called subject/object dualism (it should be called subject/object polarity). As for "absolute Oneness", that, for us, is just an abstraction. We might engage in a logical exercise to deduce that there is an absolute Oneness, like we do to deduce a First Cause or Prime Mover, but that doesn't really get us anywhere.

[Anthony66]

Anthony,

I think part of the issue here is that the seismic shift in perspective through the higher cognitive path is also vastly under-appreciated. Perhaps it is conceived like reaching up towards Oneness but bouncing back into all sorts of differentiated structures on the way there. But as Cleric has mentioned and illustrated many times, the 'non-dual awakening' is the very beginning of the higher cognitive path. Imagine you step outside and see the flowers, the trees, the birds, the air irradiated by light, the clouds, the sky, the Sun, and you immediately have a concrete sense of how a symphony of elemental and archetypal spiritual activity has temporally woven this unique holistic perspective through the evolving life of your body, soul and spirit. It is like the 'Eureka' moments we normally have when contemplating something except a few orders of magnitude more powerful, experienced and understood from the inside-out. We have a living, textured sense of where it all came from, where it is heading, why, and what our concrete role is in fulfilling the interweaving intents. I myself am relying on such a crude description from lack of experience and lack of capacity to translate the little experience I have into 'intellectual grunts' on the keyboard, but the overall point is that these are completely unimagined and unsuspected experiences from the intellectual perspective.

I think Cleric has given us very concrete reasoning in the TCT essays and elsewhere why the intellectual cognitive perspective is maintained on the path of 'nondual awakening' which does not understand its concentrated thought-life as the tip of a temporally extended cascade of inner desires, preferences, interests, character, temperament, familial and cultural context, gender context, etc. It simply views examining and working to trace those influences as beneath its purview, an unnecessary frolic in the 'dual world'. And we already know what sort of work needs to be done due to our familiarity with life and learning new skills - we need to study hard with impeccable dispassionate reasoning, to be persistent, patient, dedicated, to remain wondrous, open and, yes, even deferential to the wisdom of those who have already learned the skills. There is perhaps nothing more resisted by the modern mystics than that last one - just look at the title of this thread. These things go without saying if we are trying to learn how to fly a rocket into space, but are viewed as tyrannical if we are trying to learn to responsibly steer our thinking activity through the inner worlds which are the true Cosmic worlds.

Without that work, the genuine spirit worlds simply don't open to us - we can't unveil the living tones and speech of differentiated beings within what we experience to be the 'infinite space of awareness'. So where exactly is the seismic shift in perspective if the living and evolving processes of the Earth and Cosmos in which we are embedded are not further elucidated? Does this shift in perspective feedback into and inform the art of healing, the pursuit of science, the teaching of children, or anything similar? All these take on new artistic depths of practical meaning through higher cognitive research in ways we normally can't fathom. So I think the question is, what does it actually mean to 'shift in perspective'? If it simply means we experience new and profound personal feelings of peace, connectedness, compassion, etc., then yes sure many paths will lead us there. But if it means we begin to understand the destinies of individuals, nations, cultures, and kingdoms, and how to optimally steer our own spiritual stream of becoming within those contexts with ever-greater freedom, then we need to enliven, ennoble, and expand our cognition.

Your response here is illustrative of much of the issue I see at play here in terms of moving the conversation forward. Rather than steel-manning or demonstrating a familiarity with non-dual experience, the virtues of SS path are focused on. My critique here is not demean SS, rather to try to draw out that which I think has not been fully addressed. I'm at a disadvantage here because of my lack of non-dual or SS experiential knowledge. But I'm familiar enough with the non-dual literature and accounts to recognize the writing of someone who has attained to a non-dual state. A fundamental shift in identity, self-validation, transcendence, ineffability, bliss (ananda), are some of the marks. Do you know any of this?

I appeal for a greater focus on the connection between the non-dual state and the imaginative/inspirative/intuitive states rather than a tit-for-tat that has characterized a lot of the discussion lately. I know Cleric has entered this territory from time to time.

The best way for me to address your appeal is to simply point to Cleric's posts already illustrating that connection, or to wait for him to provide yet another illustration, as he is always more than willing to do.

In the meantime, I will address this question in bold. A lot of implicit things are wrapped up in there.

1) If you lack non-dual or SS experiential knowledge, then what exactly do all those terms mean to you? How do you know whether you are imagining them to be something completely different than what is actually experienced in the non-dual state?

2) Why is it important to experience 'transcendence, ineffability, bliss' for our spiritual growth which progressively integrates us with humanity as a whole? If we only have one single incarnation before we return to a spiritual soup, then we can reasonably say those things are critical to experience while on Earth, but if our individuated lawful becoming continues after death and we work consciously in concert with the hierarchies to advance our evolution and that of the Earthly kingdoms as a whole, and our self-consciousness is rooted in what purely personal enrichments we were willing to sacrifice during our incarnation, then those experiences could be positively counterproductive to spiritual evolution.

3) How do these experiences feedback into and inform the World and its evolution?

As said often before, the nondual state - which was realized many thousands of years ago - must be experienced on the path to higher cognition - which was made possible only in the last 150 years. But for the latter to actually unfold, the former must be sacrificed after it has been attained. These are not parallel paths of approaching to the higher worlds - modern initiation is an evolutionary metamorphosis of the nondual state which adapts to our modern body-soul-spirit constitution, where the "I" is fully awake within the intellectual thinking force. We need to get a concrete sense of the depth we are speaking of here. If we only speak of these things in horizontal abstractions, it will never dawn on us why the higher cognitive path understands and embeds the nondual state, advancing beyond it.

For ex., with respect to #3, the nondual practitioner might say that the experiences give us a sense of love, compassion, etc. for our fellow humans because we know that we are all One. Therefore we are more willing to donate our money to charities, spend some time in a soup kitchen, help an old lady across the street. I am really not trying to demean such outward gestures - they are indeed important. But once we cognitively enter the inner depth of the outer world and our soul-life, the degrees of freedom through which our spiritual activity can positively (or negatively) contribute to the World Process expand greatly. For ex. consider the following:

Let us take a particular case: the Mongolian onslaughts of the Middle Ages, when the Mongols came into conflict with the Europeans, spreading among them fear and alarm. Such fear and such alarm are then present in the peoples in question. When one looks at these attacking hordes, of which the Mongolians are the last, placing oneself in the mood of all these mediaeval peoples, one sees how the desperation of the last branches of the Fourth Root-Race and the fear and alarm engendered in the Europeans created spiritual forms. If such an onslaught were to be met with courage and love, then the putrefying substance would be dissolved. But fear, hate and alarm conserve such decaying forms and these provide a source of nourishment for beings such as bacilli. Later they incarnate in those material forms suitable for such an incarnation. Thus the decaying substances embedded themselves in the fear and alarm of the European peoples as seeds of decay. These are minute living beings. In this way arose the mediaeval disease, leprosy. It arose out of the decaying substance of the declining Mongolian peoples.

What then is the origin of those disturbers of human physical nature? They come from earlier spiritual causes, from sinfulness. This is Karma as it manifests in national communities. From this you can estimate how the moral life of a nation conditions the external life of the future. It lies in the power of a nation to care for its physical future through a corresponding moral life in the present.

If we never enter into these details and confirm their validity through higher cognitive practice, then we simply have no idea what sorts of astral forms we are always creating through our spiritual activity. Every thought, feeling, desire, and deed produces such forms and, when this process remains entirely subconscious, we naturally produce all sorts of contradictory and disharmonious forms. At the level of communities and nations, that lack of self-awareness of the depths at which our spiritual activity functions can lead to disastrous consequences, as the astral forms later condense into physical incarnations. Of course a certain amount of higher cognitive development is necessary before we are even able to discern the logical coherence of what is written above - generally it will be written off as fantastical nonsense when we remain with the horizontal intellect unaware of the depths. Most nondual practitioners will write these things off or ignore them precisely for that reason. I am not mentioning this to tout the virtues of SS, but to point to why the higher cognitive path is venturing into the depths of the soul-spirit worlds while nondual practice, as penetrating as it was thousands of years ago, now only remains swimming near the surface. The ignorance of the depths leads to inner dispositions and modes of be-ing which are counterproductive to the spiritual aims which modern man needs to fulfill for his continued evolution and that of the Earth as a whole living organism, whose members need to function in more and more harmonious rhythms.

In response to your questions...

1) Obviously I don't know "exactly" what it is like to attain these states of consciousness - non-dual, imaginative, inspirative, or intuitive or the panoply of higher states out there. But I have done a spiritual retreat in India and various workshops where I have had a firsthand taste of what is probably at play. I've listened to hundreds of hours of teaching of non-dual teachers like Spira and Swami Sarvapriyananda and gained insights.

2) Transcendence, ineffability, bliss often accompany the non-dual state. And rather than being counterproductive to spiritual evolution, they may well be an encouragement to continue to delve deeper. This has been the testimony of many.

How can one sacrifice that which one does not have nor has attained? It's all very well that certain individuals in the past have achieved these high states but it is not much use if the non-dual state hasn't reached a level of "fixation in the population".

3) Appealing again to the concept of biological fixation, from an initial "non-dual mutation", greater numbers of people become aware of, seek, and attain this state and so transform the human organism. The same can be said of the SS states.

[Lou Gold]

This has been a rich thread for me, evoking lots of learning and memories. In another conversation with an artist friend as we visited another friend's sculpture in a local park, I recalled an essay I wrote back in 2007 about Henry Moore, form and emptiness, grounding and the Mother. It explains a lot of where I'm coming from.

HENRY MOORE: REVISIONARY ARTIST

[Cleric]

To clarify, I do not resist because your approach seems dry or intellectual but I confess that I don't feel anything "juicy" as I regularly find in a good Rumi poem or a large variety of the world's scriptural texts.

When out of world-wide spaces
The sun speaks to the human mind,
And gladness from the depths of soul
Becomes, in seeing, one with light,
Then rising from the sheath of self,
Thoughts soar to distances of space
And dimly bind
The human being to the spirit's life.

[Federica]

I do, but I will continue doing it on my own and no longer will be discussing it in these interrogation-style conversations.

The 'interrogation-style' in itself never seemed to be a problem for you, as evident, for example, here:

Federica, you summarized the essential points of SS eloquently, but let me comment a bit and ask some questions.

So the reason why, in this context of the bear question, the approach is perceived as 'interrogation-style' is that one feels 'threatened' by the risk of being taken aback by someone who is implicitly recognized as having reached a higher level of cognition than oneself. Then it becomes a battle between one's ego and one's thirst for knowledge.
Your ego knows it will have to give way if you stay. Your thirst for knowledge knows it will have to give way, if you go.
You have both in good measure, Eugene, but which principle will win is hard to tell...

Ashvin,

I'm curious. Do you feel that you have let go of your ego by participating in this forum?

Lou, I'm not sure if you noticed - I wrote the above, not Ashvin.