Federica wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2023 10:18 pmThanks Ashvin, indeed, all the above speaks well to the contingent question I have been wondering about.AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon May 15, 2023 12:58 pm I have a more abstract philosophical thought here, which could be a helpful addition to the discussion. We can speak of the archetypal folds of evolution as polarities. There is the Saturn-Sun polarity, or in terms of bodies, the physical-etheric. There is also the Moon-Earth polarity, or astral-ego. Currently, in our Earthly stage of development, our I-consciousness is almost entirely within the astral body, subject to mostly alien passions and corresponding concepts. (to make it simpler, assume I am speaking of the least spiritually evolved people now). That is why we can say the path to spiritual freedom consists in aligning our personal will that of the archetypal Good, the Divine Will, so that our personal soul-life is purified and its aperture of interests is expanded more and more into spheres of higher potential becoming.
Once our will is so fully attuned to the Divine Will, as it will be on Jupiter, what becomes the expression of our spiritual freedom? Then our I-consciousness is acting through the higher Self, the Spirit Self, which is the purified and transmuted astral body. It is the Moon evolution redeemed-fulfilled, so we have again attenuated to a polar opposite mode of be-ing. That doesn't mean we are working in opposition to our Earth evolution, but we have realized the latter's fruits and are now consciously steering our stream of becoming as viewed from the spiritual pole rather than the physical-material pole. As Cleric indicates, then it makes sense to speak of the task of free I-beings as developing the art of how to manifest the Divine Will. Or as Heindel put it, more esoterically:
His power to form clear mental conceptions of colors, objects, or tones [on Jupiter] will enable him to contact and influence supersensuous beings of various orders and to secure their obedience, employing their forces as he wishes. He will be unable to send out from himself the forces wherewith to carry out his designs, however, and will be dependent upon the help of these superphysical beings, who will then be at his service.
So, when viewed from our perspective now, it does feel as if the expression of freedom becomes the polar opposite of what it is right now, based on our current stage of development. I think it mostly goes to show that we can't linearly extrapolate our current concepts, even of our highest ideals, into the future stages of evolution. In a sense, it is not essentially different from what should do now for our freedom, because when we work out problems to solve in nature and culture for our collective advancement, we are still unknowingly figuring out ways to manifest the Divine Will on the physical-etheric plane. Because it is unknowing, though, we cannot really speak of it as 'creative' or 'free'. But now we also lack the inspiration to work out such problems, instead choosing to either ignore them, hoping they will go away or be resolved by some external power, or only work on those which advance our personal well-being. Through meditative development, it becomes more clear to us how we are membered into the Divine Cosmos and what we are truly doing here with our spiritual activity, which builds the gradient between our free attunement to Earthly tasks and our free artistic rendering of the tasks on Jupiter.
Witzenmann, What is Meditation? wrote:This signifies that the nature of meditation is not something to attain but to achieve – an achievement by which man accomplishes himself. Modern meditation does not desire an entrance into a spiritual world antecedent to it, but rather freely gives itself the responsibility for the origin of a spiritual world, which can only arise out of man accomplishing himself in meditation as a world first. Modern meditation does not object to a desire for self-perfection for reasons that renunciation might expect an all the more richer welcome – but from the insight that neither desire nor renunciation can attain a real meditative content, since only the meditation itself can give this to the latter. This is not the loan that awaits it, but the gift that it offers to the world. Modern meditation is not the path into a pre-meditative world, but the formation of a new metamorphosis of the world. The nature of modern meditative experience is neither one of creaturely emerging from the creative powers of the world nor the dissolution therein, but the transformed emergence of creative spirituality from human self-formation. Meditation is the moral intuition of the human being, the moral imagination of the transmutation of the world process in man and the moral technique of freedom. Herein lies the difference to all previous forms of meditative life.
For my part, I think the underlying point can be made more clear. Instead of focusing on Earth and Jupiter, we could focus on our current incarnation and our next incarnation. Ultimately, we are speaking about spiraling the poles of physical life and spiritual life together. Here it is helpful to remember, "those who lose their lives for My sake, will find it." In other words, the best path to attaining our true heart's desires is the path of sacrifice and service to the Divine Will. People today fantasize about having all sorts of alternatives to choose from in life, from flavors of ice cream up to and including their biological gender, but they want these things with little sacrificial effort. What they don't realize is that the reality of what they dimly fantasize about can be attained through the sacrificial spiritual path. Of course this makes zero sense to most people because they haven't phenomenologically investigated the reality of ideas-thinking.
For those of us who have, we start the path of attainment by discovering the DoF in our psycho-spiritual life. To do this, we must begin transforming inwardly so that we voluntarily constrain our palette of outer choices, i.e. we give up the possibility of eating meat, drinking alcohol, staying up late and partying, etc. So far I think this is what you would call the 'anthroposophical idea of freedom', which is correct. But what is the result of this progression towards inner freedom through material-intellectual sacrifice? There are many, but one is that we gain greater consciousness of the higher worlds and their higher-order intents, thereby advancing our evolution between death-rebirth where we fashion our new vehicles for the next incarnation. Then, in the latter, we will have greater leeway in our thought-life, our soul-life, and our organic structure. So we will actually attain a greater palette of alternative possibilities to choose from in manifesting our Divinely-willed destiny in the next incarnation.
In that way, the poles spiral together and inner freedom from outer attachments feeds back into the freedom to manifest our creative capacities outwardly. "For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath." This process continually feeds back until the individuated soul-life has been perfected and the reincarnation cycle itself ends, i.e. continuity of consciousness, and then the Earth evolution is fulfilled.