Federica, you are completely right that freedom is not about perceiving glyphs, like a kid perceiving many kinds of candy and having the 'freedom' to choose. There's no question that freedom lies in the 'prism-quality'. Let me try to approach this once again, in a probably somewhat surprising way.Federica wrote: ↑Sat May 20, 2023 1:36 pm
For me, the true polarity of freedom is not from-to. The crystal-clear polarity of freedom is karma! How could it not be so. Thus freedom has an intrinsic character of action in timeflow. You are on top of the idea of Time, and yet, strangely, you conceive freedom as if estranged from the timeflow. You flatten it out on a hypothetical sort of 'time-neutral plane' on which you put the dot of the-right-thing-to-do, alongside many other dots, the less-right things, the wrong ones, the evil ones. All these alternative dots stand “there” (where?) alongside each other, as you claim. You call them temptations, more-than-one-way-to-do-things, etcetera.
Imagine a bouquet of flowers. I think your error is the same error one would make by trying to put it in a vase flowers first, instead of stems first. As Max Leyf wrote - have you carefully read his essay? It doesn't look like you did - freedom must be grasped in its dynamism. If you envision the movement of putting a bouquet of flowers in a narrow vase from the stems, versus from the flowers, and what it does to the bouquet in both cases, you will maybe get what I’m trying to say. And if you don’t like the bouquet of flowers, you could think of your (Cleric) recent metaphor of the tunnel of glyphs. As you said there, we can imagine that we move through the tunnel backwards, and what we perceive on the walls is our course of (mental, hearty, and physical) action, perceived through memory. That’s our awareness of our flow of becoming. So we can steer the flow through our free agency, to the extent that we let knowledge inflow it, from the future (in the metaphor, from the back). In the metaphoric context of the tunnel, we could picture the growing, free steering activity as our prism-body becoming a bigger, taller prism, as it walks backwards. In this way, more knowledge hits the prism of our individuality, and we can project on the walls more and more of the right glyphs, thanks to greater and greater free agency.
Now, in your vision of freedom, based on “more than one way to do things”,“temptation always arises”, etcetera, it’s as if you pretended to be moving in multiple tunnels at the same time! You pick one of the tunnels, you look at the glyphs on that one, and say: “these glyphs are an alternative solution”, or “here it is, a temptation arises”. But this doesn’t make sense! Really, you are looking at ‘hypothetical past glyphs’, but you are calling them potential, or temptation. No way... There is only our own tunnel, and our own glyphs on one side, including our errors, to learn from, and, on the other side of the tunnel, there's our free activity of better and better incorporating knowledge from the future (behind our back), better and better refracting it on the tunnel’s walls through our brighter and brighter prism quality. Freedom is expressed in our prism-quality that projects glyphs on the walls. Freedom is not expressed in alternative sets of glyphs that could hypothetically be found on a variety of diverse tunnels. Do you understand?
We can draw a parallel between what's going on here and what often happens in conversations with Eugene. Now please don't take it as a slap in the face that I attempt to draw such a comparison. I must declare that there are absolutely no personal emotions here. The goal is only to approach these questions from more sides.
What is the basic conundrum in all the talks with Eugene? It's the absolutization of the Divine essence within us into the way we experience it in our present human stage (even if enlightened). We secretly feel as one with the apex of the pyramid and only expect reality to fill the cone below it in the course of evolution. This has been contrasted many times with another picture, such as this one used in the Central Topic. You understand this very well. Actually the glyph tunnel is practically the same picture but presented from within. The unity of our inner life is the ego. It is the intuition that integrates all experiences into the holistic story of a metamorphosing being.
The reason talks with Eugene can't get to the needed depth is because the oneness is abused. We can speak of oneness only because we know the oneness of our soul life - the integration of everything we experience in relation to the one "I". This is the lower cone. This oneness seems like the final frontier. After all, what could be more one than one? Eugene was outraged when it was mentioned that we have to actually cure ourselves of this kind of oneness, which is really the last fetter before entering the spiritual world. Since this is not done, one remains wondering how can we advance in meditation. Then if one is presented with something about the spiritual world, it is immediately dismissed because it seems too fragmented, too lost in multiplicity.
Let's contemplate this well: when we meditate on oneness we feel to be at the upper boundary of reality because as said, what could we be more one than one? There's no such thing. So everything else must lie below, in multiplicity.
Now something analogous happens here but in a different way. Freedom has to do with drawing the impulses for our spiritual activity from our innermost core. If there are interfering factors, glyphs, temptations, candies and so on, these only point to multiplicity and karmic entanglement. But now the question arises: what happens with this process when it goes well into the future? What is the experience of a being that has become so free that almost everything it does springs from the individual source?
It may not be obvious but this bears some relation with the oneness scenario. Notice the commonality: in both cases there's a certain foundational idea and a question. We have often asked Eugene how he envisions future existence (which should unfold oneness even further). The answers are usually of the kind that things are too orthogonal to anything we can know on Earth. It's like saying "I don't know what it will be like but I know that much that it won’t be like you say because what you speak of obviously moves in the opposite direction of oneness."
It is similar here. It is not known what the future will be like but it is expected that the sovereignty of the individual agency should become more and more pronounced. On these grounds, anything that speaks of palettes, choices, etc. is seen as moving in the opposite direction, as fragmenting the individual source of freedom.
In both cases the hourglass shape is not properly taken into account. As soon as we cross the threshold, we find multiplicity again although in a very different way. That's why the abstract idea of oneness is the last fetter - as long as we cling to it, we would never allow ourselves to discover the multiplicity of the spiritual world. This multiplicity is of a radically different character compared to the multiplicity of glyphs or candies. It is multiplicity in the prism itself, in our innermost intuitive core. We find that our ego is really a constellation of spiritual beings.
Naturally, it is quite difficult to speak of these states because they belong to the stage of Intuition. We have to renounce Imagination and Inspiration and remain only with our pure intuitive spirit. Here we face the difficult part. If we expect that freedom consists in drawing more and more upon the unity of our sovereign individuality, we would never allow ourselves to know the true reality of our ego. We'll keep searching for what is more one than one, we’ll look to conduct our spiritual activity as if emerging from a singularity that is more and more independent of everything (thus ever freer).
So if this is the case why does Steiner mislead us in PoF to seek freedom by drawing upon our individual spiritual being? He doesn't mislead us but we have to remember that PoF leads us to the bottleneck of the hourglass. It is completely true that we have to free ourselves from the multiplicity of the lower cone in order to find freedom in the flow through the pinhole of the "I". But if we imagine that further evolution would only make this pinhole tighter and tighter, as if we draw more and more of our impulses from our individual agency, we simply preclude any possibility to know the intuitive reality of the "I". This we can only know when we experience our ego as the unity within multiplicity of spiritual beings (the Christ being of course serving as the central inspirer of the coherency).
The most difficult thing here is that we're used to conceive of beings only as something that impresses into our phenomenal world and we confront them with our "I". Then we can say that we're free if we don't allow ourselves to be dragged by the phenomena but instead draw our impulses from our innermost spiritual being. The spiritual beings in the Intuitive world however, don't impress in our inner world in this way. Instead, we find them when our "I" partitions and we understand the streams that constitute it as living spiritual beings. It's obvious that at this stage we can't go on to seek freedom in the exact same way, as seeking our impulses as emerging from the singular source of our "I". Instead, our impulses now stream as interplay of the spiritual beings that we balance consciously. Our “I” is centered at an infinitesimal point around which the Cosmic mandala of intuitive beings produce constructive interference. If we insist that we draw our impulses from that point, we find nothing there. We peel the layers of reality until there’s nothing. Our “I” has existence only as the constellation of beings. For this reason freedom is a matter of dynamic harmonization of these intuitive streams.
I hope the basic message is clear. Just like focusing on oneness leads us to a dead end, so does imagining that the inner experience of freedom is like drawing ever more our impulses from our individual agency. When we shatter the last fetter, our innermost intuitive self is found to be weaved of living intuitive beings. Pictorially speaking, one stream comes from Libra, another from Aries and so on. The grand difficulty is that the reality of this can’t be exhausted through Imagination or even Inspiration. In Imagination we still live in the metamorphosing glyphs in which Intuition is reflected. In Inspiration we hear the meaning of Intuition as World Thoughts. Only in Intuition itself we live in the reality of the “I”, where we find the beings not as something with which we interacts and emancipate from (in order to be more free) but as the intuitive streams which constitute our “I”-reality and that of the World. Freedom is now a matter of understanding how our intuitive point of balance is weaved of the streams of the Cosmic constellation and how we regulate that balance.