AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:12 pm
Federica,
I thought of another angle to approach from. Besides sleep and death, there is another phenomenon which is more accessible to our modern scientific understanding - the inner world of our physical body (which actually consists of the etheric-astral-ego depth structure as well). The outer world stands in a similar relation to this inner world as how our waking life stands in relation to sleep-death. It is a 'liminal space' in which our ordinary cognition has no knowledge or only dreamy knowledge of what is taking place. First we can notice that the inner world unfolds more directly to even our ordinary cognition as temporal processes, unlike the outer spatial world with its mostly fixed objects where we barely notice any evolution.
Secular science falls prey to the
aliasing effect - it simply assumes that what goes into the body from external nature, and what goes out of the body in the form of excretions, retains that fundamental character as it undergoes all the liminal processes within the body. What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil. Any one of these spaces - inner bodily world, sleep, death - if investigated carefully with living thinking, reveals very similar processes. It reveals the intentional activity of spiritual forces, in which we ourselves participate, which transmutes sense-perceptions, experiences, external substances, etc. into WFT forces which restore the vitality, health, life, spiritual content, of the former. Secular science speaks of this vaguely and abstractly with respect to
sleeping-dreaming. Yet the archetypal spiritual reality of these liminal processes reveal much more profound truths.
Steiner wrote:In any case, we see an immediate transformation when external, physical substances are taken in — let us say, by the mouth. We need only put a small grain of salt in the mouth and it is at once dissolved. The transformation is immediate. The physical body of man is not the same, in its inner nature, as the external world; it transforms what it takes in, and then transforms it back again. Thus we must seek for something within the human organism that is, at first, similar to external nature and, on excretion, becomes so again. It is what lies between these two stages that we must first discover.
Try to picture this that I have said: On the one hand, we have what the organism takes in; on the other, what it gives of including even the physical body as a whole. Between these are the processes within the organism itself. From the study of what the human physical organism takes in we can say nothing at all about the relation of man to external nature. We might put it this way: Though external physical nature does destroy man's corpse, dissolving and dissipating it, man does, with his organism, ‘get even’ with Nature. He dissolves everything he receives from her. Thus, when we commence with man's organs of assimilation, we find no relationship to external nature, for this is destroyed by them. We only find such a relationship when we turn to what man excretes. In relation to the form man bears into physical life, Nature is a destroyer; in regard to what man casts off, Nature receives what the human organism provides. Thus the human physical organism comes eventually to be very unlike itself and to resemble external Nature very much. It does this through excretion.
If you think this over you will say to yourself: There, outside, are the substances of the different kingdoms of Nature. They are, today, just what they have become; but they have certainly not always been as they are. Even physical science admits that past conditions of the earth were very different from those of today. What we see around us in the kingdoms of Nature has only gradually become what it is. And when we look at man's physical body we see it destroys — or transforms — what it takes in. (We shall see that it really destroys, but for the moment we will say ‘transforms’.) At any rate, what is taken in must be reduced to a certain condition from which it can be led back again to present physical Nature. In other words: If you think of a beginning somewhere in the human organism, where the substances begin to develop in the direction of excretions, and then think of the earth, you are led to trace it back to a similar condition in which it once was. You have to say: At some past time the whole earth must have been in the condition in which some-thing within man is today; and in the short space of time during which something incorporated into the human organism is transformed into excretory products, the inner processes of the organism recapitulate what the earth itself has accomplished in the course of long ages.
Actually this restoration occurs every duration of our waking experience as well, and the qualia of that experience - colors, smells, tastes, sounds, textures - are forces at the threshold of the spiritual world continually impinging on our physical consciousness but dying out rapidly when we remain with ordinary waking cognition (unlike in our dreams where we open up to and flow along with them in an instinctive manner). It is the same principle as the thought-distractions - we are constantly dying in our inattentive selfish thoughts, returning to the spiritual world, and then reincarnating in 'fresh' thought by its good grace. In this sense, the redemptive principle is always at work within the liminal spaces of experience.
Within color (as within the form of those entities that we behold) lies the hope that matter will again become light—the light that it is in the depths; moreover, there lies the hope that matter will reawaken as the light of ideas, as the warmth of life within the human soul. This is the Earth's secret. It is the secret of the light's rebirth insofar as it rises up as the fabric of thought, within thought, by ceasing to die out into the specter of space, or into the specter of time. We can reascend from the specter to the light.
Scaligero, Massimo. The Secrets of Space and Time (p. 49). Lindisfarne Books. Kindle Edition.
One clear aspect of what takes place in these liminal spaces is what Cleric has described as the '
last in, first out' principle of computer processing (that only being a dim mechanized cultural shadow of actual living processes). Throughout all of spiritual scientific research, we find descriptions of how we run through our experiences in reverse during sleep and after death. For ex., the reverse 'life-review' that we experience as an imagistic panaroma in the etheric body after casting off the physical body. A similar review happens every time we sleep. Instead of experiencing only the outer physiognomy of those experiences in dim perceptions-concepts clothed in abstract space and linear time, we experience from the perspective of the inner spiritual forces which holistically impressed them. So these are really the
same experiences viewed from opposite poles of consciousness, although that rhythmic alternating process introduces new shades of meaning to the experiences. Consider the following.
Steiner wrote:Still another question arises here, moreover a very important one. — What happens when we have a very short sleep — for example an afternoon nap? Or indeed when we have a brief forty winks during a lecture, but really do go to sleep; the whole thing may last only two or three minutes, perhaps only a minute or half a minute. What happens then? If the sleep were real, we were in the spiritual world during that half minute.
The truth is, my dear friends, that for this short nap even during a lecture, the same holds good as for the all-night sleep of a lie-a-bed — I mean, of course, a human lie-a-bed! As a matter of fact, whenever a man falls asleep, even for a brief moment, the whole sleep is a unity and the astral body is an unconscious prophet; it surveys the whole sleep up to the point of waking ... in perspective, of course. What is remote may lack clarity, as when a short-sighted person looks down an avenue and does not see the trees at the farther end of it. In the same way the astral body may be short-sighted, figuratively speaking, in the subconscious. Its perception does not reach the point where the individual earth-lives begin. But broadly speaking, the fact is that even during the briefest sleep we rush with tremendous, lightning-like rapidity through all our earthly lives. This is a matter of extraordinary significance. Naturally it is all very hazy; but if somebody falls asleep during a lecture, then the lecturer or those who share his power of observation have it in front of them. Think of it: the whole of earth-evolution, together with what the sleeper has experienced in previous earthly lives! When somebody falls asleep during a lecture everything lacks clarity because it happens with such terrific rapidity; one thing merges quickly into another, but it is there, nevertheless. From this you will understand that karma is perpetually present, inscribed as it were in the World-Chronicle. And every time a man falls asleep he has opportunity to approach his karma. This is one of the great secrets of existence.
Every short nap we take, we have the opportunity of approaching our entire Karma and thereby setting on the process of redeeming it. In other words, every duration of our experienced world-state is only what it is because the holistic forces of our entire spiritual evolution continually inflow our consciousness and thereby constitute it. These fundamental principles of our spiritual existence shouldn't be treated as only partially applicable, which is practically how the secular culture treats them - when it comes to dead things of the perceptible world, the principles are upheld dogmatically, but when it comes to living things, to ideal things, to moral things, the liminal forces from which the principles actually flow forth, they are discarded or modified or selectively paid attention to as we please. The redemptive principle which works through the liminal spaces of experience is not only limited to certain phenomena and not others - to natural phenomena and not cultural phenomena, or to some cultural phenomena and not others. They are universally applicable, which is why we have such an archetypally and lawfully structured spiritual evolution which reflects dimly, at our current stage, into our natural and cultural laws.
It is very true that discerning these principles is only the very beginning of our work and they will remain things we are seizing only with the pliers of the intellect until we also persistently engage our inverted spiritual activity during meditation, so that we make more conscious this ceaseless inflowing of Cosmic impulses from the liminal spaces. The meditative state is a willful trusting of our thinking force to the Wise spiritual guidance of humankind. Nevertheless, that spiritual guidance needs something to work with and these holistic principles we are discerning through our conceptual reasoning provide it with the foundation on which our Imaginative life can be erected, or the purified sheaths in which the Spirit can find a proper vessel for its intuitive becoming. Trust me, I know the feeling of 'man, I am hopelessly stuck surveying these things from only the outer side, as abstract schemas', but I also know the consistent defying of such habitually expected limitations when remaining prayerfully persistent and trusting in pursuit of attunement with the Wise guidance. Just in the process of writing this one post, I have had the opportunity to revisit key texts from the archive and the forum and deepen my living understanding. There are always new depths of meaning to redeem from the forms of the world through our devoted spiritual activity.
Thank you, Ashvin!
It's taking me a little while to 'digest' this idea, because in the series: reincarnation in a thought / in a waking day / in a lifetime / in the body inner world, the body really seems to be the odd one out. It's not a time rhythm itself, it has rhythms.
It’s hard to grasp that the same relation found between waking state, or lifetime, and sleep state, or death, can be found between outer and inner physical world. At first it sounded like adding apples and oranges. But if I remember that the more we develop spiritually, the more we become unlocalized (please don’t interpret this as mystical rejection of the sense world!) then I can see that everything within the threshold of the skin (inner world of the body) can also be thought of as one mode of consciousness, a way in which consciousness expresses itself, namely “laws of nature + life”.
From the viewpoint of our waking state, we can realize that we are sitting and willing in a body that we practically understand nothing of. I took note that the whole depth structure is present, or echoed, in the inner body itself. However I believe the 'special feature' of this body perspective you are presenting - the element the unconsciousness of inner bodily processes consists of - is
life, correct? If so, the inner-outer relation you are presenting should hold true for animals and plants alike (how an isolated little plant on a window sill keeps on transforming a few inputs in new limbs, and abundance of cascading flowers, season after season, seems just as mysterious to me). In other words, it's the secret of life at large we need to progressively grasp, of which the human body is only one example.
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jan 27, 2023 3:12 pm
What is really taking place within these liminal spaces? That is the key question for our conceptual reasoning and inverted spiritual activity, in rhythmic coordination, to progressively unveil.
I am taking note of this question as a valuable meditative exercise. What comes to mind at the moment is that, as we inquire about the transformative power of life, we are referring to cycles/modes of consciousness. It’s about becoming conscious of the various states, which actually only means becoming conscious
across states, embracing various modes of reality/consciousness within the scope of our individuated willed activity.
In standard waking state versus sleep, our soul and spiritual essence tend to get out of focus. Then, in sleep, we are drawn to lose focus on our physical and life bodies. We oscillate across this spectrum as we traverse the day-night cycle. In the alive-state versus dead-state rhythm, the separating pull is sharper. In the dead-state we lack the localized physical-etheric mode completely. Specularly, in our worldly life cycle, we are perhaps pulled apart from the spiritual world more abruptly than we are from the regenerative sleep cycle during our waking day. (It’s painful because as I am making an effort to really get a grasp of all these rhythms, a clear idea of ‘nesting’ has flashed, but hasn't lasted. I couldn’t hold it clearly enough to write it down). Anyway, what I was trying to say is, if I keep the rough idea of spiritual delocalization alive in the back of my mind, I could place this 'inner world of the body/outer sense world' cycle at place number 3 maybe, after 1/death-life cycle, and 2/sleep-waking cycle, and before 4/reincarnation rhythm in thoughts.
Potentially, all cycles can be fully encompassed in consciousness, however, in 4/ thinking descends all the way down to physical, it becomes thought percepts/perceptions, in which we reincarnate and can become conscious of; in 3/ we can aim to reincarnating in the secrets of our etheric body and life in general, bringing them within the scope of awareness; in 2/ the soul identity can be brought into better focus, while physical and etheric bodies are paused, and throughout the whole cycle; and in 1/ all physical-etheric (and soul?) layers are dropped, as the true self is reintegrated, and we can work at expanding that higher consciousness to our reincarnation on Earth. These my clumsy attempts to imagine some logic around the idea of inner world of body. I’m not sure if there’s anything worth salvaging from that. I feel I should read Theosophy in order to get additional help with structuring these thoughts!
So what is really taking place within the body? ...Life-etheric secrets? Something fundamentally mysterious must be operating there, on top of laws of nature, otherwise we would be able to shape the inner body within the framework of that natural lawfulness, as we shape objects in the outer physical world. What I'm unable to bring into proper focus is the hierarchy, the relations between levels, bodies, modes, within the depth structure of reality-consciousness. But I appreciate the illustration of holisticness you draw in the last part, it's still inspiring, and thanks for the words of encouragement!
Redemption as expansion of consciousness, principles as overarching reading modes valid across spectrums… I realize that all these facets of ‘holisticness’ need to remain constantly present to cognition as foundational evidence, while cognition expands to new domains. They can't work as mere concepts stored in some mind-repository, that I would constantly forget to consult when needed. Instead of endlessly pulling the blanket to one side, leaving the other sides uncovered, it’s necessary to weave the blanket bigger, and thicker, so that it can holistically cover more and more of the depth spectrum of reality, and also accommodate with equally sharp focus all the finer waves interfering in its thickness.