Symphony

[Federica]

Well on second thought, this attitude doesn't seem to be possible for me at this point. This is a work against nature, squared. Or x-ed. Where is the point of balance? I can't see it. Why not go to sleep on a bed of nails at this rate? A soft bed is highly consumptive and incredibly passive.

What is an example of something that feels to be a bed of nails at this point? For ex. do you feel that way about resisting certain impulsive speech or bodily gestures that practically unfold on autopilot, without the presence of your thinking-will?

Nothing feels like a bed of nails, because I don't know that sensation. But resisting the flow of music certainly feels mortifying. Nervous bodily gestures are good to control, and impulsive speech too. But one can easily imagine valid reasons to exert such control that have nothing to do with mortifying our earthly existence.

You play musical instruments if I'm not mistaken. How can you let the harmony emerge as sound if every note you play you are resisting, decomposing, searching for the corresponding gesture... I don't get it. Again, beyond the easy examples of nervous bodily gestures and automatic verbal expressions, where is the point of balance?

[AshvinP]

Well on second thought, this attitude doesn't seem to be possible for me at this point. This is a work against nature, squared. Or x-ed. Where is the point of balance? I can't see it. Why not go to sleep on a bed of nails at this rate? A soft bed is highly consumptive and incredibly passive.

What is an example of something that feels to be a bed of nails at this point? For ex. do you feel that way about resisting certain impulsive speech or bodily gestures that practically unfold on autopilot, without the presence of your thinking-will?

Nothing feels like a bed of nails, because I don't know that sensation. But resisting the flow of music certainly feels mortifying. Nervous bodily gestures are good to control, and impulsive speech too. But one can easily imagine valid reasons to exert such control that have nothing to do with mortifying our earthly existence.

I'm not sure where the association to 'mortifying our earthly existence' came from. All we need to recognize is that this is the work of gradually 'dismantling the personality', as you quoted from Cleric previously, so we can let the higher self shine through into earthly existence. To begin with, it is simply the work of bringing more presence of thinking-will into our routine habits, which normally go on autopilot quite independent of our core spiritual activity. We should be clear that this work is what makes our concentration efforts more fruitful as well. Those efforts meet so much resistance when we meditate precisely because our thinking-will is normally entrained by barely conscious waves of sensations, emotions, and sense-based thoughts. Its concentrated energy is routinely dispersed into these various waves throughout the day, and this is the soul atmosphere we inherit in our meditation.

For ex., when we wash our hands/faces or brush our teeth or many similar routines, we often let our minds wander to a bunch of different unrelated things. Our intent, thoughts, emotions, sensations become misaligned. By remaining present in the intentional activity, which is greatly aided by dedicating it to the spiritual archetypes at the basis of the solid, liquid, gaseous, and warmth elements that make the experience possible, stabilizing it within that depth of intention as discussed in the truthfulness essay, we accustom our inner organism to keeping its thinking-will energy concentrated. We smooth the currents of our soul life and restore some order into its flow.

As long as we strengthen our intuition for why this resistance work reestablishes our concentric alignment with our native spiritual existence, we can make better informed decisions about how to apply or not apply the 'work against nature' in service of our higher ideals.

You play musical instruments if I'm not mistaken. How can you let the harmony emerge as sound if every note you play you are resisting, decomposing, searching for the corresponding gesture... I don't get it. Again, beyond the easy examples of nervous bodily gestures and automatic verbal expressions, where is the point of balance?

The nervous gestures and verbal expressions are simple examples to point to but by no means easy to resist in practice. In fact, if we start with those and make some progress, we will have taken huge strides forward in our inner development. It's probably more than enough to focus only on those to begin with.

Playing music is already something more intentional and active, yet it is often the case that I am playing a song and my mind wanders to a bunch of other things, especially when I am very familiar with the movements and the playing itself becomes a routine habit like driving home from work. That's something I have been working on lately as well.

It's not about intellectually analyzing the process of playing the song, which is actually another way of letting the mind wander and dispersing the energy, but actively seeking to remain more present to the inner gestures by centering in the depth flow. One can try to intuitively register how the intuition of the song has condensed into imagination and flowed through to the physical limbs, how the flowing melodies and harmonies speak meaningfully as a story of spiritual evolution and initiation, how the higher archetypal beings are providing the psycho-physical support matrix in which our local musical intent is unfolding. The law of shrinking greatly helps here so we don't rigidly identify with our psyche and body, but sense them as much greater and mysterious curvatures through which our thinking-will is embedded and steered.

All of this requires a certain amount of discipline and attention that is normally lacking, especially when we passively witness the playback of the movie and nod along in enjoyment. In that case, we simply let the inner gestures run their course beneath the surface and take no active interest in them. The points of balance are what we need to intuitively discover for ourselves. But the key point is that we simply have no basis for that intuitive resonance until we build enough of a 'dataset' by exposing our inner organism to varying degrees of resistance across domains of sensory-conceptual experience. This is how we build the inner sensitivity to the ways in which our soul life is deviating from its points of balance when we let our spiritual activity be entrained by various sensations, emotions, and thoughts.

It's like our thinking-will normally feels to be swinging its 'limbs' through the unimpeded air, but now the air densifies so it more concretely senses the grooves it is always flowing through and the snags it is bumping into along the way. It is really about awakening to how normally unbalanced and misaligned our soul life is, in what specific ways, and gradually restoring some alignment and balance.

[Federica]

I read this after writing the above, OMAs daily meditation: "we are no more than a reflection, a non being, an illusion". Where is the individual perspective, or point of balance? How is this not a mortification of earthly existence? Is the only aim of all degrees of freedom, the only purpose of our thinking will in this earthly existence to work on eliminating itself, by amputating all misalignments, by resisting not only all psychic blind spots, but even ideally all sensations, all impressions from the world, until they are replaced by sense-free 'enjoyment'? Is this any different than a life-long suicide?

[AshvinP]

I read this after writing the above, OMAs daily meditation: "we are no more than a reflection, a non being, an illusion". Where is the individual perspective, or point of balance? How is this not a mortification of earthly existence? Is the only aim of all degrees of freedom, the only purpose of our thinking will in this earthly existence to work on eliminating itself, by amputating all misalignments, by resisting not only all psychic blind spots, but even ideally all sensations, all impressions from the world, until they are replaced by sense-free 'enjoyment'? Is this any different than a life-long suicide?

We can't really snip such phrases out of context (in this case, the whole oeuvre of OMA's esoteric work) to make conclusions. We can find many similar sayings in Steiner's archive if we want to. For example:

When a clairvoyant looks at a human being, it is the same with him as it is here with the spectrum. Man is actually nothing in and of himself, for what the clairvoyant sees, where the human being stands, are forces from Venus, from Mercury, and from Mars. Take away the Venus forces—and the human being vanishes. Take away the influences of Mercury and Mars —and the human being vanishes. The clairvoyant sees the human being as a convergence of cosmic forces. For the clairvoyant, the only thing that solely remains real in this spectre is the “Ego”. This working “Ego” is the true reality; it is the reason for everything flowing together; it works on the absorption of all such influences. Under the gaze of the clairvoyant, all converging streams disappear, leaving solely the “Ego” behind as the only truth. This Ego, that so few people nowadays recognise as reality, is the only thing that remains. What the physical perception considers to be a human being, is in reality only a ghost whose individual parts are held together by the almost magnetic force of the Ego. Everything about the human being, apart from the working Ego, is an optical illusion.

If we snipped out a few choice phrases from that context, they could easily be mistaken as support for 'mortification of earthly existence'. The key is to realize that what we normally feel to be our 'ego' or 'agency' is only a shadow. It is the true Ego conditioned by the ghostly spectrum of subconscious influences. This is the foundation of all esoteric science, of intuitive thinking as a spiritual path. Our normal experience of 'agency' stands in a similar relation to the thinking-will of the higher self as the 'agency' of a dream character stands in relation to the waking self. (which is not to imply there is no point of contact, because clearly there is such a point in our concentrated thinking).

The main difference is the dream character doesn't reflect enough on the movie playback to convince itself that it's a separate being exercising autonomous agency over its thoughts, feelings, and desires. Our waking self does just that while forgetting the whole movie plot, characters, dialogue, etc. is structured by the purely ideal life of the higher self, the true Ego. The forgetfulness of the waking self was necessary to reach the grounds of freedom, but if it gets stuck there, then the only direction left is to fall backwards into dreamy and sleeping consciousness.

"When you see your likeness, you rejoice. But when you see your images which came into being before you, and which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!" (Gospel of Thomas 84)

In order to be free and to work towards greater freedom, we need to always keep this reality in sight - both the reality that the normally experienced ego is a shadow and the reality that we have a lot invested in the life of that shadow, so much so that we rejoice seeing it but fear stripping its conditioned parts away to reveal the true Image within. It is the Image that 'hovers above' the earthly personality (likeness) and animates its existence, but is not identical with it. We have come to the epoch of spiritual evolution when the Image needs to be made more transparent within earthly existence in very concrete and practical ways. Far from mortifying earthly existence, we are then learning what earthly existence really is beyond the veil of the sensory conditioned dreamscape.

Our default state is severe misalignment within the soul curvature of assumptions, habits, preferences, and so forth. Normally we feel an 'assumption' or 'preference' to be some point like entity existing in our head, but it's really a much more encompassing stream of influence with a life of its own. As we have discussed before on the truthfulness essay thread, there is no need to worry about 'amputating all misalignments'. We won't even get close! Every time we attempt to amputate a misalignment it will grow right back like a phantom limb. When we resist the psychic-sensory curvatures, we have no reason to fear that they will disappear from existence. They will only push back on us more strongly, which is exactly how we build inner sensitivity for their influences, assuming we don't simply merge with them again and get carried away like leaves on a stream.

Allowing this irrational fear of 'mortification' to fester within can only serve the purpose of demotivating us from pursuing the most proximate realignments that we can work on to straighten the paths of our soul life for the Image to incarnate more fully. More than that, it blocks our ability to even perceive these misalignments and then freely choose whether to work on them or not.

(By the way, I think much of what I am abstractly conveying here will be made more concrete in Cleric's upcoming essay)

[AshvinP]

PS - I was reading some articles on the Anthroposophical section of Barfield's website recently and the following quotes stand out as relevant to the discussion.

***
https://www.owenbarfield.org/read-onlin ... preserver/
In these matters, to perceive what is wrong is to have gone more than half-way towards finding the correct remedy. But one must perceive and think precisely. And then, in the present case, one will perceive that it is not the mere awareness of forces, or even impulses, of destruction in one’s own being, in one’s own will, that is wrong. On the contrary, these are the mark of conscious strength. What is wrong is the inability to disentangle the Ego from these forces, the inability so to adjust the Ego that it shall use, instead of being used by them. Diffusion is weakness; concentration is strength; the centripetal forces of destruction and decay are revealed, by the very way in which they are experienced, to be strong for battle.

That is why it is important to realise, and to accept, that in our time the forces of destruction must be looked for not only without but also within the soul, where of course they are experienced as impulses. Otherwise we may be inclined rather to avoid the powers of evil than to meet them. Confronted with the rarefied intellectualism, the nervous symptoms, the imbecile excesses of self­-contemplation which characterise our age, we may without discrimination fly for refuge to the “living” in any shape or form in which it presents itself. But this reaction to the decadence of the age is not the distinctively anthroposophical one. On the contrary it is just in the twentieth century that we are continually meeting on all sides this dread of the sharp outlines of self-consciousness, and the same consequent relapse into that vague semi-conscious “life” whose function it is to build up the physical body without the co-operation of the conscious Ego. Such “life” is diffusive and (where the battlefield and the prize is human consciousness) merely weak. For it is still at the mercy of the destroyer before whom it flies. It will not bear the full light of consciousness.

...
https://www.owenbarfield.org/read-onlin ... l-seasons/
Let us look at the human being for a moment, as St. Paul, for instance, regarded him. For St. Paul the human being is really two men, the old man and the new. The old Adam dies in each soul, as Christ brings to birth in it the new regenerate Adam. For many of us this picture has been renewed in a very remarkable way by Rudolf Steiner; but what is especially characteristic of spiritual science is its revelation of this birth of the new out of the old as a process. It is a process which is based on the rhythmic alteration in man of dying echoes of the old consciousness and premonitory experiences of the new. And according to Anthroposophy the free will of man and the grace of God in this matter do not express themselves in some sudden emotional conversion or salvation by means of which the old is alleged to have been destroyed for ever and the new created, intact and perfect, out of nothing, in the twinkling of an eye. Grace would not be itself, if it were theatrical. Rather they work, within the rhythmic system, gradually emphasising the new direction more and the old less. The new all the time is growing out of the old rather than in its despite, and the old Adam is not violently denied, but lovingly redeemed. Moreover, all the rhythms of the earth are subservient to precisely this diapason of the pulsing growth of new consciousness out of the old. The alternation of the seasons and the alternation of life and death are there for man to work with as a magician. He shall learn how to bring the dreaming summer to birth in the conscious depths of winter; he is to “charm the night into the day,” to sleep while he is awake, and in a secret spiritual activity to be breathing out even while, physically, he is breathing in.

[Federica]

We can't really snip such phrases out of context

We do it all the time, we always and only quote snippets, we never quote entire oeuvres. Here I only highlighted the
co-incidence of the content of OMAs daily meditation - that in itself is a snippet-based practice - with the question at stake. I only quoted it as an epitome of what was already there in the text written above it. I was not making the post about OMA.

there is no need to worry about 'amputating all misalignments'. We won't even get close!

I want to know what the ideal is. Obviously I can't start the amputations saying to myself "Oh don't worry, just start amputating a bit. Be reassured, there will be plenty of bits that will remain anyway, so don't be afraid to become 'perfect'". I'm sure you are not suggesting I should start the work in such complete inner ambiguity.


I don't need the syllogism of dreaming and waking. I do realize the shadow character of the normal ego.

What I want to know is: where is the individual perspective? The higher self is not God correct? But you seem to imply it is.

[AshvinP]

We can't really snip such phrases out of context

We do it all the time, we always and only quote snippets, we never quote entire oeuvres. Here I only highlighted the
co-incidence of the content of OMAs daily meditation - that in itself is a snippet-based practice - with the question at stake. I only quoted it as an epitome of what was already there in the text written above it. I was not making the post about OMA.

The important part was, "to make conclusions". It's one thing to notice the quote and say, 'that's interesting, he is speaking of non-being, illusion, and so on and I'm not sure how that reconciles with individual perspective, let me investigate further to see how these thoughts fit into the harmony of facts discerned through the esoteric understanding of the human individual'. But it's another thing to jump from the thought to 'mortification of earthly existence'.

We should try to notice how these conclusive judgments act as molds in which our thinking flows. These are the most proximate grooves that we have formed for ourselves over the years, constraining our thinking-will into etched pathways. These are the grooves we need to not only gain cognitive distance on, but also overcome entirely, because they prevent us from further investigating the deeper grooves. We have all overcome certain rigid molds to get where we are now, exploring the inner path, but the habits die hard and we can easily create more constraining molds for our thinking-will during the initial stages.

there is no need to worry about 'amputating all misalignments'. We won't even get close!

I want to know what the ideal is. Obviously I can't start the amputations saying to myself "Oh don't worry, just start amputating a bit. Be reassured, there will be plenty of bits that will remain anyway, so don't be afraid to become 'perfect'". I'm sure you are not suggesting I should start the work in such complete inner ambiguity.


I don't need the syllogism of dreaming and waking. I do realize the shadow character of the normal ego.

What I want to know is: where is the individual perspective? The higher self is not God correct? But you seem to imply it is.

The ideal is spiritual freedom that leads to genuine moral agency. It's exactly what is conveyed in PoF and throughout esoteric science. The amputation metaphor is misleading in that sense. Activating our thinking-will to resist various grooves and misalignments is more like perceiving there is something wrong with the limb to begin with and there are possible remedies. Unless we start moving our thinking-will in novel directions which cut across the grain of familiar grooves, we won't even be aware of the misalignments at any practical level. As long as our thinking-will moves in directions that are faithfully reflected in the sensory spectrum, there is no need for it grow any sensitivity to the supersensible grooves through which it moves. Then we don't have any choice to do something about the misalignments, because we neither know they exist, from whence they come, nor how our spiritual activity can begin to address them. So it's not that we shouldn't worry because once we start amputating other parts will be left over, but that we shouldn't worry because we don't even have the capacity to amputate (apart from conceptual grooves like assumptions and conclusive opinions).

The higher self is our Individual perspective (what makes it possible), it dwells with the 3rd hierarchy of divinities. It is the Individual perspective that has not become enchanted by the selfish interests (through the Fall) and therefore entangled with the sensory spectrum. The lower self or personality (or likeness) arises when the higher self, the Individuality or Image, forgets its native existence and identifies itself with the contents of the soul, i.e. patterns of sensations, memories, emotions, habits, preferences, etc. The higher self remains as the core spirit that clothes itself in various likenesses from incarnation to incarnation but is not identical with any of them. Through the Christ spirit and its sacrificial deeds, however, the reunion of the Image and the likeness was made possible for humanity and prefigured in the personality of Christ Jesus. This occurs through the likeness/personality becoming increasingly conscious of its pre-birth and after-death existence, giving birth to the Christ within and gradually spiritualizing its psychic and bodily configuration from the inside-out. St. Paul gestured to this process when he said, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me". The Earthly "I" sacrifices its selfish identifications through purification/catharsis and gives birth to the Image within, harmonizing its intentions with those of the Cosmic "I".

Of course, this is a very abstract religious way of putting things. The amazing thing is that concrete phenomenology of spiritual activity brings us right back to this same theological observation and in a way that is intimately practical for our lives. As Barfield indicated, it is a gradual process of the old giving way to the new, not some one-time amputation of the old. That simply isn't possible even if we wanted to do it. When we put the phenomenology into practice, the distinction between the lower and higher self will become increasingly clear at an experiential level, it will make more and more intuitive sense. That intuitive clarity will provide the basis for our perception of misalignments and our ability to freely work on them as necessary for moving toward our ideals.

[Federica]

The important part was, "to make conclusions".

Here I only highlighted the co-incidence of the content of OMAs daily meditation with the question at stake! I only quoted it as an epitome of what was already there in the text written above it, I was not making the post about OMA!
Is it you who have decided you won't understand what I write, or is it that I don't know how to make myself understood? I don't hold any conclusions on OMA, and not even on the rest of this discussion for that matter. Why is it even needed that I state that?

The ideal is spiritual freedom that leads to genuine moral agency. It's exactly what is conveyed in PoF and throughout esoteric science. The amputation metaphor is misleading in that sense. Activating our thinking-will to resist various grooves and misalignments is more like perceiving there is something wrong with the limb to begin with and there are possible remedies. Unless we start moving our thinking-will in novel directions which cut across the grain of familiar grooves, we won't even be aware of the misalignments at any practical level. As long as our thinking-will moves in directions that are faithfully reflected in the sensory spectrum, there is no need for it grow any sensitivity to the supersensible grooves through which it moves.

Please tell me, what is the need to attack the experience of the sensory spectrum, to resist the sense-based perceptions and replace them with sense-free ones, in order to work on the soul grooves of hidden assumptions, preferences and likes? Why can't we work on the soul through will, and through concentrative meditation, just like exemplified in the second part of the phonograph metaphor? What is this other "real earthly existence" behind the veil of the senses that justifies attempt to resist and replace the spectrum of sensory perceptions?

The higher self is our Individual perspective (what makes it possible), it dwells with the 3rd hierarchy of divinities. It is the Individual perspective that has not become enchanted by the selfish interests (through the Fall) and therefore entangled with the sensory spectrum. The lower self or personality (or likeness) arises when the higher self, the Individuality or Image, forgets its native existence and identifies itself with the contents of the soul, i.e. patterns of sensations, memories, emotions, habits, preferences, etc. The higher self remains as the core spirit that clothes itself in various likenesses from incarnation to incarnation but is not identical with any of them. Through the Christ spirit and its sacrificial deeds, however, the reunion of the Image and the likeness was made possible for humanity and prefigured in the personality of Christ Jesus. This occurs through the likeness/personality becoming increasingly conscious of its pre-birth and after-death existence, giving birth to the Christ within and gradually spiritualizing its psychic and bodily configuration from the inside-out. St. Paul gestured to this process when he said, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ in me". The Earthly "I" sacrifices its selfish identifications through purification/catharsis and gives birth to the Image within, harmonizing its intentions with those of the Cosmic "I".

Of course, this is a very abstract religious way of putting things. The amazing thing is that concrete phenomenology of spiritual activity brings us right back to this same theological observation and in a way that is intimately practical for our lives. As Barfield indicated, it is a gradual process of the old giving way to the new, not some one-time amputation of the old. That simply isn't possible even if we wanted to do it. When we put the phenomenology into practice, the distinction between the lower and higher self will become increasingly clear at an experiential level, it will make more and more intuitive sense. That intuitive clarity will provide the basis for our perception of misalignments and our ability to freely work on them as necessary for moving toward our ideals.

Instead of enumerating what the higher self is not and how to free it from the lower, please tell me what makes it individual behind the veil of all the severe misalignments. There is not a word about that so far in this discussion.

[Cleric K]

Instead of enumerating what the higher self is not and how to free it from the lower, please tell me what makes it individual behind the veil of all the severe misalignments. There is not a word about that so far in this discussion.

Federica, here's something that may be seen as rather abstract but possibly it may help. In the SoM I used this image.


There's no simple, nor right way to present these things. If the image above should be more exact, all centers should also coincide. But this makes it more difficult to draw. Here's how it may look like if we only look at a segment:



In this perspective, there's only One Center and One Periphery. All differences manifest through the fact that the strings connecting the center and the periphery vibrate in different frequencies and phase relationships. An ensemble of such strings which vibrate in meaningful coherency, constitute an individual spiritual experience of being. Of course, we shouldn't imagine this ensemble as something spatially defined. It spans the full volume. Here we can use the coffee house metaphor again to explain why only a specific ensemble constitutes our conscious experience.

Now there's nothing fundamentally different between spiritual experience in the embodied and the disembodied state. It's the 'mode of vibration' that differs. In the embodied state the ensemble is entangled in much more complicated ways, and if there's to be continuity of consciousness, our perspective needs to follow in lockstep the unfoldment of the rhythm - from its Cosmic harmonics to the elemental sub-harmonics.

After death, the strings vibrate in greater harmony with the totality but still 'overshoot' (remember the ice skate analogy).

The crucial thing is that this out-of-phase vibration is the technique of creation. All existence is possible only because there's vibration that is off the perfect alignment. The difference is that what is creative technique on high, could lead to destruction when the vibrations are willed without awareness of the greater context.

So to your question about the higher self and God - Yes: at Infinity, our higher self is God the Absolute. That's the state where all strings coincide. However, as we have warned so many times, this idea shouldn't evoke pride. There's no conscious perspective where we can say "Now I'm the Absolute and there's nothing above me." God within our unique ideal ensemble is always a servant of the God at Infinity.

Here's something:

If a person looks back in a more unselfish way to what he has experienced in childhood, youth, etc. — according to the age he has reached — there emerges as if out of the gray depths of the spirit various persons who have had something to do with his life in all sorts of relationships.

Look back into your life and pay less attention to what interests you in your own respectable person and much more to those figures that have come into contact with you, educating you, befriending you, assisting you, perhaps also injuring you — often injuring you in a helpful way.

One thing will then become evident to you and that is how little reason a person really has to ascribe to himself what he has become. Often something important in us is due to the fact that one person or another came into contact with us at a certain age, and — perhaps, without knowing it himself, or perhaps, being fully aware of the fact — drew our attention to something or other. In a comprehensive sense, a really unselfishly conducted survey of our lives is made up of all sorts of things that do not give us occasion to immerse ourselves selfishly in our own being, to brood over ourselves egotistically, but lead us to broaden our views to include those figures who came into contact with us. Let us immerse ourselves with real love in what has come into our life.

We shall often discover that what evoked an antipathy in us at a certain period is no longer so disagreeable to us when a sufficient length of time has passed because we begin to see an inner connection. The fact that we had to be affected in an unpleasant way at a certain time by one person or another might have been useful to us. We often gain more from the harm that a person does to us than from the furtherance afforded us by another. It would be advantageous to a person if he more frequently exercised such a survey of his life, and should permeate his life with the convictions flowing from his self observation. “How little occasion I really have to occupy myself with myself! How immeasurably richer my life becomes when I look back to all those who have entered my life!”

In this way we free ourselves from ourselves when we carry out such an unselfish survey. We then escape from that terrible evil of our times, to which so many fall victims, of brooding over ourselves. It is so extremely necessary that we should free ourselves from this brooding over ourselves. Anyone who has once felt the power of such self-observation as I have just described will find himself far too uninteresting to spend much time brooding over his own life.

http://wn.rsarchive.org/GA/GA0186/19181207p01.html

This is a tremendously important thing to grasp. We understand our individual perspective only by understanding how it is defined by all other infinite ensembles and vice versa. This naturally gives the answer also of what makes us individual beyond the threshold. It's once again the unique way the tone of our ensemble sounds in relation to the whole infinite ensemble. Just like in space the uniqueness of our perspective is determined by the unique visual vantage point, so it is also in the disembodied state, where we have a unique ideal vantage point of the Cosmic ensemble. In fact, the very same holds in the embodied state, except that here we've been misled to imagine the world outside as something independent, instead of grasping our existence as continuous spiritual metamorphosis. However, as RS implies, the key is that as our ensemble evolves it more and more grasps that we share the same center and periphery.

All this also gives us a greater appreciation of concentration. The focal point of spiritual activity that we cultivate in meditation, in the course of evolution will prove to be precisely this One Center of all.

[AshvinP]

Instead of enumerating what the higher self is not and how to free it from the lower, please tell me what makes it individual behind the veil of all the severe misalignments. There is not a word about that so far in this discussion.

I wrote a whole response to this (within the forum instead of on gmail like I usually do) but I wasn't signed in and then it got erased when I went to post. I don't think I can rewrite it again now, but I see Cleric has posted something in the meantime. For now, I will just share the questions I posed in response to the last part, which is also connected with the RS quote.

What makes us individual within the veil of the misalignments? To what extent are we individuals when we are simply the product of our environment, the etched soul pathways (which are entirely interwoven with sensory events) that our thinking-will has awakened into as something entirely given and which now steers its unfoldment? Where do we find our sense of individuality within such a state?