Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

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AshvinP
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Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by AshvinP »

This article was stimulated by recent discussion on the forum and is essentially a summary of that discussion, with one or two new considerations.

***

A critical distinction to make in the flow of human experience is that between the superconscious and the subconscious. The former points to what we normally conceive as evolving skills and capacities that we learn and engage through our spiritual activity to participate in fashioning physical, emotional, and mental experiences. The latter points to what we conceive as fully formed mental, emotional, or sensory pathways of experience - already existing constraints on our spiritual activity such as beliefs, emotions, habits, and physical traits. The former weaves actively in form-free domains of integrated experience that are not yet bounded by definite forms, while the latter passively flows along with already finished and clear-contoured thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Any skill, technique, or overall way of being that can be potentially learned through experience belongs to the superconscious, while those learned skills that have since become routine habits and therefore run on autopilot belong to the subconscious.

The subconscious is comprised of relatively well-known or knowable experiences - beliefs, memories, habits, accumulated knowledge, etc. - but it is difficult to even imagine what the superconscious could be ‘comprised’ of. To begin approaching the latter, then, we should first confess that we have no idea how we think, solve problems, speak, animate our limbs, etc. When I build a piece of furniture, I know how I follow the stepwise instructions and fit one part into the next. After it is finished, I can look at the furniture and trace exactly how the various parts came together through my activity or activity that would have been similar to my own. What I don’t have any clue about, however, is how I was able to follow the instructions with mental pictures or to animate my hands while turning the screws. Whatever was going on inwardly to make it all happen remains enigmatic; some mysterious capacities that I instinctively drew upon to accomplish the task.

The paradigmatic reference of the superconscious is:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” (1)

Most of us can also confess that the above verse is but a mere abstraction for us to begin with. We have no concrete sense of what it means to experience Christ living in and working through us. We still feel that it is our familiar “I” who is thinking, feeling, and acting out of our personal knowledge and motivations on a daily basis. Normally, we don’t even think about this distinction between the familiar “I” and the Christic “I” or what it could mean. How can we tell the difference between these two as Saint Paul did? Only when we begin a path of inner development and self-knowledge do we start to sense a growing dichotomy between them as our soul life is stretched out between their boundaries, so to speak, and we feel our experiential content streaming from ‘above’ and from ‘below’. Then the paradigmatic reference becomes:

For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.” (2)

No one wants to be greedy, prideful, slothful, gluttonous, and so forth, but rather the “I” suffers through these conditions passively and habitually. We watch ourselves engaging in greedy, prideful, etc. thoughts and behaviors as if watching a movie. The subconscious soul life makes our “I” dance like a puppet on strings held by shadowy forces that, if we are honest, are beyond our sphere of conscious control. It is not the existence of this subconscious that enslaves the “I” but our ignorance of it. Because of that ignorance, we often convince ourselves, after the fact, that we have been acting freely and rationally in response to sensory events. In reality, sensory events that we experience are often opportunities for deeply subconscious impulses festering within the soul life to come to expression.

For example, we may see some political message on TV and become outraged at the content, assuming that content is the source of our emotional outburst after we have thoroughly evaluated it. We forget to consider how we went out of our way channel surfing until we found something that could act as a vent for the rage that was already there and seeking outer expression. Those vents will start to turn up everywhere in our paths of experience once the sin that dwelleth in us has built enough pressure under the surface of outer life. Outer occasions will be attracted into our conscious vicinity to fulfill the shadowy purposes of the subconscious, like flies to an electric zapper. If we remain unaware of this inner process, as most people are today, then we idolize the outer occasions as the source of all our inner reactions and woes.

That is not to say the outer event is a mere non-factor. If we project our negative emotions and thoughts into an outer event, for example, our interaction with another person, that person can then be influenced negatively at a subtle level and start acting more defensively, mistrustingly, hostile, etc. toward us. Then what began as a mere projection from our inner state comes back to meet us as a reality from the outer world and we feel validated in our reactions, never suspecting our inner activity was complicit in the entire process. These subconscious projective cycles, if we were to become intimately conscious of their existence, could elucidate all manner of social and political problems in modern times. The sins of the World gradually grew out of such cycles conceived passively in ignorance of their existence.

In that sense, our mental, emotional, and physical reactions to the World content are rarely based on dispassionate logical contemplation that we freely choose to engage in, which would always lead back to dimensions of our inner activity. Instead the reactions, and often the content itself (insofar as we were instinctively pulled towards it), emerge as the last event in a chain of inner necessity that unfolded entirely without our conscious participation. We passively witness this last event unfolding as in a dream. To lucidly awaken within, and take more creative responsibility for, this inner chain before it crystallizes in outer content and reactions is to orient toward the superconscious. The latter is a more integrated domain of meaningful soul and spiritual experience that becomes ‘hollowed out’ into the negative images of sensory life.

The method of awakening to the superconscious is not so easy to discern, however. How do we gain knowledge of the superconscious if the concepts we usually use for acquiring knowledge in the sensory domain are themselves the final decaying corpses of its living flow? This may seem like attempting to restore the living reality of an object by piecing together broken shards of the mirror in which the object was once reflected. The anticipated efforts and obstacles are enough to deter most people before they even start. How we can work through the mirror pieces to restore the original image was the subject of a series of essays (spiritual retracing).

Suffice it to say here that our concepts must evolve new functional capacities that make them analogical portals to supersensible experience. The concepts should not only point to the supersensible experience but, at the same time, allow us to live out the supersensible experience they are pointing to. Our finished experiences then start to become portals into the form-free flow of spiritual activity, which also works back to further sublimate the finished experiences of soul life and make them more imaginatively pliable for our spiritual activity. This rhythmic movement gradually brings the superconscious and subconscious into closer alignment and greater coherence. They are gradually understood as polar complements rather than as mutually exclusive. Hopefully what follows will give us a better intuitive sense of what this approach means.

The effort needed to approach the superconscious is in many ways the polar opposite of what we do when acquiring knowledge of fully formed experiences, i.e. the subconscious. If we try to apply our mental and emotional habits from the latter directly to the former, we will quickly become frustrated and also experience fear, shame, and/or hopelessness, perhaps even anger and resentment like we often experience when some physical or personality trait is strongly criticized. It is like we are approaching a spiritual Sun that radiates not only the light and warmth that we normally experience, but also infinitely wise moral judgment blazing so bright that it is impossible to look upon directly. The light and warmth of the superconscious will blind and melt us if we approach it in our passive, unprepared state of existence. In that sense, we don’t approach the superconscious but allow it to approach us.

To get a sense of this difference, we can first listen to the following well-known musical clip. It will help to close our eyes and try to sense how our inner activity reacts to the song and moves along with its musical elements. We don’t need to listen to the whole song but about 30 seconds should suffice.



These are very familiar musical elements; they are well-worn rhythms and melodic progressions of the Romantic era. Our inner activity should feel relatively cozy and comfortable as it flows through these etched musical pathways of experience in the subconscious. It feels like something we can approach directly without further ado; we can simply let loose and relax into the flow. Keeping that experience in mind, we can now listen to the following clip introducing more exotic musical elements (written by a well-known atonal composer) and compare the two. Again, we should close our eyes and sense how our inner activity responds for at least 30 seconds.



That is akin to how the superconscious is experienced from the perspective of the subconscious while the latter is firmly entrenched in its habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. From that perspective, the superconscious is encountered as something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, not fitting in with the etched subconscious pathways. It can become so uncomfortable that we instinctively try to run away from it. As we can imagine, there is hardly an opportunity to let the superconscious approach us if our first instinct is always to flee its presence due to the anticipated unpleasantness and strain of allowing it to cohabitate in our psychic dwelling. That is one of the reasons why we need a wide variety of spiritual exercises that gradually acclimate our inner activity to this unfamiliar domain of superconscious experience.

A brief exercise we can use to inwardly sensitize to this distinction between the superconscious and subconscious is to close our eyes and imagine we have grabbed hold of a steering wheel. Imagine rotating the steering wheel for a few revolutions in one direction and then switching in the other direction. We should focus less on the visual image and more on the inner gestures we are making to rotate the wheel. After doing that for about 10-15 seconds, we can nudge the steering wheel to the left or to the right in a certain pattern, for example, “left-left-right-left-right”. If we were visualizing a steering wheel before, now we can try to let go of the image as much as possible and simply make the imaginative gestures, the ‘thinking-nudges’, without any corresponding image. The point here is to sense, as concretely as possible, the sort of inner movements we are engaged in.

The pattern we choose on this first pass is not based on anything we remember doing before but is entirely improvised on the fly. We couldn’t predict what thinking-nudges would come next in the series based on any past experiences. Now we can ‘reset’ by counting slowly to five, and on the second pass, we should try to replicate the same pattern that we did before. That pattern has receded into memory and become a kind of ‘aura’ that hangs over our activity, like the meaning of a sentence hangs over each word embedded within it, and constrains its gestures. If we don’t perform the same gestures as we did on the first pass, we will distinctly feel, “That’s not what I did before." Now we are experiencing spiritual activity that is constrained by a templated pattern of past activity; it tries to replicate/remember based on the receded context of fully finished experiences.

So, on the first pass, we experience spiritual activity that doesn't know what it's going to do/think next but freely improvises from out of the superconscious. Then this spiritual activity recedes into conscious and subconscious memory and becomes something akin to a habitual constraint (although it is not yet so encrusted in the subconscious as most of the things we normally refer to as ‘habits’). If our patterns of nudges were practically useful for some Earthly task, then it could even become a technical skill after some repeated practice. It is a much more scripted spiritual activity that anticipates its next thinking-nudges simply because it tries to imitate the previous pattern from out of the subconscious. The more we experiment with such inner movements, the more these otherwise abstract differentiations and relationships between 'superconscious' and 'subconscious' will be elucidated.

In the course of life, we should seek to attain a harmonious balance between these two modes of spiritual activity. If we only keep nudging our steering wheel within the superconscious improvisational flow without any reference to the receded context, we will drive off the road into a ditch. That is to say, eventually, our inner activity will become paralyzed and our personality will dissolve (it is the subconscious that individuates our spiritual activity). Imagine that, every time you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pay attention to every single movement of your hands, arms, feet, and legs to reach the intended destination. If your attention lapsed for a single moment, you would freeze in your tracks. That is life in the superconscious - at our current stage of development, nothing on Earth would get done if that kind of permanent attentiveness was necessary for movement.(3)

On the other hand, if we only focus on replicating receded patterns of inner movement - on calculating our next thinking-nudges based on all previous experiences - we will only move in a straight line, accomplishing our routine tasks, and never visit unsuspected and more integrated experiential terrain (it is the superconscious that unites us with other perspectives). We will remain at the mercy of shadowy forces that have constellated our subconscious patterns and therefore never experience true inner freedom. Only through resonance with the superconscious domain of potential can we be gradually liberated from our habitual personality and blaze new trails of experience in mental, emotional, and physical life. An interesting normal-life example of that is bullet chess, where competitors are allotted less than three minutes and therefore must rely more on purely intuitive movements. That fosters an improvisational creativity that would otherwise be stifled by rigidly calculated moves.

In our time, due to the overall course of evolution, the receded context is encrusted to the greatest possible extent. The subconscious is woven from many automated patterns that constrain our spiritual activity within the mental, emotional, and physical spaces of experience. These patterns traditionally act as support for that activity but some of them, particularly the psychic patterns, now also hinder its further development. So, naturally, the most adaptive strategy for further progress is to focus more and more on cultivating the superconscious improvisational capacity by which we explore new supersensible terrain, bringing life and purity into the rigidified and selfish subconscious patterns. We gradually dispense with the crutches of passive sensations, thoughts, emotions, and impulses, and adopt active responsibility for their functions within our soul life.

Kuhlewind (4) wrote:If one tries to organize one's soul with an orientation to health, that is, to form it consciously, then one thing is of great importance. All exercises seek to dismantle the finished human being , habits and well-worn tracks of the life of the soul, and to call into life an unfinished human being capable of improvisation, assigning him his legitimate role. Briefly stated: one seeks to dissolve certain aspects of oneself and to form a real subject, that is, to bring oneself to self-experience instead of self-feeling. These two efforts should be made in balanced fashion, because habits are temporary supports that man needs if his true subject, the I, is not strong enough to always take the reins in hand by itself. On the other hand, exercises to strengthen the I cannot succeed if habits are too strong. In that case exercises aimed at concentrating the attention would only make the habitual man stronger. This is why exercises and techniques must always be directed in both directions.

A key strategy in this respect is to resist bringing subconscious impulses to outer expression. It is that externalization process that crystallizes their fluid elemental energies into fixed and dead forms and, at that point, they are impossible to work with and transform until we are given another opportunity. Each externalization and refusal to take responsibility makes it more and more difficult to begin the necessary work, i.e. what we commonly refer to as ‘procrastination’. For example, when we encounter a sensory event and some well-worn emotion and thought pops into our mind, we can try to resist verbalizing it either inwardly or outwardly, in speech or writing. Speech resides at the threshold of the superconscious and the subconscious, between intuitive meaning and outer perceptions. It partakes simultaneously in our life of thinking, feeling, and will whenever it is actively attended to.

By actively resisting certain impulsive patterns of speech that overtake us when we remain passive, we become more sensitive to the subconscious patterns that are conditioning the experiential flow. This naturally makes us more vigilant and attentive as we discern impulses gradually ‘bubbling up’ from the depths that we can intercept and redirect. We gradually repurpose the elemental energies of these patterns into the archetypal forces that originally birthed them. Then we are no longer at the mercy of our habitual thoughts and emotions but have brought them within the sphere of our conscious activity. This can also be done when we have flashes of insight - we can resist the impulse to immediately verbalize the insight to ourselves or others and rather let them germinate as seeds within our intuitive consciousness until their fruits ripen. (5)

Imagine you are trying to work out a kink in your back and decide to use the foam roller. At first, we need to roll around and search for a good position to apply pressure, but then we stop rolling and relax into that pressure. After imaginatively rolling our spiritual activity through the meaningful landscape and reaching some insight, we can relax into that insight and let the superconscious patiently work out the kinks. These insights will subtly refine themselves through the palette of past experiences and knowledge. In that sense, the subconscious still plays its critical role but is directed from above rather than from below. In freedom and gratitude, we return the insight to the superconscious as a choice offering. Then an entirely new life of the soul gradually dawns; a more expanded and intense life of cognitive feelings and impulses.

The subconscious reaching from below is also characterized by rushed activity, by impulses that seek to consume a lot of experience in a small amount of time. We can call forth its polar opposite in the superconscious by becoming more deliberate with our inner and outer gestures. For example, when eating we can try to quiet the distractions for a few minutes and concentrate on each bite, on the individual tastes and textures. We can start our meal this way before we turn on the TV or log onto YouTube and methodically masticate the food. Our activity will become slower but not less eventful because we are much more present and concentrated within the experiential flow. Every bite will be packed with more intimate and dense meaning. Eating can even become a way of gaining subtle inner knowledge that isn’t quite evident at first, but gradually permeates our inner life. Our cognitive life then begins to extend beyond the neurosensory system to the rhythmic and digestive systems.

An especially potent method of resisting the well-worn tracks of the subconscious is as follows:
GA 227 (2) wrote:In ordinary passive thinking we may be said to accept world events in an altogether slavish way. As I said yesterday: In our very thought-pictures we keep the earlier as the earlier, the later as the later; and when we are watching the course of a play on the stage the first act comes first, then the second, and so on to a possible fifth. But if we can accustom ourselves to picture it all by beginning at the end and going from the fifth act back through the fourth, third, second, to the first, then we break away from the ordinary sequence—we go backwards instead of forwards. But that is not how things happen in the world: we have to strain every nerve to call up from within the force to picture events in reverse. By so doing we free the inner activity of our soul from its customary leading-strings… When possible even the details should be conceived in a backward direction: if you have gone upstairs, picture yourself first on the top step, then on the step below it, and so on backwards down all the stairs.
There are infinitely many similar resistance and concentration exercises that can be practiced throughout the day based on individual considerations. We should always pay attention to the intuitive feedback we receive from such efforts. Pursuing too many at the same time will become counter-productive as we are swamped with free elemental energies that we don’t know how to properly assimilate and channel into productive purposes. Then they become like ‘free radicals’ and we may find ourselves developing even more pathological habits to replace the old ones. Nature abhors a vacuum and if our “I” doesn’t take responsibility for these freed energies, some other beings will. Maintaining a healthy rhythm between the subconscious and superconscious is highly artistic soul work that must be continually refined within evolving circumstances. Each new set of circumstances requires moral intuitions that are kindled anew. If we manage to resist and transform just one impulsive habit, however, we can rest assured that this achievement will also make itself known in other seemingly unrelated domains of our soul life. It will serve as inexhaustible inspiration for our further transmutation efforts.

As we allow the superconscious to flow through us with greater degrees of freedom, new unsuspected domains of thinking and feeling will emerge. Now we have a greater spectrum of finished inner experience for our superconscious activity to draw upon and refine the orientation of its flow. In that sense, our work is simply to clear the tangled and disharmonious paths of the impulsive soul life so that the Grace of the superconscious can more effectively visit and dwell within us, just as John prepared souls before the baptism of Jesus at the river Jordan. We can lend our preparatory efforts from below so that the real transformative work can unfold from above, while our impulsive and arbitrary desires recede further and further into the background.(6) Our receded subconscious context stops being an opaque covering that traps the Light and instead becomes a transparent chalice for the superconscious Sun forces to continually fill with fresh moral intuitions and impulses.

CITATIONS:

(1) Galatians 2:20

(2) Romans 7:19-20

(3) Rudolf Steiner, GA 227 (3)
“Now in the spiritual world nothing is done without attentiveness, for there is no such thing as habit… There, we have to follow with individual attention every smallest step, and even less than a step.”

(4) Kuhlewind, Georg. From Normal to Healthy (pp. 110-111).

(5) Matthew 7:6
“Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.”

(6) John 3:30
“He must increase, but I must decrease.”
"But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge...To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."
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Federica
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by Federica »

I am only now starting reading your article (with much interest). I have a preliminary question: why are your last two threads articles rather than essays?
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by AshvinP »

Federica wrote: Fri Jul 19, 2024 8:45 pm I am only now starting reading your article (with much interest). I have a preliminary question: why are your last two threads articles rather than essays?

It is just to indicate relatively shorter length than the retracing essays.
"But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge...To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by Federica »

Ashvin,

I take the most important point in this summary to be the importance of becoming aware of, and gaining independence from, the etched soul patterns - what has been so far mainly referred to as sympathies, antipathies, likes, dislikes, and the corresponding patterns of becoming they tend to designate for the individual. I strongly agree with that, and am constantly confronted with this situation, in myself and others. This being said, the way the ideas are laid out in this article has raised some questions. I thought I would try to express them concisely rather than discursively. I may elaborate later if appropriate.

"yet not I, but Christ liveth in me"
"Christ living in and working through us"
"Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me"

In these expressions, what is “me”? What is “us”?

Otherly said, having in mind that physical-etheric self-erasure (suicide) is not a shortcut to spiritual development in our times, how far should self-erasure (“not-I”) go within the human being’s supersensible sheaths, and what will be left once all subconscious errors are erased? Is all there is beyond "Christ in me" a cosmic mistake?

The method of awakening to the superconscious is not so easy to discern, however. How do we gain knowledge of the superconscious if the concepts we usually use for acquiring knowledge in the sensory domain are themselves the final decaying corpses of its living flow?

Prior to this, shouldn’t we ask: from within the standard, fully subconscious state of mind, how do we even end up figuring out that we need and want to inquire about methods of awakening? Karmic necessity only? Or is it somewhat too squared to put supraconscious overagainst subconscious with no buffer in between?

That [the second music sample] is akin to how the superconscious is experienced from the perspective of the subconscious while the latter is firmly entrenched in its habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. From that perspective, the superconscious is encountered as something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, not fitting in with the etched subconscious pathways. It can become so uncomfortable that we instinctively try to run away from it.
Here the supposition is made that discomfort is the inevitable emotional response to this music. On what grounds?

So, on the first pass, we experience spiritual activity that doesn't know what it's going to do/think next but freely improvises from out of the superconscious.
Isn’t it most likely from ignorance of the subconscious curvatures?

Speech resides at the threshold of the superconscious and the subconscious, between intuitive meaning and outer perceptions. It partakes simultaneously in our life of thinking, feeling, and will whenever it is actively attended to. By resisting certain impulsive patterns of speech that overtake us when we remain passive, we become active in the flow and therefore become more sensitive to the subconscious patterns that are conditioning it. This naturally makes us more vigilant and attentive, as we discern impulses ‘bubbling up’ from the depths. We gradually repurpose the elemental energies of these patterns into the archetypal forces that originally birthed them. We are no longer passively at the mercy of our habitual thoughts and emotions but have brought them within the sphere of our conscious activity.

If we are at the point of resisting expression, it means the thought has been perceived, it has become conscious - or unconscious, in the way of this article. In any case, the thought has been already impressed in the flow - possibly, but not surely, under the pressure of egotistic impulses. Then how to know what thoughts should be blocked before they are verbalized? If we knew what thoughts are biased by arbitrary soul curvatures, the latter wouldn’t be unknown anymore.

I refer to the non obvious cases here. Naturally, if I have the thought “Let me have my n-th piece of cake tonight” it’s obvious that there is a bias, or sin, that requires correction. Btw, in those cases there’s no value in resisting verbalization, since I can go get more cake regardless of verbalization (perhaps it's even easier without verbalization). Moreover, could it be that the same is true also for all other thoughts? Since they have precipitated already, why not verbalize them? At least they can be processed, and possibly countered (admitting that one has gained an insight that they are egotistic).
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by AshvinP »

Federica wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 3:07 pm Ashvin,

I take the most important point in this summary to be the importance of becoming aware of, and gaining independence from, the etched soul patterns - what has been so far mainly referred to as sympathies, antipathies, likes, dislikes, and the corresponding patterns of becoming they tend to designate for the individual. I strongly agree with that, and am constantly confronted with this situation, in myself and others. This being said, the way the ideas are laid out in this article has raised some questions. I thought I would try to express them concisely rather than discursively. I may elaborate later if appropriate.

"yet not I, but Christ liveth in me"
"Christ living in and working through us"
"Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me"

In these expressions, what is “me”? What is “us”?

Otherly said, having in mind that physical-etheric self-erasure (suicide) is not a shortcut to spiritual development in our times, how far should self-erasure (“not-I”) go within the human being’s supersensible sheaths, and what will be left once all subconscious errors are erased? Is all there is beyond "Christ in me" a cosmic mistake?

Thanks for these questions, Federica. I will first note that I made some additions to the article that may be relevant to your questions. Here are a few of the relevant parts:

This rhythmic movement gradually brings the superconscious and subconscious into closer alignment and greater coherence. They are gradually understood as polar complements rather than as mutually exclusive
... 
In the course of life, we should seek to attain a harmonious balance between these two modes of spiritual activity. If we only keep nudging our steering wheel within the superconscious improvisational flow without any reference to the receded context, we will drive off the road into a ditch. That is to say, eventually, our inner activity will become paralyzed and our personality will dissolve (it is the subconscious that individuates our spiritual activity). Imagine that, every time you wanted to go somewhere, you had to pay attention to every single movement of your hands, arms, feet, and legs to reach the intended destination. If your attention lapsed for a single moment, you would freeze in your tracks. That is life in the superconscious - at our current stage of development, nothing on Earth would get done if that kind of permanent attentiveness was necessary for movement.(3)
...
Imagine you are trying to work out a kink in your back and decide to use the foam roller. At first, we need to roll around and search for a good position to apply pressure, but then we stop rolling and relax into that pressure. After imaginatively rolling our spiritual activity through the meaningful landscape and reaching some insight, we can relax into that insight and let the superconscious patiently work out the kinks. These insights will subtly refine themselves through the palette of past experiences and knowledge. In that sense, the subconscious still plays its critical role but is directed from above rather than from below. In freedom and gratitude, we return the insight to the superconscious as a choice offering. Then an entirely new life of the soul gradually dawns; a more expanded and intense life of cognitive feelings and impulses.

So I was trying to express clearly that there is no 'cosmic mistake' with the rigidified subconscious and it serves a critical function in our development, even today. I also want to make clear there is no rigid boundary between the superconscious and subconscious, they are polar complements, and the greater overlap between them will result precisely from our efforts to understand their relationship intimately and begin the work of sublimating the psychic patterns. By default, we are starting from the most dualized state between them and their Unity will only be realized through our active efforts, which certainly entail an ongoing death and resurrection for the normal personality. 

The soul purification process is a long and drawn-out one over at least several incarnations for most people, but I wanted to also emphasize that the longer we procrastinate, the more difficult it becomes to get started. Once we get started, we realize there is no need to worry about complete self-erasure. Our initial efforts may yield a few stunning results but then we level off and fight for every inch of the soul life, as the adversaries also increase their efforts to conquer this precious territory of the Cosmic landscape. The normal personality that seeks to harmonize with the superconscious Will has its work cut out and, as stated in the article, it is highly artistic work that needs to remain vigilant and flexible, perhaps even strategically 'retreating' at times. 

On the question of "me" and "us", my use of "us" refers to the collective group of "most people" who do not concretely sense any higher "I" living and working through their thinking, feeling, and willing activities.

There are infinitely many similar resistance and concentration exercises that can be practiced throughout the day based on individual considerations. We should always pay attention to the intuitive feedback we receive from such efforts. Pursuing too many at the same time will become counter-productive as we are swamped with free elemental energies that we don’t know how to properly assimilate and channel into productive purposes. Then they become like ‘free radicals’ and we may find ourselves developing even more pathological habits to replace the old ones. Nature abhors a vacuum and if our “I” doesn’t take responsibility for these freed energies, some other beings will. Maintaining a healthy rhythm between the subconscious and superconscious is highly artistic soul work that must be continually refined within evolving circumstances. Each new set of circumstances requires moral intuitions that are kindled anew. If we manage to resist and transform just one impulsive habit, however, we can rest assured that this achievement will also make itself known in other seemingly unrelated domains of our soul life. It will serve as inexhaustible inspiration for our further transmutation efforts.
Federica wrote:
The method of awakening to the superconscious is not so easy to discern, however. How do we gain knowledge of the superconscious if the concepts we usually use for acquiring knowledge in the sensory domain are themselves the final decaying corpses of its living flow?

Prior to this, shouldn’t we ask: from within the standard, fully subconscious state of mind, how do we even end up figuring out that we need and want to inquire about methods of awakening? Karmic necessity only? Or is it somewhat too squared to put supraconscious overagainst subconscious with no buffer in between?

It seems to me you are asking how we figure out that the default materialistic mindset is flawed and we need to pursue spiritual interests. If that's so, then I can only say that I am assuming people who end up reading the article have already made that decision. In any case, I don't plan to make the case for why pursuing deeper spiritual interests is necessary at this time for anyone who values freedom and moral action. I would say that it is mostly a matter of karmic destiny that leads us to such a threshold of awakening.

If not, then maybe you can elaborate.

Federica wrote:
That [the second music sample] is akin to how the superconscious is experienced from the perspective of the subconscious while the latter is firmly entrenched in its habitual patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting. From that perspective, the superconscious is encountered as something unfamiliar and uncomfortable, not fitting in with the etched subconscious pathways. It can become so uncomfortable that we instinctively try to run away from it.
Here the supposition is made that discomfort is the inevitable emotional response to this music. On what grounds?

I wasn't supposing that it would be for all people, but my educated guess was that most would experience it similarly to how I did if they tried to pay attention to the inner movements. For those people, it will serve as a decent illustration of the underlying principle - "The love of God is the fire of hell for the sinner.” For those who don't feel the same inner response, it won't be a great illustration for them, but hopefully they can orient to the principle from the other discussion in the article.

Federica wrote:
So, on the first pass, we experience spiritual activity that doesn't know what it's going to do/think next but freely improvises from out of the superconscious.
Isn’t it most likely from ignorance of the subconscious curvatures?

That's a good question. We certainly don't have complete knowledge of what factors may be at work to influence our 'improv' at any given time. I could have emphasized more that subconscious patterns are always at play. I mentioned it briefly in the new part quoted above - "In that sense, the subconscious still plays its critical role but is directed from above rather than from below."

The key question is how we are trying to utilize the subconscious patterns - is it in a mostly selfish or more selfless way? In other words, when we are fixed on the past and want to only calculate our next steps from past experiences, it is often tied to selfish impulses such as indolence, arrogance, pride, etc. Basically, it is the TM fallacy - we want to hover above all experiences and encompass them as something easily surveyable that our intellect can manipulate. That is what we can call spiritual activity that moves from 'out of the subconscious'. On the other hand, if we are willing to release our tight grasp over experiences and insights to some extent, to offer our inner activity back to the Divine improv in humility and gratitude, then we are cultivating more selfless soul qualities. These are the qualities that are born 'out of the superconscious'.

Federica wrote:
Speech resides at the threshold of the superconscious and the subconscious, between intuitive meaning and outer perceptions. It partakes simultaneously in our life of thinking, feeling, and will whenever it is actively attended to. By resisting certain impulsive patterns of speech that overtake us when we remain passive, we become active in the flow and therefore become more sensitive to the subconscious patterns that are conditioning it. This naturally makes us more vigilant and attentive, as we discern impulses ‘bubbling up’ from the depths. We gradually repurpose the elemental energies of these patterns into the archetypal forces that originally birthed them. We are no longer passively at the mercy of our habitual thoughts and emotions but have brought them within the sphere of our conscious activity.

If we are at the point of resisting expression, it means the thought has been perceived, it has become conscious - or unconscious, in the way of this article. In any case, the thought has been already impressed in the flow - possibly, but not surely, under the pressure of egotistic impulses. Then how to know what thoughts should be blocked before they are verbalized? If we knew what thoughts are biased by arbitrary soul curvatures, the latter wouldn’t be unknown anymore.

I refer to the non obvious cases here. Naturally, if I have the thought “Let me have my n-th piece of cake tonight” it’s obvious that there is a bias, or sin, that requires correction. Btw, in those cases there’s no value in resisting verbalization, since I can go get more cake regardless of verbalization (perhaps it's even easier without verbalization). Moreover, could it be that the same is true also for all other thoughts? Since they have precipitated already, why not verbalize them? At least they can be processed, and possibly countered (admitting that one has gained an insight that they are egotistic).

This is also a good point. Some of this work only becomes possible once we have already delaminated the soul life enough to have a clear intuitive sense of when our "I" is being impulsively led to speech. Without that initial work, we may not even make much of a distinction between impulsive speech and fully conscious speech (similar to how we don't between the familiar "I" and Christic "I"). It is kind of a catch 22, because that sensitivity also comes from the resistance efforts, whether in meditation, spiritual study, or these other types of exercises. We need some intuitive sensitivity to how certain forms of speech almost leave us no choice but to express it, and there is only a tiny 'gap' for our "I" to insert itself and resist the speech. After resisting the speech and calmly evaluating it, we could then still choose to express it, and then it would be fully conscious. 

An example would be if we are watching sports, a political debate, or some other event that normally triggers our emotional life and leads us to blurt out things that come to mind. If that's something we have become sensitive to as an issue through inner development, then instead of avoiding the sporting event, we could watch it but try to resist letting the impulsive speech come to outer expression. This is much more difficult than it sounds! Even if we are quite unsuccessful at first, we will get real concrete feedback as to how there is another layer of soul life weaving beneath our normal thinking consciousness and steering it. That layer is also there in practically all other daily situations except, for one reason or another, it may be less evident, more 'papered over' by our rational intellect. 

I think I also mentioned my cat before. If she's not sleeping, there's hardly a physical gesture she makes that doesn't trigger my emotional life and bubble up as an impulsive speech pattern. I can sense clearly that these are impulsive patterns, through and through, and I have the hardest time intercepting and redirecting them. In that sense, I am grateful to her for giving me plenty of opportunities to take greater hold of the subconscious and clear the tangled paths. 

There is a significant spiritual difference between having some intuition/thought, verbalizing it in speech (it is much harder to resist inner speech than outer speech), or expressing it through a physical deed. For ex., consider the following:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA093a/E ... 11p01.html
GA 93a wrote:If we wish to understand the whole way in which Karma works, a subject we are now going to approach, we must be able to form a conception of what is called Nirvana. Very much is involved in a complete understanding of the significance of Nirvana, but we will try to gain an introductory idea of it.

In any action carried out by man there is in fact very little present of anything that might be called freedom, for man is actually the result of his deeds in the past. This is the case in the widest sense of the word. So that he should become what he is, all the kingdoms of Nature had first to be created. The mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, which he once had within him, he gradually put out from himself. To this must be added what he acquired in the time following the first third of the Lemurian race. All that he carried out in the way of deeds, all that he experienced in his soul as thoughts and feelings, belong also to his past, become his Karma. We look into a past which at the same time shows its results in the forms around us. The whole of our surrounding world is nothing other than the result of past deeds. In this same way man is now making preparation for what will happen in the future. 
...
Action arising out of intuition comes out of Nothingness [superconscious]. Whoever would attain to this must become completely free from Karma [subconscious]. He can then no longer draw his impulses from the usual sources. The mood which then comes over him is that of divine bliss, a state which is also called Nirvana....We thus differentiate three stages. The first consists in external deeds brought about through the hands; the second is what is brought about through the spoken word, and the third by what is brought about through thought. And thought is something far more comprehensive than the spoken word. Thought is no longer, as with language, different among the different peoples, but belongs to the whole of humanity.

So man ascends from actions, through words to thoughts, and in this way he becomes an ever more universal being. There is no general norm for action, no logic for deeds. Everyone must act for himself. But there is no purely personal speech. Speech belongs to a group. Thought on the other hand belongs to the whole of humanity. Here we have a progression from the particular to the universal in these three human stages: deeds, words, thoughts.

In so far as he expresses himself in the outer world, man leaves behind him traces of the spirit of the whole of humanity as thought; the traces of a human group soul as word; traces of his separate human being as actions. This is most clearly expressed by pointing out the effects of what is brought about through these three stages. An individuality is like a thread which goes through all forms of personal manifestation in the different incarnations. An individuality creates for further incarnations. A people as a speech-community creates for new peoples. Humanity creates for a new humanity, for a new planet. What a man does for himself personally has significance for his next incarnation; what a nation speaks has significance for the next sub-race, for the next incarnation of a people. And when a world will be there in which our entire thinking no longer lives purely as thinking, but makes its appearance in the results of this, thinking, then a new humanity, that is to say, a new planet, comes into being. Without these great perspectives we cannot understand Karma.

This may be confusing because it seems to indicate that thoughts have much more far-reaching significance than speech and deeds and therefore it would be OK to verbalize and physicalize impulsive/harmful thoughts once we have them, because the damage is already done. This is true in one way, but I think we can also consider how it is much easier to compensate for harmful thoughts than it is for harmful speech or deeds. If I am thinking about eating another slice of cake and go no further, I can compensate for this by intercepting the thought, remembering a higher vow not to partake in impulsive desires, and thinking about something else instead. But if I verbalize this thought to others, then it has become something working in the World and I may feel more attached to it. It may also influence those to whom it was verbalized in negative ways. It is more difficult to compensate for that because the effects have become immediately non-localized. And if I go ahead and eat the cake slice, now I have introduced the thought into objective nature (my physical-etheric bodies and so on) and it will be even more difficult to compensate. For some more extreme speech and deeds, we may need to wait for our next incarnation.

So these thoughts will be the foundation for a new planet and humanity, but they are also more directly pliable for our spiritual activity than impressed speech and deeds, therefore easier to compensate. The latter are more durable and will become the overarching context in which our future thinking unfolds as we work on building the new humanity. We should remember that the archetype for this new humanity is already present as potential within the superconscious, as an Idea of the progressive hierarchies, so the main thrust of our task is to harmonize our thoughts, speech, and deeds with the ideal streamlines so the Idea can come to realization.

The core point for this article, though, was simply the repurposing of elemental energies that otherwise go into impulsive thoughts, speech, and deeds. We can imagine that this repurposing will be more potent if we are dealing with the energies invested in physical deeds and speech in comparison to thoughts. The energy of the latter is already embedded in the former and then some. Speech and deeds also consume deeper emotional and life energies. Our thoughts that have been imbued with the repurposed emotional and life energies will be much more productive in establishing the ideal foundation of Jupiter.
"But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge...To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by Federica »

AshvinP wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 5:45 pm ...

I’am afraid my attempt to be concise hasn’t worked well. In the first question, I considered “me” and “us” to indicate approximately the same thing and my question was not about that. I was looking beyond the horizon of this life: once the distortions are fully eliminated from the soul, so that one can say “not I but Christ in me” what would that “me” be then? Will there be anything left of “me” then? I asked this question before, but this is still what I struggle with. I have no difficulty imagining an immaterial existence, coexistence, but working towards complete individual extinction does appear unbearable. That the work goes slowly, so there’s no risk of succeeding with much soul transformation in this life, I know already, including from my own efforts (I also see it more clearly in others). Knowing that it takes various incarnations is not very helpful, though, to understand "Christ in me". This is connected with the question of telos as well. I already asked it in that form too, but I didn’t find much satisfaction in the replies either. Well, I guess sometimes one needs to live with a question for long, until perhaps some perspectives open up, as one remains actively listening. In the meantime, thank you for the extensive reply, and all the previous ones as well.
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by AshvinP »

Federica wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 9:43 pm
AshvinP wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 5:45 pm ...

I’am afraid my attempt to be concise hasn’t worked well. In the first question, I considered “me” and “us” to indicate approximately the same thing and my question was not about that. I was looking beyond the horizon of this life: once the distortions are fully eliminated from the soul, so that one can say “not I but Christ in me” what would that “me” be then? Will there be anything left of “me” then? I asked this question before, but this is still what I struggle with. I have no difficulty imagining an immaterial existence, coexistence, but working towards complete individual extinction does appear unbearable. That the work goes slowly, so there’s no risk of succeeding with much soul transformation in this life, I know already, including from my own efforts (I also see it more clearly in others). Knowing that it takes various incarnations is not very helpful, though, to understand "Christ in me". This is connected with the question of telos as well. I already asked it in that form too, but I didn’t find much satisfaction in the replies either. Well, I guess sometimes one needs to live with a question for long, until perhaps some perspectives open up, as one remains actively listening. In the meantime, thank you for the extensive reply, and all the previous ones as well.

Ok, I understand now.

There is no individual extinction. "Christ in me" is exactly what allows us to preserve our individuality as we integrate with the Cosmic hierarchies. The "me" will become Spirit Self, Life Spirit, Spirit Man, i.e. the fully transformed astral, etheric, and physical bodies. Without the Christ impulse of Love (which is first expressed in our living thinking), reintegration with the Cosmos would mean the cessation of our Earthly personality because it is simply too impure to exist and be creative in the spiritual worlds that are responsible for planetary destinies. The Christ impulse provides the opportunity to gradually purify and transmute the Earthly personality through our free and fully conscious efforts over the upcoming epochs and ages. The massive transformation that Jesus went through over the span of a few years - the temptations, sacrifices, loving deeds, etc. - to culminate in the Resurrection Body will be spread out over a much 'longer' time for us (in terms of our current temporal perspective).

That begins with becoming receptive in our TFW to his ongoing sacrificial deeds. All of PoF, higher cognition, spiritual science, etc. can be understood as a means of strengthening our receptivity so we can draw new cognitive-moral forces from the superconscious that reveal the true Cosmic meaning of our Earthly "I", the interfering patterns of superconscious activity that comprise our normal sense of "I" but are merged together. It is these forces that actually allow us to remain a differentiated individuality within the spheres after death. In ancient times, we could sort of 'borrow' these forces from the higher hierarchies but now Christ has made it so that we can bring them ourselves if we develop them during life. To draw on these forces during life we need to actively surrender our purely personal thoughts, emotions, wishes, desires, etc. so that we can resonate more with the transpersonal meaning of Cosmic life, where our spiritual activity weaves in the destines of entire nations and kingdoms. Of course, that is very abstract and spiritual science practically fills the details for how exactly this process will unfold by which the Earthly personality is fully reconciled with the higher individuality, the 'Monad' that moves from incarnation to incarnation. For example:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA102/En ... 24p01.html
So there were Spirits of the Rotation of Time who guided progressive incarnations—that which passes as individuality through all the different incarnations; and there were Spirits of Love under the guidance of the Christ-Principle who so prepare this individuality that the personality can little by little go over into a Kingdom of Love. If we would characterize the great ideal that hovers before us as a Kingdom of Love we can do so in the following way.

In the widest circles today the radical error is still circulated that the well-being of a single personality is possible without the well-being of all others on the earth. Although men may not admit that directly, yet in practice our modern life is based on the fact that the individual lives at the cost of others and it is a widespread belief that the welfare of the one is independent of the welfare of the others. Future evolution will bring about the full community of the spirit, that is, on Jupiter the belief will begin to prevail that there is no health and happiness of the one without the health and happiness of all the rest, and indeed to an equal degree. Christianity prepares this conception and it is there in order to prepare it. A community arose at first through the love that was bound to the blood, and in this way sheer egotism was overcome. The mission of Christianity is now to kindle in man the love that is no longer bound to the blood—that is, that men learn to find the pure love, where the well-being of the one cannot possibly be conceived without the well-being of the other. Anything else is no real Christianity. In this way we can characterize the evolution of man to a higher stage. But the advance of evolution to such a stage occurs in cycles, not in continuity.

From a more phenomenological perspective on the cooperative superconscious "I" existence, this post from Cleric was quite helpful for me:

As explained in the lecture, differentiating ourselves is only the first step. Then we have to begin making sense of our new spiritual environment. I guess it will be very difficult to understand what it means that we 'obliterate thoughts and then beings approach us'. These things can become clear only gradually. The most important thing is that this 'approaching' has nothing to do with the approaching we know through the senses (when for example we see with our eyes a human approaching us). It is precisely this kind of images that we need to obliterate. Then the approaching of the being happens in our own being, when our intuitive spiritual activity resonates with that of the other being. In other words, to know another being after death (or in higher cognition through Inspiration and Intuition) we have to allow it to think through us, our "I" has to dance with the activity of the other "I", just like we can allow another person to be the leading partner in a dance. The great difference is that this leading doesn't impress in us as some perceptible spiritual phenomena (as it is in our Earthly state but also in the Imaginative) but has to be accommodated in our innermost being.

And also especially this one:

Imagine that you are a mathematician and you work in a team with other colleagues on a complicated problem. Now imagine that you’re so engrossed in this problem that you forget the surrounding world, you forget your bodily needs, your perceptions, your Earthly desires. Now the meaning of the mathematical ideas is your whole world. They are not simply ideas in your mind but the ideas are the structure of that world and your own being. To solve the problem is to find a specific configuration of your own ideal form. However, just when you think that you have found the solution form, you see certain imperfections and through them a whole wider ideal world confronts you and now your form has to solve for these new ideal dimensions too.

Now imagine that this inner space is not at all simple and uniform but complicated language-like hierarchy. You feel yourself to be a unity in this world not because you have a body but because your being is like an idea that grows and evolves. Your idea-being is not your own property but is itself part of the world. Imagine that as a mathematician you fully identify with your work. Theories are being developed, they grow, they reach dead ends, essential extract is produced from which new ideal growth begins. You have to imagine that you're not an ego that thinks this theory and takes pride in it (probably expecting a Nobel prize) but the theory is what you are. Developing the theory is to expand your own being, to discover its degrees of freedom, how it stands within its ideal mathematical constraints and how it can transform them.

You transform through these ideal states and understand that your colleagues are also present in this structure. They also work on the same problem. The problem is the Cosmic Puzzle. It’s not simply that we’re ‘here’ and think about the puzzle ‘there’ on the laboratory table but our own being is part of the structure of the puzzle, thus thinking about the problem is in itself movement of its parts. When the colleagues think, this is movement of the parts too. So it’s not just a mental task, it’s rather as if we have to dance together, except that every movement is also meaningful, just like the movements of the larynx are expressions of meaning. Like in a choir that we don't see, we can't say one colleague is here, another is there – we live in the meaningful interference of voices – this is the structure of reality. They sound from every point in space, so to speak. The 'theory' that we feel ourselves to be, would never exist as such, if those other voices were not sounding. They give us our ideal structure and we sound back into theirs. We're like communicating vessels, we have to dance together in order to develop our theory.

In this sense, our whole being is experienced as this 'theory' that grows and which tries to encompass, to become the solution of the Cosmic Puzzle. This is why we speak of a unique perspective within this infinite ideal world. The way our solution-being develops is only one of infinitely many possible.

The ideal movements of that reality feel coherent, in the same way the speech and gestures of a reasonable person feel coherent – we feel behind them a living being that understands its existence and seeks to unfold it creatively. This is what we feel from all sides in the ideal world. Everything results from creative and meaningful activity. That’s why in esoteric traditions the spiritual world is most often compared to speech. That’s why we speak of the Word, the Logos. This doesn’t mean that everything is only of sound-like character. Not in the least. It is a full-spectrum world which contains the ideal potential for color, sound, aroma and things which we can’t even conceive in our ordinary consciousness. Yet the reason initiates speak of Cosmic speech is because this most clearly conveys the fact that every phenomenon is an expression of meaningful spiritual activity, just like our human speech is.

We don’t have private life in the sense that the evolving idea that we are, doesn't have personal pains and pleasures. We have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to lie about, nothing that we desire for ourselves only – in short, anything that can live in a darkened soul enclosure. The mood in this ideal world is one of energetic creative work, where this Cosmic dance, this solving of the Cosmic puzzle – which is our own spiritual fabric – is our greatest joy, greatest scientific challenge, the greatest source of inspiration, the greatest artistic creation, the greatest benefactor for all existence.
"But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge...To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by Federica »

AshvinP wrote: Sun Jul 21, 2024 12:19 am
Federica wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 9:43 pm
AshvinP wrote: Sat Jul 20, 2024 5:45 pm ...

I’am afraid my attempt to be concise hasn’t worked well. In the first question, I considered “me” and “us” to indicate approximately the same thing and my question was not about that. I was looking beyond the horizon of this life: once the distortions are fully eliminated from the soul, so that one can say “not I but Christ in me” what would that “me” be then? Will there be anything left of “me” then? I asked this question before, but this is still what I struggle with. I have no difficulty imagining an immaterial existence, coexistence, but working towards complete individual extinction does appear unbearable. That the work goes slowly, so there’s no risk of succeeding with much soul transformation in this life, I know already, including from my own efforts (I also see it more clearly in others). Knowing that it takes various incarnations is not very helpful, though, to understand "Christ in me". This is connected with the question of telos as well. I already asked it in that form too, but I didn’t find much satisfaction in the replies either. Well, I guess sometimes one needs to live with a question for long, until perhaps some perspectives open up, as one remains actively listening. In the meantime, thank you for the extensive reply, and all the previous ones as well.

Ok, I understand now.

There is no individual extinction. "Christ in me" is exactly what allows us to preserve our individuality as we integrate with the Cosmic hierarchies. The "me" will become Spirit Self, Life Spirit, Spirit Man, i.e. the fully transformed astral, etheric, and physical bodies. Without the Christ impulse of Love (which is first expressed in our living thinking), reintegration with the Cosmos would mean the cessation of our Earthly personality because it is simply too impure to exist and be creative in the spiritual worlds that are responsible for planetary destinies. The Christ impulse provides the opportunity to gradually purify and transmute the Earthly personality through our free and fully conscious efforts over the upcoming epochs and ages. The massive transformation that Jesus went through over the span of a few years - the temptations, sacrifices, loving deeds, etc. - to culminate in the Resurrection Body will be spread out over a much 'longer' time for us (in terms of our current temporal perspective).

That begins with becoming receptive in our TFW to his ongoing sacrificial deeds. All of PoF, higher cognition, spiritual science, etc. can be understood as a means of strengthening our receptivity so we can draw new cognitive-moral forces from the superconscious that reveal the true Cosmic meaning of our Earthly "I", the interfering patterns of superconscious activity that comprise our normal sense of "I" but are merged together. It is these forces that actually allow us to remain a differentiated individuality within the spheres after death. In ancient times, we could sort of 'borrow' these forces from the higher hierarchies but now Christ has made it so that we can bring them ourselves if we develop them during life. To draw on these forces during life we need to actively surrender our purely personal thoughts, emotions, wishes, desires, etc. so that we can resonate more with the transpersonal meaning of Cosmic life, where our spiritual activity weaves in the destines of entire nations and kingdoms. Of course, that is very abstract and spiritual science practically fills the details for how exactly this process will unfold by which the Earthly personality is fully reconciled with the higher individuality, the 'Monad' that moves from incarnation to incarnation. For example:

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA102/En ... 24p01.html
So there were Spirits of the Rotation of Time who guided progressive incarnations—that which passes as individuality through all the different incarnations; and there were Spirits of Love under the guidance of the Christ-Principle who so prepare this individuality that the personality can little by little go over into a Kingdom of Love. If we would characterize the great ideal that hovers before us as a Kingdom of Love we can do so in the following way.

In the widest circles today the radical error is still circulated that the well-being of a single personality is possible without the well-being of all others on the earth. Although men may not admit that directly, yet in practice our modern life is based on the fact that the individual lives at the cost of others and it is a widespread belief that the welfare of the one is independent of the welfare of the others. Future evolution will bring about the full community of the spirit, that is, on Jupiter the belief will begin to prevail that there is no health and happiness of the one without the health and happiness of all the rest, and indeed to an equal degree. Christianity prepares this conception and it is there in order to prepare it. A community arose at first through the love that was bound to the blood, and in this way sheer egotism was overcome. The mission of Christianity is now to kindle in man the love that is no longer bound to the blood—that is, that men learn to find the pure love, where the well-being of the one cannot possibly be conceived without the well-being of the other. Anything else is no real Christianity. In this way we can characterize the evolution of man to a higher stage. But the advance of evolution to such a stage occurs in cycles, not in continuity.

From a more phenomenological perspective on the cooperative superconscious "I" existence, this post from Cleric was quite helpful for me:

As explained in the lecture, differentiating ourselves is only the first step. Then we have to begin making sense of our new spiritual environment. I guess it will be very difficult to understand what it means that we 'obliterate thoughts and then beings approach us'. These things can become clear only gradually. The most important thing is that this 'approaching' has nothing to do with the approaching we know through the senses (when for example we see with our eyes a human approaching us). It is precisely this kind of images that we need to obliterate. Then the approaching of the being happens in our own being, when our intuitive spiritual activity resonates with that of the other being. In other words, to know another being after death (or in higher cognition through Inspiration and Intuition) we have to allow it to think through us, our "I" has to dance with the activity of the other "I", just like we can allow another person to be the leading partner in a dance. The great difference is that this leading doesn't impress in us as some perceptible spiritual phenomena (as it is in our Earthly state but also in the Imaginative) but has to be accommodated in our innermost being.

And also especially this one:

Imagine that you are a mathematician and you work in a team with other colleagues on a complicated problem. Now imagine that you’re so engrossed in this problem that you forget the surrounding world, you forget your bodily needs, your perceptions, your Earthly desires. Now the meaning of the mathematical ideas is your whole world. They are not simply ideas in your mind but the ideas are the structure of that world and your own being. To solve the problem is to find a specific configuration of your own ideal form. However, just when you think that you have found the solution form, you see certain imperfections and through them a whole wider ideal world confronts you and now your form has to solve for these new ideal dimensions too.

Now imagine that this inner space is not at all simple and uniform but complicated language-like hierarchy. You feel yourself to be a unity in this world not because you have a body but because your being is like an idea that grows and evolves. Your idea-being is not your own property but is itself part of the world. Imagine that as a mathematician you fully identify with your work. Theories are being developed, they grow, they reach dead ends, essential extract is produced from which new ideal growth begins. You have to imagine that you're not an ego that thinks this theory and takes pride in it (probably expecting a Nobel prize) but the theory is what you are. Developing the theory is to expand your own being, to discover its degrees of freedom, how it stands within its ideal mathematical constraints and how it can transform them.

You transform through these ideal states and understand that your colleagues are also present in this structure. They also work on the same problem. The problem is the Cosmic Puzzle. It’s not simply that we’re ‘here’ and think about the puzzle ‘there’ on the laboratory table but our own being is part of the structure of the puzzle, thus thinking about the problem is in itself movement of its parts. When the colleagues think, this is movement of the parts too. So it’s not just a mental task, it’s rather as if we have to dance together, except that every movement is also meaningful, just like the movements of the larynx are expressions of meaning. Like in a choir that we don't see, we can't say one colleague is here, another is there – we live in the meaningful interference of voices – this is the structure of reality. They sound from every point in space, so to speak. The 'theory' that we feel ourselves to be, would never exist as such, if those other voices were not sounding. They give us our ideal structure and we sound back into theirs. We're like communicating vessels, we have to dance together in order to develop our theory.

In this sense, our whole being is experienced as this 'theory' that grows and which tries to encompass, to become the solution of the Cosmic Puzzle. This is why we speak of a unique perspective within this infinite ideal world. The way our solution-being develops is only one of infinitely many possible.

The ideal movements of that reality feel coherent, in the same way the speech and gestures of a reasonable person feel coherent – we feel behind them a living being that understands its existence and seeks to unfold it creatively. This is what we feel from all sides in the ideal world. Everything results from creative and meaningful activity. That’s why in esoteric traditions the spiritual world is most often compared to speech. That’s why we speak of the Word, the Logos. This doesn’t mean that everything is only of sound-like character. Not in the least. It is a full-spectrum world which contains the ideal potential for color, sound, aroma and things which we can’t even conceive in our ordinary consciousness. Yet the reason initiates speak of Cosmic speech is because this most clearly conveys the fact that every phenomenon is an expression of meaningful spiritual activity, just like our human speech is.

We don’t have private life in the sense that the evolving idea that we are, doesn't have personal pains and pleasures. We have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to lie about, nothing that we desire for ourselves only – in short, anything that can live in a darkened soul enclosure. The mood in this ideal world is one of energetic creative work, where this Cosmic dance, this solving of the Cosmic puzzle – which is our own spiritual fabric – is our greatest joy, greatest scientific challenge, the greatest source of inspiration, the greatest artistic creation, the greatest benefactor for all existence.

Thanks! Yes, I am familiar with these posts, and somewhat also with how Steiner conveys the after death experience. For example in the lecture series Cosmosophy, here from lecture X:
Therefore the sense impressions are only appearance, for the physical body is laid aside. Only so much of the appearance as the I has taken up into itself is borne through the portal of death. The etheric body is also laid aside a short time after death. When that happens, however, our being also lays aside what is between the physical body and the etheric body. This at first dissolves, as we have seen, in the cosmos at large, constituting only the seed for further worlds, but it does not really continue to live together with our human essence after death. Only what has crested upward like waves and has combined itself with the appearance of the senses continues to live. When this is pondered, one can acquire an approximate mental image of what the human being carries through the portal of death.
(...)
Our pictorial mental images, insofar as we have made them our own, we do take with us through death. Our science, our intellectual thinking, all of that we do not take along through death. A person may be a great mathematician, may have myriad geometrical conceptions—all this he lays aside just as he does his physical body. The person may know a great deal about the starry skies and the surface of the earth. Insofar as he has absorbed this knowledge in pallid thoughts it is laid aside at death. If, as a learned botanist, a person crosses a meadow and entertains his theoretical thoughts about the flowers of the meadow, then this is a thought content that fulfills him only here on earth. Only what strikes his eye and is colored by his love for the flowers, what is given human warmth by the union of the pallid thought with the I experience, is carried through death's portal.

The individuality finds its red thread there. But imagining a far-off future is a dizzying exercise. There is only a limited number of incarnations possible in the present epoch of Earth evolution. Then the Earth has two more extensive epochs to traverse, but that Earth, with its humans, will be more like another planet, from the perspective of what is familiar today. Incarnation, if it persists, will also be something very different from what we read in Steiner today, I believe. Perhaps my question is in itself still a very Fifth-epoch question, and what feels unfathomable today will progressively clarify in the future.
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

Post by AshvinP »

Federica wrote: Sun Jul 21, 2024 2:33 pm Thanks! Yes, I am familiar with these posts, and somewhat also with how Steiner conveys the after death experience. For example in the lecture series Cosmosophy, here from lecture X:
Therefore the sense impressions are only appearance, for the physical body is laid aside. Only so much of the appearance as the I has taken up into itself is borne through the portal of death. The etheric body is also laid aside a short time after death. When that happens, however, our being also lays aside what is between the physical body and the etheric body. This at first dissolves, as we have seen, in the cosmos at large, constituting only the seed for further worlds, but it does not really continue to live together with our human essence after death. Only what has crested upward like waves and has combined itself with the appearance of the senses continues to live. When this is pondered, one can acquire an approximate mental image of what the human being carries through the portal of death.
(...)
Our pictorial mental images, insofar as we have made them our own, we do take with us through death. Our science, our intellectual thinking, all of that we do not take along through death. A person may be a great mathematician, may have myriad geometrical conceptions—all this he lays aside just as he does his physical body. The person may know a great deal about the starry skies and the surface of the earth. Insofar as he has absorbed this knowledge in pallid thoughts it is laid aside at death. If, as a learned botanist, a person crosses a meadow and entertains his theoretical thoughts about the flowers of the meadow, then this is a thought content that fulfills him only here on earth. Only what strikes his eye and is colored by his love for the flowers, what is given human warmth by the union of the pallid thought with the I experience, is carried through death's portal.

The individuality finds its red thread there. But imagining a far-off future is a dizzying exercise. There is only a limited number of incarnations possible in the present epoch of Earth evolution. Then the Earth has two more extensive epochs to traverse, but that Earth, with its humans, will be more like another planet, from the perspective of what is familiar today. Incarnation, if it persists, will also be something very different from what we read in Steiner today, I believe. Perhaps my question is in itself still a very Fifth-epoch question, and what feels unfathomable today will progressively clarify in the future.

Thanks, that is a helpful quote.

I mostly understand the perspective you are conveying here. But your questions are exactly the ones we should be asking and, not only asking, but expecting to gain a much better orientation to in this lifetime through our receptivity to the superconscious. In a real sense, we experience the far-off future every night during sleep and especially before birth and after death. The future epochs of Earth life will be the progressive concretization of the more integrated spheres of meaningful experience we journey through across the threshold. More and more of that infinite potential will become objective perceptual reality, the shared Earthly environment. It is true that we will meet insurmountable difficulties if we try to extrapolate any familiar perceptual (spatialized) experience out into these future conditions, but that's exactly why we should develop more resonance with the inner temporal life, the superconscious forces that make possible our normal perceptual activities and content. What Cleric provided above, if we approach it with the necessary inner attention, already provides a dim experience of these far-off futures.

This quote from Steiner was also helpful for me, which is also what Cleric discussed as the 'study-meditate' approach. Actually, this entire lecture series will be very helpful for our orientation if we approach it in that way. I have been listening to them on audio while taking walks and then going back and reading them as well. (Incidentally, I find that audio lectures are not great for the study-meditate approach since we are constantly wandering in our thoughts and missing things, unless we use it as a preliminary introduction before going back and reading through the lectures).

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA227/En ... 21p01.html
GA 227 wrote:In the study of Anthroposophy, a justifiable objection at first can be that the anthroposophical investigation of facts concerning the spiritual worlds depends upon calling up, through the training I have described, deep-lying forces in the human being, before these facts can be reached. Hence it might be said: All those who have not gone through such a development, and have therefore not yet reached the point of perceiving super-sensible facts for themselves, and actually experiencing super-sensible beings, have no means of proving the truth of what is said by the investigator of those worlds. Often, when the spiritual world is spoken of in public and information about it is given, the protest is heard: How should such ideas concern those who cannot yet see into this super-sensible world?

This objection rests on an entirely erroneous idea—the idea that anyone who speaks about the super-sensible worlds is talking of things quite unknown to his listeners. That is not so at all. But there is an important distinction, with regard to this kind of Initiation-knowledge, between what is right today and what was once right in the old days of which I was speaking yesterday.

You will remember how I described the path into the spiritual worlds. I spoke of how it leads us first to a great life-tableau, in which we see the experiences that have become part of our personality during this life on Earth. I went on to speak of how, having progressed from Imaginative-knowledge to that of Inspiration, a man is able, with empty consciousness and in absolute stillness and peace, to survey his pre-earthly life. He is thus led into that world of spiritual deeds which he has passed through between his last death and his recent descent to Earth.

Consider how, before making this descent, every human being has gone through such experiences; there is no-one who has not experienced in its full reality what the spiritual investigator has to tell. And when the investigator clothes in words facts at first unrecognised, he is not appealing to something quite unknown to his hearers but to what everyone has experienced before earthly life. The investigator of the spiritual world is simply evoking people's cosmic memories; and all that he says about the spiritual world is living in the souls of everyone, though in the transition from pre-earthly to earthly life it has been forgotten. In fact, as an investigator of the spiritual world, one is simply recalling to people's memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on Earth a man comes across another human being with whom he remembers experiencing something, twenty years before, which the other man has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident that he himself remembers clearly, he can bring the other man to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life. It is only because people are disinclined to ask themselves seriously whether they find anything in their souls in tune with what is said by the spiritual investigator—it is only because of this feeling of antipathy that they do not probe into their souls deeply enough when hearing or reading what the investigator relates. Hence this is thought to be something of which he alone has knowledge, something incapable of proof. But it can quite well be proved by those who throw off the prejudice arising from the antipathy referred to. For the spiritual investigator is only recalling what has been experienced by each one of us in pre-earthly existence.

I would also be interested to hear what kind of difficulties you meet when approaching something like Cleric's example, i.e. why you feel it to be so 'dizzying' and whether that means it is helpful or unhelpful for your overall intuitive orientation? Not that I don't understand how it could be, and I certainly experience dizziness as well when approaching pure inspired or intuitive life, but I think these are the types of inner states that are very helpful to verbalize outwardly :)
"But knowledge can be investigated in no other way than in the act of knowledge...To know before one knows is as absurd as the wise intention of the scholastic thinker who wanted to learn to swim before he dared go into the water."
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Re: Article: Yet Not I, But the Superconscious-Subconscious that Dwelleth in Me

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AshvinP wrote: Sun Jul 21, 2024 3:17 pm I mostly understand the perspective you are conveying here. But your questions are exactly the ones we should be asking and, not only asking, but expecting to gain a much better orientation to in this lifetime through our receptivity to the superconscious. In a real sense, we experience the far-off future every night during sleep and especially before birth and after death. The future epochs of Earth life will be the progressive concretization of the more integrated spheres of meaningful experience we journey through across the threshold. More and more of that infinite potential will become objective perceptual reality, the shared Earthly environment. It is true that we will meet insurmountable difficulties if we try to extrapolate any familiar perceptual (spatialized) experience out into these future conditions, but that's exactly why we should develop more resonance with the inner temporal life, the superconscious forces that make possible our normal perceptual activities and content. What Cleric provided above, if we approach it with the necessary inner attention, already provides a dim experience of these far-off futures.

This quote from Steiner was also helpful for me, which is also what Cleric discussed as the 'study-meditate' approach. Actually, this entire lecture series will be very helpful for our orientation if we approach it in that way. I have been listening to them on audio while taking walks and then going back and reading them as well. (Incidentally, I find that audio lectures are not great for the study-meditate approach since we are constantly wandering in our thoughts and missing things, unless we use it as a preliminary introduction before going back and reading through the lectures).

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA227/En ... 21p01.html
GA 227 wrote:In the study of Anthroposophy, a justifiable objection at first can be that the anthroposophical investigation of facts concerning the spiritual worlds depends upon calling up, through the training I have described, deep-lying forces in the human being, before these facts can be reached. Hence it might be said: All those who have not gone through such a development, and have therefore not yet reached the point of perceiving super-sensible facts for themselves, and actually experiencing super-sensible beings, have no means of proving the truth of what is said by the investigator of those worlds. Often, when the spiritual world is spoken of in public and information about it is given, the protest is heard: How should such ideas concern those who cannot yet see into this super-sensible world?

This objection rests on an entirely erroneous idea—the idea that anyone who speaks about the super-sensible worlds is talking of things quite unknown to his listeners. That is not so at all. But there is an important distinction, with regard to this kind of Initiation-knowledge, between what is right today and what was once right in the old days of which I was speaking yesterday.

You will remember how I described the path into the spiritual worlds. I spoke of how it leads us first to a great life-tableau, in which we see the experiences that have become part of our personality during this life on Earth. I went on to speak of how, having progressed from Imaginative-knowledge to that of Inspiration, a man is able, with empty consciousness and in absolute stillness and peace, to survey his pre-earthly life. He is thus led into that world of spiritual deeds which he has passed through between his last death and his recent descent to Earth.

Consider how, before making this descent, every human being has gone through such experiences; there is no-one who has not experienced in its full reality what the spiritual investigator has to tell. And when the investigator clothes in words facts at first unrecognised, he is not appealing to something quite unknown to his hearers but to what everyone has experienced before earthly life. The investigator of the spiritual world is simply evoking people's cosmic memories; and all that he says about the spiritual world is living in the souls of everyone, though in the transition from pre-earthly to earthly life it has been forgotten. In fact, as an investigator of the spiritual world, one is simply recalling to people's memories something they have forgotten.

Now imagine that during life on Earth a man comes across another human being with whom he remembers experiencing something, twenty years before, which the other man has completely forgotten. By talking with him, however, about the incident that he himself remembers clearly, he can bring the other man to recall it also. It is just the same process, though on a higher level, when I speak to you about spiritual worlds, the only difference being that pre-earthly experiences are more completely forgotten than those of earthly life. It is only because people are disinclined to ask themselves seriously whether they find anything in their souls in tune with what is said by the spiritual investigator—it is only because of this feeling of antipathy that they do not probe into their souls deeply enough when hearing or reading what the investigator relates. Hence this is thought to be something of which he alone has knowledge, something incapable of proof. But it can quite well be proved by those who throw off the prejudice arising from the antipathy referred to. For the spiritual investigator is only recalling what has been experienced by each one of us in pre-earthly existence.

I would also be interested to hear what kind of difficulties you meet when approaching something like Cleric's example, i.e. why you feel it to be so 'dizzying' and whether that means it is helpful or unhelpful for your overall intuitive orientation? Not that I don't understand how it could be, and I certainly experience dizziness as well when approaching pure inspired or intuitive life, but I think these are the types of inner states that are very helpful to verbalize outwardly :)

For sure, I am constantly living with this and many more questions. I also like to listen to, and then read, lectures, though I am often short of time these days and do that in a fragmented way, unfortunately. I appreciate the enormous work done by Rudolf Steiner Press Audio for that.

Regarding the quoted posts by Cleric, I don't feel they are dizzying :) They are illuminating, but I took them to express something of our experience across the threshold in the present evolutionary phase, rather than in a far-off future, after the end of sexual reproduction, after the Moon has rejoined the Earth. The one difficulty I may have is the one Cleric mentioned: that understanding of those descriptions starts abstract, and is only progressively filled with recognition and intuition. For example, the fact that, across the threshold, understanding some other being requires that we make an ideal place for it in our will - that we obliterate our thoughts, as Steiner says. For now I see this like a retreat from the ideal space, a negative inquiry, with an intention turned towards a particular being or event. In the sense world, the act of getting to know someone or something has the character of inquiry. That is because of space and matter. But in the spiritual world, knowing the activity of another thinker is to withdraw inquisitive intention in relation to that particular movement of activity, so that it can make itself known by inhabiting us, which means that the idea temporary becomes a shared organ, or mode of being. Spiritual activity is not hidden in the folds of matter, so the only barrier to it is our capacity and, within its scope, the openness to become one with that idea. Now, this remains an abstract description, and I hope I will refine this sense, but I don’t have any real difficulty with that.


About verbalizing (I didn't reply before) your examples were of impulsive thoughts and then I agree it's valuable to refrain from verbalizing them, to counteract the impulse directly. But in the case of cold thoughts, maybe appearing in pictures, if the sense is that the thought is unfree, or the effect of undue influences, then I believe it's best to really grab it, verbalize it (to oneself of course, not to others), and process it, maybe even correct it with neutralizing, more free thoughts. For example, a thought that something bad may happen to a dear person, or a thought that is only made up to flatter the ego, or to egotistically protect us from an unpleasant situation, in anticipation. When these thoughts come - as I unfortunately know from direct experience - they are not triggered by sensory events (cat doing funny things, sports on TV,...). They are rather ‘cold’, and I believe those shouldn’t be left thriving in the consciousness. Sometimes they try to hide, but with even moderate vigilance, they can be unmasked (verbalized) and treated.
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