Saving the materialists

[AshvinP]

Yeah right, that’s exactly the right question! I think there are cues to be found in Steiner to approach that.
Surely, a genius wouldn’t need that, but normal thinkers who have Anthroposophy in their karma may be prompted to connect some dots bubbling up from the wealth of living material Steiner gifted us with. That’s how this question came to mind for me: from studying lecture cycles. For example, one connection that could help making the leap across the chasm is by picking up what Steiner suggests about the traceable similarities between the expression of the formative forces in “the thinking that structures the cultural environment” and that which “structures the natural kingdoms”. It’s as if some form of consistency across kingdoms - including man, including all physical systems - could emerge conceptually, as it overarches and constrains the manifestation of these forces in various relatively independent types of being.

To say it bluntly, the common element, the formative principle, can be traced. The earthly worlds are pervaded by one quality of thinking force. Its nature is to be formative, creative. It hits the world through the plant filter, and some types of manifestation take place on the physical plane. It also hits the physical world through the animal filter, and there it flows into the vessels of the animal, with different material fallouts. There are differences, however, some objectively (and recognizable) common element remains. It hits the material plane through the human vessel, too. The same applies to the inanimate world. It’s not only the living. Within each system, the 'sub-vessels' communicate. The living formative forces of earthly thinking find diverse outlets in each kingdom, depending on the specific organization they flow into and animate. These diverse manifestations may seem to form a chasm with each other. But a common element remains detectable, to bridge the chasm to some extent, providing a sense of the pervasiveness of the overarching formative energy.

Thanks Federica, that is a great overview of the spiritual scientific distinctions between the kingdoms. Clearly your intuition in these areas is growing through the lectures.

Certainly, there is a ton of value we can mine from exploring these questions and I would never suggest to declare them impossible and be done with it. The question is where the most value is going to come from, from what direction?

As it turns out, I have been discussing the topic of animal-human distinction with someone (same person as before) in terms of accessible Earthly facts. Just as an example of the kind of discussion that has been ongoing, here is a comment I wrote to him:

I think Ken was pointing to something similar to what you said before - "We have a sort of responsibility to the Divine to recover the original participation the *hard way*". This is what is meant by the human individuating the "I" and starting its work toward Divine Wisdom from the ground-level, from the inside-out, in complete freedom. The animal swims in this Divine Wisdom from birth. The young bird quickly 'learns' to build a nest as a matter of course, the intelligence is drawn directly out of its bodily instincts. Same thing with a spider and its web, the wasp and its nest, the beaver and its dam, etc. There is actually zero chance of failure.

Yet once these core natural skills are acquired, and the animal reaches reproductive age, there's not much more to acquire (unless mediated through *human* training). Some lower animals even die in the act of reproduction for that reason - there is simply no more potential to unfold. This is all reflected in the physical form as well. The head, torso, and limbs of the animal overspecialize to be highly functional in certain Earthly tasks, while the human form remains in a much inferior, plastic state. Many aspects of the human organism remain at a stunted development while the animal continues on. That is because the human organism is oriented toward potential *future* development, i.e. the "I" acquiring new degrees of freedom through inner effort to creatively adapt its bodily form to new kinds of tasks. At the same time, it can redirect bodily energies into the imaginative domain to accomplish tasks which can also transcend the Earthly sphere.

You mentioned fasting before. I am sure you would agree that no animal has the degrees of freedom to voluntarily resist bodily urges, drives, and desires, and to redirect the inner activity that would normally go into digestion, for example, into the imaginative, aesthetic, and moral life. This is no trivial difference only in degree. It all depends on whether we acknowledge that such ideas and ideals are *concrete realities* that can actually transform the course of evolution, working back into its psychic, biological, and even physical foundations. As long as we feel like our imaginative life simply constructs floating superstructures on the "true reality", then this won't make sense and it would be most reasonable to put animals and humans on a plane of equivalence, at best separated by minor degrees. But if we grant that, in our imaginative life freed from mere bodily necessities, we are reconnecting with the Divine Word that originally created Nature (animal, plant, mineral) and imbued it with its Wisdom, then we see how important it is to accurately make these differentiations.

I may also reference some of the interesting facts you outlined if it continues. There is no huge risk in doing so, I would say, and it may stimulate some unsuspected insights. Yet I also know the real obstacle is not in his unfamiliarity with such facts and connections. He has a few times remarked they are interesting but always comes back with ways of explaining around them. The main issue is that the intellect will always find ways of rationalizing its preferred explanation for why these facts we are outlining exist. This has become clear in this and many similar discussions.

For example, most people would end up saying "conceptual energy" is an anthropomorphization of something more fundamental, powerful, creative. The fact that we cannot regrow body parts by implementing the right sequence of thoughts only seems to confirm that we are dealing with orthogonal forces, that conceptual thinking is simply an emergent property of the underlying material-mystical forces and processes. There is no way to 'prove' that this is upside down, that our formative experience of thinking is the most pure (yet aliased) expression of the forces structuring the kingdoms. Especially when much average human thinking is still animalistic, mechanically following psssions and desires, the fact that the energy could be conceptual (intuitive) in its native essence will seem quite absurd.

That only changes when our thinking comes into transformative self-experience and realizes its preferred rationalizations, which would otherwise flow unchecked, are symptoms of deeper soul-spiritual processes and these can be resisted at a deeper scale. Then the phenonemenal facts can be traced more openly and freely to the inner realities they anchor. The only proof of thinking as continuous with the formative forces of Nature is the intimate cognitive experience of how we partake in such a force when condensing and weaving our thoughts by which we discern the distinctions between the Earthly forms and processes. Our thinking must become a creative force for it to recognize itself in Nature.

As we know, every decision we make on a spiritual path as to where to direct our mental energies comes at the expense of other potential avenues of exploration. For us, delving into these topics is not a risk and even a helpful exploration because we are already oriented to how such conceptual connections are only mental scaffolding that we can leverage to refine the inner realities to which they point, which will only be found within the Light and Life of our first-person thinking experience. For others without such orientation, it's possible that the feeling of gaining insight through these overarching conceptual considerations can begin to work counter-productively. Without the benefit of the experiential perspective inversion, it could begin inflating the intellectual balloon on the wrong side of the threshold (as in Cleric's image). Then it becomes more and more difficult to resist-renounce the scaffolding and make efforts to invert through the pinhole. If this person I am discussing with were to be sparked with the insight that there is something worth investigating within this uniquely human creative thinking quality, for example, then I would quickly try to orient the discussion toward phenomenology of spiritual activity. Otherwise the tendency toward more and more elaborate theoretical scaffolding will grow unchecked and the event horizon of real-time thinking will remain the blind spot.

[Cleric]

And I was hoping that, from this large view, spread across the spectrum of the various kingdoms, one could start to get a sense of the common element in the formative energy of thinking, and to see how the human organization by necessity diverts forces away from organical transformation, and toward the works that establish the intellectual and volitional form (soul-spiritual activity) on the physical plane. In this way, the potential for growing new organs with new functions has dried up in man, like a dry river. But the common stamp of the original energy is there. The qualitative character of the transformation is preserved across kingdoms. Similar to how the lizard and the plant regrow a lost organ, asserting their form with high degrees of freedom through functionally plastic activity, human beings pour and use that energetic value primarily in mental picture form. That’s what affirms our human form more distinctively, on the physical plane.

As Steiner says, while we can’t regrow a physical organ out of adjacent tissues, we are indeed able to regrow a lost thought sequence out of an adjacent reasoning or analogical thought train, which we may divert and repurpose, as demanded by the intellectual challenge we are faced with. The interactive generative power supporting each system's contextual form is the common trait across Nature's kingdoms, of what we could perhaps call conceptual energy.

Ashvin pointed above at the danger of taking things in the wrong way. In the most general sense, this can be explained through what we have called the painter's fallacy.

When we seek that common element that runs through all the kingdoms it is very tempting to imagine the formative forces of an unfolding leaf in the way we can will the unfolding of its mental image (basically remembering its visual appearances). One may object that Steiner has given such exercises, yet through them we become acquainted with the organic process of our own human thinking and imagination, this doesn't mean that the true plant-growing forces exist as some Cosmic visual perspective that projects its intents on a lump of matter.

So the gap is actually even greater than many spiritually inclined people imagine, as long as they conceive of World-creation as imagining things into spatial existence and willing their metamorphoses from the side. How to approach, then, the reality of these processes. We can only do that gradually by getting at least some sense of the nature of spiritual activity in our most proximate Imaginative state.

One way we can do this is by trying to feel the different kind of inner effort needed for transforming our soul state. For example, we know that through bio-feedback (for example, appropriate visualization of ECG) it is possible to learn to have some control over our heart pace - something which generally seems impossible for the average human being. The methods for achieving this generally focus on breathing techniques, but if we approach it more broadly we should also work with feelings. For example, if someone says to us "Relax", how do we go about it? Slowing down and deepening our breathing is certainly a starting point but we can also try to relax our feeling-tensions. And this already looks like an impossibility for many people. One simply has no clue what inner activity to perform in order to achieve that. Yet with some effort we can discover such inner degrees of freedom. The most important thing to appreciate here is how this inner activity feels like. When we try to relax our feelings it's not a matter of solving some strictly intellectual puzzle. This doesn't mean that our mental flow has no relevance to morphing our feeling state but only that we can't do that morphing through cold intellectual movements alone. As a matter of fact, our mental flow needs to be resonantly attuned to our feeling effort, for example by trying to visualize something that fits the relaxation intent. Nevertheless, we need to recognize clearly how we use a different scale of inner activity in order to relax. Activity that feels more spread out, as if we try to change our inner atmosphere not by individually manipulating its 'particles' but by holistically heating it up, so to speak.

By becoming more familiar with such inner gestures, we gradually can feel that they can be intuitively steered. As it has been explained before, at that stage we can comprehend much more realistically how our hidden life steers the flow of condensation of inner states. However, these are still mainly psychic (soul) states. Yet, we can already see how they reach deeper into the workings of our bodily life at the organ level. These are not yet the biologically-formative forces but they can modulate the workings of the organs from within. Unfortunately, in our age, these unconscious feeling movements primarily modulate the workings in such a way that they disrupt the proper flow and lead to diseases.

To approach the inner nature of the actual life-building forces we need to go even further toward Inspirative cognition. There we need to be active in an even greater sphere of coherence. Things are becoming much more difficult to describe at this stage because there's even less of our ordinary Earthly life that it can be directly compared to (thus the fact that for the untrained human being the Inspirative state is equivalent to deep sleep).

So we see that the gap is great indeed. We cannot speak of the reality of the formative forces without raising the question of higher forms of consciousness. Thus as Ashvin says, the question is whether one can develop interest first in livingly experimenting with their normal thinking activity and then feeling how deeper soul activity bends the flow of condensation. It's actually not even needed to go very far on the meditative path to grasp these things. Clearly, from these basic experiences one still has no choice but feelingly and intellectually extrapolate toward the even deeper forms of inner activity that animate the formative forces (not to mention those of the mineral world). Yet it is still better to extrapolate in that direction rather than fantasizing the formative forces through the painter's fallacy.

[Federica]

All right I'll put this particular line of exploration on the side for the time being, and go back to my lecture cycles. Thanks for your replies. To conclude - I sometimes listen to random lectures on Dale Brunsvolds channel. I've done it today. It's turned out to be The Karma of Untruthfulness I, Lecture XXV:

"...
On the other hand, the nineteenth century had developed in such a way that those who were scientifically educated had become—for reasons I have often discussed—materialistic thinkers about whom nothing could be done. However, in order to work one's way competently through what came to light at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century through Schelling, Schlegel, Fichte, one does need at least some scientific concepts. There is no way of proceeding without them. The consequence was this peculiar phenomenon: It was not possible to bring about a situation—which would have been desirable—in which a number of scientifically educated people, however small, could have worked out their scientific concepts in such a way that they could have made a bridge to spiritual science. No such people were to be found. This is a difficulty that still exists and of which we must be very much aware.

Supposing we were to approach those who have undergone a scientific education, with the intention of introducing them to Anthroposophy: lawyers, doctors, philologists—not to mention theologians—when they have finished their academic education and reached a certain stage in life at which it is necessary for them, in accordance with life's demands, to make use of what they have absorbed, not to say, have learnt. They then no longer have either the inclination or the mobility to extricate themselves from their concepts and to seek for others. That is why scientifically-educated people are the most inclined to reject Anthroposophy, although it would only be a small step for a modern scientist to build a bridge. But he does not want to do so. It confuses him. What does he need it for? He has learnt what life demands of him and, so he believes, he does not want things which only serve to confuse him and undermine his confidence. It is going to take some considerable time before these people who have gone through the education of their day start to build bridges in any great numbers. We shall have to be patient. It will not come about easily, especially in certain fields.
..."

[Federica]

So we see that the gap is great indeed. We cannot speak of the reality of the formative forces without raising the question of higher forms of consciousness.

Well, we have always said the PoF offers exactly such possibility. There the reasoning unfolds along a philosophical logical path. In a sense, what I was trying to figure is a fully illustrated edition.

[AshvinP]

That is why scientifically-educated people are the most inclined to reject Anthroposophy, although it would only be a small step for a modern scientist to build a bridge. But he does not want to do so. It confuses him. What does he need it for? He has learnt what life demands of him and, so he believes, he does not want things which only serve to confuse him and undermine his confidence. It is going to take some considerable time before these people who have gone through the education of their day start to build bridges in any great numbers. We shall have to be patient. It will not come about easily, especially in certain fields.
..."

Federica, do you think what comes earlier in the lecture is related to this "small step"?

The first third of the twentieth century can be seen as a critical period during which a goodly number of human beings ought to be made aware of the fact that events must be observed in the etheric world which lives all around us, just as much as does the air. We have pointed emphatically to one particular event which must be seen in the etheric world if mankind is not to fall into decadence, and that is the appearance of the Etheric Christ. This is a necessity. Mankind must definitely prepare not to let wither those forces which are already sprouting.

Indeed, we have often said the etheric experience of thinking is only a recursive (meditative) thought's distance away. This is the most proximate state of intuitive clarity to our ordinary thinking. That's why Cleric says one doesn't even need to go too far on the meditative path before the clear contours and direction of the bridge begins to reveal itself. It is certainly a small step, in that sense, in the inward direction.

And this is the direction PoF takes us to as well. We have quoted Steiner before on how PoF should bring us to thinking liberated from the physical into the etheric. He said it was exactly the academic philosophers, like von Hartmann, who failed to grasp this because they treated it like a familiar logical treatise, a series of deductive arguments, inferences, and so forth. I think it was clear for Steiner that the bridge could never be established in this way, which is why he tried something radically different with PoF.

He also presents how the scientific concepts could have been worked out toward that bridge in various lectures, which is a more imaginative, artistic direction, i.e. one that necessarily implicates thinking freed from habitual constraints rooted in sensory conditioning, such that it realizes unsuspected degrees of freedom to weave in and work with supersensible meaning in a concrete way. Then it is understood that the scientific concepts, and the whole course of scientific history, was always tending in this direction even though the modern scientists were mostly unaware.

[Federica]

Federica, do you think what comes earlier in the lecture is related to this "small step"?

The first third of the twentieth century can be seen as a critical period during which a goodly number of human beings ought to be made aware of the fact that events must be observed in the etheric world which lives all around us, just as much as does the air. We have pointed emphatically to one particular event which must be seen in the etheric world if mankind is not to fall into decadence, and that is the appearance of the Etheric Christ. This is a necessity. Mankind must definitely prepare not to let wither those forces which are already sprouting.

Indeed, we have often said the etheric experience of thinking is only a recursive (meditative) thought's distance away. This is the most proximate state of intuitive clarity to our ordinary thinking. That's why Cleric says one doesn't even need to go too far on the meditative path before the clear contours and direction of the bridge begins to reveal itself. It is certainly a small step, in that sense, in the inward direction.

And this is the direction PoF takes us to as well. We have quoted Steiner before on how PoF should bring us to thinking liberated from the physical into the etheric. He said it was exactly the academic philosophers, like von Hartmann, who failed to grasp this because they treated it like a familiar logical treatise, a series of deductive arguments, inferences, and so forth. I think it was clear for Steiner that the bridge could never be established in this way, which is why he tried something radically different with PoF.

He also presents how the scientific concepts could have been worked out toward that bridge in various lectures, which is a more imaginative, artistic direction, i.e. one that necessarily implicates thinking freed from habitual constraints rooted in sensory conditioning, such that it realizes unsuspected degrees of freedom to weave in and work with supersensible meaning in a concrete way. Then it is understood that the scientific concepts, and the whole course of scientific history, was always tending in this direction even though the modern scientists were mostly unaware.

I agree, Ashvin. Yes I think the etheric experience of thinking is related. To repeat your choice of words, this is the realization PoF should *bring us to*, and concepts should be worked out *toward that bridge*.

All I’ve said in this discussion refers to the work toward that bridge, to make scientific concepts less abstract and more real, not to a final method for real understanding of the formative forces.

If one sees the bridge itself as already swept by the gusts of higher cognition, then one may also conceive of a more preliminary bridge, that leads to the more transformative bridge, as in: “He also presents how the scientific concepts could have been worked out *toward* that bridge” : ) If it's a matter of bridge conception, we can synchronize that : )
For me this was about that preliminary part that you call "toward the bridge".

Above, Cleric has spoken of developing a more conscious influence on one's feelings. Another way to summarize what I was trying to explore is helping create a favorable terrain in feeling for more real scientific concepts (even if the feeling must start less consciously than Cleric meant). By paying notice to the pervasive effects of the formative forces (granted, not the real forces themselves) outside the human cranium, one may become more intuitively familiar with the inner environment of the difficult inner shift. My experience in interacting with people is that in general people are stubbornly opposed to change. Therefore, familiarity is an important feeling to bring about, in order to loosen resistence. But it's obviously not easy to find the right conceptual environment for creating that feeling of familiarity, and possibly not as viable as I imagined. I completely recognize that, as your discord discussions suggest.

[Cleric]

I agree, Ashvin. Yes I think the etheric experience of thinking is related. To repeat your choice of words, this is the realization PoF should *bring us to*, and concepts should be worked out *toward that bridge*.

All I’ve said in this discussion refers to the work toward that bridge, to make scientific concepts less abstract and more real, not to a final method for real understanding of the formative forces.

If one sees the bridge itself as already swiped by the gusts of higher cognition, then one may also conceive of a more preliminary bridge, that leads to the more transformative bridge, as in: “He also presents how the scientific concepts could have been worked out *toward* that bridge” : ) If it's a matter of bridge conception, we can synchronize that : )
For me this was about that preliminary part that you call "toward the bridge".

Above, Cleric has spoken of developing a more conscious influence on one's feelings. Another way to summarize what I was trying to explore is helping create a favorable terrain in feeling for more real scientific concepts (even if the feeling must start less consciously than Cleric meant). By paying notice to the pervasive effects of the formative forces (granted, not the real forces themselves) outside the human cranium, one may become more intuitively familiar with the inner environment of the difficult inner shift. My experience in interacting with people is that in general people are stubbornly opposed to change. Therefore, familiarity is an important feeling to bring about, in order to loosen resistence. But it's obviously not easy to find the right conceptual environment for creating that feeling of familiarity, and possibly not as viable as I imagined. I completely recognize that, as your discord discussions suggest.

So there's a gap and a gap. Pushing a button is technically a small-gap-action but various ideal and emotional resistances can make this gap insurmountable. So this is the first thing - to be aware that we are dealing with something that cannot be measured along a single linear scale. This in itself suggests that bridging the gap cannot be a linear recipe that can satisfy everyone. Someone will easily take abstractly the technical side but won't nudge in their deeper soul context. Others may feel an openness to a spiritual outlook but assume that dealing with scientific thoughts is too 'low-level' to be of any value, and so on.

Then we should also be aware that the bridging techniques change over time too. If a century ago it could have been seen as scientific to think of the formative forces as additional fields (like Sheldrake's morphic fields), today such an outlook already becomes detrimental.

We should understand this rightly. It doesn't mean that scientific thinking has reached a point where it can no longer proceed and must take the blind leap into the unknown. Science is at a stagnation point as far as it knowingly or unknowingly tries to preserve the Newtonian mindset - grasping reality as a spatial container with objects and processes. But as we have said many times, most of the discoveries of the twentieth century already provide the means for bridging the gap. I'm repeating myself but if we switch from our mental picture of the spatial universe from the side to the real-time experience of the phenomenological sphere, the gap would be greatly narrowed. This is technically easy. The resistance comes from habits and emotions. And it is precisely here that we shouldn't delude ourselves that we can help by providing a Newtonian-like model of thinking and formative forces (like morphic fields). At this stage this will simply feed the addiction, so to speak.

The shift toward the phenomenological experience is not a big gap. As a matter of fact, especially for the materialist, it should feel that there shouldn't be any gap to begin with. It is mandatory that our phenomenological experience is somehow 1:1 experience of the World state. If one imagines that our subjective experience can have elements that do not correspond to the objective World state, this invites some kind of dualism in the sense that the conscious experience has something in addition to the objective World state and independent of it. Thus, the physicalist should be the first to embrace that the subjective experience is a faithful 'view' of the World state and its metamorphosis. This approach would be resisted not because it seems untrue but only because one doubts that something valuable can be learned from such a direct investigation. It is assumed that there are certain limitations that leave us no other choice but to use the phenomenological experience only to build mental models.

So in a strange sense, today the gap is even more bridged than ever before (I'm speaking of the general stance within the flow of reality, not the deeper experience of the formative forces that require new forms of consciousness). Thus we are facing the inverse problem - how to convince one that there's no need to keep the gap open. If we take someone like BK, who otherwise speaks about parsimony, we can see that at a certain point the progress stops, as if one says "Oh no, this is too parsimonious! We should leave some place for an unresolvable mystery while we are in the Earthly state."

My whole point is that things are complicated because the resistance to reality is powered from different directions. Thus if we are to present scientific ideas that lead into reality, we should also be good psychologists. Simply because otherwise we may be left with the impression that we are not providing an adequate bridge. This may indeed be the case, but in many cases it is the other person who actually resists the closing of the gap, no matter how logical our explanation may be.

For a long time I have been practically obsessed with finding the perfect bridge I imagined that if things are explained well, then one will simply see reality and happily embrace it. I'm grateful for the experiences here on the forum because they have helped me alleviate that obsession. It became obvious that in many cases the more we close the gap in terms of clear conceptual thinking, the more the other party (if they are not willing to experience reality) is likely to fall into irrationality, simply bail out, begin insulting, and so on. So it is up to us to have the pedagogical approach that can understand what kind of gap needs closing.

[Federica]

The shift toward the phenomenological experience is not a big gap. As a matter of fact, especially for the materialist, it should feel that there shouldn't be any gap to begin with. It is mandatory that our phenomenological experience is somehow 1:1 experience of the World state. If one imagines that our subjective experience can have elements that do not correspond to the objective World state, this invites some kind of dualism in the sense that the conscious experience has something in addition to the objective World state and independent of it. Thus, the physicalist should be the first to embrace that the subjective experience is a faithful 'view' of the World state and its metamorphosis. This approach would be resisted not because it seems untrue but only because one doubts that something valuable can be learned from such a direct investigation. It is assumed that there are certain limitations that leave us no other choice but to use the phenomenological experience only to build mental models.

So in a strange sense, today the gap is even more bridged than ever before (I'm speaking of the general stance within the flow of reality, not the deeper experience of the formative forces that require new forms of consciousness). Thus we are facing the inverse problem - how to convince one that there's no need to keep the gap open. If we take someone like BK, who otherwise speaks about parsimony, we can see that at a certain point the progress stops, as if one says "Oh no, this is too parsimonious! We should leave some place for an unresolvable mystery while we are in the Earthly state."

Thank you Cleric. Here I think I understand your points clearly enough. In other words, "science" in "spiritual science" has never been as relevant as it is now, if only the materialist could notice and appreciate that the experiential approach must be maintained all along. If a century ago, scientists were the most likely to reject Anthroposophy, now it should be the contrary. The conventionally religious and the dualists à la BK should be the most repelled, since there's no opening in spiritual science for the unaccounted-for supernatural. In this sense, maybe some of Steiners presentations may have lost efficacy towards certain audiences today, since they were intended for minds of the XIXth century. For example the medicine cycle I'm studying now is incredibly useful for me, but for many others it would probably just "feed the addiction".

And so I wonder about Levin. He's surely not in BKs situation of secretly suffering from blind nature nostalgia, at least not for the same reasons. Then what is his problem? Why is the idea of random universe (another way to say blind nature) still so appealing to him, even with no mystical dispositon, and despite his definite openness to change? Is he by any chance at the polar opposite to BK, lost in extreme fragmentation, that is, the other facet of blind nature? It's almost as if blind nature today can be appealing from two opposite sides, each of them presided by the matching adversarial being...

[Cleric]

Thank you Cleric. Here I think I understand your points clearly enough. In other words, "science" in "spiritual science" has never been as relevant as it is now, if only the materialist could notice and appreciate that the experiential approach must be maintained all along. If a century ago, scientists were the most likely to reject Anthroposophy, now it should be the contrary. The conventionally religious and the dualists à la BK should be the most repelled, since there's no opening in spiritual science for the unaccounted-for supernatural. In this sense, maybe some of Steiners presentations may have lost efficacy towards certain audiences today, since they were intended for minds of the XIXth century.

This is true and even in his own time Steiner was aware of this. For example:

I have already called attention to the fact that the description in my Occult Science of the period of ancient Saturn, as well as that of the following embodiments of our Earth is not only not exhaustive, but that, in a sense, we had to be satisfied (in order not to startle the public, to whom the book is accessible) with clothing the subject in pictures taken from what is near at hand and familiar. The description given there is naturally in no respect incorrect, but it is very deeply immersed in Maya and Illusion; and we must first work our way through the illusion in order to penetrate further into the truth of the matter. For instance, the old Saturn period is described (and this is quite correct within certain limits) as a heavenly body whose essential parts did not consist of what we know as earth, water and air, but of “heat.” So, too, in first speaking of “space,” that also is merely a pictorial description; for, as we saw in the last lecture, “time” itself did not even exist. When we speak of “space” we are speaking pictorially. Of space there was none in our sense on ancient Saturn. And time first came into being there. When we carry our thought back to ancient Saturn we are absolutely in the realm of spaceless eternity.

https://rsarchive.org/Lectures/GA132/En ... 07p01.html

We have spoken about this before, but the advances in twentieth-century physics make for almost literal metaphors for the inner dynamics. They are still artistic symbols, of course, produced by the thinking process that tries to explicate its own contextual depth, but in many respects they are quite direct. The physics landscape in which Steiner had to work was probably the least conducive for spiritual ideas. I was practically all about space, electromagnetic waves, and atoms. Anything we try to express about reality's inner process with these tools can be nothing but a parable.

And so I wonder about Levin. He's surely not in BKs situation of secretly suffering from blind nature nostalgia, at least not for the same reasons. Then what is his problem? Why is the idea of random universe (another way to say blind nature) still so appealing to him, even with no mystical dispositon, and despite his definite openness to change? Is he by any chance at the polar opposite to BK, lost in extreme fragmentation, that is, the other facet of blind nature? It's almost as if blind nature today can be appealing from two opposite sides, each of them presided by the matching adversarial being...

I'm not under the impression that ML is attracted by fragmentation and randomness. As a matter of fact, in his late interviews he regularly speaks about how we should get comfortable with the idea that we could be parts of greater wholes. As we have spoken before, I think that in his case he simply is not willing to question the methods of science. Although he speaks of 'cognition all the way' he seems to believe that our human cognition is largely biologically conditioned and as such we have no choice but to use the intellectual tools (as bestowed by the conditioned framework) and model the other eventual modes of being. Thus one goes on by making intellectual theories and putting them against experiments.

Given that his life revolves around this, it is understandable that he's not eager to explore ideas that may render his approach obsolete. It is possible that in his private explorations he considers the deeper spiritual implications of his ideas. I don't know. As we have spoken, the most worrisome seems to be his 'freedom-from-embodiment' ideal, where human beings become so technologically advanced that they can shape their biological bubble (and thus the cognitive constraints that come with it) in any way they desire. It would be interesting to hear how he harmonizes this with his own idea that we may be integrated into greater unities. I'm not sure what role he sees these greater wholes could be playing (for example, whether they could be directing evolution and we should in fact comprehend and harmonize with their intents).

[AshvinP]

Speaking of Levin, this interview with him and MS is interesting. Clearly he is attracted to the Platonic morphospace of ideal forms with some kind of cognitive agency which plays a role in evolution. For him, the evolutionary process is highly patterned and can never be found contained in physical-sensory content. But, as Cleric says, he wants to discover ways of calculating-computing this ideal space and that necessarily tends toward functional reductionism of spiritual existence to the intellectual plane, and various infernal goals that naturally correspond with the idea that this is the only way forward for individuals pursuing well-being and freedom.