Tomberg and Anthroposophy

[AshvinP]

It seems we are all stressing that the Peter-John poles need to spiral together into greater unity in the 5th-6th epochs, and that this is a rhythmic interplay between esoteric development and the more Earthly 'ground work', emphasized strongly through the Church (which itself should reintegrate its various streams). This is the general agreed upon pattern, which is amply supported by scripture, history, and inner experience. The main dissonance I see in the discussion is what this means in practice at our current stage. If the Petrine RCC does not become an iniatic school of sorts, as Cleric put it, then how exactly is it spiraling together with the John stream? If it remains adamant that only 'eternal truths' are its purview, then where exactly is the rhythmic interplay? There seems to be some hesitance here and a hope that marginal adjustments around the 'edges' of the Church institution will carry forth souls across the threshold with enough force to develop the germinal cognitive faculties in subsequent incarnations. However, I think Cleric presented a very helpful series of images of how each individual soul is tasked with the radical initiatic transformation of Lazarus-John, and is called upon intimately by Christ himself to come forth. The longer such a death and resurrection is delayed, the harder it becomes to remain lucid across the threshold and participate in disentangling the stroboscopic knots of Earthly destinies.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Initiates, of course, were well aware of this tricky situation. Thus, Peter was tasked by Christ to "Feed my lambs". The Church can be thought of as a more experienced diver who navigates the cave system and the other divers follow him, just like the lambs follow the shepherd.

I find all of what you've written to be a wonderful and lucid description, and I resonate with it very much. There's not really anything I'd add to it or change about it. You have a very similar linguistic toolkit as Ashvin, whose work has become quite valuable to me, so it's helpful to hear these things stated in those kinds of terms. You mentioned the "Feed my lambs" line, and as this is one of my favorite sections of John 21 (really the whole chapter is astonishingly profound) I figure it would be a fitting place for me to jump in. The line is of course part of a threefold statement:

Feed my lambs
Tend my sheep
Feed my sheep

These three lines point to a whole world of esoteric facts, not least of which is the fractal epochal progression of the Christ Impulse through history (which we get an early glimpse of in Joachim of Fiore's "three ages of Christianity", for instance). We obviously see a maturation of the flock, as you've indicated, who will be required to fit through an ever narrowing opening. In the early Church, the Eucharist was universally felt to be a true Communion with Christ. As this feeling waned in the inexorable march toward materialism, on one level the "feeding of the lambs" became more of a "tending of the sheep," in the sense that Eucharistic "nourishment" was no longer intensely concentrated in the sacraments of the Mass but had begun to spread out into the intellectual sphere, where nourishment was sought increasingly in personal understanding. The Church tended to the souls experiencing this by baptizing the intellect. On another level, however, the "feeding of the lambs" was at that time still operative but with a slightly different meaning. The collective human organism had matured, but there were still less mature souls who had not caught up. These still needed to be fed as lambs but were in more danger than before, finding themselves increasingly vulnerable among the "wolves" out in the world. As we on one level move into the era of "feed my sheep," an even further sublimation of Eucharistic nourishment will take place (the etheric return). In John 21, Peter and the other apostles depicted haul ashore 153 fish (all the known varieties at the time), where Jesus proceeds to cook them and give them to the disciples to eat. Are these fish not the fertilizing streams that will enter into the Church via John, which will nourish the mature flock supersensibly? All the same, the Eucharistic bread is still there. The feeding of the lambs and the tending of the sheep is still going on while the mature sheep are being fed, as we will always have the poor with us. Are the poor in ever greater danger as Caesar's tax presses down ever more tyrannically upon them? Yes. Do the lambs ultimately need to become mature sheep in order to make it through the narrow passage? Yes. But remove Peter and the lambs are simply devoured.

[Cleric]

Yes. But remove Peter and the lambs are simply devoured.

Of course! There are many overlapping, phase-shifted worldlines of development. I should have emphasized that, but the post would grow. I constantly struggle to write short and concentrated posts, but they regularly seem to inflate as I try to support everything from different sides. Yes, I didn't imply that all sheep are at the narrowing together and that as they pass, Peter's mission is over. As Ashvin noted above: the general picture is in sync; it is in the practical details that we still need to work. I would like to add an example that will hopefully provide a more concrete image of how the life of future humanity and the ecclesiastic relations should change. Unfortunately, I'll probably be able to write that tomorrow. But to prelude the direction I would like to explore: we should always remember that not only the sensory perceived movements of people and objects will change in the future but also the consciousness of man. The worlds will indeed intermingle more and more as we live consciously more and more on both sides.

This is the critical thing that we need to keep in mind at all times. The church of the last two millennia had the main task to guide the souls through life and help them die properly. Let's repeat: the church so far had to arrange the life of the sheep up to the moment of death. The Living Ecclasia of the future will consist of souls that live more and more in both worlds at the same time! This significantly changes everything! I'll try to give an example of why this change is so significant and why we cannot manage the spiritual half of life through a structure similar to the church of today.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

Yes. But remove Peter and the lambs are simply devoured.

Of course! There are many overlapping, phase-shifted worldlines of development. I should have emphasized that, but the post would grow. I constantly struggle to write short and concentrated posts, but they regularly seem to inflate as I try to support everything from different sides. Yes, I didn't imply that all sheep are at the narrowing together and that as they pass, Peter's mission is over. As Ashvin noted above: the general picture is in sync; it is in the practical details that we still need to work. I would like to add an example that will hopefully provide a more concrete image of how the life of future humanity and the ecclesiastic relations should change. Unfortunately, I'll probably be able to write that tomorrow. But to prelude the direction I would like to explore: we should always remember that not only the sensory perceived movements of people and objects will change in the future but also the consciousness of man. The worlds will indeed intermingle more and more as we live consciously more and more on both sides.

This is the critical thing that we need to keep in mind at all times. The church of the last two millennia had the main task to guide the souls through life and help them die properly. Let's repeat: the church so far had to arrange the life of the sheep up to the moment of death. The Living Ecclasia of the future will consist of souls that live more and more in both worlds at the same time! This significantly changes everything! I'll try to give an example of why this change is so significant and why we cannot manage the spiritual half of life through a structure similar to the church of today.

You're right - we most definitely need to account for the evolution of consciousness in our reckonings of the future. I'll look forward to learning of this example you mention.

[Cleric]

You're right - we most definitely need to account for the evolution of consciousness in our reckonings of the future. I'll look forward to learning of this example you mention.

What do people do when they need to solve certain issues that concern larger groups? They arrange a meeting, forum, symposium, summit, and so on. Each individual human being lives in a uniquely aliased perspective of the World flow, which has integrated various life experiences, and certain intuitions have been reached that elucidate these stacked metamorphoses. At the meeting, people symbolically (verbally, graphically, etc.) express certain aspects of their intuition. These symbols are received by others like seeds falling into different kinds of soil, and they evoke corresponding intuitions, agitate sympathetic or antipathetic feelings according to the receiver’s inner constitution. Through iterative exchanges, hopefully, the members develop personal mental images that are elucidated by common intuition – the solution of the problem. Then these mental images should be allowed to guide the expressions of the will.

Such is the nature of most human exchanges, including Church meetings – whether between Church officials or between them and the flock. Yet, all of this takes place in our familiar sensory-intellectual consciousness. We are grounded in the primary flow of reality – the here and now within which the full spectrum metamorphoses frame by frame. Part of this spectrum feels more intimately related to our inner intents and is experienced as spatiotemporally scaled mental images of past and future movie clips of existence (or their symbolic encodings) overlaid on the more independent part of the flow. Through them, and through the context of sympathies and antipathies (which provide a more irrational and often unexamined pushes and pulls in one or another direction), we strive to shape the stream of the moment-by-moment flow, so as to align with longer-term ideal curvature.

As we progress further, hopefully not in the too distant future, as more souls take on seriously the task of inner development, the necessary meditative life will gradually transform our nightlife. Today, we are active through the day (synonymous with the waking sensory-intellectual consciousness, not necessarily the bright part of the day), and we sleep and possibly dream through the night. In the future, nighttime would be like a continuation of our evening meditation. Souls will continue to be active through (initially at least some parts of) the night.

Let’s try to form a picture of what that conscious nightlife might be like. Actually, we do not have to be far advanced to be able to make a quite clear image of this (even though still in more general lines). The nightlife can be very diverse, but we can see how such ‘meetings’ are part of it. Once again, let’s say that there’s something that needs to be collectively solved. The first difference is that there’s no longer mental imaging that is being encoded and communicated to other souls through the indirection of rippling processes in the physical spectrum. Now our whole phenomenal volume is like a single mental image that panoramically reflects the intuited processes within the soul spectrum. The second difference is that at this meeting, we are also conscious of other kinds of participants. To be sure, such participants are present also at every sensory meeting, but normally they evade our consciousness.

We can only understand these things if we hold fast to the fact that everything is experienced from a first-person perspective. The go-to metaphor for this inner experience is the video feedback, which symbolically represents the fact that our first-person experiential state is continuously metamorphosing but in such a way that in every new ‘frame’ of existence we can also intuit the stacked effects of past frames.



Let’s say that in our inner volume, after we have loosened from the suction of the sensory spectrum, we gradually attune to our meeting flow. Effectively, just like in sensory life, the question boils down to, “How should the World flow be bent, such that it aligns with such and such ideal curvatures?” Now, however, we no longer feel as if we are sculpting a private representation of the intended movie of becoming, but instead we feel that our inner volume reflects the actual curvature of the soul streams – the actual streams of destiny.

From within this soul stream, we feel that its contextual aspects are supported by various Intelligences. One of them we may call Archangelic. This general stream is further modulated on a more refined level by Intelligences (Angelic) that are concerned with more concrete ‘bundles’ of human streams or even single streams. Next, we have modulations that emerge from disembodied souls, and then there are also the modulations of the incarnated human beings who are likewise in their nighttime expanded consciousness and attend the meeting.

The critical thing to understand is that we do not see these things as some objective realities. We do not see the modulation streams in the way we see a river with our eyes. We do not see the attending souls as luminous blobs around us. Of course, all of these are valid artistic expressions of this deeper soul life, and they can indeed appear in the Imaginative flow in such a way, but we should always remember that these are not ‘objective’ realities. They are renditions of intuition, specific to our stacked frames of development. We live in the expanded inner space that reflects in unique ways the way the soul-streams of destiny bend. For example, to know the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence, it is not a matter of seeing it from the side as an objective creature as it works with its subtle hands, but of breathing in and out of the first-person streams. As we breathe (zoom) out of more specific perspectives, it is as if we become more conscious of where these concentrically overlaid first-person streams are in phase. The rest, in a sense, ‘cancel out.’ What is in phase is not the elemental content (the phenomenal ‘pixels’) – these are highly specific to each perspective and thus largely cancel out when grasped in their overlaid interference. What we align with is the soul life – the general moods, strivings, and so on – the things which indeed are the shape of the curvature of destiny (at least as far as this soul life is concerned. Obviously, everything is modulated within the even deeper archetypal contextual flows that shape the great epochs, life and the physical flow).

Thus, as we strive to comprehend the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence – which means to align with their intents and the center from within which these intents make coherent sense – we are able to differentiate how the different Intelligences contribute to the total interference. This is also how we recognize the work of our fellow human beings. We know how in ordinary life we can often recognize the imprints of other people. We enter the kitchen, we see the sink full of unwashed dishes, and say, “This can only be the work of Mikey!” Of course, in this case, this is only an intellectual matching, but in the night flow, there are also many other rich features that ‘give away’ the work of other beings. Clearly, this ability for recognition is a matter of individual development. The more interest we have in others, the better we know them, the more we can recognize their specific ‘touch’ within the soul spectrum.

This is the main thing. We do not recognize other beings by seeing their objective countenance but by recognizing their unique contributions to the modulations of the soul flow. This may sound limiting, as if other beings remain remote and ghostly, working from behind some curtains. While this might be the case when our sensitivity is not yet sufficiently developed, later these interactions prove to be far richer and intimate than anything we can experience through the proxy of rippling sensory sensations.

The nature of these ‘meetings’ is such that we do not pre-think what we would like to modulate over the common soul stream, like we may rehearse our speech before we take our place at the pulpit. Our deeper soul activity is in itself an immediate modulating push or pull applied in the World flow. As such, it immediately impresses upon other perspectives. Previously, we have compared this with clay work on a pottery wheel, where there are many invisible hands that simultaneously impress shapes, and we recognize the individual beings through their contribution, through their unique ‘touch’ (of course, not by intellectually analyzing and matching the final imprints but by resonating with the specific movements). To make this analogy more correct, we’ll have to imagine that the movements are contextual and governed by Intelligences at different scales. Thus, our meetings in this state consist of gentle pushes and pulls on the common soul stream, where everything runs in a fine balance between activity and receptivity. When we bend the stream in a certain way, it is like we make an offering; it is like we say, “Here’s the way I suggest this flow of destiny should be curved”. Then we immediately become receptive and see how this push will be received. It might be amplified or resisted. If it is resisted, and if we are able to align with the act of resistance, we also have an intuitive glimpse of why it is resisted, why from that perspective our bent in the flow does not make the best possible sense.

Of course, here we have broken down this process in a transaction-like procedure, simply because our intellect can only approach things in such a palpable way. To make it more realistic, we can imagine how these switches between activity and receptivity alternate faster and faster, thus everything takes the form of a continuous sacred dance. In this way, general flow curvatures are impressed from higher Intelligences, which are in tune with the even more encompassing Divine intentions. As they are experienced through the more differentiated perspectives, each feeds back modulation refinements such that everything can be better aligned with the specifics. This is especially important in the case of humans. Much of the human world, the complicated relations, technologies, and so on, are simply not comprehensible by the higher Intelligences. Thus, it is up to the humans to feed back modulations that fine-tune the general flow in accordance with the specifics of the entangled human world and the possible ways of its disentanglement. Furthermore, in this way, we ‘translate’ certain Earth-specific problems to more unified soul ‘language’, which can then be acted upon by the higher Intelligences. This is not that different from the way managers summarize certain situations to the CEO, who doesn’t need to comprehend all the minute details, but can nevertheless act upon according to his higher vantage point intuitions.

If we are to avoid fantastic ideas, we shouldn’t imagine that these streams of destiny exist as some metaphysical entities that spread in the past and the future, and thus we somehow modulate this temporal structure. Everything is centered in the here and now. The curvature of destiny is no more miraculous than our overarching intent to go to the bathroom while we walk through the hallway and think of other things. What makes it a curvature is the persistence of intent through time. In a similar way, the higher Intelligences do not curve the streams of destiny as some objects external to them. Instead, they can be thought of as spiritual beings in states of unbroken meditation. They are concentrated and maintain the soul-flow curvature through their intents, forming the constellation within which more differentiated soul flows are embedded.

As the human participants turn back toward the sensory spectrum, all these supported soul curvatures remain. From within our waking consciousness, they seem to recede in the background, in the contextual soul flow, within which our daily metamorphoses are unfolding. This, of course, does not mean that there’s only top-down sculpting and that through the day we only witness the playback of the intended flow. Every frame of our daily life is still fully concentric with the here and now, and it continues to feed back on the peripheral flow. Because of the extremely entangled nature of the Earthly world, even intended curvatures might be surprised by convoluted physical effects, and thus, as the physical frames unfold, certain fine-tuning of the soul flow might be needed in response.

If the above-painted Imagination is more or less understood, it should be clear that within this nightlife, we can no longer speak of a Church institution in the ordinary sense. Now we have the true Living Ecclesia – the assembly of spiritual beings. The activity and interaction of these beings is the essence of reality itself. It is not some mental space where beings ponder and model solutions, later to be applied for real – it is the actual curvature of the World flow that is being actively shaped. This in itself shows that participation in the Ecclesia is not a matter of formal roles, but contributing our most intimate existence to the real-time World flow, as a living fiber of its total stream.

As said, this doesn’t mean that the need for sensory interactions will suddenly disappear. People will have their tasks, and there will still be lambs to be fed and tended after. Religious rituals would still be needed, not only for the lamb but also for the advanced souls who will use them as spiritual technologies (obviously in a far more conscious way, effectively allowing the higher Intelligences to reach deeper into the Earthly matrix). But the main thing is that the formal church hierarchy will gradually lose its role. And most crucially, even the role of a Pope would become obsolete. The reason is that much of what the clergy and its hierarchy are now doing will transfer to the nightlife, where every soul assumes its natural position within the flow. For the external eye in waking life, it might be mysterious how individual human beings who seem to lack a strict institutional hierarchical organization nevertheless act in musical synchrony.

These things should give us a deeper understanding and some idea of how human life will transform. But I think that even at the level of intellectual common sense, we can see that there’s something fishy with the idea of the Johnian impulse being accommodated by the Peterian Host. Although not an identical situation, we can still gather some intuition if we turn back to history. Imagine what it would be if Paul and Peter had decided that the emerging Christian impulse should be best hosted by Judaism. In a sense, this is so. The Christ impulse blossoms on the rootstock of Judaism. But if we imagine that the blossom should be somehow retrofitted to make it more compatible with the Old Law, to squeeze it into the Judaic hierarchy and rituals, we’re effectively mutilating the fresh impulse. Instead, Paul wrote letters to the Hebrews and left them free. Those who continue further do not feel they have abandoned the Law, but instead, fulfilled it. But most critically, Judaism nevertheless remains as a husk that shelters souls that, for certain Karmic reasons, need to unfold there.

Expecting that the blossoming impulse of Christian Initiation should somehow be retrofitted into the RC or any other Church only places serious obstacles. Even if certain part of the Church accommodates the Initiatic impulse, we can be quite confident that there will be a massive split. This is simply the way things work. Just like the hermit crab needs an empty shell to make its living, so the husk of the Church will continue to be occupied by souls whose activity, however, will be more and more anti-evolutionary. At an age where souls will already be solving many problems in the spiritual nighttime workshops, these Church relics will maintain that the Pope is still the link between Heaven and Earth, and the life of the flock needs to be managed up to the moment of death. The fact that many souls will be living in both worlds will be fought against and accused of witchery, speaking with infernal spirits, and so on. Something which, by the way, has been already happening ever since Initiatic Science made its open appearance on the World stage.

[Rodriel Gabrez]

You're right - we most definitely need to account for the evolution of consciousness in our reckonings of the future. I'll look forward to learning of this example you mention.

What do people do when they need to solve certain issues that concern larger groups? They arrange a meeting, forum, symposium, summit, and so on. Each individual human being lives in a uniquely aliased perspective of the World flow, which has integrated various life experiences, and certain intuitions have been reached that elucidate these stacked metamorphoses. At the meeting, people symbolically (verbally, graphically, etc.) express certain aspects of their intuition. These symbols are received by others like seeds falling into different kinds of soil, and they evoke corresponding intuitions, agitate sympathetic or antipathetic feelings according to the receiver’s inner constitution. Through iterative exchanges, hopefully, the members develop personal mental images that are elucidated by common intuition – the solution of the problem. Then these mental images should be allowed to guide the expressions of the will.

Such is the nature of most human exchanges, including Church meetings – whether between Church officials or between them and the flock. Yet, all of this takes place in our familiar sensory-intellectual consciousness. We are grounded in the primary flow of reality – the here and now within which the full spectrum metamorphoses frame by frame. Part of this spectrum feels more intimately related to our inner intents and is experienced as spatiotemporally scaled mental images of past and future movie clips of existence (or their symbolic encodings) overlaid on the more independent part of the flow. Through them, and through the context of sympathies and antipathies (which provide a more irrational and often unexamined pushes and pulls in one or another direction), we strive to shape the stream of the moment-by-moment flow, so as to align with longer-term ideal curvature.

As we progress further, hopefully not in the too distant future, as more souls take on seriously the task of inner development, the necessary meditative life will gradually transform our nightlife. Today, we are active through the day (synonymous with the waking sensory-intellectual consciousness, not necessarily the bright part of the day), and we sleep and possibly dream through the night. In the future, nighttime would be like a continuation of our evening meditation. Souls will continue to be active through (initially at least some parts of) the night.

Let’s try to form a picture of what that conscious nightlife might be like. Actually, we do not have to be far advanced to be able to make a quite clear image of this (even though still in more general lines). The nightlife can be very diverse, but we can see how such ‘meetings’ are part of it. Once again, let’s say that there’s something that needs to be collectively solved. The first difference is that there’s no longer mental imaging that is being encoded and communicated to other souls through the indirection of rippling processes in the physical spectrum. Now our whole phenomenal volume is like a single mental image that panoramically reflects the intuited processes within the soul spectrum. The second difference is that at this meeting, we are also conscious of other kinds of participants. To be sure, such participants are present also at every sensory meeting, but normally they evade our consciousness.

We can only understand these things if we hold fast to the fact that everything is experienced from a first-person perspective. The go-to metaphor for this inner experience is the video feedback, which symbolically represents the fact that our first-person experiential state is continuously metamorphosing but in such a way that in every new ‘frame’ of existence we can also intuit the stacked effects of past frames.



Let’s say that in our inner volume, after we have loosened from the suction of the sensory spectrum, we gradually attune to our meeting flow. Effectively, just like in sensory life, the question boils down to, “How should the World flow be bent, such that it aligns with such and such ideal curvatures?” Now, however, we no longer feel as if we are sculpting a private representation of the intended movie of becoming, but instead we feel that our inner volume reflects the actual curvature of the soul streams – the actual streams of destiny.

From within this soul stream, we feel that its contextual aspects are supported by various Intelligences. One of them we may call Archangelic. This general stream is further modulated on a more refined level by Intelligences (Angelic) that are concerned with more concrete ‘bundles’ of human streams or even single streams. Next, we have modulations that emerge from disembodied souls, and then there are also the modulations of the incarnated human beings who are likewise in their nighttime expanded consciousness and attend the meeting.

The critical thing to understand is that we do not see these things as some objective realities. We do not see the modulation streams in the way we see a river with our eyes. We do not see the attending souls as luminous blobs around us. Of course, all of these are valid artistic expressions of this deeper soul life, and they can indeed appear in the Imaginative flow in such a way, but we should always remember that these are not ‘objective’ realities. They are renditions of intuition, specific to our stacked frames of development. We live in the expanded inner space that reflects in unique ways the way the soul-streams of destiny bend. For example, to know the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence, it is not a matter of seeing it from the side as an objective creature as it works with its subtle hands, but of breathing in and out of the first-person streams. As we breathe (zoom) out of more specific perspectives, it is as if we become more conscious of where these concentrically overlaid first-person streams are in phase. The rest, in a sense, ‘cancel out.’ What is in phase is not the elemental content (the phenomenal ‘pixels’) – these are highly specific to each perspective and thus largely cancel out when grasped in their overlaid interference. What we align with is the soul life – the general moods, strivings, and so on – the things which indeed are the shape of the curvature of destiny (at least as far as this soul life is concerned. Obviously, everything is modulated within the even deeper archetypal contextual flows that shape the great epochs, life and the physical flow).

Thus, as we strive to comprehend the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence – which means to align with their intents and the center from within which these intents make coherent sense – we are able to differentiate how the different Intelligences contribute to the total interference. This is also how we recognize the work of our fellow human beings. We know how in ordinary life we can often recognize the imprints of other people. We enter the kitchen, we see the sink full of unwashed dishes, and say, “This can only be the work of Mikey!” Of course, in this case, this is only an intellectual matching, but in the night flow, there are also many other rich features that ‘give away’ the work of other beings. Clearly, this ability for recognition is a matter of individual development. The more interest we have in others, the better we know them, the more we can recognize their specific ‘touch’ within the soul spectrum.

This is the main thing. We do not recognize other beings by seeing their objective countenance but by recognizing their unique contributions to the modulations of the soul flow. This may sound limiting, as if other beings remain remote and ghostly, working from behind some curtains. While this might be the case when our sensitivity is not yet sufficiently developed, later these interactions prove to be far richer and intimate than anything we can experience through the proxy of rippling sensory sensations.

The nature of these ‘meetings’ is such that we do not pre-think what we would like to modulate over the common soul stream, like we may rehearse our speech before we take our place at the pulpit. Our deeper soul activity is in itself an immediate modulating push or pull applied in the World flow. As such, it immediately impresses upon other perspectives. Previously, we have compared this with clay work on a pottery wheel, where there are many invisible hands that simultaneously impress shapes, and we recognize the individual beings through their contribution, through their unique ‘touch’ (of course, not by intellectually analyzing and matching the final imprints but by resonating with the specific movements). To make this analogy more correct, we’ll have to imagine that the movements are contextual and governed by Intelligences at different scales. Thus, our meetings in this state consist of gentle pushes and pulls on the common soul stream, where everything runs in a fine balance between activity and receptivity. When we bend the stream in a certain way, it is like we make an offering; it is like we say, “Here’s the way I suggest this flow of destiny should be curved”. Then we immediately become receptive and see how this push will be received. It might be amplified or resisted. If it is resisted, and if we are able to align with the act of resistance, we also have an intuitive glimpse of why it is resisted, why from that perspective our bent in the flow does not make the best possible sense.

Of course, here we have broken down this process in a transaction-like procedure, simply because our intellect can only approach things in such a palpable way. To make it more realistic, we can imagine how these switches between activity and receptivity alternate faster and faster, thus everything takes the form of a continuous sacred dance. In this way, general flow curvatures are impressed from higher Intelligences, which are in tune with the even more encompassing Divine intentions. As they are experienced through the more differentiated perspectives, each feeds back modulation refinements such that everything can be better aligned with the specifics. This is especially important in the case of humans. Much of the human world, the complicated relations, technologies, and so on, are simply not comprehensible by the higher Intelligences. Thus, it is up to the humans to feed back modulations that fine-tune the general flow in accordance with the specifics of the entangled human world and the possible ways of its disentanglement. Furthermore, in this way, we ‘translate’ certain Earth-specific problems to more unified soul ‘language’, which can then be acted upon by the higher Intelligences. This is not that different from the way managers summarize certain situations to the CEO, who doesn’t need to comprehend all the minute details, but can nevertheless act upon according to his higher vantage point intuitions.

If we are to avoid fantastic ideas, we shouldn’t imagine that these streams of destiny exist as some metaphysical entities that spread in the past and the future, and thus we somehow modulate this temporal structure. Everything is centered in the here and now. The curvature of destiny is no more miraculous than our overarching intent to go to the bathroom while we walk through the hallway and think of other things. What makes it a curvature is the persistence of intent through time. In a similar way, the higher Intelligences do not curve the streams of destiny as some objects external to them. Instead, they can be thought of as spiritual beings in states of unbroken meditation. They are concentrated and maintain the soul-flow curvature through their intents, forming the constellation within which more differentiated soul flows are embedded.

As the human participants turn back toward the sensory spectrum, all these supported soul curvatures remain. From within our waking consciousness, they seem to recede in the background, in the contextual soul flow, within which our daily metamorphoses are unfolding. This, of course, does not mean that there’s only top-down sculpting and that through the day we only witness the playback of the intended flow. Every frame of our daily life is still fully concentric with the here and now, and it continues to feed back on the peripheral flow. Because of the extremely entangled nature of the Earthly world, even intended curvatures might be surprised by convoluted physical effects, and thus, as the physical frames unfold, certain fine-tuning of the soul flow might be needed in response.

If the above-painted Imagination is more or less understood, it should be clear that within this nightlife, we can no longer speak of a Church institution in the ordinary sense. Now we have the true Living Ecclesia – the assembly of spiritual beings. The activity and interaction of these beings is the essence of reality itself. It is not some mental space where beings ponder and model solutions, later to be applied for real – it is the actual curvature of the World flow that is being actively shaped. This in itself shows that participation in the Ecclesia is not a matter of formal roles, but contributing our most intimate existence to the real-time World flow, as a living fiber of its total stream.

As said, this doesn’t mean that the need for sensory interactions will suddenly disappear. People will have their tasks, and there will still be lambs to be fed and tended after. Religious rituals would still be needed, not only for the lamb but also for the advanced souls who will use them as spiritual technologies (obviously in a far more conscious way, effectively allowing the higher Intelligences to reach deeper into the Earthly matrix). But the main thing is that the formal church hierarchy will gradually lose its role. And most crucially, even the role of a Pope would become obsolete. The reason is that much of what the clergy and its hierarchy are now doing will transfer to the nightlife, where every soul assumes its natural position within the flow. For the external eye in waking life, it might be mysterious how individual human beings who seem to lack a strict institutional hierarchical organization nevertheless act in musical synchrony.

These things should give us a deeper understanding and some idea of how human life will transform. But I think that even at the level of intellectual common sense, we can see that there’s something fishy with the idea of the Johnian impulse being accommodated by the Peterian Host. Although not an identical situation, we can still gather some intuition if we turn back to history. Imagine what it would be if Paul and Peter had decided that the emerging Christian impulse should be best hosted by Judaism. In a sense, this is so. The Christ impulse blossoms on the rootstock of Judaism. But if we imagine that the blossom should be somehow retrofitted to make it more compatible with the Old Law, to squeeze it into the Judaic hierarchy and rituals, we’re effectively mutilating the fresh impulse. Instead, Paul wrote letters to the Hebrews and left them free. Those who continue further do not feel they have abandoned the Law, but instead, fulfilled it. But most critically, Judaism nevertheless remains as a husk that shelters souls that, for certain Karmic reasons, need to unfold there.

Expecting that the blossoming impulse of Christian Initiation should somehow be retrofitted into the RC or any other Church only places serious obstacles. Even if certain part of the Church accommodates the Initiatic impulse, we can be quite confident that there will be a massive split. This is simply the way things work. Just like the hermit crab needs an empty shell to make its living, so the husk of the Church will continue to be occupied by souls whose activity, however, will be more and more anti-evolutionary. At an age where souls will already be solving many problems in the spiritual nighttime workshops, these Church relics will maintain that the Pope is still the link between Heaven and Earth, and the life of the flock needs to be managed up to the moment of death. The fact that many souls will be living in both worlds will be fought against and accused of witchery, speaking with infernal spirits, and so on. Something which, by the way, has been already happening ever since Initiatic Science made its open appearance on the World stage.

Please don't take the brevity of this response as more than a sign of just how closely I am tracking with you. You say things very well - it's hard to add to it! Let me clarify though: I don't at all mean to insinuate that the Petrine institution will not also undergo a dramatic change, especially over the timescales you're considering. I do agree that there is at least a roughly analogous process in Peter-->John as in Law-->Gospel. This pattern is found in the mystical writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, for instance, where he discusses the progression of the "6th to the 7th to the 8th days of creation," describing 6-->7 as Law-->Gospel and 7-->8 as Gospel-->eschaton. Gospel-->eschaton is in a sense equivalent to the transition of Peter to John, the telos of which is the "Johnification" of the institution: the Ecclesia Catholica born out of the RCC. You see this as more of an immediate shedding of a husk situation, whereas I see it as a gradual interior transformation, with the very earth itself becoming the husk. In any case, like Ashvin said above, it seems we are all pretty closely tracking with each other. We just have different ideas and convictions about the precise contours of the future and the pathways to get there. These are admittedly still major differences, but the common ground is significant.

[AshvinP]

[quote="Rodriel Gabrez" post_id=26836 time=1755913127
Please don't take the brevity of this response as more than a sign of just how closely I am tracking with you. You say things very well - it's hard to add to it! Let me clarify though: I don't at all mean to insinuate that the Petrine institution will not also undergo a dramatic change, especially over the timescales you're considering. I do agree that there is at least a roughly analogous process in Peter-->John as in Law-->Gospel. This pattern is found in the mystical writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, for instance, where he discusses the progression of the "6th to the 7th to the 8th days of creation," describing 6-->7 as Law-->Gospel and 7-->8 as Gospel-->eschaton. Gospel-->eschaton is in a sense equivalent to the transition of Peter to John, the telos of which is the "Johnification" of the institution: the Ecclesia Catholica born out of the RCC. You see this as more of an immediate shedding of a husk situation, whereas I see it as a gradual interior transformation, with the very earth itself becoming the husk. In any case, like Ashvin said above, it seems we are all pretty closely tracking with each other. We just have different ideas and convictions about the precise contours of the future and the pathways to get there. These are admittedly still major differences, but the common ground is significant.
[/quote]


Cleric raised a good point above when he discussed the inevitable split within institutions like the RCC, assuming certain aspects are increasingly Johnified. That is indeed what we see across all cultural institutions today, from our immediate family relations to nations, religious organizations, and so on. To the extent certain members have incorporated a tendency to live consciously along the 'phase spaces' of inner life, the other members meet them with increasing suspicion and disdain. I think we have seen that on this forum as well. It's like few souls wants to quite admit that other souls who communicate with them may be interacting directly with the spiritual beings-curvatures that they contemplate indirectly via the mediation of scaled mental images and preferred philosophers, scientists, theologians, religious figures, etc. Instead, the former are imagined to simply be abstractly theorizing about such spiritual relations, delusional, deceived by demonic beings, and so on. It's hard to imagine how such a splitting tendency would not also manifest itself in the RCC as the streams begin to overlap more.

Do you see that as a major short-term risk in the RCC? Perhaps you have even experienced this to some extent when trying to subtly point toward esoteric dimensions to members of yoir congregation?

[Güney27]

You're right - we most definitely need to account for the evolution of consciousness in our reckonings of the future. I'll look forward to learning of this example you mention.

What do people do when they need to solve certain issues that concern larger groups? They arrange a meeting, forum, symposium, summit, and so on. Each individual human being lives in a uniquely aliased perspective of the World flow, which has integrated various life experiences, and certain intuitions have been reached that elucidate these stacked metamorphoses. At the meeting, people symbolically (verbally, graphically, etc.) express certain aspects of their intuition. These symbols are received by others like seeds falling into different kinds of soil, and they evoke corresponding intuitions, agitate sympathetic or antipathetic feelings according to the receiver’s inner constitution. Through iterative exchanges, hopefully, the members develop personal mental images that are elucidated by common intuition – the solution of the problem. Then these mental images should be allowed to guide the expressions of the will.

Such is the nature of most human exchanges, including Church meetings – whether between Church officials or between them and the flock. Yet, all of this takes place in our familiar sensory-intellectual consciousness. We are grounded in the primary flow of reality – the here and now within which the full spectrum metamorphoses frame by frame. Part of this spectrum feels more intimately related to our inner intents and is experienced as spatiotemporally scaled mental images of past and future movie clips of existence (or their symbolic encodings) overlaid on the more independent part of the flow. Through them, and through the context of sympathies and antipathies (which provide a more irrational and often unexamined pushes and pulls in one or another direction), we strive to shape the stream of the moment-by-moment flow, so as to align with longer-term ideal curvature.

As we progress further, hopefully not in the too distant future, as more souls take on seriously the task of inner development, the necessary meditative life will gradually transform our nightlife. Today, we are active through the day (synonymous with the waking sensory-intellectual consciousness, not necessarily the bright part of the day), and we sleep and possibly dream through the night. In the future, nighttime would be like a continuation of our evening meditation. Souls will continue to be active through (initially at least some parts of) the night.

Let’s try to form a picture of what that conscious nightlife might be like. Actually, we do not have to be far advanced to be able to make a quite clear image of this (even though still in more general lines). The nightlife can be very diverse, but we can see how such ‘meetings’ are part of it. Once again, let’s say that there’s something that needs to be collectively solved. The first difference is that there’s no longer mental imaging that is being encoded and communicated to other souls through the indirection of rippling processes in the physical spectrum. Now our whole phenomenal volume is like a single mental image that panoramically reflects the intuited processes within the soul spectrum. The second difference is that at this meeting, we are also conscious of other kinds of participants. To be sure, such participants are present also at every sensory meeting, but normally they evade our consciousness.

We can only understand these things if we hold fast to the fact that everything is experienced from a first-person perspective. The go-to metaphor for this inner experience is the video feedback, which symbolically represents the fact that our first-person experiential state is continuously metamorphosing but in such a way that in every new ‘frame’ of existence we can also intuit the stacked effects of past frames.



Let’s say that in our inner volume, after we have loosened from the suction of the sensory spectrum, we gradually attune to our meeting flow. Effectively, just like in sensory life, the question boils down to, “How should the World flow be bent, such that it aligns with such and such ideal curvatures?” Now, however, we no longer feel as if we are sculpting a private representation of the intended movie of becoming, but instead we feel that our inner volume reflects the actual curvature of the soul streams – the actual streams of destiny.

From within this soul stream, we feel that its contextual aspects are supported by various Intelligences. One of them we may call Archangelic. This general stream is further modulated on a more refined level by Intelligences (Angelic) that are concerned with more concrete ‘bundles’ of human streams or even single streams. Next, we have modulations that emerge from disembodied souls, and then there are also the modulations of the incarnated human beings who are likewise in their nighttime expanded consciousness and attend the meeting.

The critical thing to understand is that we do not see these things as some objective realities. We do not see the modulation streams in the way we see a river with our eyes. We do not see the attending souls as luminous blobs around us. Of course, all of these are valid artistic expressions of this deeper soul life, and they can indeed appear in the Imaginative flow in such a way, but we should always remember that these are not ‘objective’ realities. They are renditions of intuition, specific to our stacked frames of development. We live in the expanded inner space that reflects in unique ways the way the soul-streams of destiny bend. For example, to know the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence, it is not a matter of seeing it from the side as an objective creature as it works with its subtle hands, but of breathing in and out of the first-person streams. As we breathe (zoom) out of more specific perspectives, it is as if we become more conscious of where these concentrically overlaid first-person streams are in phase. The rest, in a sense, ‘cancel out.’ What is in phase is not the elemental content (the phenomenal ‘pixels’) – these are highly specific to each perspective and thus largely cancel out when grasped in their overlaid interference. What we align with is the soul life – the general moods, strivings, and so on – the things which indeed are the shape of the curvature of destiny (at least as far as this soul life is concerned. Obviously, everything is modulated within the even deeper archetypal contextual flows that shape the great epochs, life and the physical flow).

Thus, as we strive to comprehend the workings of the Archangelic Intelligence – which means to align with their intents and the center from within which these intents make coherent sense – we are able to differentiate how the different Intelligences contribute to the total interference. This is also how we recognize the work of our fellow human beings. We know how in ordinary life we can often recognize the imprints of other people. We enter the kitchen, we see the sink full of unwashed dishes, and say, “This can only be the work of Mikey!” Of course, in this case, this is only an intellectual matching, but in the night flow, there are also many other rich features that ‘give away’ the work of other beings. Clearly, this ability for recognition is a matter of individual development. The more interest we have in others, the better we know them, the more we can recognize their specific ‘touch’ within the soul spectrum.

This is the main thing. We do not recognize other beings by seeing their objective countenance but by recognizing their unique contributions to the modulations of the soul flow. This may sound limiting, as if other beings remain remote and ghostly, working from behind some curtains. While this might be the case when our sensitivity is not yet sufficiently developed, later these interactions prove to be far richer and intimate than anything we can experience through the proxy of rippling sensory sensations.

The nature of these ‘meetings’ is such that we do not pre-think what we would like to modulate over the common soul stream, like we may rehearse our speech before we take our place at the pulpit. Our deeper soul activity is in itself an immediate modulating push or pull applied in the World flow. As such, it immediately impresses upon other perspectives. Previously, we have compared this with clay work on a pottery wheel, where there are many invisible hands that simultaneously impress shapes, and we recognize the individual beings through their contribution, through their unique ‘touch’ (of course, not by intellectually analyzing and matching the final imprints but by resonating with the specific movements). To make this analogy more correct, we’ll have to imagine that the movements are contextual and governed by Intelligences at different scales. Thus, our meetings in this state consist of gentle pushes and pulls on the common soul stream, where everything runs in a fine balance between activity and receptivity. When we bend the stream in a certain way, it is like we make an offering; it is like we say, “Here’s the way I suggest this flow of destiny should be curved”. Then we immediately become receptive and see how this push will be received. It might be amplified or resisted. If it is resisted, and if we are able to align with the act of resistance, we also have an intuitive glimpse of why it is resisted, why from that perspective our bent in the flow does not make the best possible sense.

Of course, here we have broken down this process in a transaction-like procedure, simply because our intellect can only approach things in such a palpable way. To make it more realistic, we can imagine how these switches between activity and receptivity alternate faster and faster, thus everything takes the form of a continuous sacred dance. In this way, general flow curvatures are impressed from higher Intelligences, which are in tune with the even more encompassing Divine intentions. As they are experienced through the more differentiated perspectives, each feeds back modulation refinements such that everything can be better aligned with the specifics. This is especially important in the case of humans. Much of the human world, the complicated relations, technologies, and so on, are simply not comprehensible by the higher Intelligences. Thus, it is up to the humans to feed back modulations that fine-tune the general flow in accordance with the specifics of the entangled human world and the possible ways of its disentanglement. Furthermore, in this way, we ‘translate’ certain Earth-specific problems to more unified soul ‘language’, which can then be acted upon by the higher Intelligences. This is not that different from the way managers summarize certain situations to the CEO, who doesn’t need to comprehend all the minute details, but can nevertheless act upon according to his higher vantage point intuitions.

If we are to avoid fantastic ideas, we shouldn’t imagine that these streams of destiny exist as some metaphysical entities that spread in the past and the future, and thus we somehow modulate this temporal structure. Everything is centered in the here and now. The curvature of destiny is no more miraculous than our overarching intent to go to the bathroom while we walk through the hallway and think of other things. What makes it a curvature is the persistence of intent through time. In a similar way, the higher Intelligences do not curve the streams of destiny as some objects external to them. Instead, they can be thought of as spiritual beings in states of unbroken meditation. They are concentrated and maintain the soul-flow curvature through their intents, forming the constellation within which more differentiated soul flows are embedded.

As the human participants turn back toward the sensory spectrum, all these supported soul curvatures remain. From within our waking consciousness, they seem to recede in the background, in the contextual soul flow, within which our daily metamorphoses are unfolding. This, of course, does not mean that there’s only top-down sculpting and that through the day we only witness the playback of the intended flow. Every frame of our daily life is still fully concentric with the here and now, and it continues to feed back on the peripheral flow. Because of the extremely entangled nature of the Earthly world, even intended curvatures might be surprised by convoluted physical effects, and thus, as the physical frames unfold, certain fine-tuning of the soul flow might be needed in response.

If the above-painted Imagination is more or less understood, it should be clear that within this nightlife, we can no longer speak of a Church institution in the ordinary sense. Now we have the true Living Ecclesia – the assembly of spiritual beings. The activity and interaction of these beings is the essence of reality itself. It is not some mental space where beings ponder and model solutions, later to be applied for real – it is the actual curvature of the World flow that is being actively shaped. This in itself shows that participation in the Ecclesia is not a matter of formal roles, but contributing our most intimate existence to the real-time World flow, as a living fiber of its total stream.

As said, this doesn’t mean that the need for sensory interactions will suddenly disappear. People will have their tasks, and there will still be lambs to be fed and tended after. Religious rituals would still be needed, not only for the lamb but also for the advanced souls who will use them as spiritual technologies (obviously in a far more conscious way, effectively allowing the higher Intelligences to reach deeper into the Earthly matrix). But the main thing is that the formal church hierarchy will gradually lose its role. And most crucially, even the role of a Pope would become obsolete. The reason is that much of what the clergy and its hierarchy are now doing will transfer to the nightlife, where every soul assumes its natural position within the flow. For the external eye in waking life, it might be mysterious how individual human beings who seem to lack a strict institutional hierarchical organization nevertheless act in musical synchrony.

These things should give us a deeper understanding and some idea of how human life will transform. But I think that even at the level of intellectual common sense, we can see that there’s something fishy with the idea of the Johnian impulse being accommodated by the Peterian Host. Although not an identical situation, we can still gather some intuition if we turn back to history. Imagine what it would be if Paul and Peter had decided that the emerging Christian impulse should be best hosted by Judaism. In a sense, this is so. The Christ impulse blossoms on the rootstock of Judaism. But if we imagine that the blossom should be somehow retrofitted to make it more compatible with the Old Law, to squeeze it into the Judaic hierarchy and rituals, we’re effectively mutilating the fresh impulse. Instead, Paul wrote letters to the Hebrews and left them free. Those who continue further do not feel they have abandoned the Law, but instead, fulfilled it. But most critically, Judaism nevertheless remains as a husk that shelters souls that, for certain Karmic reasons, need to unfold there.

Expecting that the blossoming impulse of Christian Initiation should somehow be retrofitted into the RC or any other Church only places serious obstacles. Even if certain part of the Church accommodates the Initiatic impulse, we can be quite confident that there will be a massive split. This is simply the way things work. Just like the hermit crab needs an empty shell to make its living, so the husk of the Church will continue to be occupied by souls whose activity, however, will be more and more anti-evolutionary. At an age where souls will already be solving many problems in the spiritual nighttime workshops, these Church relics will maintain that the Pope is still the link between Heaven and Earth, and the life of the flock needs to be managed up to the moment of death. The fact that many souls will be living in both worlds will be fought against and accused of witchery, speaking with infernal spirits, and so on. Something which, by the way, has been already happening ever since Initiatic Science made its open appearance on the World stage.

Please don't take the brevity of this response as more than a sign of just how closely I am tracking with you. You say things very well - it's hard to add to it! Let me clarify though: I don't at all mean to insinuate that the Petrine institution will not also undergo a dramatic change, especially over the timescales you're considering. I do agree that there is at least a roughly analogous process in Peter-->John as in Law-->Gospel. This pattern is found in the mystical writings of St. Maximus the Confessor, for instance, where he discusses the progression of the "6th to the 7th to the 8th days of creation," describing 6-->7 as Law-->Gospel and 7-->8 as Gospel-->eschaton. Gospel-->eschaton is in a sense equivalent to the transition of Peter to John, the telos of which is the "Johnification" of the institution: the Ecclesia Catholica born out of the RCC. You see this as more of an immediate shedding of a husk situation, whereas I see it as a gradual interior transformation, with the very earth itself becoming the husk. In any case, like Ashvin said above, it seems we are all pretty closely tracking with each other. We just have different ideas and convictions about the precise contours of the future and the pathways to get there. These are admittedly still major differences, but the common ground is significant.

Rodriel,

How do you think the Catholic conception of Christ and the Incarnation can be reconciled with the anthroposophical conception? The Church radically rejects the idea that there were two Jesus children or that the Incarnation was only complete after the baptism, among other things.
This would essentially declare the Church’s interpretation as entirely false.

The Church’s teachings (Catechism and Dogmatics) cannot integrate these elements without completely abandoning its doctrine. I also cannot imagine that this will happen. Rudolf Steiner and Valentin tomberg are likely considered as heretics by most Catholics. Of course, there are theologians who are more open, such as Hans Urs von Balthasar. What would happen if a cardinal or a pope began publicly discussing the idea of two Jesus children or other antroposoohical elements of Steiners christology?

[Federica]

The way you describe the inward effect of the sacraments and liturgy above sounds to me like what becomes possible only after the soul has expanded the 'boundaries' of its imaginative cube through a phenomenological path (which is surely cognitive and moral, simultaneously and synonymously).

Ashvin, the bold is true in the absolute, but in the context of souls called to walk a spiritual path in our day, this is not how things stand. To say it with Steiner, “Sin, for the man of modern time, lives in a world of abstract being. It is a mere transgression, a moral concept which he cannot really connect with the necessities or laws of Nature” or, as I wrote above: “man's path to salvation cannot be moral before it is cognitive”. Nobody begins a phenomenological path today with the realization of the simultaneity you speak of, or, at the very least, there is a very majoritarian tendency to be drawn to phenomenology through cognition, without an understanding of the unitary nature of reality.
It has to be like that, and that's precisely the context that was in question.

[Federica]

Unfortunately, we are not all stressing the same things. It seems to me that the in-group behaviors, feelings of superiority, and also the dimension of oneness here, are the clearest microcosmic demonstration of the massive split. Unfortunately, the proof is in the pudding.